ABSTRACT
The Tibetan ritual implement the phur-ba, called kīla in Sanskrit, has attracted the interest of Western scholars for many years. R.A.Stein, J.Huntington, T. Marcotty, G.Meredith, and S.Hummell have all contributed studies ranging from entire books to learned articles. A consensus seems to have been reached by most of these scholars, that although the kīla in some form or other was certainly known and used in India, the characteristic form of it that is so widespread in Tibet is not of Indian, but of autochtonous Tibetan provenance-or, in the opinion of Hummell, of Mesopotamian origin. Thus Huntington writes “no phur-ba like instrument has been demonstrated to be of Indian origin up to the present day”.1 He loosely suggests that the phur-ba was incorporated from Bon into Buddhism.2 Similarly, R.A.Stein was for many years very interested in the origins of the phur-ba, but he also writes that although the Tibetan lamas' religious and philosophical explanations of their phur-ba are in Indian Buddhist idiom, the actual form and shape of the phur-ba itself, as known in Tibet, seems to be purely Tibetan. Stein says that no literary or archeological evidence for it has ever been found in India; and although he concludes at the end of his research that there is no doubt that some kind of kīla was known in India, he feels he can not establish that the Indians ever knew it in the form used in Tibet.3
