A little bit framing to talk not just briefly about the entire book project as a whole that I have on Nichel,
but about the process of it, which in my experience has always been, and I think in a lot of people's experience, very obscure.
It's not something that you really know about until you're in it and you can kind of feel like a deer in the headlights when that happens.
There's just something about me and a lot of cases where this information is sort of esoteric until the time comes.
And so I wanted to talk first a little bit about how I even came upon this project, which was my dissertation back in 2013, almost 10 years ago.
And then now I'm in the thick of converting it into a manuscript for Oxford University Press.
I'm in the final stages of that. So it's really on the top of my head right now for doing this.
It was a little bit inspired, actually, I should say, by Rachel and Anna's work.
I'm kind of the oral history of Tibetan studies. Right.
This is something that hasn't let a lot of people have peeked behind the curtain of until recently.
So I'm hoping that this sort of impromptu conversation,
a little bit of vulnerability will show through of kind of the failures that we all have experienced to some point, as well as the successes.
And even though mine are particular to me, hopefully many of you will be able to relate to some degree.
So I should first off, start saying that the title is maybe a little bit of a misnomer writing about the nature of Oracle.
Maybe I should have just simplified it instead of writing about nature as a whole,
because most of the book project is really about nature as an institution.
And I split it up between three major lenses that I felt were fairly helpful and trying to make sense of all that.
By the way, this mural and most of the images in these slides are gonna be from Natu Monastery outside of Lhasa,
unless otherwise, said this one in particular, as of the Natu Oracle at the end of the 17th century named named looks on your.
Any way to kind of start this framing with the background for how we even got on this?
When I was going into my dissertation,
the original focus of it was on the cults of pay ha as a whole DEEDI pay ha across Tibet, CNN chronically and die chronically.
I wanted to visit all these monasteries and it's long and calm and amdo.
And if any of you are bulking at that, it's for very good reason. It's way too hot.
The biggest criticism I got finally when I started trimming it down was that this is like a 10 volume project or at least a 10 year project.
There's no way that a year or so of dissertation work is going to be able to encompass that.
So I applied for the Fulbright Scholarship and I was declined. And that was hard.
That was tough. It's a very competitive thing, as we all know. But it doesn't take away that feeling of like, well, now what am I going to do?
I have this huge project in mind. How am I going to get. All right.
After some really good advice from my mentors, especially Curtis Schaffer and David David Ramano, they advised me to contract my focus to just nature.
If nature was kind of this linchpin for the cult of pay ha sort of across Tibetan history,
it would be a great thing to maybe just contract my focus to that.
Just give that attention. And believe me, it was more than enough.
As we'll see, trying to even condense all that just for, you know, a 30 minute talk or so, there's gonna be a bit tough.
So they advised me to contract my focus to just natuman, try to look at all the strands of that.
And really, thanks to David Germano. I was offered a teaching opportunity in Hong Kong for that next year.
And that allowed me because of the both the funds that it produced and the location.
A lot of very fruitful trips to Foster and Dharamsala between 2010 and 2012.
That was when my fieldwork really took place. And it was it was a lot easier back then than it was several years later.
By contrast, when I went back after my dissertation in 2014 to assess specifically, I could only go for two weeks instead of six months.
And a lot of the sites that I wanted to visit or photograph were no longer open for that photo.
Photography was very, very limited.
So as we're all very well aware, when it comes to going into Tibet, it's it's unpredictable and you just have to work with what you have.
So I was very fortunate for the time that I did have there from 2010 to 2012.
I was really able to get the bulk of the research I needed done and even was able to collect material I wasn't anticipating at all.
Some material I'm still going through. In fact, I hope to kind of look into in greater depth for future work so that plenty of friends.
Not going to name names who have had very unfortunate experiences trying to do fieldwork over there and just something not working out,
a crucial meeting not happening. So I felt incredibly fortunate for that.
And again, I really do want to highlight just the number of advisors and other researchers that are just so crucial in this process.
I mean, you just you can't predict what help you might need or really rely on.
So, of course, Curtis and David, I already mentioned my first mentor, Brian Kavis was a huge help.
Major scholars in Tibet like permanent get out Saryan Global Pugil and that the
Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences and Hossa were just incredibly helpful.
And it really wouldn't have been able to get the material that I needed without their help.
So I think we're acknowledgements and books are where you kind of put this stuff.
But I think it deserves more attention because the work wouldn't even happen without a lot of these individuals.
Corey. So what was the end result of the process of deserting?
Well, my methodology was predominantly historical and textual.
I was looking through textual texts, obviously through biographies, the ritual text, the various histories.
And then because I was over there a fair amount and was able to interview some important individuals at these various institutions and monasteries,
ethnographic elements. I was able to kind of seep in here and there, which I felt really kind of cohered my observations.
The basic structure, like anything, is introduction, conclusion,
and then these three really big chapters that ended up being divided through those three lenses that I explored, nation with mythology.
Looking at papers kind of mythos.
And I don't mean to use that word to mean falsehood or fiction, but rather these very powerful narratives of identity.
Second chapter was on the ritual corporates looking at the nature of so and all these central rights pertaining to that.
And then the third and final chapter was on nature's institutional developments and other institutions associated with it, which I'll get into.
And then the other half of the dissertation as a whole were for appendices,
outline of the major liturgical corpus of nature in the three central rites,
which I'll talk briefly about the nature and record, which I'll also talk about that nature.
KARKOC And then the hagiography of this figure took a chunk dependent.
I had an incomplete translation at that point.
So after all was said and done and I was kind of ready to move on to the next professional side of things at Stetson.
I didn't want to look at it for a while. I think we can all relate to that feeling.
I kind of wanted to just put it away for a couple of years.
And because where I am is a liberal arts university that I couldn't almost help
but do that with my three classes to teach a semester department colloquium,
student advisees and thesis advisees there.
For the first couple of years of curriculum development and service work at the university,
you almost don't have any time to look at your research or to expand on it for a good two, three years.
And that service side of things in the academy was always a mystery to me until I got out of grad schools.
The research aspect, the teaching aspect, I built on those during grad school, but it really was the service work, the expectations and committees.
That was a big surprise. Not always pleasant. When it came to actually getting into the professor at.
All right. So the nature warrigal that's in the title of this talk.
Again, it is kind of just a point of focus. I see him as almost the office of an ancient oracle is almost this embodiment of
those major elements of the mythic of the ritual of the institutional right.
And and together, they all proceed and define nature in these really fascinating networks that even extend beyond it.
And I'll have a couple of examples of that. So in looking at all this, I don't think it's a big surprise to anyone,
but the history of the Natuman Oracle is intimately linked with the Dalai Lama's and especially in all these three ways.
And I'll have some examples because I'm basically summarising the entire project.
I can't go into too much depth and we can save that for discussion.
But I can give you kind of the overarching outline in terms of my inspiration for sort of theoretical framing of this material.
I was really inspired by a lot of the work that came out of Chinese religious studies.
There's some really good stuff in Indian and Japanese religious studies as well.
But some of these major works like Richard von Golon, sinister way, Robert Hymes way and by way, Paul Katsas, demon horns and burning boats.
I just reread that. In fact, all really were great inspirations for trying to make sense of Tibetan DTD cults, right.
In Dedi cults in the Tibetan you, because there's not a lot of works really.
You can point to that, do what they do. But in the Tibetan context, there's a lot in Chinese religious studies.
So there's a lot of good inspiration there. The growth of Wooten's cults, the growth of the three lords and Marshall wins,
it's really Hymes is question of why these deities and not others that kind of became the foundation for this project.
Why pay ha. There are a lot of other Didi's. Obviously, we're all very aware of that.
Amy Hellers work on Beck say was a credible inspiration in the Tibetan context.
And of course, Nebeski boycott's before. But this this question of why more pay.
Ha. I mean is he independent lama. So Gummow are the two big protectors of the dial on linae Dalai Lama's lineage.
So why wasn't that. I just wanted to try to understand this kind of growth in importance and.
And Robert Hymes question there, Paul Katz's work on cogeneration and reverberation were really inspirational in that he in turn was
actually drawing off of print for Sangeet to Ordos work on Guan Gyi and his notion of super ascription.
So all of that was really, really, I thought, powerful for inspiration, by the way.
This is another mural of an ancient oracle. This time a figure from the late 19th century named Shuka ya pal.
It was a very impactful virtual figure. All right.
So what about sources? Well, there's a lot obviously these are just the major sources, the ones that I kept turning to.
Again and again and again for various reasons. And I have them just listed out here.
Obviously, the Pennicott Tong,
there are two specific chapters in that sixty three and one of four that are particularly about some of us encounter with pay.
Ha. And the assigning him to Sam Yang.
There's this text. I'm using very short names just to save time.
So I just call it simply the symphony of the captivating gods.
This is a Somnia history composed by my shop in the early 17th century, incredibly useful.
He quotes quite extensively from some very valuable texts.
So I return to that again and again and even wrote up a very kind of basic index for that history as a whole, almost complete.
The nature record. The nature, Karkoc. This is this is the work if anyone's really familiar with Nature Monastery outside of LOSSA.
This is actually the car cheque that's inscribed on the southern wall of the courtyard there in nature.
And so there are even transcribe once before by this really incredible Tibetan scholar in the 80s named linguist Pamela Carson.
But this this work has a lot of great material. It's half the fifth Dalai Lama's own writings.
It's half some good. Gatsas it's been there presumably since sixteen eighty two or a little bit thereafter.
And then there's other really incredible but very difficult work and pear their songs.
And I've talked about this, the hagiography of Jhumpa Chung's dependent.
It was really thanks to Seren Global, you know, irreplaceable Saryan global hat tests and lossa that provided me a copy of this works.
I was very grateful to him for that. And then also these really great murals, murals on a song for a chapel at metter supper monastery in Lhasa.
That was also thanks to fellow scholar there named Moema Meet my tatting who pointed those out to me when I was doing my research.
And they were just a wealth of information. The image in the top right is an example of that.
In the top bottom is the nation record at Meecham. And I was just floored by the material that these sources had.
And just to kind of help round things out, even if it is a bit. But 50 years later, lay loom, shaping Georges Washington some katsas unparalleled.
And he does a really good job generally of citing his sources, great people, the graphic references there.
And then this very modern source. But I think a very powerful reference for oral information and some good textual citations as well.
Is the history of nature in this nation. We need you to assume that was composed by Venerable, took them to look at the natuman in Dharamsala.
And it was published in 2007.
Now, you might notice on top there I have this sort of title that's kind of shadow over the other text and that is this right?
Like Crystal Rosary, the Shuddering Karpel. A lot of the texts that I just listed either cite fairly extensively or at least
note this source clearly a very foundational source for understanding pay.
Ha. And it exists. It still extents, unlike a lot of the other ones listed in these works.
But the thing is, it's not available to the uninitiated, which I am not initiated.
So I was very graciously given a viewing of the introduction and the California of this work by monks at both nations.
The Nature Hossa. And in Gaza. But I wasn't able to see the whole thing.
So I had to kind of. Pick what I could of fragments from other sources.
So getting kind of that, that's all very introductory, getting to the three major aspects of sort of teasing out nature's significance.
The first, of course, is Pager's mythos. And again, I mean this in this broader sense of these powerful narratives that are used
by different communities that are that are promoted by different communities.
And that will, of course, include the fifth Dalai Lama in his administration as well.
The term that I use to translate the common label for the group of Didi's that pay ha heads is.
Which is the global. I called in my dissertation to five sovereign spirits.
I was really trying to figure out better ways of naming the different kinds of really
the dizzying array of spirit types that you find in Tibetan belief and practise.
Right. All the tan and the Guilfoile and the moon and then Nejat.
And how do we label those can always use the Sanskrit. There's not really good English alternative.
So I did my best and tried for that. And that was my example for cableway translator sovereign spirits given their history.
Some of the mythic accounts really, though, most of them actually only focus on paper.
So that's fascinating. You see in the original context, the five sovereign spirits all the time, you see them crop up in the major ritual text.
But in the mythic accounts, it's really only pay hard. Now,
the caveat to that is that some of the names of the sovereign spirits and their ministers crop up as alternatives or variant names for pay higher,
especially Shingletown 10, which I find very fascinating. But for the most part, it's only really pay ha.
That's that's the main central figure in a lot of these mythic variations.
And one thing I also found, and it's something that my good friends who was also at Oxford,
Cameron Bailey, has really been teasing out in his work, which is that certainly pay ha.
But he sees in a lot of the Tibetan protected DEEDI narratives that that mythic kernel of Rouda.
Right. The great the great demon rugrat in the gathering of attention suturing that Jacob Doulton worked on that that narrative narrative strand,
rather, is really found permeating through a lot of the mythos of different protector deities.
Definitely the case for pay ha potential even more so. It's definitely in the narratives associated with pay ha before his arrival in Tibet.
But beyond that, even in terms of his appearance, he's got the three heads of the three different colours.
You've got the six arms.
There's this lifetime after lifetime of getting meaner and meaner and getting just more angry and ruthless and destructive and dangerous,
powerful and Raffel all over time. So Pay Harz mythos is really drawing from clearly Rudaw as a kernel,
including that very fundamental moment of two devotees learning and their teacher.
And one understands the teacher and the other one doesn't. And you see that kind of that kind of story going all the way back to the Shindou
go open shot right when in trying to watch and try to learn other jeopardy.
So so seeing these reverberating strands of of mythology through the aeons is really fascinating when it
comes to the Dalai Lama's sort of master narrative of what you might call the nation's charter myth.
He really lays it out fairly cleanly.
I would say that if you have this moment before Tibet where pay ha in his previous form was this very devout king,
he has a minister left and not Bo that names already significant.
And they both go under the same master. But of course, like not, Bo understands things.
He understands the meat of the material and pay ha in this form former form as a as a king does not.
And his vows degenerates. He ends up sleeping with a Brahmin woman.
At one point he gets chastised for it. And over numerous lifetimes he keeps attacking, letting Noteboom, who's whose ordination name is daunting.
And that's, that's what's happening in the upper right picture.
You have this very lovely compression of events where you have pay ha in this previous form, attacking, attacking, letting knuckle as a scorpion,
as giant scorpion and then on the right, vowing to him when he gets subdued in these stories, especially, it's a vulture.
Ponti who keeps coming back again and again and again and just knocking, knocking,
pay her down a peg as he keeps taking on these different forms to try to attack them.
Not only takes the form of a lion of a moment of a bore and all these different ways of trying to get at his former friends now enemy.
And eventually he gets especially with much upon himself. At what point lectern?
Not himself. Subdue them by embodying diva.
That's important, obviously.
And then he arrives in Tibet and he gets subdued by putting some of a lot of this material is found in the Chronicle of Patmos,
some of it in the pen, Scott Tong.
And involves especially from the fifth Dalai Lama's material in his autobiography and his other writings, like the Song of the Spring Queen.
It involves this other kind of mysterious figure named Dharma Paula.
Now, this name gets confused in some sources as just a reference to pay.
But that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to have been this person with close ties to pay ha who was Fromm's a
[INAUDIBLE] and has this relationship with the show gay lineage of the Tibetan Lama.
And I think that's going to be very significant later down the line. So Pasar comes in.
He's assigned a protector of something and then eventually she moves on to Natrium.
There's a lot of different mythology surrounding that, a lot of variant stories.
Nebeski void of it's especially really talks about that in his chapter on pay ha.
But the one that I note the most is what's found in the hagiography of chomper challenge pinned that pay ha angered the cell miraki.
He's thrown into the kitchen river and then eventually picked up by the assistance of a protector pendant.
Now the very popular oral account is that the assistant brings the box up to draw upon.
It gets heavier and heavier and the curiosity of assistant overwhelms so many opens.
It part comes out in the form of a white bird and absorbs into the nearby tree.
And that's the tree at the centre or was historically at the centre of Nature Monastery in the hagiography.
But after pendent, you don't see any of that. It's rather this very prolonged dialogue between what appears to be a possessed figure,
what appears to be sort of the prote protean or really the earlier from the Natu Oracle having these
conversations with the assistance which of potential opinium and agreeing to protect Dré pool.
As long as he's giving a given a small place. Right. Natuman where his possessions can be helped.
So that whole narrative is really, really quite fascinating.
The rest of that chapter is just all the dizzying variations on his name's, on the different characters and the stories on the different plots.
And each one of them, the examples I used, because you can use so many, it could take up its own book.
Examples I used are actually from the same sources that the fifth Dalai Lama was clearly familiar with.
And each one of them maybe emphasises Harz Buddhists character or his Mongolian character or his Tibetan mythic pedigree.
But the fifth other Lamas narrative, or at least the natural narrative,
seems to my mind if cites all three quite equally in order to create two attempts to create this coherent narrative in his own writings.
The Dalai Lama clearly struggles with trying to understand some of the contradictions in these accounts and has tried to make something more singular,
more standard. And then there's even an interesting part of the nature record, specifically,
Sanjay Gateaux part explains the five sovereign spirits as emanations of the five Buddha families.
So that divide between you, can they pay someone? You can pay so much.
There's a little bit blurry there. Well, which I find fascinating. All right, so getting into the ritual accretion.
Really? And I'll try to kind of zoom through this a little bit more. I wanted to go through with a concentric approach.
I wanted to look at ancient ritual calendar as a whole and then specifically the natural.
So that whole collection of works.
And then finally, the three texts that are really the two texts, I should say, that are at the heart of the nature console.
So we're looking at the ritual calendar. It's admittedly a very dry part of that chapter, really just translating from them insults, history.
It shows nature's involvements with festivals like Lozar,
like the One Line Chima and something she song with major institutions like Somnia, Triple Mido Mnemba, Ségolène Tongue.
So it's still still this relationship with, say, that area south east of LOSSA.
And with these various creative elements that get added on this Major Turchin lit up link,
but at the end of the 19th century, has some major involvement with nature through the 13th Dalai Lama.
So these are materials that could added to that Natuzzi ritual corpus and activities over the centuries.
And then looking at an ancient console itself, first of all, there there's two additions.
There's a three volume addition, actually, that has even more text going all the way up to modern times.
But I think the core addition is this forty two text compilation from eighteen
forty five that was even compiled at the request of the Natu Oracle at the time.
Twenty two of those texts are by a Dalai Lama, usually the 5th of the 7th and then 17 were either composed or requested by Natu Oracle.
So that's the vast majority of them right there. The handful of other texts are either by Sunday gets or pension.
Pension. You have the fourth pension Lama, Tadek Linfa and Lei Long having a text in there.
And of course one text by now. Oh sorry. But that's in some ways the most important one in the collection.
Or at least one of the two, because what you have.
And this was a struggle to try to visually represent this, because I find it so cool,
frankly, is in transcribing these three rituals, seeing over time this evolution,
or I should stick with accretion or even reverberation of this ritual material going all the way back to this text
by Nungarrayi Mozer are rediscovered rather treasure text for discovered by him called the Ten Chapter Sardina.
And then that text being used first actually by the second Dalai Lama and some of his offerings.
He has that collection of offerings and praises, dedicated multiple duties.
And in the six or so texts in that collection dedicated to the gospel crooner, you have these excerpts from the 10 Chapter seven.
And then this very important central right in the nature of liturgy, the adamantium melody Torday Diana,
composed by the Fethiye Lama around sixteen fifty, give or take a decade.
And that has all of those elements.
In fact, I suspect that the name that nature takes on under its renovation and sixteen eighty two by the Dalai Lama on Sunday,
Gattu is drawn from this right or J. Diane Lane.
So this image on the right, you're not supposed to be able to read it. It's just too, too, too much.
But hopefully the colours stand out because what you really find is that that little kernel of blue texts actually
describe the five sovereign spirits that is in all three texts that originates in the 10 chapter Southern.
You see it permeating the offerings and praises,
then eventually finding its way into the adamantium melody and then the it builds on that by adding even more material from the 10 chapter shortener.
And that's what the red text is in this excerpt.
And then there's also orange text that is from the offerings and praises of the Dalai Lama was clearly drawing from that as well.
And then finally, the black text is all this expansive addition by the fifth lama.
So we have the dialogue over lifetimes, right.
He's certainly the incarnation of the second is believed and touted by Tsonga Kotzer to be an incarnation of Mozer.
You have this this accretion, this composing or this rediscovery of a text over centuries of lifetimes,
which I find so fascinating in this this history of ritual development.
And then the nature of Oracle, as we see, has also been very actively promoting the growth of his own cult.
The growth of the nation cult at that site.
So the monastery itself, the institution itself, kind of finish up with these and then move on to turning it into a book somehow.
The gist is this is a great picture, by the way, that Tasha commit was kind enough to send to me.
You could see the tree there that supposedly flew into right there in the middle of the courtyard.
You have two major elements. You have the history of the monastery itself.
And you have the architecture, which I find just as if not even more compelling.
There are three major elements in nature in its history.
You have these this kind of mythos surrounding this shrine called you Loka that was established
by Munitz simple at putting some of us prophetic requests from some of us supposedly said,
oh, this is where Pasar Sultry and Soul Lake are at.
So make sure to put a shrine here. And then a statue of Taro was brought from Somnia, which was the name Chinh to this natuman.
So that's one sort of aetiology for the name.
And then we have the newsroom chapel established into potential pendants time possibly 15, 20, nine, maybe fourteen sixty nine.
There's a little bit of issues with the dates there.
And then finally, this renovation and expansion under the fertile lama and his regents' not just sung a ghetto, but mostly in the late 17th century.
But the architecture.
When I was there, I couldn't help but go to nature as often as I could, even if it meant paying the 10 CLY for the ticket every single time.
But I found Martin Mills's work on these axes of spiritual power to be very fruitful in understanding the architecture because it is.
And the murals, the imagery, the iconography is just so impactful.
You go into the courtyard and the walls are covered in these amazing murals of hundreds of papers, retinue.
It's kind of like you're walking into a military encampment to see the leader.
You go into the assembly hall and you see this so axis of movement from the
impure worldly entrance to the pure transcendent back and up of that space.
So you have Oracle's representative murals on both sides of the door, the five sovereign spirits kind of in tandem with each other.
You have the sodden TBD, as I call him, the drip a further in.
And then finally, you have right at the end of those murals on both sides, putting a symbol on one side.
I agree. The on the other. And then you get into the central chapel.
You have statues now of the five sovereign spirits, again, goddesses like Dorji and Douma during Chang'e.
And then high griever at the very back centre. And then right in the middle of that room is a statue of an ancient oracle.
And then what has been built since then behind even that space, you to go to the second floor to see it.
Is this two storey statue of putting assembly? So he's sort of overlooking everything right now at this grand second Buddha, Wood and Thamer.
And from there, you have been each monasteries that have been established. Past that.
So what I found very fascinating is it seems from the late 7th century onward
and there's some nuanced discussion about what the extent of the influence was.
Was it hegemonic? Was it something more organic or local? I think it's a case by case basis.
But you have nations influence one way or the other spreading to these institutions in Alaska.
And certainly from from there on out into Tibet, from the 17th century onward,
Yonglin Southeast still has this major cult to five sovereign states and five sovereign spirits.
They have the same ritual manuals, more or less, that are used,
including one really fascinating one that I still haven't been able to dig into day on college at draping major murals dedicated to them.
Major rituals still. And a lovely chapel, the Pesach choke on the ceiling of day on college to this day made owning the monastery
right behind the Cho Kong is where nature monks stay and recite rituals from the dungeon.
From Chapter seven in other nature liturgies on a regular basis.
I observe a number of those when I was there. And obviously, the mural's as well and the history there of the nature Oracle staying there,
got the monastery right around the mountain from Drei boom, that DEEDI is Shuja Chen.
And it's it's one of the five sovereign spirits. And of course, that's who the Oracle.
The goddamn oracle is possessed by Kaarma Shot Chapel. There's maybe some discussion here because Karma Shah's associate Sara writes under Sarah.
But the main DEEDI of Karma Shah is. Sehring, I'm sorry.
It's a tangible and tangible who is the minister of Mumba Putra, one of five sovereign spirits,
and then a monk told me at Sara Mae College that talc choky all of me college that protect her.
There is actually a form of Ginji.
So you have these really fascinating networks of Didi's related to the five sovereign spirits even going all the way through their actual chapel.
It's right there in the park. Or also Chan seems to be tied to a monastery.
And then even outside of the plateau, you have Nature Monastery being re-established, as this picture shows.
And Dr. Michala, it's really just a walk down from the Library of Tibet.
Works in archives. Right. Right past the Natuman Cafe, wonderfully named.
And that was completed in the mid 1980s. There was actually a Hawaii centre built first, established first in 1973.
And that's still there on the big island of Hawaii. And what these institutions first.
The ones in Tibet really do show this further reverberation or kind of emanation,
radiation of this influence, both ritually and I can graphically in Lhasa and beyond.
But because of current history, you also see this splitting happening between the institutions.
Process still has these amazing sacred sites. It has the tree.
Even if it's now cut up and in one of the shrine rooms, it has the stone that the box was supposedly put on where Paha flew out of.
But you don't have that in exile. But you do have the sacred person's right.
That's what the Dalai Lama on the nature oracle are now residing there.
And Dharamsala in exile in performing these various ritual practises.
And that brings us brings us back to the nation. Oracle to Dimpling spoke.
His history really provides a good detail of this. I'm going to kind of breeze through this because I know I'm running out of time.
We have 17 known.
Oracle's earliest date of reference I could find specifically to an ancient oracle was at the death of the second Dalai Lama in forty two.
You have the third Dalai Lama being encouraged by the Natu Oracle to accept the invitation by Alten Khan.
That's actually in the jewel translucence sugiura that Johann Elver Skog translated.
And then past that, you have the fifth Dalai Lama in his biographies of previous Dalai Lama is like the third and the fourth.
And in his writings that you see this noticeable increase in pay Harz presence in the nature of Oracle's presence.
There's even this fun story of pay are being assigned.
Really, that the black in the red DEEDI that Amy Hiller's went about being assigned to protect the dialogue,
the lineage in the intermediate state between the second and the third reincarnations birth, the second death in the third rebirth.
So we had this activity really dramatically increasing in the fifth dilemmas, time and writings.
And I don't think I'll talk about the selection too much or the Tibetan Monkey Festival.
Unfortunately, if you have questions about it, I'll talk about it. Discussion. I know I need to move forward.
Final observations. What was basically my conclusion before I can talk about the book process for a couple of
slides is to me it seems that Pay Ha was chosen above others in these certain contexts,
in part because of these numerous connexions that he shared with the fifth Dalai Lama.
You had an ancestral connexion because it the a horror line and on Rapallo you had a transmission connexion
because of all these texts that fit dilemmas initiated in these new treasure texts like Nung Romney,
especially incarnational connexions over a lifetime. Second, I lama not really mozer even going back to putting on some of entree.
Some get some institutional connexions, especially with the close ties to draping and Mongolian connexions,
which were especially pertinent at that time given this burgeoning relationship with Gucci.
So it seems to me in nature,
monastery and nation Oracle were part of this larger activity on the Food Dilemmas Administration's part to consolidate at this time.
It was part of this ritual consolidation effort that was that was really ramping up.
And you see that also in pay.
Harz strengthening links to Tibet's imperial past with the Bedi Dai Lama being perceived as this reincarnation of these imperial figures.
Sanjay Guzzo as well. Tagaq Hlinka Menninga to talk too much about him, but he's considered a reincarnation of the low tower.
But China, all these other institutional figures are almost embodying the imperial age in the 17th century.
And all these extensive networks are just reinforcing that NAVCENT government because
its power was not a foregone conclusion as work already on the 17th century as shown.
And I feel like this activity was part of that larger, larger effort to aid in and maintain the government's legitimation.
So that was the dissertation. And you can maybe understand why I wanted to leave it alone for a while.
And that was just a long winded summary, to say the least, in terms of seeking a publisher when I was reading.
The advice I was given was look for publishers, university publishers, university presses.
That's really what you want to go for. I can only speak from the email merican context,
but you want to look for publishers whose catalogue contains books that accord with your own thematically and topically.
And if you have friends who have worked with as publishers, give them give him a call.
Contact them. E-mail them. Ask them for any advice on how they made their first contact.
They might even put in a good word for you. I have a couple of good friends and colleagues do that.
I was very grateful when I tried. Columbia University Press first, Sarah Jacoby and.
And I'm sorry, I'm kind of blanking on the names on this and Sarah Jacoby and David de Valerio.
We're very kind. I'm sorry. Jeff Barstow. We're very kind to offer me advice.
Serge Coby and Jeff are still very kind to offer me advice and even put in a good word for me.
You want to try to make the claim that your book kind of accords with what they've published.
So I make I made arguments for Sara's book on Living Liberacion, Justin MacDaniels book on Thai Buddhism,
Love, and goes to the magical monk Peter Swagger's book on the dilemma, the Emperor of China.
All of this. I made it a case, unfortunately, was right.
That time was about a about a year and a half ago. This was in the summer of twenty eighteen when I first did this.
It's a long process, but unfortunately their series that did the funding ran out and the only option they gave me was subvention.
This was a word I had not heard before, but apparently it means seeking outside funding and I wasn't able to get any.
And so I had data declining. I tried Yale University next.
Also declined. I thought I made a fairly good case for Jacob Dolgov for connecting with taming of the demons, dealing with a lot of the same things.
But got to. You just never know. And then finally, I'm very grateful.
Oxford University Press accepted. But this is not immediate.
They will want to ask for very specific information through a book proposal or a prospectus and a cover letter.
And that will include information like a book title, a brief description, a fuller description chapter, outline author, info the markets.
And this is the sticking point when it comes to trying to make this information accessible, especially in the American market.
The whole point of these books is try to put them on the shelves and Barnes and Noble or on Amazon and try to sell them.
So there's a real push to try to make them accessible to the general reader as well as valuable to the specialists.
That can be very hard line to balance. And I'm still struggling with it.
Who also your competition might be? They don't want to publish a book that might already kind of already be out there.
Something along those lines.
So you want to be mindful of your competition and any additional information or specs, the length of it, stage of completion, number of illustrations.
If the manuscript is complete, that's really preferred because you might have got something, but it's not always necessary.
Some friends sample chapters. So that can take a semester or more.
It took a semester before Columbia got back to me to tell me that.
Unfortunately, you might want to look for other publishers.
Yale took about a month on that and it took about a year to get through this process with with Oxford for good reason.
I'm not saying any of this critically.
I'm just telling you my experience that they would express interest, they might ask for changes first, and that could take some time.
Initially, the draught that I had for them was one hundred and fifty seven thousand words.
Didn't know it at the time. And apparently that's like 500 pages. So that's not something I want to spend a lot of money publishing paper for.
So they want to cut it down to around one 10.
I got it to 112 by cutting out all my appendices and the two big ones, my translations of the nation record.
And so pretty much opinions hagiography.
I've already published or were in the works to be published so I could at least just cite those inter textually and then they're sent off to two,
two to three reviewers and given their schedules. They're busy with their own research goals and work.
They could take half a year or more to get back to you on what the reviewers say if the reviewers liked it enough to agree.
Yes. Write these anonymously or say you should publish, but with major or minor revisions.
Then you write a response to the reviewers responding in response to the reviewers, to the publisher agreeing that you're going to make those changes.
And if they accept that, then you get the contract.
So it took me about a year from December of twenty eighteen to just this past December to get that contract signed.
And with that sign is an understanding that the revision has a certain date in which it needs to be done.
And the date for me is June 1st. So less than a month. But I've already incorporated most of the revisions, some of them in the last stages of that.
So finally, I mean, this is where I met and I'm revising.
I spent the first I've been on sabbatical this last semester.
Gratefully, I just gotten tenure last spring at my university and now had this past semester on sabbatical to just focus on making those revisions,
which were very encouraging. They were constructive, but they were encouraging mostly small changes like changed my language.
I changed sovereign's spirit, which I understand now is a bit Kaki King spirit, ten point sodomised, maybe a bit more accurate.
Translation of Gerima. They are generally Benjamina than 10.
Chapter seven. All these little things.
Walking back some of my bolder claims, the biggest one was really splitting up my chapters a bit more to seven full ones,
which I'd already done and rearranging them. I just literally I was talking with Guzin about this.
I, I flipped my first in my second chapter to talk first about the variant mythos show reverberation and then a second
one now focuses on the fifth Dalai Lama's narrative to kind of show how that came about as the Meecham charter myth.
So I'm still building on better reflecting and expanding my analysis through through the book and then and then incorporating crucial penances.
I thought it was so easy to just cut out the appendices and then realised, oh, wait,
there's a lot of material I cited in those appendices that now no one can look at because they're not in the book anymore.
So you can take that for granted.
So now I have to bring in some of that material that was so pertinent from my appendices kind of copy and paste them in.
And then the last thing I'll say is this field work that I did in 2016 in Rio, Assar and Dharamsala was incredibly fruitful.
That was the monkey festival that I just don't have too much. I don't have any time to talk about.
But that ended up being a good chunk of my conclusion now, and I felt like it really rounded out the project as a whole.
So your book, at the end of the day is not your dissertation. It's a heads ideally a better version, a more consolidated and condensed version.
You really have to ask yourself, what is the most important thing to say and what can you just kind of put on the sidelines?
And that can be a hard decision that makes sometimes. But but compiling all of that into something coherent and solid.
It takes time. It can take up to two years as this is the last thing I'm on.
I'm still trying to figure out a title. Any suggestions are welcome. One of the reviewers said that they like the second option.
The body stuff and the God I still love.
Brian Quave is bringing in my head saying that a title without a colon is better.
So I try to do that with the first option.
And then there's a part of me that wants to just go big or go home and just have it called simply the dialogue with the nature of Oracle.
So I'm I'm still kind of going back and forth, but.
That's my process.