Education for Experience: One View of Tibetan Tantric Initiation

The ethnographic treatment of "rites de Passage" is discussed with reference to

material relating to religious initiation. It is suggested that the major transitions

engendered through the Tibetan Buddhist Tantric W a n g Kur rituals may be profitably

analyzed not simply as changes in social status but rather as tools for the re-ordering

of phenomenology which are designed to engender long-term alterations in the

initiates' experience of the world. The initiation provides a rationale and instruction

conjunctive with ritual technique which is consciously designed to globally and

permanently alter the consciousness of the practitioner. Suggestions for studies of

rites of passage which take into account this dimension of the ritual control of

experience are offered.