Tibet has long conceived of itself as a frontier or a borderland of unruly human and non-human beings in need of taming, mostly by Buddhism. Now absent from most maps, and facing the erasure of even the name "Tibet," per PRC mandate, Tibet, its language, and culture are increasingly marginalized. This panel explores this space of the margin - and its dynamics of violence and non-violence – through five case studies spanning Tibet and the Himalayas. These include Bhutanese Buddhists who build stupas in Lhop territory to convert the Lhop and turn them away from animal sacrifice, monasteries built by Tibetan nomads to lay claim to contested territory in Qinghai, a newly built peace park for Nepal-China friendship adjacent to Boudha stupa in a Tamang and Tibetan enclave of Kathmandu, ‘invisible villages’ inhabited by non-human beings in Gyalthang in Yunnan, and the cultural politics of negotiating “sacred landscapes” in contemporary Sikkim.
Tibetan Buddhist historiography tends towards a “borderland complex” that fueled fascination with, and pilgrimage to, holy sites in South Asia. Yet, focusing on central Nepal—as both a destination for devotees and a periphery from the perspective of the major sites of the Buddha’s life—problematises applying such discourse to modern times. Kathmandu’s Boudhanath Stūpa has on its own periphery a newly created “Ghyoi Lisang Peace Park” expressing Tibetan, Newar, Tamang and other Himalayan identities as part of its architecture, iconography and used by pilgrims, tourists and locals; but is also a leisure destination run by municipal administrators. This presentation analyses its ecology in relation to older dynamics of pilgrims creating and reading space, identifying the “sacred” and negotiating holy sites. Further, it sheds light on how religio-economic power between China and India manifests here, in not only in mundane bricks-and-mortar business but also online through Instagram and Google reviews.
In the nineteenth century, Tibetan nomadic pastoralists in Amdo defied the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911), conquered the Qinghai Mongols, and settled the grasslands surrounding Lake Tsongön (Tib. Mtsho sngon; Mong. Kökenuur; Ch.: Qinghai hu). After decades of conflict, Qing officials acquiesced and recognized their right to live in these grasslands. The communities then built their own permanent monasteries, established relationships with territorial deities, and affiliated their monasteries with larger monasteries in farming regions in the east. I argue that these processes constituted a form of Buddhist place-making. The monasteries they built and the regions they settled often took on the communities’ names. Through affiliating their monasteries with large monasteries in farming regions, they established religious teaching networks, pilgrimage circuits, trade networks, and political alliances with eastern Amdo monasteries. By establishing different pastoralist communities as patrons (Tib. lha sde) of the same monastery, they facilitated ties between communities.
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?
This paper discusses non-Buddhist animal sacrifice practices carried out by the Lhop and Monpa communities in Bhutan, and the attempts of Buddhist practitioners to ban these based on the Buddhist principle to not take life. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper looks at the ongoing efforts to prohibit animal sacrifice in the Lhop community, and the abandoning of these practices with the Monpa in the past. It lays out the arguments, the progress of events, and the power relations between the minority groups and members of the mainstream Buddhist culture within the nation state of Bhutan. Understanding animal sacrifice as a key practice to connect to their protective deities, the paper considers the effects of this interruption of human-deity relationships and asks if the banning of animal sacrifice might be the stimulus event for full conversion to Buddhism.
In a context of landslides, rampant and unplanned urbanization, and unreliable roads, different communities in Sikkim have turned to their local divinities, narratives, and repertoires of “sacred landscapes” to take protective measures. Using competing narratives, collected from multiple informants from different communities, this paper examines stories, conflict reports, and the display of religious symbols, objects, and materials at various sites that serve to negotiate 'sacredness.' It asks question such as Whose landscape is it? Who has the authority to form a sacred site? By doing so, the paper illustrates how local communities merge, transform, and make sacred landscapes by negotiating beliefs and performing rituals.