Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia

Places and Practices of Power in Changing Environments

Riamsara Kuyakanon, Hildegard Diemberger, David Sneath, Riamsara Kuyakanon, Hildegard Diemberger, David Sneath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000482300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Biological Sciences

Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia offers a unique insight into the non-human and spiritual dimensions of environmental management in a changing world.

This volume presents a comparative, place-based exploration of landscapes across Asia and the entities, practices and knowledges that inhabit them. Rather than treating sacred mountains, terrains and water sources as self-contained, esoteric religious phenomena, the authors consider them within critical 'cosmopolitical ecologies' framings in which non-human entities are engaged as actors in the socio-political arena. The chapters include case studies of healing springs recognized by governments, and sacred mountains that are addressed by heads of states and Communist Party cadres, or that speak to the faithful through spirit mediums in a politics of re-enchantment. Contributors explore the diverse ways in which non-human entities such as forest spirits, reindeer, mountains and Buddhist Masters of the Land are engaged by humans to navigate environmental change and address a range of ecological threats from large-scale mining to climate change. Cosmopolitical ecologies approaches encompass the healing power of topography as well as transformative intimacies with other-than-human beings such as sparrows within an Islamic eco-theological poetic setting. In this light the book observes dynamic and creative processes of cosmological innovation including the repurposing of ritual to address challenges such as the Covid-19 epidemic.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environment and society across disciplinary perspectives in general, and to anthropologists, human geographers, political ecologists, indigenous studies, area studies, environmental sciences and environmental humanities scholars in particular.

The Introduction to this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I Cosmopolitical landscapes and ecologies of practice

1 When lha lu¹ spirits suffer and sometimes fight back: Tibetan cosmopolitics at a time of environmental threats and climate change

Hildegard Diemberger

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036272-1

Introduction

As we arrived at dusk in the village of Til, perched on the steep rocky slopes of Gurlha Mandata massif in the Limi Valley, we stared at this mighty mountain in awe. Towering at the height of almost 8,000 metres above sea level, it is a Himalayan giant clad in snow and ice. Located to the south of the more famous Mt Kailash, it straddles the border between Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China and dominates the landscape of the extreme northwestern corner of Nepal: the Limi Valley in Humla district. The glaciers of this mountain range have been a source of water for agropastoralist communities inhabiting its slopes for centuries and have from time to time caused Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs). In recent years the frequency and intensity of such phenomena seem to have increased significantly, linked to a wide range of local and global factors, including global warming. It is a series of GLOFs experienced by Astrid Hovden (see Hovden and Havnevik, this volume) that inspired the HimalConnect project, which led a team of scholars, including the author of this paper, to explore this landscape and try to understand the predicament of its inhabitants.

When discussing receding snow lines and environmental hazards with the local inhabitants, a common response was that many things were not quite right as the lha lu (lha klu) were disturbed and disasters reflected their anger and/or suffering. It wasn’t the only explanation, but it was certainly a common one, alongside others that ranged from an accumulation of bad karma in a Buddhist perspective to observed dynamics of ice and rock movements from a local empirical perspective.² Referring to the lha lu, the people of Limi were referring to mountains and springs as ‘beings’ that were both the topographical features and the entities inhabiting them that could be translated (somewhat problematically) as ‘gods’, ‘spirits’, or ‘deities’ in English. They were referring to specific ‘beings’ as well as to a common trope rooted in Tibetan cosmology – a concept that I have encountered in many other sites in the Himalaya and on the Tibetan plateau as well as in ancient Tibetan manuscripts (and which in terms of translation challenges reminds us of the Peruvian ‘earth beings’, the tirakuna discussed by De la Cadena (2015). The term lha lu is intriguing as it reflects an ancient vertical tripartition of the cosmos with the gods (lha) above, the lu spirits (below) and a range of other spirits (tsen, nyen, etc.) in the middle – a cosmological feature that can be found in the earliest Tibetan written records. This concept is particularly meaningful when considered in light of Tibetan linguistic features: Tibetan is a syllabic language and each syllable has an original meaning; for example, the term for ‘size’ che chung is created by combining che (lit. ‘big’) and chung (lit. ‘small’), similarly ring tung (lit. ‘long-short’) means ‘length’ while the category pha khu (lit. ‘fathers and uncles’) indicating generically patrilineally related males in a certain generation. Lha lu is, therefore, a cosmological word that encompasses all the divine beings in the landscape, from the gods (lha) above to the spirits of the underground waters (lu) below. As such, it is also similar to concepts such as sadag zhibdag (sa bdag gzhi bdag, lit. ‘[spirits] owner of the land and [spirits] owner of the earth foundation’) lu sadag (lit. ‘lu [spirits] and [spirits] owners of the land’], which can also be found in the Mongolian context – the ‘spirit masters of earth (gazryn ezed) and related spiritual constituents of landscape (lus, savdag)’ (see Sneath and Turk, this volume). In addition, the term lu has also been used to render the Sanskrit term naga in Buddhist literature, so that translation in itself has been part of a process of the conflation of meanings inscribed in the landscape. Both in Tibetan and Mongolian contexts, natural features of the landscape (see Paldrun 2021:236) may thus be seen as both the homes of deities and the corporeal bodies of the deities themselves (Huber 1994). These spiritual entities control the wellbeing of the land with all its inhabitants, including their health.

Setting out from an exploration of the concept of lha lu as can be found both in historical sources and ethnographic contexts, I suggest that it lies at the heart of a ‘cosmopolitical’ rituality as it engages with non-humans as actors in the political arena. Intimately linked to and often identical with environmental features in the landscape, these non-human actors link the religious, the political and the environment in what can be seen as a cosmopolitical ecology. I suggest that rather than representing specific ontological claims, these spiritual entities emphasize the relational dimension of humans with the environment they inhabit and are therefore inherently connected to a morality of care as well as to local power relations. For this reason, it was possible (and compelling) for them to be integrated into different world views over time (pre-Buddhist, Buddhist, other religious traditions according to context, modernist and even Communist); they are not necessarily incompatible with ‘scientific’ knowledge and practices. Even in rural Himalayan contexts that have not been exposed in any significant way to scientific narratives, they co-exist with empirical explanations of environmental phenomena and show that different forms of causality are not mutually exclusive. In other contexts, shaped by modernist science-informed worldviews, these spiritual entities can thus easily resurface and/or be reinvented in processes of re-enchantment that characterize Asia’s varieties of secularism (see Bubandt and van Beek 2011). Associated with illness and healing practices (including ‘spirit possession’), they can even dovetail with China’s fragmented post-Maoist and ‘post-cultural’ cosmologies of spirits and spectres (Ng 2020).

Tibetan environmental cosmopolitics according to the dBa' bzhed (the testament of Ba): a paradigmatic historical narrative

The Tibetan term lha lu (lha klu) appears in innumerable sources in all kinds of genres: ritual texts, biographies, histories, pilgrimage guides and many others. I decided to focus on an 11th century document that can be seen as paradigmatic and particularly important in all Tibetan Buddhist traditions (including the Kagyupa that are dominant in Limi): the dBa’ bzhed, also called ‘the Testament of Ba’. Many years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Pasang Wangdu on the earliest known version of this text (just after its rediscovery in a monastic archive in Lhasa). Also known as ‘the narrative of the bringing of the [Buddhist] doctrine to Tibet’, it gives an account of the events that led to the arrival of key Buddhist masters into Tibet (Santaraksita and Padmasambhava), the construction of the first Buddhist monastery in 775 AD, the declaration of Buddhism as the state religion and the political and religious tensions that followed (see Wangdu and Diemberger 2000; see also Pa tsab Pa sangs dBang ‘dus 2012 and Rme ru Yul lha thar 2012) (Figure 1.1). Since the publication of our preliminary English translation and study of this source in 2000, several scholars have engaged with this text. This led to the discovery of fragments in the Dunhuang collection at the British Library, which testifies that the core of this narrative came into existence temporally closer to the 8th/9th century events it describes than any other account (see Van Schaik and Iwao 2008: 477–87).³

Figure 1.1 Image of the 11th century Tibetan manuscript of the dBa' bzhed text. Made up of 33 sheets, it is currently preserved in Lhasa (TAR). Photograph: Pasang Wangdu.

The theme of local spirits creating havoc for human beings and requiring appropriate engagement appears several times in the narrative. In particular, they play an important part in creating the circumstances that lead to the invitation of the spiritual master Padmasambava to come to Tibet. Famous across Tibet and omnipresent in Himalayan landscapes, this master became the hero in innumerable later accounts of the taming of landscape spirits.⁴ Although stereotypical narratives of Buddhification of a pre-Buddhist land with its spiritual entities have often been used to construct ideas of tradition, indigeneity, pre-Buddhist religion, temporality, etc. that need to be interrogated rather than taken at face value (something that both international and Tibetan ‘traditional’ historians have engaged with in different ways), I suggest that early sources such as the dBa’ bzhed can assist in understanding the historical depth of cosmological features that shape what Basso (1996) calls ‘lived topographies’. Their study can also interface with cross-disciplinary textual and ethnographic research into landscape deities involved in human livelihoods, such as the srid pa’i lha on the margins of the Tibetan plateau (Huber 2020).

In the dBa’ bzhed, Padmasambhava’s intervention is remarkably limited and more realistic than in any narrative that followed. He is depicted as a sort of skilful ‘engineer’ introducing new forms of water management as well as a powerful ritual specialist. A remarkable passage states that:

That day Padmasambhava perfomed mirror-divination…and pronounced the name of all the gods and underground water spirits (lha lu) that had caused the flood of Phangthang, the fire in the Lhasa castle [hit by thunderbolt], the epidemics among people and cattle and the famines. Then calling the names and the clans of all wicked gods and underground water spirits (lha lu), these were summoned to Padmasambhava’s presence. They were made to descend into human beings [i.e. become embodied by mediums] and were severely threatened by him. With the help of a translator, Bodhisattava [Santaraksita] taught them the Buddhist doctrine of cause and effect and made the truth evident. Afterwards Khenpo Padmasambhava told the king: ‘Henceforth, practise the holy doctrine as you like in the country of Tibet! The gods and underground water spirits (lha lu) have been bound by oath but such ritual for giving orders to gods and underground water spirits (lha lu) and binding them by oath must be performed twice more’. (dBa’ bzhed folio 12a–12b)

This passage indicates that lha lu spirits had caused environmental disasters and needed to be dealt with. This offered the opportunity for their taming so that they were ‘bound by oath’ of loyalty to Buddhism (using a language common in the political practices of the time) and were committed to act as Buddhist protectors. Rather than referring to specific landscape gods, as it is done elsewhere in the text, here the narrative refers to lha lu as a generalizing cosmological concept in a way that is not dissimilar from what was done by the Limi farmers I met in 2018. The taming described in this passage implied several steps: first, the spirits’ name was called out, making them present in ways that are still practised in many Himalayan contexts; then, they were compelled to descend (phab) into human beings (mi la), using a vocabulary evoking ‘spirit possession’ through mediums (lhabab, lha ‘bab, lit. ‘god descending’, see also Diemberger 2005); and finally, they were taught the Buddhist ‘doctrine of cause and effect’. The detail of the ‘translator’ (lotsaba) makes this description particularly plausible and compelling. It evokes both the actual process of translation of the Buddhist teachings into Tibetan as well as the role of ‘translators’ assisting mediums during spirit possession (see Diemberger 2005). This realistic description stays in stark contrast with later narratives of Padmasambhava’s miraculous subjugations of deities typically found in the literature based on revealed ‘treasures’, i.e. terma (gter ma). What was represented in the dBa’ bzhed narrative was the enactment of a power r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Cosmopolitical Ecologies Across Asia
• PART I: Cosmopolitical landscapes and ecologies of practice
• PART II: Communities and cosmos: place-based knowledges and practices
• PART III: Cosmopolitics and the contemporary state
• PART IV: Cosmopolitical ecologies for the 21st century
• Afterword