Field Capture: Why the Chinese Tao Drum Lost Its Sacredness and How the Tibetan Buddhist Damaru Preserved It

Once a ritual implement of the Shang and Zhou ancestral temples that kept a place in state sacrifice until the Qing, the Chinese tao drum (tao 鼗) survives today as the bolanggu, a children’s toy and peddler’s rattle whose original name is forgotten. The Tibetan Buddhist damaru, similar in form but independent in origin, remains a ritual implement. Comparing the two, this article asks what conditions sustain or dissolve the sacredness of religious objects. It argues that sacredness is always socially conferred, but in two modes: attached sacredness stores meaning in an external institution’s classification, whereas embedded sacredness encodes it in an object’s form, materials, and rules of use, maintained by a transmission community able to regenerate itself across political regimes. It further proposes the concept of field capture: the absorption of a sacred object by a secular field, marked by the replacement of its name, the release of its form and materials from prescription, and the escape of its production and circulation from ritual control. Since the Song, the captured tao drum has not returned to ritual; state revivals restored the category “tao” but not the captured objects. Attached sacredness proves more vulnerable to capture than embedded sacredness.