For. So welcome everyone to this, our third talk of the full series.
And I'm really delighted to present Valeria Garcia's over,
who is a postdoctoral fellow at the South Asian Institute in the Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at Heidelberg University,
and she's also affiliated to the GSR l in Paris.
Valeria has a master's degree in Tibetan studies and a Ph.D. in the history of religion from the University of Oslo,
from the Department of Culture, Studies and Oriental Languages. Prior to her appointment at Heidelberg University,
she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Social Anthropology as part of the Mongolian Asian Studies Unit.
So, Valeria, thank you so much for talking to us today.
And who would you. Thank you.
Can I begin? Yes. Oh, wonderful. Thank you very much for inviting me to share some of my work at the Treasures Seminar.
My talk today is based on a series of field research trips to commit between 2011 and 2019,
and it is integral to my larger research project, which is devoted to underground secret religious activities and influential figures.
During the Soviet era, religious suppression in the Buddhist of conflict.
I'm looking at different forms of secrecy in relation to ritual and healing practices
that were generated and performed in this condition of exclusion and state suppression.
And in this respect, treasure recoveries being predicated first and foremost on concealment and memory
constituted important parts and important variety of what I see as practices of secrecy.
The comics are a group of Mongolian descent who migrated to the present day location
from Moscow in the in the 17th century from approximately St John in Western Mongolia,
and establish the point of Kanaks that became subjected to the church structure.
Tibetan Buddhism, primarily in this group of Aryans, was the dominant religion, at least from the time of the collapse of the Stalinists.
And so religious reprisals, it raised the Buddhist establishment from the public scene in the thirties.
Organic monasteries, numbering approximately 100 by the late twenties, had been destroyed, had ceased to work by the Second World War.
During the Second World War,
the entire comic population was accused of treason against the Soviet Union and exiled en masse to Siberia and Central Asia,
even though comic book content 13 years later and comic was restored within the Soviet states.
But Buddhism, as well as popular forms of popular forms of popular worship and folk healing, continued to be prohibited.
And the Buddhist establishment never regained the official statues at least until at least the late eighties.
But nevertheless, even though it was suppressed and prohibited it,
religion was not eradicated altogether, but acquired new specific forms in this situation.
So it was functioning basically in the form of underground centres and temples focussed around the rich and the ex monks.
That is, those so-called monks who received the Buddhist training in or abroad have been through prison camps, deportation.
And then they came back to army and continued conducting the rituals in secret and
transmitting knowledge to the students and even going on secret pilgrimage trips,
even though some of them continued to be under surveillance with the local KGB.
So basically my larger in my larger project,
which I hope will result in a monograph I am looking at on the one hand and looking at construction of memories
about so-called underground Buddhist and developing popular hagiography centred on its key personalities.
And at the same time, I'm looking at religious transformations that this condition of state imposed mode of secrecy has triggered.
And when it comes to treasure practices, treasure recoveries in the present economic context, on the one hand,
it is part of the broader pattern for the role, the scope of religious transformations, because it is a rather new phenomenon.
I mean, treasure recovery, especially if we think about the Tibetan tradition of thermal revolution,
which is largely predicated on the role and figure of the treasure revealer,
who is a recognised national treasure revealing so concealers from previous lifetimes.
But in in the institutes all recognised reincarnations was practically non-existence since the 18th century.
So this so the validity or I mean this important element on which the validity rest was gone at the same time,
even though it is quite new, I mean, it says a practice in at large.
They are used deployed as a way of maintaining continuity in the local of the local tradition as a means of survival,
whether in the Soviet era or today, the treasure practices were deployed.
Almost as a means of survival of local tradition. And at present, they are looked at as instruments of national and ethnic cultural renewal.
So now. I said, I'll introduce two absolutely different varieties of what can be subsumed under the stress and mode rubric,
which somewhat also these two cases are very different,
but and they somewhat strongly correspond to the overstated Tibetan dichotomy of earth treasures and minus treasures.
And one is rooted in directly embedded in the Soviet history of suppression,
while the other case is that it is the result of transnational connections of present day common Buddhist groups.
So when saying that Buddhism in Soviet filmmaking moves on the grounds, it can be understood quite literally.
Not only that, upon their return, the secret underground ex monks lived in dug out houses, but importantly,
as was largely the case during periods of religious persecution in other societies,
that scenes, Tibetan societies or among other Mongol groups of people were built.
They buried Buddhist texts, images and ritual paraphernalia in the grounds.
This was happening particularly beginning from the late twenties, throughout the thirties and forties.
And one important place for such one I wouldn't place was such underground concealment,
particularly among the monks, were ancient burial models abounding on the northern Caspian.
Still, these mountains they date to different historical eras,
from the early Bronze Age to the decline of the Golden Horde and one in the same burial mound,
which is a basically it contains graves of three story people.
And one of the same mounds can contain burials belonging to absolutely a very different distance, historical times, historical eras.
And in this way, amount is point of intersection of diverse temporalities, which resonates with the function of the treasures.
So on the one hand, I'm looking at,
I explore this relationship between the comics historical veneration of burial models and the recent treasure recoveries.
And this, in turn, reveals very important connection between the cult of mountains,
among the Mongols, at least the veneration of local deities and treasure revelations.
So in the in the topography of the northern Caspian lowlands,
the burial mounds functions as they basically they substituted for mountains because the comics, they brought the culture of mountains with them.
But there were no mountains. So they were these nows. They became of this important reference points in their Buddhist ritual landscape of the comics.
They were venerated as sacred heart and the bones of different categories of cosmological beings,
from the territorial deities to enlightened members of the Pantheon.
And some specific monks were in fact associated with particular deep Buddhist deities from the Pantheon.
So so while being incorporated into this basically Buddhist size and becoming part of the Buddhist landscape,
the models also functioned as important reference points and sacred sacred areas.
Territories of patrilineal. Patrilineal.
Territories at which initial collective rituals were conducted during the Soviet era.
When saying that would is went underground.
So basically the models they were connected, that they became the sites of diverse types of secret ritual practices.
Most of all, collective rituals will covertly conducted at the site or in the vicinity of the mosque.
Sometimes what directly connected with certain underground ex monks secretly
practising and performing rituals for individual supplicants during the Soviet era.
And of course, they'd work. So that was the place where all these treasures Buddhist images,
texts and ritual implements were concealed during the time of the destruction of monasteries.
And the reason for choosing demons was a numerous.
One possible practical way is that being the most prominent in the landscape,
the mind's function is a sort of mnemonic devices for people to remember because it was not only the monastics who would hide the images,
but also just the common people, common to cheese and believers.
And my respondents would tell me stories about, you know, their family or their family, family accounts,
how they buried their family images, statues of Buddha statues, and then were able to recover them upon their return from the devastation.
And now the important reason is that Mars being sacred, being a sacred spiritual territory and negative sort of life,
and surrounded with numerous taboos and ritual prohibitions.
So that was regarded as a space, a space of exclusion.
So they provided a very safe place to conceal and to hide Buddhist images from being destructed and defiled and dissipated,
which was largely the case, of course, during the destruction of monasteries.
To what extent are the images buried in or in the vicinity of the mines was supposed to be recovered in the future?
It still remains to be investigated because on the one hand,
people do want to recover and there are recoveries of images documented and whether individual families or monks,
they do encounter this, whether spontaneous or deliberately looking for ancestors.
But at the same time, it could be that statues were just buried there for protection.
And even even now, the excavation, the unearthing of these images requires a specific ritual setting.
And a series of rituals must be conducted to restore the proper balance between the territorial entities.
Abiding Citizen Biden. The role in the models.
And you must take in the treasures from them, perhaps.
And of course, there is this popular hagiography in mythologies,
developing their own demons around the treasure recoveries and around the pre-revolutionary
or Soviet secret so that monastics who would who were supposed to be hiding the statues,
numerous stories, miraculous legends about treasures of pre-revolutionary monasteries hidden around certain mines, for example.
This is one of them. Some of these mountains are now being restored, reconstructed as sites of sites of worship by monasteries and by lay communities.
And this is one of the examples, perhaps one of the largest models, because some of this was backwards, although not all of them are so prominent.
And there was also legends that surrounded this mound.
No treasures have been recovered from here so far, but there are numerous legends surrounding this particular site.
But perhaps one of the largest one of the largest recent discovered treasure discoveries which received attention in the media was
in 2016 when an entire collection of Buddhist images and ritual implements that you can see numbering approximately 2040 items,
was discovered in a very low mound, ostensibly of the sites in an era near the village in the centre of Kunming.
Here you can see the ritual. The monk is chanting prayers and making offerings to demands to the end.
This as a budget in the mound, where after the treasures have after the treasures were removed.
And what's another interesting point?
Regarding this specific practices and this is Congress is that the focus is not so much to the actual discoverer who found the items,
but importantly it is the role of the concealer and the reconstruction of the past and of the local history.
That is the focus of attention here. People are trying to reconstruct, for example, regarding this collection.
People are trying to reconstruct the history of the of this specific collection where where it comes from and different interpretations,
different opinions expressed. For example, monks from the central monastery.
And they suggest that it must have been hidden by now by monks from the nearby monastery.
Then local people from the nearby villages that I talk to connect this specific collection and
the items with the certain important secret Buddhists that were practising during the time.
All religious suppression in the Soviets in Soviet economy can.
So this process of recovering treasures from the mind is also the process of reconstructing the history of the recovered objects.
And by constructing the history of the objects,
people reconstruct the history of their their local history and their local Buddhist history, and in this way,
recreate their unique subjectivities and belonging so they are the case, or rather, as a story prolongs the story,
that beginning 2010 is another interesting dimension of present day and recoveries.
At least it is seen by some adherents as treasures, and it is directly connected with transnational influences,
which at the same time becomes the site of civil strife and tension on the on the chronic religious scene.
Because on the one hand,
post-Soviet cosmic identity building is rooted opposing Buddhism and especially in the in the historical connection between the comics and Tibet.
And for this reason, Tibetan long Tibetan Buddhist lamas,
especially emigre lamas in exile and reconstructed Tibetan Buddhist establishment, were built, for example, across India and in Nepal.
They play a very important, prominent role in this process.
However, on the other hand, this constant, this tendency of looking for foreign inspiration elsewhere beyond cosmic,
beyond the Roman wall, there is also can be also criticised by those who aspire to a more local form of religious practice in Buddhism.
So my second example concerns the introduction of the worship of to protect deities in several cosmic Buddhist centres,
which the adherents see as mind treasures and which were revealed by a very well known Tibetan emigre Lama Kadri made in Potsdam.
He's the head of the rebel lineage and the founder of the International Records Centre with all Atlas monasteries in different countries.
So the important thing that he is recognised as,
as a treasure reveal as a person and his lineage of his birth includes a number of very important Buddhist personalities.
So during his first visit to the media in the summer of 2010,
Kadri Me is reputed to have had a number of visions and dreams of a local protective deity and later
composed or rather reveals as reported by my interlocutors and offering prayer texts for his worship.
According to the text and the descriptions received from the Tibetan, the deity is an ancient gods in and the war gods of the aurochs,
who had been helping to cull mixed since the time of their migration.
So the lower hoga came together with them and continued helping them in their new cave.
However, during the the general dark time of the Soviet era, this crucial connection was allegedly lost,
and it is now due to the agency of a powerful lama that this connection is being restored.
The name.
So this is the concise version of the text and the name of the new dates is Jungle Drill La Dull, cause they call them Inconsequential Jungle Dog.
And as the name indicates, the new DG belongs to the class of Rule of four.
I'm not talking about Warrior. It is equestrian warrior heroes whose tasks include protecting the country and its people increased in wealth.
And this type of deer, this category of the warrior deities was and is well known throughout the among the Mongol groups.
And of course in Tibet and in coming the conflicts were not exception to this rule.
Nevertheless, the name Jiu Gar is quite new, at least to me, as the name suggests.
It is the images, the immediate reference to the to what is regarded as the ancestral home of the called Exclusion Gardena.
That is the geographical area from where they came to the field regarded as new locale.
And so in this sense the recovered protected entity reinforce the karmic links within the
region and their belonging to the larger Mongolian Tibetan Buddhist world at large at the same.
So another important point is that at least the followers of Kadri may correlate this rediscovered equestrian deejay with the epic hero Jungkook Khan,
the prominent Mongolian and Euler Khan, epic hero, the universal conqueror.
And the ruler of the imaginary kingdom of.
As has been traditionally the case in other innovations science the comic epic was performed used to be performed
in a special ritual setting by spy boards who were also believed to possess visionary powers in the Soviet Union.
However, Jaeger was suppressed as a visionary and ritual practice, but promoted as a literary text.
And at present there is a tendency of resynchronisation therapy.
And perhaps this invention, or the rediscovery of jungle jungle Khan as a deity,
embodied, embodied as a warrior deity, is part of this general resynchronisation.
Nevertheless. If you look at the of the stock, I was the produce was painted.
Only in accordance, according to the visions received from mom to the text and visions of Non-covid man and here their lineage,
the genealogy of the the rediscovered data is reflected.
So as you can see, edge and God's law is.
A servant, an attendant in the retinue of guests. And this was also in the text that I showed you previously.
So. In this sense. So in this sense.
Guest star, which is of course, a well-known now the hero of another well-known epic,
especially importance in eastern Tibet and among other Mongol groups, but not so much among the comics.
So it turns out that this entire cosmology and this lineage somehow puts the comics the epic hero,
low ranking them lore to the to the Tibetan epic hero.
And also, it appears that the comic worried it serves not so much as a defender of national interests, but this.
But most of us would soldier in fights and enemies of Buddhism.
And this is this is quite this this became quite a provocative innovation and led to intense debates, if not outright.
Outright conflicts between the Buddhist groups.
But the story is to continue because during his next trip in the summer of 2011,
now Catherine Mann is reported to have had and is reported to have had a seizure and a new series of visions.
And this time the visions were about another biblical date of the comics.
And according to the text and the descriptions received from the turtle on the day she was identified as the white's old man,
which of course, the white man is a very well-known figure throughout Tibetan, Buddhist and the Mongol world.
And in case it is, this figure has been traditionally venerated as the Lord of the land and water and the guardian of codes and nature.
Basically his principle task is to regulate the relationship between humans and natural worlds,
which includes not only protecting herds and healing, but also punishing for what is considered improper behaviour.
And in this sense, the wild old man is perceived as ambivalent, highly ambivalent, but also powerful.
And in present day comics, The Wild Man is perhaps the central figure of popular worship.
And there is a growing number of religious groups whose religious and ritual and healing practice is focussed on the veneration of the wild man.
And some of these some of these groups, at least the practices,
the practices of textual revelation somewhat resonates with the Thurmont textual term of discoveries.
For example, some of these communities they claim to be receiving texts of religious importance are usually ritual and heathen.
Texts from deeds is usually from the Buddhist deities, from the Buddhist faith and and of course, from the wild man.
So they claim to be receiving special texts and visions and themes, and this texts encoded in incomprehensible language.
And then they claim to be receiving translations or a code to decipher the text.
So this is something that's happening in public. There's grassroots movements focussed on the words of myth.
And of course, here, the Wild Man, I mean, he receives new functions and his entire role is receives profound reinterpretation.
But coming back to the to our inputs. Yeah,
he he is his discovery proposes another way to another type of distortion of the indigenous
cosmology and another way of reinterpreting the function and the figure of the white old man,
which is reflected again in the new thangka that was again painted,
produced in accordance with the instructions, vision and texts received from them accordingly.
So here we can see that the words old man, so it appears that the wild man is somehow admitted, is correlated with the of family.
So you can see that in the upper register. In the middle you can see there was a megabucks lent by Guru and watch it.
And then I'll look at the spa and the suit.
We have this big, big depiction of I agree the centre and what is unusual is that according to my informants.
The wild man is directly connected with gravity.
So the wild man is has been retained re subjugated by high river and it is river cruise control in the wild now.
And so when Booth actually Booth Concourse Booth, where both paintings present a sort of collective collaboration,
collective work, collective work between the third gong,
the treasure dealer, the painter and the Buddhist Buddhist monastics,
because it includes a several important elements which are quite typical of the comic local tradition.
I don't know if you can see it all, but in the corner in the lower register there is a depiction of Saiga antelope.
If you can see it and you know, for the comics they believe that the Saiga Antelope is the mount, the mountain animal of the Wild Man.
And this is the first time I have never seen conkers or depictions or the depictions of the wild man with saiga.
But this appears to be something, again,
new new tendency to be caught in cooperation with local mythology and books representing it in them in the developing arts.
So let's so the topic is our collective collaboration and it also looks like it seems, which I have not really looked at,
but it also seems the text written by Nakajima about the new text written about the world now is
also seems to be a sort of collective production of Intertextual nature because according to my.
According to the lamas that I talked to in Jamaica,
they told me they emphasised that Revere was experiencing difficulties in locating the wise old man,
and for this reason he asked the lamas some lamas, in case they had any other texts devoted to this duty.
And of course, the texts devoted to the wise old man are not.
I mean, there are numerous texts devoted to the sage in Jamaica, in Tibetan, in Karmic.
And so they gave him the lamas gave and gave him several all the copies.
And this is allegedly the pre-revolutionary all the copy of the incense offering to the wise old man.
And there was another text that they gave him and gave it to the person,
the text which was allegedly used before the Soviet era to cause the articles, rain and sweetness, the weather.
So I have not done this year, but it would be interesting to see to what extent.
To what extent how much has been so much has been borrowed from it's older from the old allegedly old checks donated to the states.
So. So as.
So this new discoveries, of course, they became very contested points.
And on the one on the one hand, the ball was off. Markers remain.
They see them as treasures. But the details, the images, the texts and the emphasised numerous accounts.
So they relate numerous stories of miraculous happenings, changes in the weather, which they maybe even dreams and their own experiences,
visionary experiences that they had, which they interpret as signs that prove the validity of the new treasures.
And one of such important signs, at least what they told to me, is that the name of the new temple, as you can see here,
this is one of the new outlets of the Reform International Centre of it was built a few years ago in Copenhagen.
And the name of this temple, the monastery and the monastery will be devoted first and foremost to the to the worship,
to the rituals devoted to the newly discovered deities, to God and to the wise old man and to gifts.
Are they this coincidence? So they emphasise that the name of this specific monastery coincides with the name
of pre-revolutionary Kunming Buddhist monastery that was located around this area.
And that shifted. And it's indeed true. There was there was the monastery with the same name, which was quite old,
and it was brought in the 17th century when it was still in its mobile nomadic form,
and then it acquired its stationary incarnation in the village of A.
So. So the disciples of academia, they tried to somehow validate and legitimise the new developments that they are now trying to promote.
But at the same time, on the other hand, and this opinion is perhaps even more belated and more proliferated and comic.
So the opinion is that this new this new and this innovations this innovations of Christian logic,
they are not gaining ground because it contradicts certain important principles of,
first of all, that the guest star guest star has never been venerated in common.
And then the Jungkook Khan cannot be a foot soldier or guest star because he's the conqueror of the universe.
And so he cannot be an attendant, a servant in directing gifts.
So some even expressed their opinion that it can be not just of no appeal,
but it can be quite dangerous to promote this new cause because it can anger and outrage the local.
It is the true protectors of cosmic who do not want to be re subjugated in this.
But most some of our government cosmology and perhaps several of my interlocutors cited it.
I cited an example that proves this inconsistency.
So during one of his subsequent trips to Mecca, I think it was 2000, I'm not sure, not exactly sure where it was, but now I'm glad that he made it.
But should during when he was given big public ritual, public initiation into the new practice of the white man,
he suffered a stroke and spent some time in the hospital.
And of course, this episode, this unfortunate event, was interpreted by a number of other Buddhist communities who do not support the new practice.
It was interpreted as the truth of the local deities who do not agree with this new cosmology that is being imported.
So. So I guess just.
I shall leave it here. Just what my my point was to show two different cases of what are considered as treasure and to what extent it is.
No matter how new it may seem and how unusual it can be in the in the general historical context of care,
it is nevertheless deployed as a way of reinventing continuity and as an instrument of recovery
and revival or renewal of what is being needed by their adherents as the true indigenous,
authentic elements of their tradition.
Well, thank you. I guess I have to stop here.