Dri za- Tibetan RaceRace"Scent Eaters"

Scent Eaters

The Tibetan name says what they are: dri means scent, za means eater. They have bodies, but not bodies made of anything a hand could touch. They drift where fragrance drifts. When incense burns in a temple, the Dri za gather. When flowers open on a shrine, they are already there.

Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa places them among the beings of the desire realm and counts scent as their sole sustenance. They belong to the same class as the Sanskrit gandharva, the celestial musicians of Indian tradition, though in Tibet the musical associations faded and the hunger remained. The lha srin sde brgyad, the eight classes of gods and spirits in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmos, count them alongside nāgas and yakṣas.

The most striking connection is to the dead. In the bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth, a being's consciousness drifts without a physical body. It subsists on odors. Tibetan funeral rites burn juniper and incense partly for this reason: to feed the dead while they wander, bodiless, searching for their next birth.

The Offering and the Fed

Every monastery altar holds torma, sculpted offering cakes set out for the beings a monk cannot see. The cakes sit for hours, sometimes days. When they are finally removed, the butter and barley flour remain, but something has been taken. The Dri za have consumed the lzé, the subtle aromatic essence, and left the gross matter behind.

Incense operates the same way. The smoke rises, disperses, vanishes. What the practitioner smells is what the Dri za eat. Jamgön Kongtrül's Treasury of Knowledge describes this as an extension of dāna, generosity: every stick of incense burned before a shrine feeds beings the practitioner will never see, in a realm that overlaps with the visible world but never quite enters it.