Okay. I'm usually someone who, like, walks around and is very sort of dynamic when presenting, but for the sake of time,
in order to keep this to 45 minutes, I'm going to have to be pretty stationary and sort of script bound.
So let's go ahead and dive in before we go into the strange and wonderful world of Tibetan nature spirits or eco demonology.
I want to touch a moment on this idea of unseen beings.
This is, of course, a reference to my book, Unseen Beings How we Figure out the World is more than human,
in which I present a kind of clinical ecology, an approach to the climate crisis that's rooted in what we might call a more holistic approach,
paying really close attention to the root causes and conditions of our planetary
disease so that we can more effectively find a suitable path of treatment.
The book is divided into four main sections, which might be familiar to a lot of you,
since this is the model that was used by the Buddha for the teachings on the Four Noble Truths,
his assessment of our universal diagnosis of suffering was itself quite clinical in approach,
complete with an explanation of a diagnosis, its aetiology, a prognosis and a path of treatment.
In the case of unseen beings, I take the Anthropocene as our planetary diagnosis,
even though this term admittedly has some really significant problems, which I do talk about in the book and its fundamental cause,
in my view is anthropocentric from the conception that the world should and indeed naturally does revolve around human beings
that only we are intrinsically valuable and that the pursuit of human flourishing supersedes any other moral considerations.
Our disease is unfortunately both chronic and most likely terminal, and our prognosis is incredibly dire.
I argued that it is in fact an apocalypse of sorts, but we need to really critically analyse what apocalypse truly means and acknowledge
that the ending of One World isn't necessarily the ending of all worlds for treatment.
I propose that we need to go beyond the idea of a quick fix pill that's going to cure us or save the Earth, and instead focus on recovery,
both in the sense of a return of planetary health and also a recovery of a clear view of ourselves,
of others, and what it means to be human in a more than human world.
Our anthropocentric world is crumbling. We can't really avoid that.
But there's still space for new life and new ways of being to emerge from the cracks.
So what our unseen beings, when I first started writing the book, I had really intended to primarily talk about nature of spirits,
especially Tibetan nature spirits, and to explore what eco demonology might offer.
Our modern discussions on climate change. But unseen can mean many things.
We, of course, have the more conventional, unseen beings, those that are at least usually invisible to the naked eye.
This includes beings like ghosts and spirits, gods and demons, but also beings like microbes and viruses.
These are all unseen beings of a rather literal sort.
But there's a very different application of this word as well, which became sort of increasingly prominent as I was writing the book.
And these are the beings who aren't necessarily invisible or imperceptible,
but rather unseen as a function of our disregard, those that we have actively unseen as beings.
This can include plants and fungi, both of whom we are often blind to.
They're pushed into the background as a kind of painted scenery.
Some animals have also been unseen, especially those that we regard as objects are stuck.
In fact, a lot of humans have been comprehensively unseen,
usually in order to justify oppression and exploitation landscapes themselves often
regarded as a kind of being in many cultures around the world are now mere stages.
They're backdrops for our human centred trauma.
There are some beings who lie somewhere in the centre of this, and these are beings that I'm quite interested in.
Notably nature spirits were at once conventionally regarded as invisible,
but at the same time they're deeply connected to a lot of those disregarded beings like animals, plants and landscapes.
I would argue that their invisibility is itself a function of the very same disregard that pushes us to unsee trees.
A tree spirit might in some cases inhabit a tree, much like we inhabit a house.
The trees are not buildings, they're our own biological kin.
Perhaps trees are simply the physical bodies of tree spirits.
Perhaps the powerful spirits of mountains, lakes and trees are not invisible at all.
We've simply learned not to recognise them.
Admittedly, this book is largely Eurocentric and not because European cultures or sciences are the most important or the most valuable,
but because they have quite unnaturally come to dominate the world through centuries of colonisation,
forced conversion and the pursuit of absolute control.
If we want to understand the causes of a crisis primarily orchestrated by Western powers and institutions,
we have to critically analyse Western philosophical and cultural traditions.
But in today's talk we're going to be looking primarily at Asia and the Buddhist world,
starting with the question Is there a Buddhist approach to nature?
Now, the nature of Buddhist environmental ethics have been a hotbed of debate for a long time.
Many have argued that Buddhism, and specifically Tibetan Buddhism, isn't quite as green as we might think that it is.
Or rather its modern greenness is a lot younger than you might care to admit.
David Cooper and Simon James have argued that Buddhism is actually distinctly non ecological
in outlook because of due in part to its primary concern with individual liberation,
individual sentient beings, which they claim precludes a moral concern for species.
To be fair, there are others who would argue that this is actually an asset, but this is something worth considering nonetheless.
Others, including Lambert Schmidt Housing,
have argued that Buddhism or Buddhist forms of anthropocentric ism actually idealised a human dominated world,
since nonhuman beings like animals are usually regarded as lesser or at least more miserable than humans.
One could then conclude that if all animals were to suddenly disappear and human populations were to spike,
then that would be a good thing because everyone's working their way up the existential ladder.
Nevertheless, it is possible to find some form of environmental ethics in Buddhism, including in Tibetan Buddhism.
But as many have noted, this will usually require a certain degree of renegotiation in order to align with especially modern green,
or what Patrick Murray calls light green environmentalism, aligning with movements like eco modernism.
But to really have this conversation, we have to break down some of the basic terms and ideas being discussed.
Issues of paradigmatic translation across philosophical contexts are rarely addressed in these kinds of discussions.
For instance, what is ecology? What is nature?
These are actually rather important questions. Ian Harris writes The evolution of the modern ecological definition of nature and the natural
can only be fully understood against the background of the history of Western thought itself.
This is important for us to wrap our heads around. This idea of nature are what Lorraine Duston calls local nature's.
That place out there, the undifferentiated abode of non-human beings situated across and apart from humanity, this is.
It's a very distinctly European cosmological model, partly rooted in the classical era, but expanded upon substantially in the Enlightenment.
This nature is a domain of objects, resources devoid of agency who are inert, or which are inert and unaware, mechanical, much like a clock.
They're driven by instinct and the rules set in place by the Creator.
This nature is devoid of intrinsic value beyond its utility to humans.
It's also quite devoid of individuality. It's monolithic, universal, undifferentiated.
Importantly, it's not a moral dimension at all unless dynamics of human ownership get involved.
Most importantly, nature is a disenchanted domain.
It's not a magical place. It's a strictly material, scientific place governed by mathematics and natural laws.
On the other side, we have this idea of human culture, which is quite distinct from nature,
and the two are thought to rarely coincide, at least until recent times.
So we're told humanity, in contrast in nature, is a domain of subjects.
Unlike nature, we have agency. Supposedly free will driven by our rational human souls.
We have a neat value, and we're both bound and impacted by morality.
It intrinsically matters how we treat other humans, whereas with nature, this is a largely secondary operation, and humanity notably is enchanted.
In fact, even in especially in scientific contexts, all of the magic and wonder of the world is seen to be merely a function of the human mind.
Now it's from this basis that discussions of ecology emerge.
This was actually originally termed economy, which is now a separate but very closely interconnected idea.
Ecology also emerged in the Enlightenment, focussed on the study use and management of the Oikos.
This is the root of of eco Greek oikos, meaning the house or our household resources.
This, of course, is a fundamentally anthropocentric ontology.
This is an anthropocentric approach built around the human as both the centre and the apex of existence,
with nature conceived as a stage or a storehouse of resources designed to support our existence.
Importantly, there is no native equivalent to this idea of nature,
this term nature in Buddhist cultures or indeed in most non-Western cultural and linguistic traditions.
As Philippe Escola notes, for most non and non modern and pre-modern peoples quote plants and animals, rivers and rocks,
meteors and the seasons do not exist all together in an ontological niche defined by the absence of human beings.
Of course, the original meaning of the word in nature based on Latin natuna, which means that the nature of a thing or that which is inborn.
This does have correlates in many different global traditions, including in Sanskrit, Svalbard, the Tibetan religion.
But there's no equivalent term for that place out there, that monolithic natural world that is outside of and apart from humanity.
Great in Buddhism. Nature spirits are in fact a very pragmatic medium through which the experiences
and perspectives of non-human and non-biological phenomena can be negotiated.
But due to a lot of factors, some of which we'll talk about tonight, some of which we can't, including modernist pragmatism,
because of these discussions of environmental ethics, often ignored the topic of so-called nature spirits.
In haunting the Buddha, Robert Crowley demonstrates that spirit is played a central role in the development and
growth of Buddhism in all of its contexts and in all of its forms throughout history.
They've always been there in Buddhist cosmology, philosophy, ethics, ritual arts, and beyond.
Only Tidwell argues that at least in Tibetan society's spirit, paradigms act as a kind of potent trans cultural affordances.
They're a cultural affordances because they afford a particular range of possibilities for action in the cultural sphere.
And they're trans cultural because they actually have this a strange ability to transcend social and cultural barriers.
In her field work at a hospital in Ondo, she's a Tibetan doctor.
She notes that weaker Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists may very well agree on the existence of particular spirits,
even engaging with them in very similar manners while disagreeing on their social or existential nature.
This can be seen far beyond Tibet. But these aren't just sociological or anthropological phenomena.
Spirits are often distinctly, ecologically and environmentally embodied.
They truly exist at the crossroads, at the intersections of cultures and geographies, and indeed also at the crossroads of human and nonhuman worlds.
Given the complexity of these beings, it's obviously rather difficult for us to come to sensible terminologies.
We could call these being spirits,
but this is perhaps a bit too sprightly and it bears a lot of baggage from Western cultural notions about spirits and souls.
We could use the term demons, which I personally like.
This comes from the Greek tradition, referring to powerful spirits, usually lesser than gods who are associated with particular localities.
I tend to use this as a sort of step away from demons, which is a lot more prominent.
We'll come to that in a second, but we'll touch on this later.
Personally, I quite like terms like fairies and elves for a number of reasons, most of them Tolkien, Ian,
but these are arguably unusable due to their specific cultural context and also
because of popular modern conceptions of them as little winged pixies and so on.
We could of course just call them nature spirits, but this has two problems the problem with nature and the problem of spirits embedded within it.
Nevertheless, I do use this term because I think it's useful to highlight the ecological embeddedness
of these beings and to counteract movements towards the so-called supernatural.
I, of course, also use unseen beings quite a bit, but mostly to capture this dual meaning of unseen as invisible and unseen as disregarded.
And I would say that the most charged terminology that we could possibly use for these beings is, in fact, gods and demons.
This taxonomy is not only problematic in a modern sense.
There are even Tibetan system advisors and thinkers from 900 years ago that disagreed with the use of this terminology.
I don't have a solution for this, and I think that that's actually a bit of the point.
We need to resist the urge to collapse complexity in lieu of a universalising taxonomy.
The ambiguity may actually be an asset, but more on that later.
In my research, I think it's really important to go beyond doctrine and religious texts in order to get to the nature of these nature.
Spirits. Oftentimes folkloric mythic,
historical and even medical materials speak much more directly to the lived experiences of Tibetans living in relation with these beings.
Some underexplored sources that I use in my research derive from Tibetan medicine,
especially the sections on the publication Disorders of the Denisova,
which is from the Magnum view, or the oral instruction tantra of the U.S., The four countries the locus classic is of Tibetan medicine.
Another rather important source for indigenous daimon a logical knowledge, arguably is the Indian boom,
the Indian collection, which comes from the blend angular, but it also exists in other contexts.
These four collections are a mythic and ritual corpus that deal primarily with four types of nature spirits.
I'm also really interested in whether control rituals like the Cha Boon Yanga or the oral tradition of summoning rain in the tradition,
and how the evolution of rituals like these intersect with climatic shifts on the Tibetan Plateau.
So when talking about Buddhism and the more than human world, it's I think a good place to start are the so-called six realms.
Most of us are very familiar with these.
But I want to deconstruct this idea a little bit and demonstrate demonstrate its limitations when dealing with the topic of spirits.
We all know these realms. These are the realms of the devil's assumed as humans, animals, protectors and the [INAUDIBLE] beings.
And this is straightforward enough. Sometimes there's only five realms.
But some copper's preference for a divide between the Davids and the students leaves us the six fold model as a little bit more orthodox.
But once we're once we begin trying to project nature spirit onto this, this scheme, it becomes a bit more complicated.
For instance, we're often told that beings like in darkness are lesser kinds of gods, lesser kinds of devils.
Sometimes Nagas are also regarded as a kind of lesser form of danger,
but sometimes Nagas are also regarded as a kind of Asura, and in other cases they're regarded as animals.
So I would argue their caste based social system and their obsession with
jewels and so on makes them a little bit more similar to humans specifically.
Sometimes Nagas are in the picture, look usually predicated upon the assumption that creatures can be divided into two categories.
We find this really prominently in Tibet.
In one group we have the proper hungry ghosts in their miserable realm of existence, where they're sort of fixed in that place.
But on the other side we have the so-called eight classes of gods and demons.
But then we've got another problem, because this suggests that we would find gods devils in the pit to look at, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
And then, of course, there's the question of demons. Who are the ones that are stirring the cauldrons in the [INAUDIBLE] rooms?
Are those also demons? In short, it's quite complicated, and it, in fact, becomes even more complicated when you consider,
for instance, the fact that humans are certainly animals. Where do we draw that line, or are apes a part of the human realm or the animal realm?
What about Denisovans or Neanderthals? There's a lot of a lot of questions here.
For me personally, anyone that's read my book will know that I'm particularly concerned about the omission of plants from this scheme,
despite the fact that they are immensely complex multisensory beings who can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, communicate, learn and respond to pain.
Sounds like a sentient being to me. They are not actively embraced as sentient beings in Buddhism.
They are in Jainism. But that's a different day. Fungi are much the same.
Where do they go? Even though they're genetically closer to us as animals than they are to plants?
And what about micro-organisms?
It's worth noting that in some circles microorganisms are actually placed in the press to look as part of these eight classes.
A lot of Tibetan doctors hold this this belief, especially with the dual connotations of sin.
It's important, essentially that this model is not an absolutist paradigm,
and it speaks rather poorly to the spatial placement of beings who in Buddhist cosmology are
in fact arrayed across 31 different or more than 31 potentially different realms of existence.
Jungian control hits. It hints at the fluidity of this construct when he says that, quote, Even the mountains, cliffs, trees,
temples and homes of this human realm, wherever suitable, may serve as the habitat or environment for any of these forms of life.
Now, of course, before Buddhism came to Tibet,
there was already a well-established continuum of traditions negotiating the nature of non-human beings.
In his comparative study of Siberian and Tibetan shamanic traditions, Dmitri Armacost notes that in ancestral, Himalayan and Siberian traditions,
lakes and mountains were regarded as actual living beings in and of themselves, and they often still are in Siberian and variety in contexts.
It's likely that it was only with increasing Indian influence that these spirited
locations were reduced to the mere abodes of spirits rather than their physical forms.
In some modern approaches to burn, they still maintain and maintain a kind of dual status.
Once perceived as a living sentient being and also as a spirit residence.
Now, because both India and Tibet had very complex,
arguably animistic systems and demon logical cosmologies a new hybridised
approach had to be very carefully negotiated and it did have to be negotiated.
For Tibetan peoples,
the spirits that they had known and lived with for arguably thousands of years weren't just beliefs that could be replaced by other beliefs.
They were members of a more than human society,
and their presence needed to be acknowledged and dealt with by Buddhism for it to really be applicable to Tibetan Lifeways.
In demonology, this took three major forms. In some cases, Tibetan Buddhist spirits or Tibetan do.
The spirits that we know today were adopted from India and they were equipped with account a literal translation.
This includes beings like the slum in the slum in that word is very clearly based on the late in life of Asura,
which eventually came to be understood to mean non God.
There's other examples. Trees off or again, Dava, perhaps even Mamo came from this, but this is needs more investigation.
Another approach was that some indigenous Tibetan spirits were retained.
This includes beings like the Union, the Tend, the Tao Dong, etc. These were not a part of Indian tradition at all.
They don't appear in Indian Buddhist texts, but they retained their place in the tradition.
And then there are others who are assimilated and combined into a common class.
This includes beings like the Naga and Lee, the Yorkshire and Nugent, the Deva and Flor in both of their respective contexts.
These beings existed in their own cultural spheres for a very long time,
and it was only in the Buddhist era in Tibet that they were collapsed into a single category,
presumably based on the premise that this was a kind of mutual discovery by different groups of people of the same type of being.
Now, of course, the most common classification that we encounter when we talk about spirits in Tibet are the
so-called eight classes variably presented as passing de guerre La Rue de Guerre or Dray de Guerre.
There are probably some others as well, and there are some early references to these eight classes in the Dunhuang materials,
but they don't provide a listing of who they actually are.
The first descriptive use that we can find is a 19th century translation of the Golden Light Sutra,
where it uses this term Sun Day to translate off into which are the eight legions.
And in this context, these were eight specific groups of spirits that sought teachings from the Buddha and became protectors.
But over time in Tibet, these eight classes came to be a rather universal paradigm for describing all of the spirits that exist in the world.
But this obviously only works symbolically because there are, in fact, obviously many more than just eight variations in the eight classes abound.
There are countless variations. You can see an early listenings like this one from the Golden Light Sutra.
These are mostly Indic spirits or these are all index spirits.
In fact, as we progressed through time, more and more indigenous Tibetan spirits make their way into the mix.
And you may have encountered this yourselves. It is very difficult to find the same list twice.
There are countless variations of this in this 14th century listing Oregon length even employs
the classic outer inner secret device to squeeze 24 types of beings into an eight fold rubric.
Pascal also notes that in his fieldwork, most Himalayan lay people found this idea of eight classes to be a kind of stuffy doctrinal
construct with not a lot of applicability to people's real on the ground experience with spirits.
On the other side, he found that even very seasoned ritualist would often struggle to give you the same list twice,
or even to keep it within eight individual spirits.
They would often provide many more than that in their attempt to explain who they are.
This really points to the fact that taxonomies are often slippery at best, even when we're dealing with empirical phenomena like biological species.
But for spirits, they're almost useless. Christopher Bell notes.
Spirit taxonomies consistently lack uniformity and system opposition,
despite attempts over the centuries by numerous religious authorities to establish such consistency.
This indicates that Tibetan spirit types their traits and their values are context
specific and relative to the regional communities in which they are encountered.
So given the complexities of these beings and understanding that there's no single way of viewing them, classifying them or engaging with them.
Let's turn to this idea of engagement itself.
Many will be familiar with the core Tibetan charter myths dealing with spirit stories like the popular symbol, the myths,
and something Gogol's famous Taming of the Cinema of Tibet,
which arguably represent rather polarised and often oppressive narratives of Buddhist conquest.
This became, of course, very prominent trope in later Tibetan Buddhist myths and and ritual arts,
which often employ ritual violence to quell spirit obstacles standing in the way of Buddhist institutional authority.
But importantly, this was never the only approach.
Tibetan Buddhism is not universal because no religion is universal.
We can, for instance, look to the teachings of Magic Latrine and the tradition dating to the 11th and 12th centuries.
Many will be familiar with Magic's teachings on the four Martyrs or the four Devils for Demons, if you prefer, in which she explains.
And for the second time not going to read it. I might read another one, but we'll just do this.
Translation That which is called Devil Dude is not some actual great big black thing that scares and petrified whomever sees it.
A devil is anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom.
That's Sarah Harding's translation.
Now, this is, of course, taken directly from the teachings of the Buddha on the topic of moderates indicating that they are not external,
demonic, devilish beings, but rather the afflicted mental states that hinder our experience of liberation.
They are indeed devils in a philosophical and a theoretical sense.
Now, this is it's important to understand.
Many have interpreted this to mean that those great big black things don't exist according to magic, that they are entirely imaginary.
But this is almost certainly a misreading. It's clear that from much further teachings on the so-called six paradigms of gods and demons,
that unseen spirits do exist in much the same way that you and I exist.
They simply aren't absolute good gods or absolute bad demons.
This is the point. They're just other sentient beings.
She may as well be talking about diabolical humans in this regard, saying that cruel and scary people are not devils.
That doesn't mean that the cruel and scary people don't exist, nor that they're not cruel and scary.
They're just not demons or gods or devils. They're sentient beings.
When it comes to the real devil's magic, advises that Buddhist practitioners should cut through them through spiritual practice.
That's what is cut in church. But her advice regarding the non devil spirits is quite distinct.
A set of ten obligations that she provides to her students.
She explicitly says not to beat down, dried out or torture other beings by instigating harm on a hostile,
non-human sentient beings through charm substances, wrathful mantras, or doing wrathful practice.
The method to tame demons.
In this case, referring to spirits, is to give up your cherishing fixation on the body and give your life and limb to those demons without hesitation.
She goes on to say in what's probably the most famous quote attributed to her with a loving mind cherished more than a child,
the hostile gods and demons of apparent existence. This is specifically referring to spirit beings and tenderly surround yourself with them,
nourish them always with your warm flesh and blood, with the hook of compassion, of loving compassion.
Befriend them and never dismiss them. This is a very different approach to spirit engagement than we find in some of the more orthodox materials.
And while I would agree with the general scholarly consensus that the tradition is not shamanic, it is absolutely animistic.
I would argue that it represents a somewhat more compelling application of
Buddhist Mahayana philosophy and the ethic of compassion in an animistic context.
Now, let's take a look at a couple of specific examples, starting with weather control and rainmaking in the Tibetan tradition.
Some have argued that it was primarily due to inability rather than unwillingness
that small scale pre-modern societies have a less destructive impact on the planet,
especially compared with our own industrial societies.
Cathy Cantwell, who I believe is here and Tony Huber, have suggested that this was also the case in pre-modern Tibet.
Cantwell says if pre-modern Tibet was ecologically sustainable,
purely a because it was too sparsely populated to make much environmental impact and B because its culture,
although anthropocentric at least did not actively encourage environmental exploitation,
then any attempts to build an ecological ethics on the basis of Tibetan ideology
would seem to involve a complete reinterpretation of Tibetan cultural symbolism.
Now, it is, of course, true that pre-modern Tibetan societies had a far less destructive impact on the environment than modern industrial societies.
And it's reasonable to question how much of an. Intact cultural values really had in that.
I would also concede that pre-modern Tibetan societies weren't some eco friendly green utopia.
The building of monasteries alone often involved significant amounts of deforestation.
But I think that the terms of this argument missed an important point.
From a Tibet Tibetan perspective, we have to ask whether or not they perceived their actions as being ecologically
inconsequential or otherwise disconnected from environmental and climatic processes.
I would say no. Tibetans were no strangers to climatic disaster and human behaviour was very much regarded as one of its root causes.
Humans were also seem to have a potential role in remediation with the ability to protect against drought,
hail, etc., regarded as a tremendously valuable magical skill.
The earliest mentions of Padma Simba's identify him as primarily an itinerant water specialist with expertise in water engineering and magic.
Indeed, weather control has continued into the present day.
Luckily, actually, Dorji was the chief weather maker for the Dalai Lama for many decades, and numerous miraculous stories abound about him.
These kinds of services weren't just a display of magical prowess.
Droughts have been recorded in Tibet for as long as written records have been kept both historical and paleo climatic data support,
for instance, the instance of extensive famines and droughts in central Tibetan river valleys between the late 13th and the mid 15th centuries.
In the 1327 account from the third Karmapa, Ranjan Gorge, he says.
Rain does not fall, the harvest are poor, and what little it does grow is carried away by frost and hail.
He notes that people were crying out as they died on the road. A few people ate the flesh of others.
A few sold their children for food. Others, wracked with hunger, jumped into the river.
Their skeletons were barely covered, but the skin that hung off them.
For ranging torture. These calamities were specifically a consequence of human behaviour as well as political corruption.
Humans were not uninvolved in climatic processes.
To Tibetans, they believed that they could impact the climate.
Even if we believe that humans have only recently stumbled upon that power.
We can also find indications of severe drought in the 17th century connected to the large scale,
cold and dry period that encompassed much of the Northern hemisphere,
contributing to a lot of global crises, including the fall of the GU gay kingdom in Western Tibet.
This was the era in which climate check made the famed Ritualist and Buddhist system advisor,
who was also the chief protector of the rich and triangular trade corpus known as much IX oral tradition.
I always found it very interesting that if you look at the call often for the totally sodden,
which is the central thread sodden in the wrench and Triangle Corpus, he can't talk.
May writes hold this soap play ritual and the rainmaking ritual as the most important practices.
Now, the practice that he's referring to is the chisel sharpening, which is the oral tradition for summoning rain in the tradition.
And we'll talk about that in a minute. But why would and Truck may be advising people to associate the totally sodden to this very lofty and
advanced sadhana centred on spiritual liberation with a seemingly mundane ritual like weather control.
And before we get into that. It's important to note that whether control has actually been a mainstay in Buddhism for a very long time,
the Locus classic is of this kind of magical endeavour is the Mega Sutra or the Great Cloud Sutra,
which predominantly focuses on interactions with Nagas as Rain Lords.
Nagas have themselves been associated with rain and weather since at least the early Vatican period first discussed in me at Harvard later,
but this was elaborated upon substantially in Pharaonic materials composed between 301,000 seeds.
In the Buddhist tradition, the Great South structure was incredibly popular.
It spread widely across Asia, including to Tibet, were inspired a number of rainmaking rituals,
including one that's found in a spell book from June one, which Sam Landscape translates in his excellent book, Buddhist Mat Magic.
This ritual is itself quite fascinating. It follows a multi-stage process of engagement,
starting with a more peaceful approach where you just make offerings to the Nagas and appeal to their kindness and hopes that they'll provide rain.
But if they don't do that within 3 to 5 days, then you start applying a bit more pressure.
They'll press down the rituals, presses down on the nuggets, heads with mantras and sprinkles holy water on them.
And if that doesn't work, then you take it a step further and they'll beat them with sticks.
And if that still doesn't work, then the Ritualist digs a pit, builds a ritual fire,
and incinerates the entire Naga loka for their impertinence from a chalk maze.
Text is also definitely based on the Great Cloud Sutra, as well as the teachings of Magic doctrine.
This is in the tradition and also the writings of ranking Dorjee, who was personally very familiar with the consequences of drought.
This text hasn't been translated.
I'm working on it, and I haven't seen any sort of academic discussion of it, but it basically has four main sections.
There's preliminary preparations which talk about specific places where weather control is more or less effective,
auspicious signs and dreams and so on.
There's an overwhelming with splendour or zeal none section where the practitioner arises is from a namo and subjugates the Nagas.
There's the main practice which has a lot of components, including interestingly, an appeal to the compassion of the Nagas,
trying to inspire them to have pity on the humans and animals that are suffering as a consequence of drought.
And then there's the feasts, there's the banquets, the body offering feasts which range again from peaceful to wrathful approaches.
Notably, a part of this is also a common practice. The giving and receiving practice specifically for spirits,
specifically dedicated on taking away their suffering and sending them love and compassion.
The Buddhist weather wizard does not summon rain merely by willing it,
nor by casting spells or petitioning supreme rain gods like thorn or zoo or something to provide rain.
It's with these relatively mundane nature spirits that this is enacted by inviting them, perpetuating them, healing them diplomatically,
negotiating with them, and even threatening them, which all actually speak to their highly personable kinds of characteristics,
their highly social character, rather than seeking to improve systems of anthropocentric exploitation,
Tibetan approaches to dealing with climate change rely on not always friendly forms of relationship.
And while indeed these methods might differ in substantial ways from modern green environmentalism, they offer a fundamentally.
Different starting point for environmental discussions as opposed to the
Western empirical approach which regards nature as disenchanted and non agent,
is it takes the agency of non-human beings and environments even the climate itself as it as a given,
allowing for genuine relationship with all of its complexity to occur now outside of the ritual and religious sphere.
Another really important source of Tibetan daimon a logical knowledge is the Tibetan medical tradition.
In the U.S., there is a specific section known as the domain.
So the treatment of provocation and these are found in the manga.
Yu The oral instruction tantra, which deals with all of the nitty gritty of pathology.
This section consists of five main chapters, including one on gentle provocation,
which is really spirit possession, which is largely based on the Ashtanga.
She daya samhita, which is one of the core diabetic texts.
There's also chapters on yoga and JJ roughly psychosis and amnesia, also largely based on Havana.
And then there's these chapters on Zordon and Lou Dutton, which are sometimes translated as like provocation and provocation.
But I would argue that that might be a bit hasty. Unlike the others, these chapters have very little to do with either video.
They also have very little to do with psychology or mental health, which we'll come back to in a second.
This term Dun is itself quite interesting.
I tend to follow not often order in pitches approach to translating it as provocation or based on the verb done to provoke,
but that can in fact take many losses and in many things. Malcolm Smith is another Tibetan doctor.
He once said to me, You know, when we use this word done to refer to the spirits themselves as a noun, we should really call them provocateurs.
But in that I think that is a hasty jump.
I think it's a lot more valuable for us to sit with the question, who is the real provocateur in these dynamics?
Is it the spirits or is it the humans that incur the wrath, the doesn't?
So I provide some interesting perspectives on this. Looking for just a second of the history of the DNA.
So this is it's largely influenced by invented by the time history dies samhita The first chapter comes
almost entirely from the fourth and fifth chapters of the sixth section of the strongest Judaism Meta,
which deals with Bhutta. Vidya This is the idea of ethnic study of spirit illness.
Some might be surprised to learn that I read that it has such a discipline because
it's usually marginalised or completely ignored in modern diabetic colleges,
much like Spirit matters in Chinese medicine. But it's very much there in both cases.
M.J. and JJ also are based on the strongest Udaya samhita.
But interestingly, in either case, these diseases have nothing to do with spirits.
And even in the U.S., YouTube only mentions one out of all of the types of each of those those classes of disease as being spirit related.
The rest of them have very mundane, non demon illogical causes.
The last two chapters are the most interesting younger children who's probably the foremost scholar on the sources of the U.S. today.
He wasn't able to identify where you got these materials.
They certainly aren't derived from either DNA, and they may in fact have indigenous influence.
I'll talk more about one of these chapters in a moment.
It's another place in the U.S. where we find a lot of provocation, discussion and spirit influence is in relation to epidemic infections.
These are seem to primarily arise due to provocation of various naked, dark or disease lords spirits.
But once they arise in a primary case having been provoked,
these diseases can then pass from person to person through a process of contagion or rhyme.
Given all of this, it's clear that DNA is not a form of Tibetan medical psychiatry, as some have suggested.
A lot of the illnesses discussed in the DNA so have absolutely nothing to do with psychological afflictions.
There are distinctly physiological and even epidemiological in nature.
Furthermore, there's an obvious direct link between environmental disturbance, spirit, provocation and illness.
Nevertheless, there has been a long history of repackaging DNA as a form of Tibetan psychiatry.
In Terry Clifford's book, The Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry,
she characterises Tibetan spirits as primarily a psychological phenomenon associated with the multitude of mental and emotional observations,
obviously observations experienced by humans specifically.
She even goes so far as to call them the ID trying to obstruct the super egos higher promptings.
This may have more relevance to the concept of martyrs than it does to actual spirit beings.
While she concedes that these spirits are often perceived as having some kind of an outer existence.
They remain little more than an external projection of the forces of human life and emotion that can drive the mind insane.
She even quotes Theodore Boot on highly questionable source.
Don't know why she would have quoted him in saying that for learned Tibetans spirits are strictly regarded as mental entities or projections,
mostly of a lower order or as psychic fields of force.
Now, I would argue that this has a lot more to do with Western ideas of poltergeists and psychical phenomena than with Tibetan demonology.
And this reduction of DNA to psychiatric is itself, I think, very problematic,
in part because it precludes a non anthropocentric approach to these beings and an acknowledgement of their ecological and environmental embeddedness.
When we look at the Gucci itself, we can easily see that this aspect is very much front and centre.
There's a very interesting section of delusion. So on the treatment of provocation chapter or treatment of Lou Provocation chapter,
where you took list some of the factors that can lead to an outbreak of zany, which is specifically usually translated as leprosy.
It's not just leprosy, it's a category of disease that includes leprosy and a number of other lymphatic and cutaneous conditions.
But I think there's good reason to believe that this section actually represents
a far more in general indigenous model of the ideology of provocation.
Again, for the sake of time, sorry I could read it, but it'll take a second.
He says the Earth Union will be attacked in the fields will be ploughed, the water will be stirred up in the meadows,
flooded the tree and will be cut down and the stone in will be uprooted.
The hearth will be contaminated by impure substances and the blood of wild animals will be spilled.
Buddhist sand dune posts. A hastily gained power will disturb the sensitive places the Nyanza to subdue their enemies.
At that time, the union Starbucks flower in sin will be in turmoil.
Poison will spread through touch sight, the vapour of their breath and recollection, ushering in an aeon of blazing city.
Zola again younger, doesn't identify a source for this text,
but it's self-evident that at least the discussion of men can't come from Indian tradition, since genera specifically an indigenous Tibetan spirit.
So looking to potential indigenous influences, I naturally think it's valuable to look at the Indian boom or the Indian collection,
which has been chiefly investigated by something Kami and Daniel Burtynsky.
This is one of the four collections or Gucci of the Boone tradition to look boom, boom,
boom and boom, all of which present mythic and ritual materials relevant to those spirit classes.
Kami considers the Indian boom to have been probably codified around the 10th century,
and Burtynsky believes that this probably took place around the Cumbre Mountains in eastern Tibet.
Many sections of this text very closely match materials from Dune Wong further attesting to its antiquity.
And in general, there's a much stronger case to be made for the indignity of the mining boom than the other more popular loop.
The Naga collection, which has very clear and pervasive Indian influence in the Indian boom.
There is a particularly interesting story, the story of Meet Senator, which something Kami translates in Holy Cow Designs Tibetan Ritual.
And this is a story of a prehistoric Tibetan man who commits what Kami calls actions against nature,
including cutting down trees, digging up stones, polluting lakes,
springs and rivers and hunting wild animals meets and rather dramatically proclaims,
I will kill hundreds of thousands of the beasts of the white snow mountain.
I will kill hundreds of thousands of snow cocks. And the grouse, the blue slate mountain.
I will kill hundreds of thousands of beavers and otters of the river.
I will cut the trees of the onion, dig up the stones of India, and I will allow the land of the Nyet is my field.
I will irrigate my homeland with the water of the Indians.
There are clear similarities here to what you took rights in the four countries, and much like you'd hope,
warns this has grave consequences for medicine and also for his livestock, who are afflicted with illness.
And they all have their souls, their loss stolen by the union and concealed with these nine concentric walled enclosures
unlocked with a padlock meets and then has to call in a shaman or a Zen priest to help.
He gives them a list of objects and sacrifices that he has to procure in order to unlock all of the padlocks.
And he does this, but not without great cost to himself.
Another place where we can find some similar kind of language is in Karnataka.
In his own prayer of apology to the Earth Lords or the Sonic Shotgun Dupa, which he composed in the 17th century.
It's notable that Kami Chutney was specifically a master of toad rituals.
These are distinctly non-Indian ritual procedures, likely Sino Tibetan in origin, often associated with the bun tradition.
I've always found this prayer to be quite inspiring,
but the section that really caught my eye is where he discusses specific kinds of transgressions, namely digging up the spirits here,
specifically Men of the Earth, Raising Canyon of Stones during the Union of Water,
cutting the end of trees, disturbing burial ground and funeral rites and the like.
In this prayer, the practitioner apologises quite directly to the spirits themselves,
including for the past transgressions of one's ancestors and the future transgressions of one's descendants.
The apology factor here I think, is really important.
This isn't a confession where we're petitioning the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to cleanse us of our bad karma.
This is an apology and an attempt to restore a healthy relationship between humans and spirit beings.
Now, there's a lot more that can be said about all of this.
But again, for the sake of time, I want to start turning to some potential conclusions.
I want to start by pointing out something else that Cathy Campbell writes in her paper, Reflections on Ecological Ethics in the Tibetan Earth Ritual.
Excellent paper. I highly recommend reading it.
She writes, It is conceivable that fear of the vengeance of Earth that is could be integrated into an explicitly ecological ethics.
And she says that this could motivate ecological thinking and behaviour which
could potentially align with contemporary green ideas about nature striking back.
But she concludes that it would seem extremely unlikely that any modern form of Buddhist
environmentalism would choose to encourage an ideology of angry earth deities taking revenge.
Now, I certainly agree that it would seem quite unlikely for modern Buddhist environmentalism to take this approach.
And I would also concede that a paradigm based in vengeance and a fear of retribution has major limitations.
But is there a place for so-called nature spirits in ecological conversations?
I would argue yes. I think the hesitancy to discuss and involve them really arises from a concession to scientific empirical disenchantment.
The presupposition that the other than human world is in fact devoid of magic and agency and subjects,
that it's simply a domain of inert objects and resources.
Thus to play to buddhism's rational reputation, which a lot of folks like to do.
There may be a temptation to pretend that Buddhists actually understood that all along.
As Bruno Latour brilliantly states, animation is the essential phenomenon,
and de animation is the superficial, auxiliary, polemical and often defensive phenomenon.
One of the great enigmas of Western history is not that there are still people naive enough to believe in animism,
but that many people still hold the rather naive belief in the supposedly animated material world.
In effect, I argue that we need to take an eco in a logical turn.
To do so involves taking indigenous knowledge seriously as a form of knowledge and not merely a relic of culture.
We need to adopt a more critical approach to ecology and more than human relations, especially from our position in the bowels of the Anthropocene.
Eco demonology is not only reasonable, given all that we now know about the intelligence of non-human beings, including plants,
unicellular organisms, viruses and even hollow basins like old growth forests connected under the forest floor through MYCORRHIZAL networks.
But this eco demonology is also a particularly valuable tool for making sense of their perspectives and needs.
I would argue that this is the single greatest asset afforded by nature spirit paradigms the capacity
to inspire genuine care for a tremendously vast array of being seen and unseen through them.
We can transcend theoretical,
moral and legal frameworks as our only tool for inspiring change and environmental ethics and instead draw upon personal experiences of relationship.
But to do this effectively, we need to move beyond both entropy centrism and super naturalism.
We need to stop thinking about spirits as psychological or psychical phenomena and begin to embrace them as ecologically embedded beings.
In closing, and to nobody's surprise, who knows me since I certainly couldn't have done a presentation at Oxford without mentioning J.R.R. Tolkien.
I want to share a quote from the Professor that I find quite relevant to this discussion from his essay on fairy stories.
One of my favourite works in the entire world in which he says Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses,
looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix.
For it is man who is in contrast to fairies supernatural, whereas they are natural, far more natural than sheep such as their doom.
Ex if you want to get in sources. That's it.