Human sacrifice, including cannibalism, was doubtlessly practiced in Tibet prior to the arrival of Buddhism in the 7th century.[38]
The prevalence of human sacrifice in medieval Buddhist Tibet is less clear. The Lamas, as professing Buddhists, could not condone blood sacrifices, and they replaced the human victims with effigies made from dough. This replacement of human victims with effigies is attributed to Padmasambhava, a Tibetan saint of the mid 8th century, in Tibetan tradition.[citation needed]
Nevertheless, there is some evidence that outside of lamaism, there were practices of tantric human sacrifice which survived throughout the medieval period, and possibly into modern times. The 15th-century Blue Annals, a seminal document of Tibetan Buddhism, reports upon how in Tibet the so-called "18 robber-monks" slaughtered men and women for their tantric ceremonies.[39] Such practices of human sacrifice as there was in medieval Tibet was mostly replaced by animal sacrifice, or the self-infliction of wounds in religious ritual, by the 20th century[citation needed]. A systematic survey of evidence for human sacrifice in 20th-century Tibet turns up three instances:
a British traveller in 1915 was told that in previous times, babies had been sacrificed at a Gyantse monastery.
Charles Alfred Bell reports the finding of the remains of an eight-year-old boy and a girl of the same age in stupa on the Bhutan-Tibet border in which were apparently ritually killed.
American anthropologist Robert Ekvall in the 1950s reported some instances of human sacrifice in remote areas of the Himalayas.
Based on this evidence, Grunfeld (1996) concludes that it cannot be ruled out that isolated instances of human sacrifice did survive in remote areas of Tibet until the mid 20th century, but they must have been rare enough to have left no more traces than the evidence cited above.
