The Way of the Jhankri

In the hills of central Nepal, far from the temples of the Kathmandu Valley and the monasteries of the high Himalaya, a man sits in a darkened room. He wears a headdress of peacock feathers. In his hands he holds a two-headed frame drum — the dhyāṅgro — with a small round mirror set into its face. He begins to beat the drum. The rhythm is steady, insistent, accelerating. The people of the household sit around him in the firelight. Someone is ill. The jhankri has been called.

As the drumming intensifies, the jhankri begins to shake. His voice changes. He is no longer speaking as himself. He is calling the spirits — the deities of the upper world, the serpent lords of the lower, the forest spirits and river spirits and ancestor spirits who populate the middle world where humans live. He is searching for the cause of the illness. Something has been displaced. A spirit has been offended. A soul has wandered from the body. The jhankri's task is to find it, negotiate with whatever holds it, and bring it home.

This is not a historical reconstruction. This is happening now, tonight, in a thousand villages across the hills of Nepal — from the Tamang settlements of the Langtang Valley to the Magar villages of the Dhaulagiri range, from the Limbu homelands of the eastern hills to the Gurung communities of the Annapurna foothills. The shamanic traditions of Nepal are among the most vital and least documented living religious practices on earth. They predate Hinduism in the region. They predate Buddhism. They may predate the migration of Tibeto-Burman peoples into the Himalayan hills thousands of years ago. And they are still alive — not as museum pieces, not as tourist performances, but as the first response of millions of rural Nepalis when sickness or misfortune strikes.

I. The Name

Nepal has no single shamanic tradition. It has dozens — as many as there are ethnic groups in the hills and mountains, each with its own name for the ritual specialist, its own spirit cosmology, its own initiatory practices, and its own relationship to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions that arrived later.

The most widely known term is jhankri (झाँक्री), a Nepali word that has become the default label in both popular and scholarly usage for the Himalayan shaman. The jhankri is the ecstatic practitioner — the one who drums, shakes, enters trance, and journeys between worlds to heal the sick, divine the future, and negotiate with spirits. The word is used across ethnic boundaries, though each community also has its own term: the Tamang say bombo (बोम्बो), the Gurung say ghyabresi or pachyu, the Limbu say phedangba, the Rai say nokchha or nakso, the Magar say jhankri or refer to their practitioners by clan-specific titles. The Tharu of the Terai have their guruwa. The Newar of the Kathmandu Valley have their dyaḥ-bāju.

Alongside the jhankri stands the dhami (धामी) — often translated as "oracle" or "oracle-priest." The dhami is typically a medium: rather than journeying outward, the dhami is possessed by a deity who speaks through them. In some ethnic traditions the roles are distinct; in others they overlap. A single practitioner may drum and journey like a jhankri and also serve as a vessel for divine possession like a dhami. The boundary between the two roles is permeable, and attempts to draw a clean line between "shamanism" (journey) and "mediumship" (possession) often say more about the classifier than about the practice.

What unites all these practitioners — jhankri, bombo, dhami, phedangba, guruwa — is the drum, the trance, and the three-world cosmology. They are intermediaries between humans and spirits. They heal by restoring balance between the visible and invisible worlds. They are called, not trained — the spirits select them, often through illness, and the refusal of the calling can be fatal. They are, in the oldest sense of the word, shamans: the Himalayan cousins of the Siberian practitioners from whom the term originally derives.

II. The Himalayan Matrix

Nepal is the hinge of the Asian religious world. To the north, the Tibetan plateau: Bon, Vajrayana Buddhism, the high monastic traditions. To the south, the Gangetic plain: Hinduism in its full complexity, from Vedic sacrifice to Bhakti devotion. Between them, the hills — a crumpled landscape of steep valleys, terraced rice paddies, and isolated villages connected by footpaths that take days to walk.

The hill peoples of Nepal are predominantly Tibeto-Burman speakers — Tamang, Gurung, Magar, Rai, Limbu, Sunuwar, Thakali, Chepang, and many others. Their ancestors migrated into the Himalayan hills from the north and east, bringing with them a shamanic religious substrate that predates both Hinduism and Buddhism. This substrate is not a single tradition but a family of related practices: the drum, the ecstatic trance, the three-world cosmology, the spirit negotiation, the initiatory illness. The similarities to the shamanic traditions of Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet are not coincidental. The jhankri and the Siberian shaman, the bombo and the Mongolian bö, the phedangba and the Bon dpa'-bo share a common deep ancestry in the shamanic complex of Inner and Central Asia.

When Hinduism expanded into Nepal — brought by Indo-Aryan settlers, consolidated by the Lichchhavi and Malla dynasties, and enforced by the Shah rulers after 1768 — it did not replace the shamanic traditions. It layered over them. The Hindu gods entered the jhankri's pantheon. Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, the nagas — all were incorporated into the spirit cosmology, added to the list of beings the shaman could call upon or negotiate with. The local spirits were not displaced; they were reclassified. The forest spirit became an aspect of Shiva. The serpent lord became a naga. The ancestor became a pitri. The Hindu overlay was real and pervasive, but the shamanic substrate — the drum, the trance, the journey, the calling — remained fundamentally intact.

Stan Royal Mumford's Himalayan Dialogue (1989), based on fieldwork among the Gurung of Gyasumdo in the Manang district, captures this layering precisely. In a single village, Tibetan Buddhist lamas and Gurung shamans coexist — the lamas performing textual rites, the shamans performing ecstatic ones. The two systems are not in competition. They serve different needs. When the village needs a text recited, a merit-making ceremony performed, a funeral conducted according to scriptural rules, the lama is called. When someone is sick, when a spirit is angry, when a soul has wandered, the shaman drums. The lama reads. The shaman flies. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient.

III. The Calling

No one chooses to become a jhankri. The spirits choose.

The calling typically manifests as illness — often in childhood or adolescence. The future shaman falls sick with symptoms that defy medical treatment: seizures, fainting, uncontrollable trembling, visual and auditory hallucinations, prolonged fever, wasting. The family consults a practising jhankri, who diagnoses the illness not as a disease but as a calling. The spirits are claiming the child. If the calling is accepted and the child is trained, the illness resolves. If it is refused or ignored, the child may die or go permanently mad.

This is the universal pattern of the shaman's initiatory illness, documented from Siberia to the Amazon. In Nepal, it takes a distinctive local form through the figure of the ban jhankri (बन झाँक्री) — the forest shaman.

The ban jhankri is a spirit being who lives in the deep forest. He is described as small — sometimes child-sized, sometimes smaller — covered in long red or golden hair that grows so thick it covers his face. His feet point backward. He lives in caves or under overhanging rocks. He is the master shaman of the spirit world, and it is he who selects, captures, and trains future jhankris.

The accounts are remarkably consistent across ethnic groups and regions. A child — always young, always before puberty, always in a liminal or vulnerable state — wanders into the forest, or is near the forest edge, or is sleeping alone. The ban jhankri appears, seizes the child, and carries them away into the forest or into a cave. There, for a period that may feel like days or weeks (though in the human world only hours or a single night may pass), the ban jhankri teaches the child the arts of shamanism: the drum rhythms, the chants, the spirit names, the techniques of healing and divination.

Larry Peters, the American psychologist and anthropologist whose Ecstasy and Healing in Nepal (1981) was the first major English-language study of Nepali shamanism, recorded the testimony of Bhirendra, a Tamang bombo from the Kathmandu Valley. Bhirendra was captured by the ban jhankri as a child and taken into a cave where he was taught to drum, to call spirits, and to heal. The experience was terrifying and transformative. When he was returned, he was changed — marked as a future shaman.

Not every calling involves the ban jhankri. Some future shamans are simply seized by spirits during illness. Some inherit the calling from a deceased relative — the power passes down the lineage. Some are marked at birth by physical signs: an extra finger, a caul, unusual birthmarks. But the ban jhankri remains the most vivid and culturally significant form of the calling, and his presence in Nepali folklore is enormous. Parents warn children not to wander into the forest alone. The ban jhankri is both terrifying and sacred — a danger and a gift.

After the initial calling, the future jhankri must be trained by a human teacher — a guru (गुरु) in the formal sense. The guru-student relationship, called guru-parna in some traditions, is the mechanism by which the shamanic knowledge is transmitted from one generation to the next. The guru teaches the chants (mantras), the drum rhythms, the spirit names and their hierarchies, the techniques of trance induction, the rituals of healing and protection. The training may last years. It involves fasting, isolation, night vigils in cremation grounds, and progressive initiation into deeper levels of practice.

The jhankri is not self-made. They are called by the spirits, captured by the ban jhankri, and trained by a human guru. All three elements are necessary. Without the calling, the training is empty. Without the training, the calling is madness. Without the guru, the power is uncontrolled. The guru-parna lineage is the tradition's survival mechanism — master to student, life to life, voice to ear.

IV. The Drum

The jhankri's primary instrument is the dhyāṅgro (ध्याङ्ग्रो) — a large, two-headed frame drum, typically made from a wooden frame covered with animal hide on both faces. The drum is struck with a curved stick called a gājo (गाजो). Set into one face of the drum, or hung from the handle, is a small round mirror — the melang — which serves both as a scrying device and as a shield against malevolent spirits.

The drum is not an instrument. It is a vehicle. In the jhankri's cosmology, the drum is variously described as a horse that carries the shaman through the spirit world, a boat that crosses the rivers between the three worlds, or a bird that flies to the upper heavens. The rhythmic beating of the drum is the technology of ecstasy — the mechanism by which the jhankri enters trance, leaves the ordinary world, and travels to the realms where spirits dwell.

The relationship between the jhankri and the drum is personal and sacred. Each drum is ritually consecrated and treated as a living thing. When a jhankri dies, the drum may be retired or passed to a successor, but it is never treated as a mere object. The drum holds the accumulated power of every séance it has witnessed, every spirit it has called, every healing it has facilitated.

Gregory Maskarinec, whose The Rulings of the Night (1995) documented the oral texts of shamans in the far western hills of Nepal, notes that the drum appears in shamanic origin myths as a gift from the gods — the first drum was given to the first shaman to enable communication between the human and divine worlds. The drum is the axis between worlds made portable. The shaman carries the world tree in his hands.

V. The Three Worlds

Nepali shamanic cosmology is organized around a vertical axis connecting three worlds:

The upper world (sarga or swarga lok) is the realm of the gods — the celestial deities, the high spirits, the ancestors who have ascended. It is reached by the shaman's upward journey through the drum.

The middle world (mrityu lok or madhya lok) is the human world — the visible realm of villages, forests, rivers, and mountains. But the middle world is not only visible. It is populated by spirits that humans cannot ordinarily see: the forest spirits, the water spirits, the spirits of crossroads and boundaries, the ghosts of the improperly dead. These spirits are the jhankri's primary interlocutors. Most illness and misfortune originates in the middle world, from offended spirits or displaced souls.

The lower world (pātāla lok) is the realm of the nagas — the serpent spirits who control water, rain, and underground treasures — and other chthonic beings. It is reached by the shaman's downward journey, often through water or earth.

The three worlds are connected by the world axis — sometimes imagined as a tree, sometimes as a mountain, sometimes as a pillar or a rope. The shaman's drum is the portable axis. When the jhankri drums, he activates the connection between worlds. When he enters trance, he travels the axis — up to consult the gods, across the middle world to track a wandering soul, down to negotiate with the nagas.

The spirit population of the middle world is vast and detailed, varying by ethnic group but sharing common types: the bhut (भूत) and pret (प्रेत) are ghosts of the dead who have not been properly dispatched; the masān (मसान) haunt cremation grounds; the bān (बान) are forest spirits; the bir (बीर) are warrior spirits; the deuta (देउता) and devī are deities of place and function. Each spirit type has its own characteristics, its own methods of causing harm, and its own requirements for propitiation. The jhankri's knowledge of this taxonomy is the core of the profession — to heal, you must know what hurt, and to know what hurt, you must know every being that might.

VI. The Séance

The jhankri's central act is the healing séance — a nightlong ceremony that is at once diagnosis, journey, negotiation, and cure.

The séance typically begins after dark. The jhankri arrives at the patient's home and prepares a small altar: offerings of rice, flowers, incense, and sometimes animal blood. The patient sits or lies before the altar. The household gathers. The room is dimmed.

The jhankri begins to drum. The rhythm starts slow and builds — a steady pulse that fills the room, entrains the breathing of everyone present, and carries the jhankri toward trance. As the drumming intensifies, the jhankri may begin to shake, to sing, to chant the names of spirits in a litany that can run for hours. This is the invocation — the calling of the spirits, beginning with the highest deities and descending through the ranks to the local beings who inhabit the immediate landscape.

The diagnosis often comes through divination: the jhankri may read uncooked rice grains scattered on a plate, may examine the flame of an oil lamp, may gaze into the mirror on the drum, or may receive the diagnosis directly from a spirit who speaks through them. The cause is identified: a soul has been captured by a forest spirit. A naga has been offended by construction near a water source. A ghost is clinging to the patient from a death improperly mourned. A witch has sent illness through sorcery.

The treatment follows the diagnosis. If a soul has wandered, the jhankri journeys — drumming at full intensity, entering deep trance, traveling through the spirit world to find the lost soul and bring it back. The return is often dramatic: the jhankri may suddenly grasp at the air, trapping the soul in their fist, then press it back into the patient's body through the crown of the head. If a spirit has been offended, the jhankri negotiates — offering sacrifices, promising future offerings, bargaining for the patient's release. If sorcery is involved, the jhankri may perform counter-rituals: sucking illness-objects from the patient's body, transferring the disease to a substitute (an animal, an effigy, an egg), or sending the sorcery back to its source.

The séance ends at dawn. The spirits are dismissed. The drum falls silent. The jhankri, exhausted, returns to ordinary consciousness. The patient may feel immediate relief or may improve over the following days. The jhankri's fee is typically modest — a small payment in kind or cash — and many jhankris continue to farm or herd alongside their shamanic practice. This is not a priesthood. It is a vocation that sits within the fabric of ordinary rural life.

VII. The Ethnic Mosaic

The generalizations above describe a shared shamanic template. The reality on the ground is far more diverse. Each ethnic group in Nepal has developed its own variant of the shamanic tradition, shaped by its own language, cosmology, history, and encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism.

The Tamang bombo is perhaps the most studied variant, thanks to the work of Larry Peters, András Höfer, and David Holmberg. The Tamang are one of the largest Tibeto-Burman groups in Nepal, concentrated in the hills surrounding the Kathmandu Valley. Their bombo tradition retains strong connections to Tibetan Bon — the Tamang language is closely related to Tibetan, and the bombo's cosmology shares structural features with the Bon shamanic worldview. The bombo uses the dhyāṅgro drum, enters ecstatic trance, and journeys between worlds. Holmberg's Order in Paradox (1989) describes how the Tamang maintain a dual ritual system: the bombo for shamanic healing and spirit communication, and the lama for Buddhist textual rites. The two systems are complementary, each handling problems the other cannot.

The Gurung ghyabresi and pachyu operate within a similar dual system, as Mumford's Himalayan Dialogue documents. The ghyabresi is the ecstatic practitioner who drums and journeys; the pachyu recites texts and performs rituals. Mumford shows how the shamanic and the Buddhist exist in productive tension — the shaman's wild journeys and the lama's orderly texts, each correcting the excesses of the other.

The Limbu phedangba of the eastern hills is not primarily a healer but a ritual specialist — a master of the Limbu oral tradition who recites the mundhum, the Limbu oral scripture, at weddings, funerals, and seasonal ceremonies. The phedangba is a shaman in the broad sense — he enters altered states, communicates with spirits, maintains the connection between the living and the dead — but his primary medium is the spoken word rather than the drum. The Limbu also have the samba and the yeba/yema, who perform more specifically healing and divinatory functions.

The Rai of the eastern hills have the nokchha (or nakso), a ritual specialist whose practice varies significantly between Rai sub-groups. The Magar of the western hills have produced some of the most extensively documented shamanic practices, thanks to Michael Oppitz's monumental film Shamans of the Blind Country (1981), which recorded Magar shamanic ceremonies in the remote Dhaulagiri region.

The Tharu of the Terai lowlands, an indigenous people of the southern plains, have the guruwa — a healer-priest whose practice draws on both shamanic and Hindu-tantric elements. The Newar of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal's indigenous urban civilization, have a complex ritual landscape that includes the dyaḥ-bāju (spirit priest) and various tantric healers.

What all these variants share — despite their differences in language, cosmology, and practice — is the fundamental shamanic structure: a called practitioner who uses altered states of consciousness to mediate between the human and spirit worlds for the purpose of healing, divination, and the maintenance of cosmic balance. The drum may differ in size and construction. The spirits may carry different names. The chants may be in different languages. But the act — the human being who crosses the boundary between the visible and the invisible to serve the community — is the same.

VIII. The Hindu Current

The relationship between Nepali shamanism and Hinduism is not opposition but interpenetration.

When the Shah dynasty unified Nepal in the late eighteenth century, they imposed a Hindu legal and social order — the muluki ain (law of the land) — that classified every ethnic group within the caste hierarchy. The Tibeto-Burman hill peoples were assigned caste positions, their customs were brought under the umbrella of Hindu orthodoxy (at least in theory), and the shamanic practitioners found themselves operating within a nominally Hindu framework.

The result was not the destruction of shamanism but its Hinduization. The jhankri's spirit pantheon absorbed Hindu deities. The chants incorporated Sanskrit mantras alongside Tibeto-Burman spirit names. The séance might begin with an invocation to Shiva or Devi before proceeding to the local spirits. The jhankri's practice was reframed — by the jhankri themselves as much as by outside forces — as a form of Hindu worship, a local variant of tantric practice, rather than as an autonomous religious tradition.

This reframing was strategic as much as sincere. In a society that defined legitimacy through the Hindu caste order, claiming Hindu identity offered social protection. The jhankri who invoked Shiva was more respectable than the jhankri who invoked only the forest spirits. The absorption of Hindu elements was a survival mechanism — a way of maintaining the shamanic practice by clothing it in acceptable garments.

The dhami tradition represents the most Hinduized form of shamanic practice. The dhami is typically possessed by a Hindu deity — a local manifestation of Shiva, Devi, or a deified ancestor — rather than journeying through the spirit world. The dhami's practice looks more like Hindu temple medium-ship than like the ecstatic drumming of the jhankri. In many communities, both roles exist: the dhami for possession and divine consultation, the jhankri for trance journey and healing. The boundary between them is porous.

The anthropologist Gregory Maskarinec, working among the Brahmin and Chhetri communities of far western Nepal — Hindu caste groups, not Tibeto-Burman — found fully developed shamanic practices among people who considered themselves orthodox Hindus. The shamanism was not a foreign import or a survival from a pre-Hindu past. It was a living practice, adapted and integrated into the Hindu framework, serving needs that the textual Brahminical tradition could not address. When the priest's mantras fail to heal, the jhankri's drum is called.

IX. Shadows

The jhankri's world is shrinking.

Biomedicine is the most direct competitor. As health posts and hospitals reach further into the rural hills, the jhankri's role as primary healer is challenged by a system that offers antibiotics, surgery, and measurable outcomes. The relationship is more complex than simple replacement — many Nepalis use both systems simultaneously, consulting the jhankri for spiritual diagnosis and the hospital for physical treatment — but the trend is clear. Among the young, the educated, and the urban, the jhankri is increasingly seen as backward, superstitious, a relic of the village world their parents left behind.

Christianization is a growing force. Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity has expanded rapidly in Nepal since the democratic reforms of 1990 ended the legal prohibition on conversion. Christian missionaries target precisely the hill communities where shamanism is strongest, and the conversion pattern is total: accepting Christ means rejecting the spirits, the drum, the séance, the entire shamanic worldview. This is the same pattern Dorje's Akha face — the gate comes down. The missionary critique is simple: the spirits the jhankri serves are demons, the healing is false, the tradition is darkness. For communities facing poverty, illness, and marginalization, the offer of a modern global community with schools, clinics, and a clear moral framework is powerful.

Deforestation and urbanization erode the landscape that sustains the tradition. The ban jhankri lives in the forest. When the forest is cut, the spirit world loses its habitat. When villages empty as young people migrate to Kathmandu or the Gulf states for work, the guru-parna lineage frays. The guru ages. The students leave. The drum falls silent — not because the tradition was defeated, but because no one was there to learn it.

The Maoist insurgency (1996–2006) disrupted rural life across the hills, displacing communities and destabilizing the social structures that sustained shamanic practice. The Maoists' explicitly materialist ideology viewed the jhankri as a fraud and the spirits as superstition, though their actual relationship with local traditions was more pragmatic than ideological.

State indifference compounds the problem. Nepal's 2015 constitution declared the country a secular republic, ending the Hindu kingdom. But secularism in practice has meant neither active support nor active suppression of indigenous religious traditions. The jhankri does not appear in government cultural programs. The shamanic traditions are not taught in schools. They are not protected by cultural heritage laws. They exist in a space of official invisibility — neither banned nor recognized, neither persecuted nor preserved.

X. The Living Way

And yet the drum has not fallen silent.

In the remote hills of the Dhaulagiri, Langtang, Solu-Khumbu, and the eastern districts of Sankhuwasabha and Taplejung, jhankris and bombos still practice much as their predecessors did. The calling still comes. Children still are seized by the ban jhankri — or experience whatever the ban jhankri represents, whatever name you give to the initiatory crisis that has produced shamans across Central Asia for millennia. The guru-parna lineage still transmits knowledge from master to student. The drum still carries the shaman between the three worlds.

In the Kathmandu Valley, a modest revival is underway. Urban Nepalis — educated, globally connected, proud of their indigenous heritage — have begun to take an interest in shamanic traditions that their parents' generation dismissed. The jhankri appears in art exhibitions, academic conferences, documentary films, and cultural festivals. The Tamang bombo tradition, in particular, has attracted scholarly attention and cultural prestige. Some urban practitioners combine shamanic training with modern therapeutic frameworks, offering services that bridge the traditional and the contemporary.

Internationally, Nepali shamanism has drawn the attention of Western researchers and spiritual seekers since the 1980s. Larry Peters continues to teach and publish. Bhola Nath Banstola, a Nepali jhankri, has conducted workshops and demonstrations across Europe and North America. The tradition has entered the global shamanic marketplace — with all the complications that entails: the tension between authentic transmission and commercial packaging, between cultural preservation and cultural tourism.

The most vital survival of the tradition, however, is not in the academy or the workshop circuit. It is in the hills, in the villages, in the homes where a child falls ill and the family sends for the jhankri. It is in the nightlong séance where the drum beats from dusk to dawn and the community gathers in the firelight to witness the crossing. It is in the guru-parna relationship — the old jhankri teaching the young one, passing on the chants, the spirit names, the drum rhythms, everything that cannot be learned from a book because it was never in a book.

XI. The Aquarian Question

What keeps Nepali shamanism alive?

The survival medium is the guru-parna lineage — the chain of transmission from master to student, spirit to shaman, voice to ear. Like the Akha's spoken genealogy, like the Samoan vā, the guru-parna depends on presence. The master must be there. The student must be there. The drum must be there. The spirits must call. No element can be replaced by text, by recording, by distance learning, by institutional structure.

The jhankri's tradition has no scriptures. No central authority. No governing body. No seminaries. No buildings. No endowment. The tradition lives in people — in the master who knows the chants, in the student who receives them, in the community that trusts the practice enough to call the shaman when the hospital has nothing left to offer.

This is the twenty-seventh survival medium in the archive. It is kin to the Akha's spoken line and the Aboriginal songline: a tradition carried entirely in human bodies, sustained by human relationships, and extinguished by human absence. When the guru dies without a student, the chain breaks. When the student goes to Doha or Dubai to work, the chain thins. When the community converts to Christianity and the drum is put away, the chain ends — not because someone destroyed it, but because someone was not there to continue it.

The ban jhankri still waits in the forest. The calling still comes. The question is whether there will be someone there to answer it — a child near the forest edge, a family willing to recognize what is happening, a guru willing to teach what cannot be written down.

The drum is the axis between worlds made portable. As long as someone carries it, the three worlds stay connected. When the last drum falls silent, the axis breaks, and the worlds come apart.

Colophon

This profile draws on the ethnographic work of Larry G. Peters (Ecstasy and Healing in Nepal, 1981; Tamang Shamans, 1998), Gregory G. Maskarinec (The Rulings of the Night: An Ethnography of Nepalese Shaman Oral Texts, 1995), John T. Hitchcock ("Aspects of Bhujel Shamanism," 1967; A Shaman's Song, 1976), Stan Royal Mumford (Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal, 1989), David Holmberg (Order in Paradox: Myth, Ritual, and Exchange among Nepal's Tamang, 1989), Michael Oppitz (Shamans of the Blind Country, 1981), and András Höfer (Tamang Ritual Texts I, 1981). The broader framework of Himalayan religious ecology draws on these scholars' collective recognition that shamanism in Nepal is not a relic but a living practice, operating alongside and within the Hindu and Buddhist traditions rather than beneath them.

The jhankri drums between the three worlds — above, below, and the middle ground where humans live among spirits they cannot ordinarily see. The tradition persists wherever the calling comes, the guru teaches, and the community gathers in the firelight to witness the crossing.

Profiled for the Good Work Library by Yungdrung of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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