Invisibility, Transgression, & Revelation in Tibet: The Relationship between Invisible Villages and sbas yul (Hidden Valleys)

What is the relationship between Buddhist beyul (Tib: sbas yul) revealed valley refuges and oral folktales about invisible, inhabited villages that are sometimes revealed through tragedy or error? Drawing on oral storytelling traditions in the Tibetan region of Gyalthang and literature about beyul, this paper scrutinizes the tensions between revelation through transgression and revelation through realized vision. Accounts abound in Gyalthang of hidden villages, locally pronounced zi göh, and their revelation through acts of transgression, inversion, or mischief. Both beyul and zi göh are about relocation, discovery, rendering the invisible visible, and the idea that there was an amazing place that we could not see until something wondrous happened. I argue that the older concept of zi göh deeply informed and rendered intelligible the Buddhist dynamic of beyul revelation. How might we assess a hypothesized morphological relationship between seemingly contradictory tales of paradise lost and of paradise found?