1 00:00:18,280 --> 00:00:29,250 So, um. Why go on pilgrimage, Jim, see transformational powers of sacred places and Tibetan Buddhism, 2 00:00:29,250 --> 00:00:36,780 and then I'm not going to be saying anything about what Pern is for present purposes. 3 00:00:36,780 --> 00:00:39,750 Just think of it as a branch of Tibetan Buddhism. 4 00:00:39,750 --> 00:00:46,440 I know the Bompas will hate me for saying that, but functionally, that's all we need to know for the for the time being. 5 00:00:46,440 --> 00:00:52,780 Um. So I'm going to talk through these. 6 00:00:52,780 --> 00:01:01,090 Two things. First of all, the geomagnetic aspect of of the bond of sacred places in Tibet. 7 00:01:01,090 --> 00:01:06,880 Why do people go on pilgrimage? Because there's something special about the places that they go to. 8 00:01:06,880 --> 00:01:18,970 And then we're going to see something about the way in which Tibetans believe that the sacred places are not only transformed by the Saints, 9 00:01:18,970 --> 00:01:25,300 but as a kind of dialectical process that the have the events that's imbued in 10 00:01:25,300 --> 00:01:33,550 the land can then continue to generate good things which can benefit visitors, 11 00:01:33,550 --> 00:01:42,720 ordinary visitors and saints in the future. 12 00:01:42,720 --> 00:01:49,790 Now, a Tibetan pilgrimage. 13 00:01:49,790 --> 00:01:55,900 It is very diverse. Can look at it from lots of different angles. 14 00:01:55,900 --> 00:02:01,990 One of the things that David and I briefly discussed earlier was considering pilgrimage 15 00:02:01,990 --> 00:02:07,540 from three different aspects and the way that he himself has considered the religion, 16 00:02:07,540 --> 00:02:14,980 that is to say, from the societal aspect, the satiric logical aspect and the instrumental aspect. 17 00:02:14,980 --> 00:02:22,810 So I won't actually categorise the talk according to three to these three schemes. 18 00:02:22,810 --> 00:02:31,420 Elements of these three will become apparent as I talk, so let's just sort out some vocabulary to begin with. 19 00:02:31,420 --> 00:02:34,720 Well, let's take a look at some of the literature, first of all. 20 00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:45,850 So pilgrimage, there is a corpus of Tibetan literature, of pilgrimage literature, which we look at briefly in a short while. 21 00:02:45,850 --> 00:02:53,530 But there are also all sorts of other domains of literature which can inform image. 22 00:02:53,530 --> 00:03:00,940 So there's an awful lot in the literature of sacred landscape, which is mainly what I'll be talking about, I suppose. 23 00:03:00,940 --> 00:03:07,450 Then in the lives of Saints, in hagiographies, real characters, mythical characters. 24 00:03:07,450 --> 00:03:13,840 There's a lot about the way in which their spiritual activities are grounded in in certain locations. 25 00:03:13,840 --> 00:03:16,060 Then there are more standard biographies. 26 00:03:16,060 --> 00:03:26,260 Tibetan spent an awful lot of time travelling to sacred places all over Tibet and they record their images in their biographies and autobiographies. 27 00:03:26,260 --> 00:03:35,050 Then there's a more secular variant of this, which we can call travelogue. And finally, there is tantric literature. 28 00:03:35,050 --> 00:03:38,890 There are other areas of literature besides and I'm not going to be looking at all of these, 29 00:03:38,890 --> 00:03:45,910 but I'll dip into some of them periodically to see what they what they can tell us. 30 00:03:45,910 --> 00:03:53,970 So let's begin with the. The idea of sacred lands. 31 00:03:53,970 --> 00:03:59,550 I was the last person, I think, to give my title to the series, and by the time I got there, 32 00:03:59,550 --> 00:04:06,870 I saw that my friend and colleague Hildegard Danberg had already given a title that included sacred landscape. 33 00:04:06,870 --> 00:04:12,420 So I felt a bit bad about using that. However, sacred landscape will feature quite prominently. 34 00:04:12,420 --> 00:04:18,660 And what I'm going to be saying today, and I'm sure I'll be treating it in a very different way from the way Hildur will be. 35 00:04:18,660 --> 00:04:26,370 So I haven't got too many qualms about that. What I have got more qualms about is the fact that this is being recorded. 36 00:04:26,370 --> 00:04:35,220 And a lot of what I'm going to be saying is taken from other talks, which are probably also online. 37 00:04:35,220 --> 00:04:44,580 So if you have a sense of deja vu, then forgive me, but I think we all probably do this sometimes. 38 00:04:44,580 --> 00:04:53,280 Okay. So landscape. Let's get the vocabulary. 39 00:04:53,280 --> 00:04:58,620 And for pilgrimage, I'm coming to you in a moment, and it's based on the Tibetan term for place, 40 00:04:58,620 --> 00:05:06,360 Tibetan has several words for place, but the most formal one perhaps, is this term near what's in brackets. 41 00:05:06,360 --> 00:05:12,900 Is that the Tibetan orthography? So name means place, not just any place, but usually a rather special place. 42 00:05:12,900 --> 00:05:19,710 And the standard term for pilgrimage in Tibet is Natcore Corvin's to go around. 43 00:05:19,710 --> 00:05:23,730 So Nacole is going around places and you don't just go to one place. 44 00:05:23,730 --> 00:05:31,770 When you go on pilgrimage, you stop off at a loss even if you have a single goal, which could be, for example, the main cathedral in Lhasa, 45 00:05:31,770 --> 00:05:41,610 that you can you will almost certainly taken quite a lot of other monasteries, sacred mountains, the sacred lakes and so forth on your way. 46 00:05:41,610 --> 00:05:50,190 And the act of actually visiting a sacred location is an JAL is a human term, meaning to to meet, to encounter, to visit. 47 00:05:50,190 --> 00:05:57,750 And you would use this term, for example, the Lama. You don't just encounter a lama, you Allama. 48 00:05:57,750 --> 00:06:05,610 So there is a certain reverence towards these places insofar as they are, insofar as they are sacred. 49 00:06:05,610 --> 00:06:18,330 Another thing, probably the only anthropological component of this talk is that of space and place, 50 00:06:18,330 --> 00:06:23,970 which is interesting discussion and quite a lot of the secondary literature, 51 00:06:23,970 --> 00:06:29,740 anthropological literature, archaeological literature, geographical literature and and so on. 52 00:06:29,740 --> 00:06:38,070 So much said about this anthropology they used as follows. 53 00:06:38,070 --> 00:06:49,350 A space is a set of coordinates on a map and a place is what you do with it is the culturally meaningful space. 54 00:06:49,350 --> 00:06:56,670 And just to confuse matters, these terms are used in exactly the opposite way by geographers. 55 00:06:56,670 --> 00:07:09,800 So before you read any piece of work that uses place and space, just remember which particular genre it is you're you're reading. 56 00:07:09,800 --> 00:07:19,570 So there are various views about this. One view that's come to prominence in recent times is. 57 00:07:19,570 --> 00:07:28,360 That the the relationship between humans and the physical environment is not one of subject and object. 58 00:07:28,360 --> 00:07:33,040 The distinction implicit in this is false and we should understand that these two, 59 00:07:33,040 --> 00:07:38,680 that is to say, a person and the place that he or she inhabits are mutually constitutive. 60 00:07:38,680 --> 00:07:42,430 This is what we might call a strong phenomenological point of view. 61 00:07:42,430 --> 00:07:48,640 And it's advocated, especially in the work of Tim Ingold. Reference will be coming in just a moment. 62 00:07:48,640 --> 00:07:54,190 And he proposes that an individual's knowledge of a place derives from physical interaction 63 00:07:54,190 --> 00:08:01,030 with it and not from theoretical constructs independent of any such direct experience. 64 00:08:01,030 --> 00:08:12,550 This has been, to my mind, fatally contested by certain other authors, notably Chris Gosden of the Archaeology Department in Oxford. 65 00:08:12,550 --> 00:08:23,590 And these are three references. If you want to look into this further, there's Tim Tingle's presentation of the the issues, Chris Gosden take on it. 66 00:08:23,590 --> 00:08:29,690 And just to mention somebody else who was at the at risk, a computer hindsight, 67 00:08:29,690 --> 00:08:34,990 who will be known to some of you who wrote a wonderful doctoral thesis, which he hasn't yet published. 68 00:08:34,990 --> 00:08:49,490 And it's the which we say it's a pilgrimage in the sense that is the daily circumambulation of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and. 69 00:08:49,490 --> 00:08:59,750 He explores in this thesis the usefulness of some of these phenomenological positions anyway, 70 00:08:59,750 --> 00:09:10,760 it's not published, but it should be in the library somewhere or at least in the board or online. 71 00:09:10,760 --> 00:09:18,900 Now I'm going to talk about what we mean by sacred landscape, first of all, by talking not about landscape. 72 00:09:18,900 --> 00:09:28,410 I'm going to talk about cloud scape. I've used this example before, so if it's familiar to you, again, apologies. 73 00:09:28,410 --> 00:09:34,180 So we look at this, we don't see a cloud. We see something that the cloud looks like. 74 00:09:34,180 --> 00:09:42,060 Yeah. And it could be an animal. 75 00:09:42,060 --> 00:09:53,800 That, for example, or even death. And, of course, what I'm doing is giving a visual presentation of this very well-known passage in Hamlet. 76 00:09:53,800 --> 00:09:59,700 We're hamlets talking to Polonius, and he says he owned the cloud that's almost in the shape of a camel by the mass and it's like a camel. 77 00:09:59,700 --> 00:10:04,000 Indeed, he thinks it is a weasel. It is back like a weasel or like a whale. 78 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:09,340 Very like a whale. So this is a cloud scape. 79 00:10:09,340 --> 00:10:14,530 That is to say, these are not camels and weasels in whales out there. 80 00:10:14,530 --> 00:10:20,660 These are clouds that remind us of these things. 81 00:10:20,660 --> 00:10:27,260 And that will serve as an introduction to what we mean by a landscape, a landscape originally did not mean what's out there. 82 00:10:27,260 --> 00:10:30,800 It's not the topography, it's the interpretation of it. 83 00:10:30,800 --> 00:10:32,480 It's a representation of it. 84 00:10:32,480 --> 00:10:48,720 And it comes into English in the 16th, in the 17th century, actually, to mean a painted representation of and something that's out there. 85 00:10:48,720 --> 00:10:53,760 And what's out there, this topography, this geography can be into? 86 00:10:53,760 --> 00:11:01,320 Artistically and of course, we're not just going to be talking about art can be interpreted in numerous different ways. 87 00:11:01,320 --> 00:11:12,760 And here's a nice little example of that. There was a photograph that was taken by an artist named Thomas Gardner. 88 00:11:12,760 --> 00:11:18,670 And then he made a painting of this and he asked some of his colleagues to make paintings of it, 89 00:11:18,670 --> 00:11:24,140 so here you have the closest thing to the topography that's out there. 90 00:11:24,140 --> 00:11:34,510 And then here is one of his colleagues paintings. A painting of the same scene by himself. 91 00:11:34,510 --> 00:11:48,280 And by a third person, and you can see that these representations, these landscapes of that topography are all very different. 92 00:11:48,280 --> 00:11:55,210 And one of the mistakes that a lot of people have made is to assume that. 93 00:11:55,210 --> 00:12:00,160 Understandings, interpretations of what out there are universal. 94 00:12:00,160 --> 00:12:06,190 So you have Mays' writing in the 1930s that certain canons of beauty are unalterable, 95 00:12:06,190 --> 00:12:18,350 taken generally you and I plamen admire very much what Plamen admired and Chaucer's de Shakespeares de Wordsworth's de. 96 00:12:18,350 --> 00:12:27,800 Wrong, Joshua, approval rating of 62 percent in this country described mountains as WarZ wens blisters, 97 00:12:27,800 --> 00:12:34,250 Tumer Imposture Arms and Samuel Johnson, who has no lover of landscape, either, referred to the Pyrenees as uncouth. 98 00:12:34,250 --> 00:12:39,440 Huge, monstrous excrescence is of nature being nothing but craggy stones. 99 00:12:39,440 --> 00:12:49,770 So there is certainly no universal canon of what constitutes a beautiful landscape. 100 00:12:49,770 --> 00:13:00,580 And Thomas Burnett visiting, I think, and heating them, so he visited the Alps in 1970, 1960 and 71, 101 00:13:00,580 --> 00:13:05,880 these mountains, a place to no order with one another that can either respect youth or beauty. 102 00:13:05,880 --> 00:13:10,320 There is nothing in nature, a more shapeless and an old rock or mountain. 103 00:13:10,320 --> 00:13:20,920 If you look upon an EP of them together or a mountainous country, they are the greatest examples of confusion that we know in nature. 104 00:13:20,920 --> 00:13:31,150 So in a sense, Tibetans agree with Burnett, but they get around it by imposing order on it, in other words, turning what's out there into a landscape. 105 00:13:31,150 --> 00:13:39,160 And as this process of landscaping that I'm going to be talking about, in other words, how to infuse the. 106 00:13:39,160 --> 00:13:44,710 A topography with meaning how to turn space into place. 107 00:13:44,710 --> 00:13:55,150 Now, one of the ways in which this is done and you find this in a lot of prescriptive and descriptive pilgrimage literature is through resemblance. 108 00:13:55,150 --> 00:14:02,500 So people will find visual resemblances in the in the in the land. 109 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:11,410 So here you have Mount Kailash, a very famous pilgrimage destination in the far west of Tibet, which is considered to have an anticlockwise swastika. 110 00:14:11,410 --> 00:14:19,810 You can just sort of make it out. So here's a swastika that's actually been inscribed near the mountain and you can see it there. 111 00:14:19,810 --> 00:14:26,320 And of course, these it's believed to be a true swastika. That spot really occurred because of the activities of saints. 112 00:14:26,320 --> 00:14:31,190 So I'll give you a few examples of these, because I think they are they are quite interesting. 113 00:14:31,190 --> 00:14:34,840 It's how the landscape is red in a certain way. 114 00:14:34,840 --> 00:14:42,530 And this will take us into the the whole domain of Geomancer. 115 00:14:42,530 --> 00:14:47,720 So here you have a hill, it's a once inhabited hill, but again in a pilgrimage guide, 116 00:14:47,720 --> 00:14:56,290 it will say you will come across a rock that looks like a trauma, that is to say, a sacrificial cake. 117 00:14:56,290 --> 00:15:05,810 Right. So the images that are chosen belong to the world that you are trying to realise via this landscape. 118 00:15:05,810 --> 00:15:15,950 Here's another one, it appears on a list of animals, Buddhist animals that dot the landscape and obviously this is an elephant. 119 00:15:15,950 --> 00:15:22,640 Why an elephant? There are no elephants in Tibet because the elephant is from India and India is the land of Buddhism. 120 00:15:22,640 --> 00:15:32,820 So it's a way of converting the meaningless geography that's out there into a Buddhist landscape. 121 00:15:32,820 --> 00:15:38,880 Here's another one, take a look up here. This is, again, a northern Mustang near the Tibetan border. 122 00:15:38,880 --> 00:15:49,650 So there's a strange shaped hill which is understood in certain books to be the hat of one of the great saints in Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism. 123 00:15:49,650 --> 00:15:55,860 Padmasambhava, an 8th century figure very close to this hat. 124 00:15:55,860 --> 00:16:03,780 There is this which is considered in the guidebooks to be the saddle of Padmasambhava. 125 00:16:03,780 --> 00:16:15,940 You can see the resemblance there. And then moving up the scale, rather, in terms of the spiritual hierarchy at a sacred lake in northern Tibet, 126 00:16:15,940 --> 00:16:19,750 a place called UNAMSIL now about a day's drive north of Lhasa, 127 00:16:19,750 --> 00:16:34,900 there is this pair of stones which in the pilgrimage guides to this area are described as being the the tantric divine pair. 128 00:16:34,900 --> 00:16:43,520 Shakra Sambora and his female consort are here in sexual union like this. 129 00:16:43,520 --> 00:16:48,940 OK, so this is how they are understood. 130 00:16:48,940 --> 00:16:53,080 But of course, not everybody sees the same landscape in the same way. 131 00:16:53,080 --> 00:17:01,840 So members of a different school of Buddhism or the Bond religion would see this pair as something different. 132 00:17:01,840 --> 00:17:10,790 And indeed, we do have a different representation of it. Now, the whole area has been converted into a tourist resort. 133 00:17:10,790 --> 00:17:16,670 And you have these two rocks again, there's now a road through there, it's a tourist destination. 134 00:17:16,670 --> 00:17:21,500 And of course, because Tibet is one of the it's one of the minority areas, 135 00:17:21,500 --> 00:17:30,050 it's it's the sort of place that's associated with romance, femininity and so on. 136 00:17:30,050 --> 00:17:36,890 So now these two are no longer understood that these two rocks are no longer understood as being a divine couple. 137 00:17:36,890 --> 00:17:41,900 They are simply the couple stone. So it's a romantic destination. 138 00:17:41,900 --> 00:17:47,740 This is where newlywed couples go on their honeymoon, for example. 139 00:17:47,740 --> 00:17:54,730 And there are many such examples of the politicisation and modernisation of classical. 140 00:17:54,730 --> 00:18:01,780 This is what is sometimes called contested landscapes. But in these. 141 00:18:01,780 --> 00:18:07,900 Prescriptive text, when you visit a landscape like Sacred Mountain, like this mountain, 142 00:18:07,900 --> 00:18:15,310 I'm going to be talking about more presently the mountain of Congo and southeast Tibet. 143 00:18:15,310 --> 00:18:19,350 There are referenced references to locations. 144 00:18:19,350 --> 00:18:25,780 So it will say, for example, rocks and crags which have the appearance of the signs of the five Buddha families, 145 00:18:25,780 --> 00:18:28,810 Saud's mirrors and the eight auspicious symbols. 146 00:18:28,810 --> 00:18:40,180 Again, very, very Buddhist, an area which has a village like quote that looks like a mirror, a drum and a flat bell, 147 00:18:40,180 --> 00:18:48,970 a flat area of hill, which looks like a mandala, a rock which resembles a three edged blazing jewel and so on and so on. 148 00:18:48,970 --> 00:18:57,160 I mean, we could go on at great length. Some of them are quite inventive crags that give the impression of Ultra's a turquoise coloured rock, 149 00:18:57,160 --> 00:19:00,430 which looks like a lady hiding herself and laughing there. You know, 150 00:19:00,430 --> 00:19:04,210 you can see that the author is actually perhaps getting a little bit bored 151 00:19:04,210 --> 00:19:12,640 with the Buddhist imagery and and letting his imagination run a little wilder. 152 00:19:12,640 --> 00:19:23,290 So it's not just particular locations that are understood as resembling divinities, sacred objects and so forth. 153 00:19:23,290 --> 00:19:29,710 It's Tibet. According to a very old idea, the land of Tibet is the supine demoness, 154 00:19:29,710 --> 00:19:34,540 there's been a great deal of literature about this and that this demoness had to be subdued, 155 00:19:34,540 --> 00:19:41,590 not killed, but subdued because she was hostile to Buddhism. But she has a great deal of inherent power. 156 00:19:41,590 --> 00:19:48,550 And this power, if rightly harnessed, could make it make the land propitious for the introduction of Buddhism. 157 00:19:48,550 --> 00:19:54,310 So this is an older representation of this demoness, and this is a more recent one. 158 00:19:54,310 --> 00:19:57,910 And so it's a it's an enduring theme. 159 00:19:57,910 --> 00:20:09,820 And this takes us nicely on to what we might regard as a more systematic representation of the landscape through the domain of Geomancer. 160 00:20:09,820 --> 00:20:24,790 Now, I must immediately acknowledge my friend and colleague Petra Mora, who kindly sent me copies of these images which are published. 161 00:20:24,790 --> 00:20:30,760 And I'm afraid I haven't got the details of the publication with me at the moment. Anyway, it's a Tibetan geomagnetic manual. 162 00:20:30,760 --> 00:20:41,280 And what we're going to look at some of these and. The point is that. 163 00:20:41,280 --> 00:20:54,980 It's not just a haphazard. Random reading of the landscape, there is actually a process whereby people can be trained, they can be taught. 164 00:20:54,980 --> 00:21:02,630 See the landscape in a certain way and to interpret it and this is the whole domain of Geomancer, which in Tibetan is called Suchi, 165 00:21:02,630 --> 00:21:13,220 which literally would mean diagnosis of place, some place or land to diagnosis and ultimately redo the translation. 166 00:21:13,220 --> 00:21:18,010 So these are hills. And this is what you have to try. 167 00:21:18,010 --> 00:21:26,470 Does it look like this? Does it look like this one? Does it look like this? And if it looks like any of these, then you act accordingly. 168 00:21:26,470 --> 00:21:31,270 You build your monastery there or you don't build your monastery there. You don't build a house there, whatever. 169 00:21:31,270 --> 00:21:36,970 Okay, so this is how you should understand. It's very much based, I think, on the Chinese tradition. 170 00:21:36,970 --> 00:21:46,390 I don't know if anybody has done a systematic comparison of feng shui and Tibetan suchi, but anyway, this is the Tibetan interpretation of it. 171 00:21:46,390 --> 00:21:51,130 So here the one on the left, it says this is a symbol. 172 00:21:51,130 --> 00:22:00,920 So this is a symbol demon demoness, waving like the sharp edge of a weapon, like a raised flag, like the spokes of wheel. 173 00:22:00,920 --> 00:22:08,380 So this is like the the sharp edge of a weapon. 174 00:22:08,380 --> 00:22:15,790 Sorry. This is the raised flag. This is the spokes of a wheel. This is the face of an angry demon. 175 00:22:15,790 --> 00:22:20,500 These are the major what they call the Sarda, the Earth enemies. 176 00:22:20,500 --> 00:22:26,710 And then it lists the harm that these do. Anybody who builds a house that the lives of the people will be short. 177 00:22:26,710 --> 00:22:30,700 There will be diseases and many hindrances. There will be outbreaks of contagious diseases. 178 00:22:30,700 --> 00:22:35,620 So the whole point is to avoid places like this, you know, they're useful for certain types of meditation, 179 00:22:35,620 --> 00:22:42,610 for example, and perhaps for placing a cemetery or some such thing, but it will not heal your illnesses. 180 00:22:42,610 --> 00:22:46,480 And since we're partly talking about healing, this is certainly a consideration. 181 00:22:46,480 --> 00:22:53,260 It will make them worse and you will probably die young and lose your fortune. 182 00:22:53,260 --> 00:23:01,990 Whereas on the other hand, a mountain that looks like people debating here, we have two people debating athletes fighting or fighting lions. 183 00:23:01,990 --> 00:23:06,330 Oh, sorry, these are also enemies and you will have different results. 184 00:23:06,330 --> 00:23:13,540 So if you build a settlement here, then there will be a lot of gossip, lots of diseases, quarrels and fights. 185 00:23:13,540 --> 00:23:19,810 And then if the upper and lower part of the mountain appear to be separated, 186 00:23:19,810 --> 00:23:25,660 they appear to be ruptured, then et cetera, et cetera, there will be similar things. 187 00:23:25,660 --> 00:23:36,240 Let's take a look at a few more days. It's quite interesting you got here, so if you have a forest in the front side and antidepression depression. 188 00:23:36,240 --> 00:23:48,720 If the peak resembles a sitting teacher and the upper part looks as if it was encircled by his disciples, this is good. 189 00:23:48,720 --> 00:23:53,550 If it looks like a king sitting on a throne encircled by his vassals, this is good. 190 00:23:53,550 --> 00:24:00,090 If it looks like she's descending on a pass, there's also unsettled by many vulture chicks. 191 00:24:00,090 --> 00:24:08,490 This is auspicious. And I've got to give you I'm not going to go through all the examples, but, you know, they're magnificent. 192 00:24:08,490 --> 00:24:11,880 But you can see that they're not vague. They're very precise. 193 00:24:11,880 --> 00:24:19,660 You know, it's a king sitting surrounded by his surrounded by his courtiers, vultures and chicks and and so forth. 194 00:24:19,660 --> 00:24:28,380 So you need to have a trained visual imagination that coincides with the visual imagination of your 195 00:24:28,380 --> 00:24:37,770 colleagues from the same school in order to reach a consensus about the significance of the place. 196 00:24:37,770 --> 00:24:45,930 OK. I won't go through all this. 197 00:24:45,930 --> 00:24:55,560 Leave that out as well. OK, so another way of reading meaning into a place is by naming. 198 00:24:55,560 --> 00:25:00,840 And in this case, you have the chaplain not not really a Buddhist chaplain, 199 00:25:00,840 --> 00:25:13,560 in this case of a local duke in a provincial Tibetan area who invokes the territorial gods at excuse me, 200 00:25:13,560 --> 00:25:17,970 most of these gods don't actually have a physical form. 201 00:25:17,970 --> 00:25:27,870 They are simply the place itself. They are the names of the place itself that are buying at a very low level. 202 00:25:27,870 --> 00:25:30,350 These are the representations of the divinities. 203 00:25:30,350 --> 00:25:40,110 So when they are invited to come and be feasted, they come and occupy these effigies, these effigies that are situated here. 204 00:25:40,110 --> 00:25:41,280 And once they're there, 205 00:25:41,280 --> 00:25:48,090 then he will feed them with beer and he will feed them with with various other things used to perform animal sacrifices for them. 206 00:25:48,090 --> 00:26:02,300 But that is now discontinued. Now, the point is that this text is divided geographically, so it goes in a kind of spiral. 207 00:26:02,300 --> 00:26:06,470 And it starts off in the far west of Tibet and then this great big sweep around, 208 00:26:06,470 --> 00:26:12,560 it invites all the gods of western Tibet, not the gods of northern Tibet, the gods of eastern Tibet. 209 00:26:12,560 --> 00:26:18,980 And then that's phase one. And then you have a sort of inner circle invites those divinities. 210 00:26:18,980 --> 00:26:25,750 And finally he comes in on the his local village and an. 211 00:26:25,750 --> 00:26:30,310 All the different categories of divinities is the father, Lou, the certain spirits, the warrior gods, 212 00:26:30,310 --> 00:26:37,270 the demons, the royal divinities, as they call them, the earth spirits and fist's them. 213 00:26:37,270 --> 00:26:39,600 So what this. 214 00:26:39,600 --> 00:26:55,580 Invocation does is to create a kind of imaginary map, and it's situates the speakers village at the centre of the cultural area, that is. 215 00:26:55,580 --> 00:26:59,330 West central Tibet and beyond that, greater Tibet. 216 00:26:59,330 --> 00:27:08,930 So it's a kind of zooming in, it's a spiralling into to his local community, you know, it's sacred at only a very, very low level, to put it that way. 217 00:27:08,930 --> 00:27:17,060 And what he's invoking are these creatures, these things called Sadakat means place and that means owner. 218 00:27:17,060 --> 00:27:26,060 Or Lord, and it's also these are the the divine lords of the soil, but it's the term that's also used for and Lord. 219 00:27:26,060 --> 00:27:30,980 So you can talk about your conduct, your house owner or your Sadak or your landowner. 220 00:27:30,980 --> 00:27:39,320 So and this is exactly how these types of divinities are understood and in the process of the invocation. 221 00:27:39,320 --> 00:27:49,430 This is what the priest does. He re-establishes this bond with them and is a kind of rental agreement that the divinities of the soil, 222 00:27:49,430 --> 00:27:55,910 other owners, they are the hosts and we humans are the guests. And he asks the. 223 00:27:55,910 --> 00:28:04,850 Continue to extend their hospitality and you can read it, and then he he pays the rent, which is, you know, 224 00:28:04,850 --> 00:28:07,520 the beer and the reverence and the and the food, 225 00:28:07,520 --> 00:28:12,100 and then he sends them back because he don't want the landlords hanging around your house all the time. 226 00:28:12,100 --> 00:28:19,430 So and then there is this rather nice request for support by our companions. 227 00:28:19,430 --> 00:28:25,760 If we go on the Craggs, be our steps and ladders, if we pass through water by our bridges, if we walk on trails, et cetera, et cetera. 228 00:28:25,760 --> 00:28:33,060 Yeah. Know this can go a little bit further to talk about the societal aspect of it here. 229 00:28:33,060 --> 00:28:39,230 We've seen the way in which this virtual pilgrimage around Tibet, it's you know, he acts as a kind of psychopomp. 230 00:28:39,230 --> 00:28:51,250 You know, he travels around in spirit, but it can go a little bit further by really establishing a political identity. 231 00:28:51,250 --> 00:28:58,060 And the example I would like to take here is not a pilgrimage literature of a long song cycle. 232 00:28:58,060 --> 00:29:05,500 It's supposed to be a thousand eight songs from a southern Tibetan principality called Barong, 233 00:29:05,500 --> 00:29:09,730 and they have the song cycle called JLC, which means the victory song. 234 00:29:09,730 --> 00:29:15,850 And the men and women dress up in their finery and they sing these alternating songs together. 235 00:29:15,850 --> 00:29:19,730 And there are many of these. But the opening song locates them. 236 00:29:19,730 --> 00:29:26,510 Now, most of the community lives in exile. They've moved into the. 237 00:29:26,510 --> 00:29:29,300 Quite a lot of them are in Switzerland, in fact, but even there, 238 00:29:29,300 --> 00:29:37,490 whenever they start the cycle, they begin with this particular song which locates them. 239 00:29:37,490 --> 00:29:40,820 It's extols the area in which they live. 240 00:29:40,820 --> 00:29:46,940 So to the west of the village, Gary Berntsen seems to be an offering of heaped flower. 241 00:29:46,940 --> 00:29:48,200 And this is Gary Bunch. 242 00:29:48,200 --> 00:29:57,170 And this is the the main snow mountain over to the west, to the north of the village, the Red Hill looks like the offering of Mandala. 243 00:29:57,170 --> 00:30:05,300 It looks like a monk wearing robes because indeed to the north of the village there is this rather old monastery are quite badly destroyed, 244 00:30:05,300 --> 00:30:14,120 called barong payment should be. So to the west, you have the Lord, to the north, you have the the main monastery. 245 00:30:14,120 --> 00:30:20,810 And then the song continues to the east, the village. I want to show you images of the landscape here, but there are the blue Slate Hills. 246 00:30:20,810 --> 00:30:28,250 Who are the young men dressed in monk's robes and then to the south of the village Mount Teashop on the Upland 247 00:30:28,250 --> 00:30:32,810 Meadows are sunlit and it seems to be the splendid fathers and mothers and the children all gathered here. 248 00:30:32,810 --> 00:30:38,180 So essentially, you have the whole community. 249 00:30:38,180 --> 00:30:51,020 Divided up into its major components, the priesthood, the rulers, the warrior force and then the civil community and projected onto this landscape, 250 00:30:51,020 --> 00:30:58,460 and it's like a sort of magic carpet that they can roll up and take with them all around the world wherever they go, 251 00:30:58,460 --> 00:31:07,040 and then reproduce their landscape when they begin the set of songs that somehow expresses their social identity. 252 00:31:07,040 --> 00:31:13,220 And I'm sure that we would be able to find many other communities that have something similar. 253 00:31:13,220 --> 00:31:20,100 OK, so another term for the SADAK, the owners of the soil is shidduch, which just means the owners of the place. 254 00:31:20,100 --> 00:31:30,830 But after a while, historically, what tends to happen is that these attacks, Bushi, essentially just names their names of places they are nominee. 255 00:31:30,830 --> 00:31:34,940 And the nominee, as we know, classically turned into pneumonia. 256 00:31:34,940 --> 00:31:48,950 They turn into spiritual entities and they become user and the or something sometimes called, okay, you're literally in spell slightly differently. 257 00:31:48,950 --> 00:31:53,870 It can be the root of the place, the root of the land. So the euro is not just a place. 258 00:31:53,870 --> 00:32:00,740 It's a politicised place. It's a place of any dimension, a political place of any size, 259 00:32:00,740 --> 00:32:06,560 so it can mean England or it can be a village of eight houses, but it is essentially a political unit. 260 00:32:06,560 --> 00:32:16,750 So from being something out there inhabiting the landscape, these divinities, these birth owners become. 261 00:32:16,750 --> 00:32:23,440 Divine. They start to take on personalities, they start to take on an iconography in the literature. 262 00:32:23,440 --> 00:32:27,730 So there's a kind of development which I want to I want to look at. 263 00:32:27,730 --> 00:32:37,080 How does this happen? It happens through a process called Delois, which is one of the most wonderfully policy. 264 00:32:37,080 --> 00:32:48,170 Terms and Tibetan. It can mean to pacify or to subdue it and be to preach, to convert, to cure, to conquer. 265 00:32:48,170 --> 00:32:58,110 To cultivate so, you know, if you go to a forested area and you decide to make a field, then that would be W.R You called the place, you tame it. 266 00:32:58,110 --> 00:33:04,500 And it also refers as a noun to the Buddhist monastic disciplinary code, the Vinaya. 267 00:33:04,500 --> 00:33:12,420 And this is what happens to these meaningless landscapes. It's a process of W.R It's a process of conversion to a Buddhist open landscape. 268 00:33:12,420 --> 00:33:26,770 Let's take one particular example. So here we have this rather beautiful mountain in the north of Tibet with this lake numb to heaven lake. 269 00:33:26,770 --> 00:33:37,420 And the divinity of this mountain is envisaged like this as a a warrior divinity on a white horse. 270 00:33:37,420 --> 00:33:45,700 And according to the legend, when Padmasambhava, the supposedly the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, came to the country in the 8th century, 271 00:33:45,700 --> 00:33:53,350 one of the first things he did was to subjugate Nanshan Tongala, who was the ruler of all the indigenous gods of Tibet. 272 00:33:53,350 --> 00:33:59,710 So he subjugated them. And from that point on, they are no longer hostile to Buddhism. 273 00:33:59,710 --> 00:34:09,880 They become minor Buddhist divinities. And as a process of this conversion, these mountains, which were regarded as warrior mountains, 274 00:34:09,880 --> 00:34:19,000 which used to receive blood sacrifices and and so forth, I mean, I could have included descriptions and presentations of quite a number of these, 275 00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:23,770 what we might call pagan rituals, but I haven't included them here. They get converted. 276 00:34:23,770 --> 00:34:30,850 Obviously, it's not the mountain itself. That's although this is how it's represented in the literature, it's people's perceptions of it. 277 00:34:30,850 --> 00:34:40,240 And so from being a Gulzar, it becomes a Nadie. It becomes really is a mountain and a name is a powerplays. 278 00:34:40,240 --> 00:34:42,520 So it's a mountain that is a powerplays. 279 00:34:42,520 --> 00:34:50,710 And from now on, these are the kinds of places to which one can go on pilgrimage and perform the things that one does on pilgrimage. 280 00:34:50,710 --> 00:34:59,530 For example, circumambulation, you don't normally circumambulation the site of a Gulzar territory, but you do circumambulation. 281 00:34:59,530 --> 00:35:07,720 When this divinity has been converted into some major divinity of the of the bond religion or the Buddhist religion. 282 00:35:07,720 --> 00:35:16,280 Again, another concrete example here we have a one of the highest mountains in the world. 283 00:35:16,280 --> 00:35:26,430 Which because she's too modest to mention, it was first claimed by Hildegard Dembo that Burger's father. 284 00:35:26,430 --> 00:35:36,250 So it's in that, Paul. It's over a thousand metres, and it is, as we see, a great heap of snow and rock. 285 00:35:36,250 --> 00:35:39,930 But that's only because we see it with external vision. 286 00:35:39,930 --> 00:35:45,960 If we see it with proper, educated, spiritual inner vision, then it would look completely different. 287 00:35:45,960 --> 00:35:56,660 And according to one pilgrimage account, there is a lama in the 18th, in the 19th century, specifically in 1863. 288 00:35:56,660 --> 00:36:05,000 Sitting in his cave near this mountain and he sees a bright light and he hears a voice speaking to him from a waterfall, 289 00:36:05,000 --> 00:36:11,000 and the speaker introduces herself as the Duchesne, the goddess of the place, and she invites him to a feast. 290 00:36:11,000 --> 00:36:15,980 She emerges from the water she's wearing not very much some jewels. 291 00:36:15,980 --> 00:36:24,560 And then they set off. They reach this mountain, which is called Mulligan in the text in just an instant. 292 00:36:24,560 --> 00:36:31,040 And then he suddenly realises that it's different from this stone and Snow Massif that he's used to seeing. 293 00:36:31,040 --> 00:36:36,560 The sky is thick with parasols victory banners, rainbows, Buddhas, lamas, incense, smoke wheels, 294 00:36:36,560 --> 00:36:42,560 conchas and everywhere you can hear the sound of bells, drums and mantras being interned. 295 00:36:42,560 --> 00:36:48,200 And there are a lot of other inhabitants. So there are certain spirits, earth gods and so on and so forth. 296 00:36:48,200 --> 00:36:54,050 And he says that scene within inner vision, this is not just a pile of snow and rock, 297 00:36:54,050 --> 00:37:03,260 it is actually sung apology sung by being the sacred mountain inhabited by none other than the Sumbawa. 298 00:37:03,260 --> 00:37:10,640 And this is a representation of it. This is how the mountain would look if we only had the inner vision with which to see it properly. 299 00:37:10,640 --> 00:37:18,560 And he duly meets again, accompanied by his wives and as many attendants and receives teachings from him. 300 00:37:18,560 --> 00:37:26,350 And amongst other things, we are told that inside this mountain there is a hidden land. 301 00:37:26,350 --> 00:37:33,730 Called Dunlow Jumper, which has 500 villages, it gathers a harvest without planting and all its waters are like beer and milk, 302 00:37:33,730 --> 00:37:41,740 it's Earth is like Zampa and it's wood is like meat. So it's, you know, the big rock candy mountain in a in a rather spiritual perception. 303 00:37:41,740 --> 00:37:50,800 And we're also told that at the moment it's hidden, but that it will be opened in the water monkey of the 20th cycle, which is 2172. 304 00:37:50,800 --> 00:37:58,140 And sadly, we won't be around to see it, but our children's children's children will. 305 00:37:58,140 --> 00:38:08,280 Anyway, so he writes down what he sees, and this becomes the prescription of how this new pilgrimage place should henceforth be seen. 306 00:38:08,280 --> 00:38:14,150 So this is how pilgrimage literature occurs. Somebody has a vision, sees. 307 00:38:14,150 --> 00:38:21,410 Sees them out in a different way, writes it down, another lama will then go there, have another vision and then add to it. 308 00:38:21,410 --> 00:38:33,190 So it's a process of accretion of sanctity whereby these topographic locations turn into sacred places. 309 00:38:33,190 --> 00:38:39,460 So this is essentially what Thomas Burnett was hoping to see in the Alps in 71, 310 00:38:39,460 --> 00:38:45,010 but he lacked the vision to transform the place into a sacred landscape. 311 00:38:45,010 --> 00:38:49,660 Now, one of the important processes for transforming the landscape is, well, 312 00:38:49,660 --> 00:38:55,780 these are just some examples of the type of literature I've been talking about. 313 00:38:55,780 --> 00:39:05,520 But an important is the representation of the topography as a mandala and a mandala. 314 00:39:05,520 --> 00:39:12,700 You don't need to go into too much detail about this, but it's essentially what Giuseppe Torchy called a psycho Kosma Gram. 315 00:39:12,700 --> 00:39:17,020 It's a representation of the universe which is also inherent in oneself. 316 00:39:17,020 --> 00:39:21,820 Above all, it's symmetrical. North, south, east, west. It has an inner circle. 317 00:39:21,820 --> 00:39:29,560 It has a circle, it has an outer circle and so forth. So it's a symmetrical square surrounded by circle. 318 00:39:29,560 --> 00:39:38,290 And this is henceforth how these mountains are represented in the literature. So there are always four caves or four sets of caves. 319 00:39:38,290 --> 00:39:47,360 There are always sacred entrances, there are four of this and so on. 320 00:39:47,360 --> 00:39:50,800 And so for four major streams at each of the four directions and so on. 321 00:39:50,800 --> 00:39:59,380 So it doesn't really necessarily correspond to the actual topography, but it's an idealised topography to a mandala. 322 00:39:59,380 --> 00:40:05,690 So how is the act of pilgrimage seen? How do Tibetans envisage. 323 00:40:05,690 --> 00:40:10,730 The process of going on pilgrimage and there is a hierarchy of religious activity, 324 00:40:10,730 --> 00:40:15,290 you find this in quite a lot of sources, but here I'm citing a Bompas protocol. 325 00:40:15,290 --> 00:40:21,530 Tenzin Ambac, who wrote a Tibetan were called, which translates as a guide for the blind. 326 00:40:21,530 --> 00:40:30,930 And he says that. The wonderful thing about the ball and about Buddhism is that there is something for everybody. 327 00:40:30,930 --> 00:40:37,800 So if you have the highest spiritual abilities, then you practise this tradition called the great perfection. 328 00:40:37,800 --> 00:40:45,810 It's the highest regarded as the the most elite. And it's the sort of sass of the of Tibetan religious practise. 329 00:40:45,810 --> 00:40:54,840 And then if you can't quite manage those levels of abstraction and you need kind of ritual props, then you should engage in the higher Tanisha's. 330 00:40:54,840 --> 00:41:01,290 And then if you can't deal with this, if in some order and discipline, 331 00:41:01,290 --> 00:41:06,330 then you become a monk, you observe monastic vows, and then if you can't even do that, 332 00:41:06,330 --> 00:41:15,000 then he says and I quote, Merit might also be accumulated by those who are unable to undertake this kind of religious activity by means of the body, 333 00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:20,070 the speech and the mind. He gives examples. They should make prostrations to sacred supports. 334 00:41:20,070 --> 00:41:28,860 That means temples, lamas, sacred mountains and so on, circumambulation them, make offerings with their voices. 335 00:41:28,860 --> 00:41:32,490 They should recite mantras and sing hymns of praise. And with their minds, 336 00:41:32,490 --> 00:41:40,380 they should be faithful and devout and altruistic as far as they can in order to clear away the defilement of the three spheres of action they should, 337 00:41:40,380 --> 00:41:45,420 with their bodies, visit sources of blessings and places where saints have meditated. 338 00:41:45,420 --> 00:41:49,680 And if they have enough knowledge of the stories behind these holy mountains and visit them, 339 00:41:49,680 --> 00:41:54,030 that is a powerful asset for increasing their faith and wishes. 340 00:41:54,030 --> 00:42:00,320 And he then goes on to say. Don't worry too much about the local territorial divinities, 341 00:42:00,320 --> 00:42:07,140 just envisage the mountain as one of the great tantric divinities or as the Buddha himself, the Buddha. 342 00:42:07,140 --> 00:42:12,860 Okay, so this is how pilgrimage can be perceived. 343 00:42:12,860 --> 00:42:18,170 It's what you do when you can't do anything else, essentially, you know, so it's rather low on the hierarchy. 344 00:42:18,170 --> 00:42:22,880 But that is not the whole story. It's the power of these sacred places. 345 00:42:22,880 --> 00:42:29,480 The relevance of them for other forms of spiritual practise are also are also quite important. 346 00:42:29,480 --> 00:42:43,160 And we will see that in just a minute. But let's look at what pilgrims do when they are on pilgrimage, when they're following their their guidebooks. 347 00:42:43,160 --> 00:42:47,360 So they walk around in the case of Shalash, for example, this is Mount Kailash, 348 00:42:47,360 --> 00:42:53,150 there is an outer circle which takes actually you can do it in a day, pretty exhausting, but it can be done. 349 00:42:53,150 --> 00:42:59,800 And when you've done that 13 times, then you are entitled to do the inner. 350 00:42:59,800 --> 00:43:06,280 And then, if you like, you can also circumambulation the lake Lake Manassero River, which I think takes 18 days and done that. 351 00:43:06,280 --> 00:43:10,180 So these are pilgrims from the far east of Tibet who are walking all around the lake, 352 00:43:10,180 --> 00:43:14,650 having walked around the mountain and then as if this were not enough. 353 00:43:14,650 --> 00:43:20,710 OK, here we go. So there are all kinds of specific things that have to be done at specific locations. 354 00:43:20,710 --> 00:43:27,760 So most commonly, as you go over a high pass, you add a white stone to a can. 355 00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:33,070 Very commonly at polling places, there will be two rocks which are very close together, 356 00:43:33,070 --> 00:43:37,300 and you have to try and squeeze through and if you do manage to squeeze through, 357 00:43:37,300 --> 00:43:45,310 then you will have an easy time of it in the after death, plain what they call the border after death and before rebirth. 358 00:43:45,310 --> 00:43:47,950 But if you're rather against the sort of camel through the eye of the needle thing, 359 00:43:47,950 --> 00:43:53,620 and if you can't quite get through, then, you know, things are going to be a little difficult for you. 360 00:43:53,620 --> 00:43:58,660 You can make it more difficult for yourself by prostrating or all the way around. 361 00:43:58,660 --> 00:44:05,590 I met some people who had prostrated all the way from eastern Tibet and it had taken them a year and a half, 362 00:44:05,590 --> 00:44:18,610 I think, to get to western Tibet, perhaps even more. And this is treated with some bewilderment by Hindu pilgrims to the area who don't do this. 363 00:44:18,610 --> 00:44:27,440 This is another location, a different mountain, but here, this rock on which the pilgrim is sitting is called dicterow pupusa, which means. 364 00:44:27,440 --> 00:44:34,610 Placing placing the rock on which you placed the stones of sin. 365 00:44:34,610 --> 00:44:39,500 So basically you pick up a few stones, you put them on here, and this represents you depositing your sins, 366 00:44:39,500 --> 00:44:48,470 leaving your sins behind on the rock before you then go up further onto the mountain into into purer, more sublime levels on the pilgrimage. 367 00:44:48,470 --> 00:44:53,900 And then, you know, there are certain locations this is to put in the far west, which have, you know, 368 00:44:53,900 --> 00:45:01,880 wonderful geo morphological configurations where, again, the prescription will say there are sacred springs here. 369 00:45:01,880 --> 00:45:10,040 You must drink the water from this to purify your sins, or you should bathe in the springs to wash away all your sins, as indeed they do. 370 00:45:10,040 --> 00:45:19,640 Hot springs are they're not just hot springs. They are they are imbued with spiritual qualities. 371 00:45:19,640 --> 00:45:26,270 OK, so, you know, these are some of the many things that pilgrims will do when they are on on when they're travelling. 372 00:45:26,270 --> 00:45:32,750 There's another genre of literature which we might dip into, and this is travelogue. 373 00:45:32,750 --> 00:45:41,780 Giuseppe Tucci, the great Italian Orientalist, was rather sniffy about this genre of literature. 374 00:45:41,780 --> 00:45:46,190 He says the itineraries of these Tibetan monks are far from that exactness, which we admire. 375 00:45:46,190 --> 00:45:52,280 And the writings of Chinese travellers not only does a great deal of legendary and fantastic elements permeate their descriptions, 376 00:45:52,280 --> 00:45:58,820 but the itinerary itself can hardly be followed from one place to another Balash. 377 00:45:58,820 --> 00:46:06,470 There are actually quite a number of pilgrims who leave accounts that are quite accurate. 378 00:46:06,470 --> 00:46:14,150 Some years are, you know, slightly fantastic. But others, you know, you can follow them with a great deal of reliability. 379 00:46:14,150 --> 00:46:25,730 One person whom Touchy would have approved on is a writer called Cataclysmic, who wrote a book called A Pilgrim's Diary Tibet, 380 00:46:25,730 --> 00:46:32,120 Nepal, India, 1944 to 1956, which was the subject of the CD by someone else. 381 00:46:32,120 --> 00:46:39,320 You may know Lutcher Galilea also not yet been published, but I hope it will be soon. 382 00:46:39,320 --> 00:46:47,160 He was a very interesting character and even though he calls his book a Pilgrim's Diary. 383 00:46:47,160 --> 00:46:57,750 When he in his forty ninth year set off from his native eastern Tibet through central Tibet and to Nepal and India, he documented all sorts of things. 384 00:46:57,750 --> 00:47:05,490 So superficially, at least ostensibly, it was supposed to be an account of the holy places of India. 385 00:47:05,490 --> 00:47:15,030 But he's also very major trader. You know, he was an important figure in one of the big trading houses in central Tibet, 386 00:47:15,030 --> 00:47:21,010 and while he's on pilgrimage, he can't help doubling up his activities with with other things. 387 00:47:21,010 --> 00:47:26,520 So I don't know if I have the quotation in the slide. Yes, here we go. 388 00:47:26,520 --> 00:47:34,340 So he gives a. And of the holy places of of Varanasi, and then the following day, 389 00:47:34,340 --> 00:47:41,030 they take a break from the pilgrimage using activities and after spending a night in a Pilgrim's rest house in Varanasi, 390 00:47:41,030 --> 00:47:46,460 and on the following day, we went to visit the market and the silk factories and relaxed a little bit. 391 00:47:46,460 --> 00:47:51,220 Then we returned and in the evening bought tickets for a train that left at 11 o'clock. 392 00:47:51,220 --> 00:47:57,050 OK, so pretty precise. It actually goes on. And if I have this here. 393 00:47:57,050 --> 00:47:58,670 Yeah, here we go. 394 00:47:58,670 --> 00:48:08,930 So they go to Amritsar, they go to the Golden Temple and he gives a rather nice ethnographic description of the things he sees over there, 395 00:48:08,930 --> 00:48:11,360 you know, the distribution of food by the Sikhs. 396 00:48:11,360 --> 00:48:18,350 And then, you know, just to spite Tucci, he says in the evening we bought tickets and went on our way in a small train. 397 00:48:18,350 --> 00:48:26,060 So, you know, it's sometimes a very grounded. 398 00:48:26,060 --> 00:48:35,780 It's also possible to take virtual pilgrimages, sometimes you may not be able to get to a pilgrimage place, 399 00:48:35,780 --> 00:48:43,850 you may not be well, for example, or you may have political duties if you're a king, for instance, or a local minister. 400 00:48:43,850 --> 00:48:50,780 And in this case, what the Tibetans would sometimes do is to bring the sacred places to your location. 401 00:48:50,780 --> 00:48:54,020 And there's this fantastic cave we found in northern Mustang. 402 00:48:54,020 --> 00:49:04,860 These are all old troglodyte settlements, abandoned hundreds and thousands, but which were then reused as retreat's. 403 00:49:04,860 --> 00:49:12,420 And inside one of these caves, you have a virtual pilgrimage of. 404 00:49:12,420 --> 00:49:14,440 Thabet. 405 00:49:14,440 --> 00:49:25,150 So it's not just these abstract mandalas, but there are also specific things, so here, for example, you see I can't remember which one this is. 406 00:49:25,150 --> 00:49:31,240 There are inscriptions over here, but it'll say this, the Buddha of the digital coming in Lhasa. 407 00:49:31,240 --> 00:49:36,130 This is the Buddha of the Ramatoulaye Temple in Lhasa. And this is the so and so this is the Potala and so on. 408 00:49:36,130 --> 00:49:45,100 So within this cave, you actually have the main pilgrimage sites of the Tibetan Buddhist world that have been represented as paintings. 409 00:49:45,100 --> 00:49:53,590 And, you know, I thought at first maybe just a scrapbook of some sort, you know, collection of holy places that the painter himself had visited. 410 00:49:53,590 --> 00:50:04,030 But no, it is actually specific locations in the Tibetan world that had the sanctity of these places is brought there through the medium of painting. 411 00:50:04,030 --> 00:50:15,530 So it's a condensed pilgrimage, a virtual pilgrimage. You know, this is the protector of Tabo in western Tibet. 412 00:50:15,530 --> 00:50:20,330 Pretty. And so on. 413 00:50:20,330 --> 00:50:28,690 OK, and the next one I want I haven't got that much more to say, so I should be able to wind up in five minutes or so. 414 00:50:28,690 --> 00:50:37,210 Move on tantric literature. I won't be saying too much about biography and hagiography, but in tantric literature. 415 00:50:37,210 --> 00:50:44,110 You have a similar kind of thing where you can do the pilgrimage without actually going anywhere. 416 00:50:44,110 --> 00:50:54,280 And this is, again, the internalisation of the landscape, but in this case, internalising the landscape within yourself, not inside a cave. 417 00:50:54,280 --> 00:51:00,010 One of the most prestigious Tanisha's in the Buddhist cannot call the Kalachakra Tantra. 418 00:51:00,010 --> 00:51:05,980 It's a late Tantra, possibly the latest. I think it's 11th century and it's called the wheel of Time. 419 00:51:05,980 --> 00:51:19,510 It's also the basis of the Tibetan calendar. It comes into Tibet in 2007 and then becomes very important for for certain schools of Buddhism. 420 00:51:19,510 --> 00:51:31,060 And this is the mandala of the colour chocolate until it's actually an 18th century, 18th century mandala in the Portela Palace. 421 00:51:31,060 --> 00:51:38,250 And in this text, it's got a very interesting take on pilgrimage. 422 00:51:38,250 --> 00:51:45,780 So there is this concept of the world that the Tibetans inherit that you have at the centre of the universe, 423 00:51:45,780 --> 00:51:50,040 and that there are four continents surrounding it and then there are minor continents and so on. 424 00:51:50,040 --> 00:51:56,870 But the continent in which we live, the scapula shaped continent is jumbled viper. 425 00:51:56,870 --> 00:52:03,860 In the south, some to the left here. So this is where we live, but the point is that. 426 00:52:03,860 --> 00:52:09,750 This whole cosmos is present in our bodies, this is the whole point of the mandala. 427 00:52:09,750 --> 00:52:14,040 And it corresponds very precisely like this, so you have a great job with VPA, 428 00:52:14,040 --> 00:52:22,530 which is the entire scheme, and the different continents correspond to different parts of the body. 429 00:52:22,530 --> 00:52:25,710 So that's the most general correspondence. Your body is itself amandola. 430 00:52:25,710 --> 00:52:35,190 The source I'm citing here is Vesna Wallis, 2001, just a couple of books on the Kalachakra Tantra. 431 00:52:35,190 --> 00:52:44,580 It gets much more detailed. So you have in India, you have these 10 pilgrimage sites which are then also, incidentally, transposed to Tibet. 432 00:52:44,580 --> 00:52:49,620 There are corresponding places in Tibet. So you don't need to go all the way to India to visit some of these places. 433 00:52:49,620 --> 00:53:01,380 You can go to their representatives in in Tibet, but you don't even need to go to these places because all these places are banned inside your body. 434 00:53:01,380 --> 00:53:05,070 And so it goes on, you know, the different kind of secretions and so forth. 435 00:53:05,070 --> 00:53:15,150 The lists and lists of how all these the sacred geography of the Buddhist world corresponds to your body to the extent that a certain poet, 436 00:53:15,150 --> 00:53:25,710 Assad's the poet called. Her father says that he has not seen another place of pilgrimage as blissful as his own body. 437 00:53:25,710 --> 00:53:34,410 So in spite of this snobbishness about going on, pilgrimage, pilgrimage nevertheless endures. 438 00:53:34,410 --> 00:53:45,450 And it endures not only as an inferior type of spiritual activity for those who are incapable of doing anything more subtle and satirical, 439 00:53:45,450 --> 00:53:56,820 logical terms. It's also something that is regarded as important by, shall we say, more sophisticated practitioners. 440 00:53:56,820 --> 00:54:06,370 I'll give you some examples of these. It's understood that. It can be a booster for some of the city's radiological activities that you might 441 00:54:06,370 --> 00:54:14,830 be up to now in the same way that the tundras themselves can be very basic. 442 00:54:14,830 --> 00:54:20,620 You know, the Tatras are organised so that the lower tundras, as they say, the the earlier tundras, 443 00:54:20,620 --> 00:54:26,680 the action Tatras, for example, they are to effect transformations in the physical world. 444 00:54:26,680 --> 00:54:38,110 Quite simply, you know, the early one of the action is, is for weather control, for instance, the Moha Tantra, Mohammedi Kalpa, actually. 445 00:54:38,110 --> 00:54:42,850 But then later on, as the countries themselves evolve through these magical procedures, 446 00:54:42,850 --> 00:54:48,940 the identification with the divinity can be used not simply to effect transformations in the material world, 447 00:54:48,940 --> 00:54:53,740 but can also be used to help you with your spiritual achievements. 448 00:54:53,740 --> 00:54:59,770 And so it covers the whole and pilgrimages rather similar. So at one level. 449 00:54:59,770 --> 00:55:09,190 Certain specific pilgrimages can cure certain specific conditions, and there is one pilgrimage place called Schottenheimer. 450 00:55:09,190 --> 00:55:13,720 It's a mountain on the second Tibet border over here you see it. 451 00:55:13,720 --> 00:55:23,170 And there's an article by Cartier three, Pilgrimage and Incest, the case of Schottenheimer on the Tibetan Systemise Border Bulletin of Tibet ology. 452 00:55:23,170 --> 00:55:26,710 Sorry I forgot the year, but you can Google it. 453 00:55:26,710 --> 00:55:37,220 And essentially, this is a pilgrimage that is undertaken if you want specifically to purge yourself of the pollution of incest. 454 00:55:37,220 --> 00:55:46,420 Yeah. That's defined in different ways by different communities of Tibetans, depending on their their marriage rules. 455 00:55:46,420 --> 00:55:53,650 But if you have incurred what is regarded as the sin of incest, you can go to this mountain, 456 00:55:53,650 --> 00:55:59,520 do your pilgrimage, and you even get a receipt saying that you've. 457 00:55:59,520 --> 00:56:02,490 Purged, why it's important to show this receipt, 458 00:56:02,490 --> 00:56:11,070 because many communities won't allow anybody who has committed incest to live in their community because that brings disasters on the whole village, 459 00:56:11,070 --> 00:56:15,960 it'll be sort of landslides, the crops will fail, disease and so forth. So you have to be purified. 460 00:56:15,960 --> 00:56:20,910 You go to this mountain, do your pilgrimage, you get your certificate of purification, come back. 461 00:56:20,910 --> 00:56:31,820 Sure. To the villages and you can be reintegrated. So this is a good example of a very specific form of healing. 462 00:56:31,820 --> 00:56:36,080 Yeah, and now you can get bottled water from from Schottenheimer. 463 00:56:36,080 --> 00:56:43,430 Is that an early label? And here's one of the letter labels, this one collected by the late Elliott Spurling. 464 00:56:43,430 --> 00:56:50,420 This one by Katie, obviously. And then other places, too. 465 00:56:50,420 --> 00:57:07,260 So. Yeah, so, Perry, we mentioned this place earlier, a very important Bumbo mountain in the southeast of Tibet, 466 00:57:07,260 --> 00:57:12,780 recorded by Tibet, by Bompas as being the most important pilgrimage site for them. 467 00:57:12,780 --> 00:57:18,770 The pilgrimage guide to this area states that even if you take just one step in this direction, 468 00:57:18,770 --> 00:57:22,770 you are impediments in this life will be removed and you will have your heart's desire. 469 00:57:22,770 --> 00:57:29,460 And so this is a kind of generic improvement to one's fortune. 470 00:57:29,460 --> 00:57:38,250 So it goes on it says at all times the spiritual value of each circuit you make will be increased to equal 700 million circuits, 471 00:57:38,250 --> 00:57:44,480 takes two days to get around this mountain, but particularly in horse, sheep, bird and monkey months. 472 00:57:44,480 --> 00:57:49,000 Each circuit is equivalent to thirteen hundred million. 473 00:57:49,000 --> 00:57:54,700 Make recitations on behalf of living beings, and you will receive long life, merit, prosperity and power. 474 00:57:54,700 --> 00:57:59,260 Your heart desires will be fulfilled by means of reverence, according to your wishes. 475 00:57:59,260 --> 00:58:04,840 And then it goes on, says if you go there and perform prostrations circumambulation and make offerings, 476 00:58:04,840 --> 00:58:12,100 your defilement that includes diseases will be purified. You will find your way to liberation in the assembly of perfected ones. 477 00:58:12,100 --> 00:58:16,240 And animals that visit this place will be born in Persia. 478 00:58:16,240 --> 00:58:21,970 So you have a much better life in Persia. 479 00:58:21,970 --> 00:58:36,880 Just benefit beneficial not just for human beings, and it's also, you know, beneficial, as I did earlier, as a way of increasing the efficacy of your. 480 00:58:36,880 --> 00:58:45,930 Your spiritual activities include the founder of this little village over here, lubra 13th century. 481 00:58:45,930 --> 00:58:52,770 If the place that had been blessed by saints and then he came along, he himself was a saint, and so it it increases in power. 482 00:58:52,770 --> 00:59:00,060 And according to his biography says, he used to say that the spiritual qualities of the place was such that he could do more by 483 00:59:00,060 --> 00:59:04,050 meditating here for a week than he could by meditating anywhere else for a whole year. 484 00:59:04,050 --> 00:59:15,060 So it's not just to improve your karma, to remove your your diseases, your your moral stains and so forth. 485 00:59:15,060 --> 00:59:19,500 It can actually turbocharge your your meditation. 486 00:59:19,500 --> 00:59:30,450 And this just to conclude with something that's represented in this wonderful Tunker, a Tibetan spiritual painting from probably the 18th, 487 00:59:30,450 --> 00:59:39,900 representing a rather mystical scent called Seven Rings and believed to have lived in the 8th century. 488 00:59:39,900 --> 00:59:47,100 And he was a shapeshifter. You know, he's not very he's not very present in the outside world. 489 00:59:47,100 --> 00:59:55,530 And what's interesting is that you can see represented in his life the transformative power of the landscape 490 00:59:55,530 --> 01:00:01,800 because his form and his attributes change a call lot to the particular holy place he is visiting. 491 01:00:01,800 --> 01:00:07,080 So these are representations of him visiting different holy places around the edges. 492 01:00:07,080 --> 01:00:15,180 This is him at the centre with his consort. But the text on which this painting is based actually says as follows. 493 01:00:15,180 --> 01:00:20,700 So when he goes to Mount Kailash, he was white in colour, wrote the rainbow, had ribbons in his hair, 494 01:00:20,700 --> 01:00:25,950 wore jewelled earrings, adopted a dance posture and played melodies on a lute surrounded by Duchene. 495 01:00:25,950 --> 01:00:29,820 Is that Adam? So that's how he was when he went to Cuyler. 496 01:00:29,820 --> 01:00:38,040 He goes to another place, he is correspondingly transformed luncheon Gingrey He was red in colour and he wrote a sunbeam putting it. 497 01:00:38,040 --> 01:00:45,840 Then just north of Shalash he was blue, green in colour, and he wrote A Divine Eagle. 498 01:00:45,840 --> 01:00:54,930 Shinji, then they then he was brown in colour and he wrote the quick lightning and so on and so on. 499 01:00:54,930 --> 01:01:02,040 So anyway, these are the this is a very nice representation, I think, 500 01:01:02,040 --> 01:01:09,690 of the way in which it's not only we who transform topography into a cultural or religious landscape, 501 01:01:09,690 --> 01:01:17,430 but also the dialectical process whereby this landscape then can then act back on us, 502 01:01:17,430 --> 01:01:25,170 to cure us, to improve our spiritual pursuits and to change us in ways that we would want. 503 01:01:25,170 --> 01:01:30,344 OK, I think I've probably run out of time and I've run out of things to say stop.