Tukdam, Different Ontological Bodies, and Making Tibetan Deaths Visible
Culture Medicine and Psychiatry June 1, 2025 D. V. Coleman 2 citations
The postmortem state of tukdam, unknown to science until recently, cannot be adequately explained in biomedical terms. The article argues that tukdam is best understood as a particular kind of Indo-Tibetan death, emerging from different cultural bodies and death processes. Drawing on medical anthropology, history of science, and cross-cultural medicine, the author critiques the epistemological assumption of one reality 'out there' and instead proposes an ontological approach where epistemology and ontology collapse, so that different ways of conceiving-perceiving produce different forms of being. Exploring Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy and its Tibetan appropriations alongside science studies and ontological anthropology, the author sketches how tantric Buddhist bodies and deaths remain largely incommensurable with and invisible to the modern medical gaze and the Euroamerican regime of truth that privileges visibility, quantification, and technological measurability.