ABSTRACT
House organisation differs across the Himalaya and Tibet but the similarity of linguistic terms among Tibetan speakers has led to misleading assumptions about common practices. Religious – in contrast to secular – ritual requires specialist expertise and Buddhist smallholders defer to ‘religion’ under the mediation of monks who also guarantee the integrity of houses. Most houses have one central pillar in the kitchen, sometimes capped by a capital or wooden bracket known as a ‘pillar-bow’ holding a ‘pillar-arrow.’ Individuals are made up in the same way, as shown by the ritual planting of arrows during the life course. Periodic calendrical rituals no longer constitute a Buddhist house so clearly as cosmos and the environment in which people organise their productive and reproductive lives. Ladakhis put great store today on understanding the words and their religious referents, and both monks and laypeople conduct more frequent and more comprehensible recitals than in the past.
