So, um. Why go on pilgrimage, Jim, see transformational powers of sacred places and Tibetan Buddhism,
and then I'm not going to be saying anything about what Pern is for present purposes.
Just think of it as a branch of Tibetan Buddhism.
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.
Um. So I'm going to talk through these.
Two things. First of all, the geomagnetic aspect of of the bond of sacred places in Tibet.
Why do people go on pilgrimage? Because there's something special about the places that they go to.
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,
but as a kind of dialectical process that the have the events that's imbued in
the land can then continue to generate good things which can benefit visitors,
ordinary visitors and saints in the future.
Now, a Tibetan pilgrimage.
It is very diverse. Can look at it from lots of different angles.
One of the things that David and I briefly discussed earlier was considering pilgrimage
from three different aspects and the way that he himself has considered the religion,
that is to say, from the societal aspect, the satiric logical aspect and the instrumental aspect.
So I won't actually categorise the talk according to three to these three schemes.
Elements of these three will become apparent as I talk, so let's just sort out some vocabulary to begin with.
Well, let's take a look at some of the literature, first of all.
So pilgrimage, there is a corpus of Tibetan literature, of pilgrimage literature, which we look at briefly in a short while.
But there are also all sorts of other domains of literature which can inform image.
So there's an awful lot in the literature of sacred landscape, which is mainly what I'll be talking about, I suppose.
Then in the lives of Saints, in hagiographies, real characters, mythical characters.
There's a lot about the way in which their spiritual activities are grounded in in certain locations.
Then there are more standard biographies.
Tibetan spent an awful lot of time travelling to sacred places all over Tibet and they record their images in their biographies and autobiographies.
Then there's a more secular variant of this, which we can call travelogue. And finally, there is tantric literature.
There are other areas of literature besides and I'm not going to be looking at all of these,
but I'll dip into some of them periodically to see what they what they can tell us.
So let's begin with the. The idea of sacred lands.
I was the last person, I think, to give my title to the series, and by the time I got there,
I saw that my friend and colleague Hildegard Danberg had already given a title that included sacred landscape.
So I felt a bit bad about using that. However, sacred landscape will feature quite prominently.
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.
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.
And a lot of what I'm going to be saying is taken from other talks, which are probably also online.
So if you have a sense of deja vu, then forgive me, but I think we all probably do this sometimes.
Okay. So landscape. Let's get the vocabulary.
And for pilgrimage, I'm coming to you in a moment, and it's based on the Tibetan term for place,
Tibetan has several words for place, but the most formal one perhaps, is this term near what's in brackets.
Is that the Tibetan orthography? So name means place, not just any place, but usually a rather special place.
And the standard term for pilgrimage in Tibet is Natcore Corvin's to go around.
So Nacole is going around places and you don't just go to one place.
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,
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.
And the act of actually visiting a sacred location is an JAL is a human term, meaning to to meet, to encounter, to visit.
And you would use this term, for example, the Lama. You don't just encounter a lama, you Allama.
So there is a certain reverence towards these places insofar as they are, insofar as they are sacred.
Another thing, probably the only anthropological component of this talk is that of space and place,
which is interesting discussion and quite a lot of the secondary literature,
anthropological literature, archaeological literature, geographical literature and and so on.
So much said about this anthropology they used as follows.
A space is a set of coordinates on a map and a place is what you do with it is the culturally meaningful space.
And just to confuse matters, these terms are used in exactly the opposite way by geographers.
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.
So there are various views about this. One view that's come to prominence in recent times is.
That the the relationship between humans and the physical environment is not one of subject and object.
The distinction implicit in this is false and we should understand that these two,
that is to say, a person and the place that he or she inhabits are mutually constitutive.
This is what we might call a strong phenomenological point of view.
And it's advocated, especially in the work of Tim Ingold. Reference will be coming in just a moment.
And he proposes that an individual's knowledge of a place derives from physical interaction
with it and not from theoretical constructs independent of any such direct experience.
This has been, to my mind, fatally contested by certain other authors, notably Chris Gosden of the Archaeology Department in Oxford.
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.
And just to mention somebody else who was at the at risk, a computer hindsight,
who will be known to some of you who wrote a wonderful doctoral thesis, which he hasn't yet published.
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.
He explores in this thesis the usefulness of some of these phenomenological positions anyway,
it's not published, but it should be in the library somewhere or at least in the board or online.
Now I'm going to talk about what we mean by sacred landscape, first of all, by talking not about landscape.
I'm going to talk about cloud scape. I've used this example before, so if it's familiar to you, again, apologies.
So we look at this, we don't see a cloud. We see something that the cloud looks like.
Yeah. And it could be an animal.
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.
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.
Indeed, he thinks it is a weasel. It is back like a weasel or like a whale.
Very like a whale. So this is a cloud scape.
That is to say, these are not camels and weasels in whales out there.
These are clouds that remind us of these things.
And that will serve as an introduction to what we mean by a landscape, a landscape originally did not mean what's out there.
It's not the topography, it's the interpretation of it.
It's a representation of it.
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.
And what's out there, this topography, this geography can be into?
Artistically and of course, we're not just going to be talking about art can be interpreted in numerous different ways.
And here's a nice little example of that. There was a photograph that was taken by an artist named Thomas Gardner.
And then he made a painting of this and he asked some of his colleagues to make paintings of it,
so here you have the closest thing to the topography that's out there.
And then here is one of his colleagues paintings. A painting of the same scene by himself.
And by a third person, and you can see that these representations, these landscapes of that topography are all very different.
And one of the mistakes that a lot of people have made is to assume that.
Understandings, interpretations of what out there are universal.
So you have Mays' writing in the 1930s that certain canons of beauty are unalterable,
taken generally you and I plamen admire very much what Plamen admired and Chaucer's de Shakespeares de Wordsworth's de.
Wrong, Joshua, approval rating of 62 percent in this country described mountains as WarZ wens blisters,
Tumer Imposture Arms and Samuel Johnson, who has no lover of landscape, either, referred to the Pyrenees as uncouth.
Huge, monstrous excrescence is of nature being nothing but craggy stones.
So there is certainly no universal canon of what constitutes a beautiful landscape.
And Thomas Burnett visiting, I think, and heating them, so he visited the Alps in 1970, 1960 and 71,
these mountains, a place to no order with one another that can either respect youth or beauty.
There is nothing in nature, a more shapeless and an old rock or mountain.
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.
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.
And as this process of landscaping that I'm going to be talking about, in other words, how to infuse the.
A topography with meaning how to turn space into place.
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.
So people will find visual resemblances in the in the in the land.
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.
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.
And of course, these it's believed to be a true swastika. That spot really occurred because of the activities of saints.
So I'll give you a few examples of these, because I think they are they are quite interesting.
It's how the landscape is red in a certain way.
And this will take us into the the whole domain of Geomancer.
So here you have a hill, it's a once inhabited hill, but again in a pilgrimage guide,
it will say you will come across a rock that looks like a trauma, that is to say, a sacrificial cake.
Right. So the images that are chosen belong to the world that you are trying to realise via this landscape.
Here's another one, it appears on a list of animals, Buddhist animals that dot the landscape and obviously this is an elephant.
Why an elephant? There are no elephants in Tibet because the elephant is from India and India is the land of Buddhism.
So it's a way of converting the meaningless geography that's out there into a Buddhist landscape.
Here's another one, take a look up here. This is, again, a northern Mustang near the Tibetan border.
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.
Padmasambhava, an 8th century figure very close to this hat.
There is this which is considered in the guidebooks to be the saddle of Padmasambhava.
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,
a place called UNAMSIL now about a day's drive north of Lhasa,
there is this pair of stones which in the pilgrimage guides to this area are described as being the the tantric divine pair.
Shakra Sambora and his female consort are here in sexual union like this.
OK, so this is how they are understood.
But of course, not everybody sees the same landscape in the same way.
So members of a different school of Buddhism or the Bond religion would see this pair as something different.
And indeed, we do have a different representation of it. Now, the whole area has been converted into a tourist resort.
And you have these two rocks again, there's now a road through there, it's a tourist destination.
And of course, because Tibet is one of the it's one of the minority areas,
it's it's the sort of place that's associated with romance, femininity and so on.
So now these two are no longer understood that these two rocks are no longer understood as being a divine couple.
They are simply the couple stone. So it's a romantic destination.
This is where newlywed couples go on their honeymoon, for example.
And there are many such examples of the politicisation and modernisation of classical.
This is what is sometimes called contested landscapes. But in these.
Prescriptive text, when you visit a landscape like Sacred Mountain, like this mountain,
I'm going to be talking about more presently the mountain of Congo and southeast Tibet.
There are referenced references to locations.
So it will say, for example, rocks and crags which have the appearance of the signs of the five Buddha families,
Saud's mirrors and the eight auspicious symbols.
Again, very, very Buddhist, an area which has a village like quote that looks like a mirror, a drum and a flat bell,
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.
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,
which looks like a lady hiding herself and laughing there. You know,
you can see that the author is actually perhaps getting a little bit bored
with the Buddhist imagery and and letting his imagination run a little wilder.
So it's not just particular locations that are understood as resembling divinities, sacred objects and so forth.
It's Tibet. According to a very old idea, the land of Tibet is the supine demoness,
there's been a great deal of literature about this and that this demoness had to be subdued,
not killed, but subdued because she was hostile to Buddhism. But she has a great deal of inherent power.
And this power, if rightly harnessed, could make it make the land propitious for the introduction of Buddhism.
So this is an older representation of this demoness, and this is a more recent one.
And so it's a it's an enduring theme.
And this takes us nicely on to what we might regard as a more systematic representation of the landscape through the domain of Geomancer.
Now, I must immediately acknowledge my friend and colleague Petra Mora, who kindly sent me copies of these images which are published.
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.
And what we're going to look at some of these and. The point is that.
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.
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,
which literally would mean diagnosis of place, some place or land to diagnosis and ultimately redo the translation.
So these are hills. And this is what you have to try.
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.
You build your monastery there or you don't build your monastery there. You don't build a house there, whatever.
Okay, so this is how you should understand. It's very much based, I think, on the Chinese tradition.
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.
So here the one on the left, it says this is a symbol.
So this is a symbol demon demoness, waving like the sharp edge of a weapon, like a raised flag, like the spokes of wheel.
So this is like the the sharp edge of a weapon.
Sorry. This is the raised flag. This is the spokes of a wheel. This is the face of an angry demon.
These are the major what they call the Sarda, the Earth enemies.
And then it lists the harm that these do. Anybody who builds a house that the lives of the people will be short.
There will be diseases and many hindrances. There will be outbreaks of contagious diseases.
So the whole point is to avoid places like this, you know, they're useful for certain types of meditation,
for example, and perhaps for placing a cemetery or some such thing, but it will not heal your illnesses.
And since we're partly talking about healing, this is certainly a consideration.
It will make them worse and you will probably die young and lose your fortune.
Whereas on the other hand, a mountain that looks like people debating here, we have two people debating athletes fighting or fighting lions.
Oh, sorry, these are also enemies and you will have different results.
So if you build a settlement here, then there will be a lot of gossip, lots of diseases, quarrels and fights.
And then if the upper and lower part of the mountain appear to be separated,
they appear to be ruptured, then et cetera, et cetera, there will be similar things.
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.
If the peak resembles a sitting teacher and the upper part looks as if it was encircled by his disciples, this is good.
If it looks like a king sitting on a throne encircled by his vassals, this is good.
If it looks like she's descending on a pass, there's also unsettled by many vulture chicks.
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.
But you can see that they're not vague. They're very precise.
You know, it's a king sitting surrounded by his surrounded by his courtiers, vultures and chicks and and so forth.
So you need to have a trained visual imagination that coincides with the visual imagination of your
colleagues from the same school in order to reach a consensus about the significance of the place.
OK. I won't go through all this.
Leave that out as well. OK, so another way of reading meaning into a place is by naming.
And in this case, you have the chaplain not not really a Buddhist chaplain,
in this case of a local duke in a provincial Tibetan area who invokes the territorial gods at excuse me,
most of these gods don't actually have a physical form.
They are simply the place itself. They are the names of the place itself that are buying at a very low level.
These are the representations of the divinities.
So when they are invited to come and be feasted, they come and occupy these effigies, these effigies that are situated here.
And once they're there,
then he will feed them with beer and he will feed them with with various other things used to perform animal sacrifices for them.
But that is now discontinued. Now, the point is that this text is divided geographically, so it goes in a kind of spiral.
And it starts off in the far west of Tibet and then this great big sweep around,
it invites all the gods of western Tibet, not the gods of northern Tibet, the gods of eastern Tibet.
And then that's phase one. And then you have a sort of inner circle invites those divinities.
And finally he comes in on the his local village and an.
All the different categories of divinities is the father, Lou, the certain spirits, the warrior gods,
the demons, the royal divinities, as they call them, the earth spirits and fist's them.
So what this.
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.
West central Tibet and beyond that, greater Tibet.
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.
And what he's invoking are these creatures, these things called Sadakat means place and that means owner.
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.
So you can talk about your conduct, your house owner or your Sadak or your landowner.
So and this is exactly how these types of divinities are understood and in the process of the invocation.
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,
other owners, they are the hosts and we humans are the guests. And he asks the.
Continue to extend their hospitality and you can read it, and then he he pays the rent, which is, you know,
the beer and the reverence and the and the food,
and then he sends them back because he don't want the landlords hanging around your house all the time.
So and then there is this rather nice request for support by our companions.
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.
Yeah. Know this can go a little bit further to talk about the societal aspect of it here.
We've seen the way in which this virtual pilgrimage around Tibet, it's you know, he acts as a kind of psychopomp.
You know, he travels around in spirit, but it can go a little bit further by really establishing a political identity.
And the example I would like to take here is not a pilgrimage literature of a long song cycle.
It's supposed to be a thousand eight songs from a southern Tibetan principality called Barong,
and they have the song cycle called JLC, which means the victory song.
And the men and women dress up in their finery and they sing these alternating songs together.
And there are many of these. But the opening song locates them.
Now, most of the community lives in exile. They've moved into the.
Quite a lot of them are in Switzerland, in fact, but even there,
whenever they start the cycle, they begin with this particular song which locates them.
It's extols the area in which they live.
So to the west of the village, Gary Berntsen seems to be an offering of heaped flower.
And this is Gary Bunch.
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.
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,
called barong payment should be. So to the west, you have the Lord, to the north, you have the the main monastery.
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.
Who are the young men dressed in monk's robes and then to the south of the village Mount Teashop on the Upland
Meadows are sunlit and it seems to be the splendid fathers and mothers and the children all gathered here.
So essentially, you have the whole community.
Divided up into its major components, the priesthood, the rulers, the warrior force and then the civil community and projected onto this landscape,
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,
and then reproduce their landscape when they begin the set of songs that somehow expresses their social identity.
And I'm sure that we would be able to find many other communities that have something similar.
OK, so another term for the SADAK, the owners of the soil is shidduch, which just means the owners of the place.
But after a while, historically, what tends to happen is that these attacks, Bushi, essentially just names their names of places they are nominee.
And the nominee, as we know, classically turned into pneumonia.
They turn into spiritual entities and they become user and the or something sometimes called, okay, you're literally in spell slightly differently.
It can be the root of the place, the root of the land. So the euro is not just a place.
It's a politicised place. It's a place of any dimension, a political place of any size,
so it can mean England or it can be a village of eight houses, but it is essentially a political unit.
So from being something out there inhabiting the landscape, these divinities, these birth owners become.
Divine. They start to take on personalities, they start to take on an iconography in the literature.
So there's a kind of development which I want to I want to look at.
How does this happen? It happens through a process called Delois, which is one of the most wonderfully policy.
Terms and Tibetan. It can mean to pacify or to subdue it and be to preach, to convert, to cure, to conquer.
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.
And it also refers as a noun to the Buddhist monastic disciplinary code, the Vinaya.
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.
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.
And the divinity of this mountain is envisaged like this as a a warrior divinity on a white horse.
And according to the legend, when Padmasambhava, the supposedly the founder of Buddhism in Tibet, came to the country in the 8th century,
one of the first things he did was to subjugate Nanshan Tongala, who was the ruler of all the indigenous gods of Tibet.
So he subjugated them. And from that point on, they are no longer hostile to Buddhism.
They become minor Buddhist divinities. And as a process of this conversion, these mountains, which were regarded as warrior mountains,
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,
what we might call pagan rituals, but I haven't included them here. They get converted.
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.
And so from being a Gulzar, it becomes a Nadie. It becomes really is a mountain and a name is a powerplays.
So it's a mountain that is a powerplays.
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.
For example, circumambulation, you don't normally circumambulation the site of a Gulzar territory, but you do circumambulation.
When this divinity has been converted into some major divinity of the of the bond religion or the Buddhist religion.
Again, another concrete example here we have a one of the highest mountains in the world.
Which because she's too modest to mention, it was first claimed by Hildegard Dembo that Burger's father.
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.
But that's only because we see it with external vision.
If we see it with proper, educated, spiritual inner vision, then it would look completely different.
And according to one pilgrimage account, there is a lama in the 18th, in the 19th century, specifically in 1863.
Sitting in his cave near this mountain and he sees a bright light and he hears a voice speaking to him from a waterfall,
and the speaker introduces herself as the Duchesne, the goddess of the place, and she invites him to a feast.
She emerges from the water she's wearing not very much some jewels.
And then they set off. They reach this mountain, which is called Mulligan in the text in just an instant.
And then he suddenly realises that it's different from this stone and Snow Massif that he's used to seeing.
The sky is thick with parasols victory banners, rainbows, Buddhas, lamas, incense, smoke wheels,
conchas and everywhere you can hear the sound of bells, drums and mantras being interned.
And there are a lot of other inhabitants. So there are certain spirits, earth gods and so on and so forth.
And he says that scene within inner vision, this is not just a pile of snow and rock,
it is actually sung apology sung by being the sacred mountain inhabited by none other than the Sumbawa.
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.
And he duly meets again, accompanied by his wives and as many attendants and receives teachings from him.
And amongst other things, we are told that inside this mountain there is a hidden land.
Called Dunlow Jumper, which has 500 villages, it gathers a harvest without planting and all its waters are like beer and milk,
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.
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.
And sadly, we won't be around to see it, but our children's children's children will.
Anyway, so he writes down what he sees, and this becomes the prescription of how this new pilgrimage place should henceforth be seen.
So this is how pilgrimage literature occurs. Somebody has a vision, sees.
Sees them out in a different way, writes it down, another lama will then go there, have another vision and then add to it.
So it's a process of accretion of sanctity whereby these topographic locations turn into sacred places.
So this is essentially what Thomas Burnett was hoping to see in the Alps in 71,
but he lacked the vision to transform the place into a sacred landscape.
Now, one of the important processes for transforming the landscape is, well,
these are just some examples of the type of literature I've been talking about.
But an important is the representation of the topography as a mandala and a mandala.
You don't need to go into too much detail about this, but it's essentially what Giuseppe Torchy called a psycho Kosma Gram.
It's a representation of the universe which is also inherent in oneself.
Above all, it's symmetrical. North, south, east, west. It has an inner circle.
It has a circle, it has an outer circle and so forth. So it's a symmetrical square surrounded by circle.
And this is henceforth how these mountains are represented in the literature. So there are always four caves or four sets of caves.
There are always sacred entrances, there are four of this and so on.
And so for four major streams at each of the four directions and so on.
So it doesn't really necessarily correspond to the actual topography, but it's an idealised topography to a mandala.
So how is the act of pilgrimage seen? How do Tibetans envisage.
The process of going on pilgrimage and there is a hierarchy of religious activity,
you find this in quite a lot of sources, but here I'm citing a Bompas protocol.
Tenzin Ambac, who wrote a Tibetan were called, which translates as a guide for the blind.
And he says that. The wonderful thing about the ball and about Buddhism is that there is something for everybody.
So if you have the highest spiritual abilities, then you practise this tradition called the great perfection.
It's the highest regarded as the the most elite. And it's the sort of sass of the of Tibetan religious practise.
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.
And then if you can't deal with this, if in some order and discipline,
then you become a monk, you observe monastic vows, and then if you can't even do that,
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,
the speech and the mind. He gives examples. They should make prostrations to sacred supports.
That means temples, lamas, sacred mountains and so on, circumambulation them, make offerings with their voices.
They should recite mantras and sing hymns of praise. And with their minds,
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,
with their bodies, visit sources of blessings and places where saints have meditated.
And if they have enough knowledge of the stories behind these holy mountains and visit them,
that is a powerful asset for increasing their faith and wishes.
And he then goes on to say. Don't worry too much about the local territorial divinities,
just envisage the mountain as one of the great tantric divinities or as the Buddha himself, the Buddha.
Okay, so this is how pilgrimage can be perceived.
It's what you do when you can't do anything else, essentially, you know, so it's rather low on the hierarchy.
But that is not the whole story. It's the power of these sacred places.
The relevance of them for other forms of spiritual practise are also are also quite important.
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.
So they walk around in the case of Shalash, for example, this is Mount Kailash,
there is an outer circle which takes actually you can do it in a day, pretty exhausting, but it can be done.
And when you've done that 13 times, then you are entitled to do the inner.
And then, if you like, you can also circumambulation the lake Lake Manassero River, which I think takes 18 days and done that.
So these are pilgrims from the far east of Tibet who are walking all around the lake,
having walked around the mountain and then as if this were not enough.
OK, here we go. So there are all kinds of specific things that have to be done at specific locations.
So most commonly, as you go over a high pass, you add a white stone to a can.
Very commonly at polling places, there will be two rocks which are very close together,
and you have to try and squeeze through and if you do manage to squeeze through,
then you will have an easy time of it in the after death, plain what they call the border after death and before rebirth.
But if you're rather against the sort of camel through the eye of the needle thing,
and if you can't quite get through, then, you know, things are going to be a little difficult for you.
You can make it more difficult for yourself by prostrating or all the way around.
I met some people who had prostrated all the way from eastern Tibet and it had taken them a year and a half,
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.
This is another location, a different mountain, but here, this rock on which the pilgrim is sitting is called dicterow pupusa, which means.
Placing placing the rock on which you placed the stones of sin.
So basically you pick up a few stones, you put them on here, and this represents you depositing your sins,
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.
And then, you know, there are certain locations this is to put in the far west, which have, you know,
wonderful geo morphological configurations where, again, the prescription will say there are sacred springs here.
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.
Hot springs are they're not just hot springs. They are they are imbued with spiritual qualities.
OK, so, you know, these are some of the many things that pilgrims will do when they are on on when they're travelling.
There's another genre of literature which we might dip into, and this is travelogue.
Giuseppe Tucci, the great Italian Orientalist, was rather sniffy about this genre of literature.
He says the itineraries of these Tibetan monks are far from that exactness, which we admire.
And the writings of Chinese travellers not only does a great deal of legendary and fantastic elements permeate their descriptions,
but the itinerary itself can hardly be followed from one place to another Balash.
There are actually quite a number of pilgrims who leave accounts that are quite accurate.
Some years are, you know, slightly fantastic. But others, you know, you can follow them with a great deal of reliability.
One person whom Touchy would have approved on is a writer called Cataclysmic, who wrote a book called A Pilgrim's Diary Tibet,
Nepal, India, 1944 to 1956, which was the subject of the CD by someone else.
You may know Lutcher Galilea also not yet been published, but I hope it will be soon.
He was a very interesting character and even though he calls his book a Pilgrim's Diary.
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.
So superficially, at least ostensibly, it was supposed to be an account of the holy places of India.
But he's also very major trader. You know, he was an important figure in one of the big trading houses in central Tibet,
and while he's on pilgrimage, he can't help doubling up his activities with with other things.
So I don't know if I have the quotation in the slide. Yes, here we go.
So he gives a. And of the holy places of of Varanasi, and then the following day,
they take a break from the pilgrimage using activities and after spending a night in a Pilgrim's rest house in Varanasi,
and on the following day, we went to visit the market and the silk factories and relaxed a little bit.
Then we returned and in the evening bought tickets for a train that left at 11 o'clock.
OK, so pretty precise. It actually goes on. And if I have this here.
Yeah, here we go.
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,
you know, the distribution of food by the Sikhs.
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.
So, you know, it's sometimes a very grounded.
It's also possible to take virtual pilgrimages, sometimes you may not be able to get to a pilgrimage place,
you may not be well, for example, or you may have political duties if you're a king, for instance, or a local minister.
And in this case, what the Tibetans would sometimes do is to bring the sacred places to your location.
And there's this fantastic cave we found in northern Mustang.
These are all old troglodyte settlements, abandoned hundreds and thousands, but which were then reused as retreat's.
And inside one of these caves, you have a virtual pilgrimage of.
Thabet.
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.
There are inscriptions over here, but it'll say this, the Buddha of the digital coming in Lhasa.
This is the Buddha of the Ramatoulaye Temple in Lhasa. And this is the so and so this is the Potala and so on.
So within this cave, you actually have the main pilgrimage sites of the Tibetan Buddhist world that have been represented as paintings.
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.
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.
So it's a condensed pilgrimage, a virtual pilgrimage. You know, this is the protector of Tabo in western Tibet.
Pretty. And so on.
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.
Move on tantric literature. I won't be saying too much about biography and hagiography, but in tantric literature.
You have a similar kind of thing where you can do the pilgrimage without actually going anywhere.
And this is, again, the internalisation of the landscape, but in this case, internalising the landscape within yourself, not inside a cave.
One of the most prestigious Tanisha's in the Buddhist cannot call the Kalachakra Tantra.
It's a late Tantra, possibly the latest. I think it's 11th century and it's called the wheel of Time.
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.
And this is the mandala of the colour chocolate until it's actually an 18th century, 18th century mandala in the Portela Palace.
And in this text, it's got a very interesting take on pilgrimage.
So there is this concept of the world that the Tibetans inherit that you have at the centre of the universe,
and that there are four continents surrounding it and then there are minor continents and so on.
But the continent in which we live, the scapula shaped continent is jumbled viper.
In the south, some to the left here. So this is where we live, but the point is that.
This whole cosmos is present in our bodies, this is the whole point of the mandala.
And it corresponds very precisely like this, so you have a great job with VPA,
which is the entire scheme, and the different continents correspond to different parts of the body.
So that's the most general correspondence. Your body is itself amandola.
The source I'm citing here is Vesna Wallis, 2001, just a couple of books on the Kalachakra Tantra.
It gets much more detailed. So you have in India, you have these 10 pilgrimage sites which are then also, incidentally, transposed to Tibet.
There are corresponding places in Tibet. So you don't need to go all the way to India to visit some of these places.
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.
And so it goes on, you know, the different kind of secretions and so forth.
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,
Assad's the poet called. Her father says that he has not seen another place of pilgrimage as blissful as his own body.
So in spite of this snobbishness about going on, pilgrimage, pilgrimage nevertheless endures.
And it endures not only as an inferior type of spiritual activity for those who are incapable of doing anything more subtle and satirical,
logical terms. It's also something that is regarded as important by, shall we say, more sophisticated practitioners.
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
be up to now in the same way that the tundras themselves can be very basic.
You know, the Tatras are organised so that the lower tundras, as they say, the the earlier tundras,
the action Tatras, for example, they are to effect transformations in the physical world.
Quite simply, you know, the early one of the action is, is for weather control, for instance, the Moha Tantra, Mohammedi Kalpa, actually.
But then later on, as the countries themselves evolve through these magical procedures,
the identification with the divinity can be used not simply to effect transformations in the material world,
but can also be used to help you with your spiritual achievements.
And so it covers the whole and pilgrimages rather similar. So at one level.
Certain specific pilgrimages can cure certain specific conditions, and there is one pilgrimage place called Schottenheimer.
It's a mountain on the second Tibet border over here you see it.
And there's an article by Cartier three, Pilgrimage and Incest, the case of Schottenheimer on the Tibetan Systemise Border Bulletin of Tibet ology.
Sorry I forgot the year, but you can Google it.
And essentially, this is a pilgrimage that is undertaken if you want specifically to purge yourself of the pollution of incest.
Yeah. That's defined in different ways by different communities of Tibetans, depending on their their marriage rules.
But if you have incurred what is regarded as the sin of incest, you can go to this mountain,
do your pilgrimage, and you even get a receipt saying that you've.
Purged, why it's important to show this receipt,
because many communities won't allow anybody who has committed incest to live in their community because that brings disasters on the whole village,
it'll be sort of landslides, the crops will fail, disease and so forth. So you have to be purified.
You go to this mountain, do your pilgrimage, you get your certificate of purification, come back.
Sure. To the villages and you can be reintegrated. So this is a good example of a very specific form of healing.
Yeah, and now you can get bottled water from from Schottenheimer.
Is that an early label? And here's one of the letter labels, this one collected by the late Elliott Spurling.
This one by Katie, obviously. And then other places, too.
So. Yeah, so, Perry, we mentioned this place earlier, a very important Bumbo mountain in the southeast of Tibet,
recorded by Tibet, by Bompas as being the most important pilgrimage site for them.
The pilgrimage guide to this area states that even if you take just one step in this direction,
you are impediments in this life will be removed and you will have your heart's desire.
And so this is a kind of generic improvement to one's fortune.
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,
takes two days to get around this mountain, but particularly in horse, sheep, bird and monkey months.
Each circuit is equivalent to thirteen hundred million.
Make recitations on behalf of living beings, and you will receive long life, merit, prosperity and power.
Your heart desires will be fulfilled by means of reverence, according to your wishes.
And then it goes on, says if you go there and perform prostrations circumambulation and make offerings,
your defilement that includes diseases will be purified. You will find your way to liberation in the assembly of perfected ones.
And animals that visit this place will be born in Persia.
So you have a much better life in Persia.
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.
Your spiritual activities include the founder of this little village over here, lubra 13th century.
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.
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
meditating here for a week than he could by meditating anywhere else for a whole year.
So it's not just to improve your karma, to remove your your diseases, your your moral stains and so forth.
It can actually turbocharge your your meditation.
And this just to conclude with something that's represented in this wonderful Tunker, a Tibetan spiritual painting from probably the 18th,
representing a rather mystical scent called Seven Rings and believed to have lived in the 8th century.
And he was a shapeshifter. You know, he's not very he's not very present in the outside world.
And what's interesting is that you can see represented in his life the transformative power of the landscape
because his form and his attributes change a call lot to the particular holy place he is visiting.
So these are representations of him visiting different holy places around the edges.
This is him at the centre with his consort. But the text on which this painting is based actually says as follows.
So when he goes to Mount Kailash, he was white in colour, wrote the rainbow, had ribbons in his hair,
wore jewelled earrings, adopted a dance posture and played melodies on a lute surrounded by Duchene.
Is that Adam? So that's how he was when he went to Cuyler.
He goes to another place, he is correspondingly transformed luncheon Gingrey He was red in colour and he wrote a sunbeam putting it.
Then just north of Shalash he was blue, green in colour, and he wrote A Divine Eagle.
Shinji, then they then he was brown in colour and he wrote the quick lightning and so on and so on.
So anyway, these are the this is a very nice representation, I think,
of the way in which it's not only we who transform topography into a cultural or religious landscape,
but also the dialectical process whereby this landscape then can then act back on us,
to cure us, to improve our spiritual pursuits and to change us in ways that we would want.
OK, I think I've probably run out of time and I've run out of things to say stop.