kangling

{{Short description|Musical instrument}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2019}}

Image:Kangling example.jpg

File:Alexandra David-Neels.jpg in 1933 Tibet with a Kangling instrument at her waist|alt=]]

Kangling ({{Bo|t=རྐང་གླིང་། |w=rkang-gling}}), literally translated as "leg" (kang) "flute" (ling), is the Tibetan name for a trumpet or horn made out of a human tibia{{Cite book|last=Attala|first=Luci|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jDiqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA166|title=Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body|last2=Steel|first2=Louise|date=2019-05-01|publisher=University of Wales Press|isbn=978-1-78683-416-4|location=Cardiff, Wales|pages=166|language=en}} or femur, used in Tibetan Buddhism for various chöd rituals as well as funerals performed by a chöpa. The leg bone of a deceased person is used.{{cite book |author=O.C. Handa |title=Buddhist Monasteries of Himachal |publisher=Indus Publishing Company |year=2005 |pages=320 |isbn=81-7387-170-1 }} Alternatively, the leg bone of a respected teacher may be used.{{cite book |author=Andrea Loseries-Leick |title=Tibetan Mahayoga Tantra: An Ethno Historical Study of Skulls, Bones and Relics |publisher=B.R. Pub. Corp |year=2008 |pages=225 }} The kangling may also be made out of wood.

The kangling should only be used in chöd rituals performed outdoors with the chöd damaru and bell. In Tantric chöd practice, the practitioner, motivated by compassion, plays the kangling as a gesture of fearlessness, to summon hungry spirits and demons so that she or he may satisfy their hunger and thereby relieve their sufferings. It is also played as a way of "cutting off of the ego."{{Citation needed|date=July 2011}}

File:Detail of two shin-bone trumpets from a Tibetan banner Wellcome L0030388.jpg|alt=]]

A minor figure from Katok Monastery, the First Chonyi Gyatso, Chopa Lugu (17th – mid-18th century), is remembered for his "nightly bellowing of bone-trumpet [kangling] and shouting of phet" on pilgrimage, much to the irritation of the business traveler who accompanied him. Chopa Lugu became renowned as "The Chod Yogi Who Split a Cliff in China (rgya nag brag bcad gcod pa)."{{Cite encyclopedia

| last = Chhosphel

| first = Samten

| title = The First Chonyi Gyatso, Chopa Lugu

| encyclopedia = The Treasury of Lives: Biographies of Himalayan Religious Masters

| access-date = 2013-10-08

| date = December 2011

| url = http://www.treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Chopa-Lugu/8631

}}