Curious Gifts

A Tibetan Prayer Wheel and Material Canon at the Royal Ontario Museum

Annie Heckman

PhD student, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

In a third-floor gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum, a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel sits in a tall glass case. The Wimodausis Shop (Wives Mothers Daughters Sisters), run by a Toronto social club raising funds for Word War II, gifted this wheel to the ROM in 1942. While the wheel’s cylindrical silver casing displays a peaceful mantra, the inside holds a text associated with a wrathful protector practice. Although both practices relate to wisdom and compassion in Tibetan Buddhist frameworks, the combination of container and contents is surprising—but only if we subscribe to a standardized canon for material religion.

For Sites of Memory workshop participants — read more (password protected)

With the support of the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, Dr. Pamela Klassen of the University of Toronto and Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer, Director of the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut of Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen, are directing a research project on Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies. The project runs from 2015 to […]

How Should We Understand Indigenous Spirituality (in English)? A reflection on the philosophy of listening Indigenous spirituality matters to Indigenous peoples. In this discussion, I am broadly interested in how Indigenous spirituality is used in contemporary Indigenous politics. More specifically, I ask the question: How should we understand Indigenous spirituality in English? My discussion involves […]