Beyond the Secret (gsang ba): The Performativity of Citation in an Exile Tibetan Buddhist Ritual

This article focuses on the Nechung kang-so (bskang gso), a ritual performed at Nechung monastery in exile, and deemed secret (gsang ba) by the monks. In my interactions with the monks, this secret presented itself as an unremitting series of contradictions and conundrums. I attempt here to portray and understand them. I posit that the secret invoked an implicit “cultural concept” (Silverstein 2004), namely, the kang-so’s transmissibility. For the kang-so’s transmission within the monastery involved a specific semiotics of authorization, rooted in a karmic ethic. To reveal the secret to me was to extricate the esoteric ritual from that traditional “social organization of interdiscursivity,” and the ethic shaping it (Gal 2018). The monks’ citations of the esoteric ritual, whereby they spoke to me of the secret, thus performed an alteration in the kang-so’s transmissibility, a reorganization of the esoteric ritual’s interdiscursivities, toward enabling its “circulation” among academic publics.