ABSTRACT
Sandy Macdonald's writings have been a constant source of stimulation and encouragement to me and to many others involved in trying to understand Tibetan and Himalayan religion in its social context. The subject of this chapter, originally written for a Festchrift in his honour, is ~he relationship betw~en Buddhism and shamanism in Tibet, and, in particular, the prehistory of that relationship in India. It intersects with several themes of his work. The chapter is a kind of parergon to my book, Civilized Shamans (Samuel 1993), and explores some questions sketched but not dealt with in any detail in that book.
