[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So welcome, everybody to the fourth talk in our Padmasambhava, Ludhiana and Tibet seminar series.
We've got a wonderful line up this term still to come to San Francisco Dylan Esler, Dorjee Wangchuk and Luis Doni.
You can find details on our website with abstracts and so on.
But today we're really delighted to be able to introduce Professor Ben Bogan.
Benjamin Bogan is a scholar of Himalayan Buddhism. He's associate professor at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.
He writes and teaches on the intersections of biographical literature, sacred geography, and visual art in Himalayan cultures.
He's the author of The Illuminated Life of the Great Yamada, published by India 2013, and the co-editor, with Andrew Quitman,
of Himalayan Passages Tibetan and Nahua Studies in Honour of Hubert de Clare,
published by Wisdom Publications in 2014, and with Ariana mackey and Rachel Seligman.
Forms of Awakening Tibetan Art from the Jack Shear Collection, published by Delmonico Books, 2025.
And I should add, Ben has also spent many years researching Padmasambhava, his famous Pure Land, the glorious copper coloured mountain.
Over the last ten years or more,
he's probably some extremely valuable journal articles that have been our most important and respected academic resources on the subject.
Now he's also preparing for publication an entire book on a glorious copper coloured mountain,
which is eagerly anticipated by all scholars of the Nimoy's school in particular, and of Tibetan Buddhism in general.
So it's really a great privilege to be able to hear Ben talk on this important topic today.
Ben, thank you so much for coming. And over to you.
Thanks so much, Rob, for that very kind introduction and for the invitation to participate in this webinar series.
It's an amazing Line-Up of scholars, many of whom I've relied on in my own research,
and I very much look forward to the upcoming seminars in the series.
And thank you to everyone for joining today. I always find lecturing on zoom challenging,
as I'm more accustomed to the face to face interaction that we have in seminars and conferences and meetings,
but it really is meaningful to me that you've decided to take some time from your day to listen to my thoughts about the songbook,
about the copper coloured mountain. As Rob mentioned,
I've been working on this topic for a number of years and have a book that should be coming out in the near future devoted to the subject.
And I'm going to share today some parts of that work.
Some of them are related to some of the journal articles that Rob mentioned that I've previously published.
And to take advantage of zoom, some of those articles dealt with visual materials that I was not able to include in the article.
So zoom gives us an opportunity to really immerse ourselves in the visual world that's so central to this tradition.
So in some cases, I'll be speaking about research that I published in journal articles, but together with the visual supplement.
And then there's other material from the book that I have not yet published that I want to share today.
So to begin, I thought I would just read a little from the introduction to the book to talk about the overall project.
I introduced the broader project, and then I'll speak more informally about a couple of aspects from that project as a whole.
So, um. So, uh, this is a book about encountering Padmasambhava.
His footprints, relics, stories, images, caves, paintings,
songs and ritual practices over the past 20 years at sites across the Himalayas associated with the figure known as the Second Buddha.
I encountered his presence in the words and actions of his many worshippers.
My interest in Padmasambhava grew over time as I came to see the tremendous diversity of his identity.
I realised how the glimpses of the figure that I happened upon deeply challenged my presumptions about Buddhism.
As my exploration of the figure of Padmasambhava shifted from the places associated with
him in the Himalayas to the vast textual archive of Tibetan literature devoted to him.
I've grown to appreciate more fully, both his unquestionable centrality to the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism,
and the challenge that the study of such figure of such a figure poses to the academic study of Buddhism.
The sheer quantity and variety of textual sources, from literary genres as diverse as historical narratives,
philosophical treatises, poetic compositions, liturgical texts, and contemplative guidebooks forms a daunting edifice.
However, as essential as textual research is, and this remains my primary means of approach to the topic,
this often offers only a pale and hollow approximation of the figure of Padmasambhava.
There's also the artistic, architectural, and ritual embodiments of Padmasambhava,
and the diverse contexts where his image is shaped by social, historical, institutional, and personal elements.
Padmasambhava Importance as the mythologised founder of Tibetan Buddhism is difficult to overstate.
The paucity of scholarly research devoted to him is stunning.
This book has two goals. First, it seeks to advance our knowledge of the role of Padmasambhava in Himalayan Buddhism,
and second, it seeks to appreciate the diverse range of cultural practices surrounding him.
The starting point of these two journeys is his extraordinary palace.
Padmasambhava is said to dwell even today in the palace of Lotus Light that sits atop the peak of the copper coloured mountain,
a place described both as a pure land, dark base, Shinken like Amitabha s famous Land of Bliss devotion and as a tantric Paradise
inhabited by once ferocious man eating demons now tamed by the Buddhist teachings.
This imagined world has attracted relatively little attention.
I might mention one exceptional exception to that is this lovely book by George Celsius and Christina Padalecki.
The copper coloured mountain, which focuses on signalling prayer for rebirth.
There is a recent publication and there are also some publications from Bhutan
on the extraordinary murals and Temple Copper Kaliamman Temple in Bhutan.
That's a photographic book with wonderful material. Um.
This may be the relative lack of attention to the copper coloured mountain.
Maybe because Padmasambhava palace challenges biases endemic to the study of religion in general and of Buddhism in particular,
the assumed dichotomy between elite and popular religion,
the classification of religious traditions according to sect or schools such as Tantric Buddhism versus Pure Land Buddhism.
And the almost exclusive reliance upon doctrine as the ultimate source of religious authority.
The traditions surrounding the copper coloured Mountain challenge all of these categories and demand a method that
renounces the search for some abstract form of religious meaning that can be extracted from the messiness of human lives.
Texts, images, and rituals are neither created nor understood in isolation.
They participate in a sophisticated cultural system, where meanings are shaped and reshaped by shared visions of a historical event,
of the death of a family member, of the building of a road.
In the pages that follow, I attempt to connect many different visions of the copper coloured mountain,
noting how they differ and what they share in this process.
The theme of death and separation has emerged as a central concern.
The grief Voiced by disciples who watched Padmasambhava fly off to the southwest,
the sorrowful longing of prayers for rebirth and the fulfilment of that longing found in the visions of the treasure,
reveals who journeyed to the copper coloured mountain. But what is the object of this longing?
In many ways, the copper coloured mountain provides a mirror, reflecting Tibet's own myth of itself.
The land of demons, tamed by the great guru on the rocky slopes of the copper coloured mountain.
The defining act in the drama of Tibet is played out eternally and perfectly.
It is almost as if Padmasambhava became so intimately identified with the idea of Tibet that when he left,
he took the real Tibet with him to the distant land of Rupa.
Longing for this lost Tibet. Those left behind gain a fleeting glimpse through fragmentary reflections in the mountains of the Himalayan plateau,
in the dreams of Padmasambhava children,
and in the melodies of the recited prayers that will guide them to the copper coloured mountain at the moment of death.
The copper coloured mountain is not the memory of a lost golden age, or the hope for a future perfect world.
Although it is both of those things, it is a kind of parallel universe, another, better Tibet, present in the here and now.
So I go on from there to describe the outline of the book and the various chapters,
and I'll spare you the reading of that outline, but I wanted to frame the overall project within these these broader concerns,
in part because they are somewhat different, I think,
than many of the other approaches to thinking about Padmasambhava that we've heard so far in this webinar series, and that we'll hear ahead.
I, as fascinated as I am in the questions surrounding the historicity and the
text that we may attribute to an eighth century figure known as Padmasambhava.
My research has focussed much more squarely on Guru Rinpoche,
as he developed in Tibetan cultural history after the writings of General Nima and the other Tibetans,
who were not really concerned in the same way as we are with uncovering fragments in Dunhuang manuscripts and elsewhere.
So this project has really come from, as I mentioned,
encounters with the centrality of guruma to Tibetan Buddhism in Himalayan communities in the world today,
and as opposed to a project that's more narrowly defined by philological and historical concerns.
That said, I use many of the same tools and methods to try to trace this cultural history.
And here I'm going to focus particularly on the work that I've done,
reading various accounts left by Tibetan travellers who travelled to the copper coloured mountain.
And this is almost a requisite for the writings of a treasure revealer that at some point in their life
story they experience and describe an encounter with Gorham directly at the copper coloured mountain.
Um, so, um, I mentioned that aside from the textual tradition, I'm very much interested in the visual record,
in Tonka paintings, in three dimensional sculptures, in architecture.
This is a famous, uh, copper coloured mountain temple at Katok Dorji Den in eastern Tibet.
Um, that is representative of that tradition.
Um, and, um, these of the dozens of different accounts of journeys to the copper coloured mountain that I have,
uh, studied, by far the most detailed is the one found in the writings of Cougar Lingpa.
And, uh, we are very lucky in this case that this textual record is accompanied by a Talk.
A painting that was composed at the precise time of the composition.
So just a little backstory. And this is a shared this in the past, but it's the happiest accident of my scholarly career,
so I like to rejoice in the memory of it from time to time, as I was becoming interested in this subject.
One day I visited the Rubin Museum of Art,
which is already dearly missed since it closed its doors and looking through storage there with Catherine Selig Brown,
who was at the time a curator, I came across this depiction of the song.
It was very, very different from the standard representations that I was more accustomed to seeing.
And as I was looking at it, it happened that Jeff, the very knowledgeable art historian,
was walking by and I said, Jeff, do you know anything about this painting?
Can you help me understand? You know, it's such a different depiction.
And he said, well, it must be the very particular vision of one particular territory, but which territory it would be?
There's no way we can ever know. Like, how would we be able to find out? He said, you just have to look into a reading.
That summer I was travelling in Tibet and at Zhongshan Monastery at Kinzie le Prang I saw this painting,
which is the same composition, and I immediately recognised it and I thought, um, wow, here's another version of that same painting.
And I asked the monks who were showing us around, do you happen to know anything about this painting?
You know, do you know where it was from? And they said, well, we don't really know.
It's, uh, beyond that, I'm not sure.
They said, let's look on the back and they turned it around.
And if you can see, uh, up in this little right hand corner, there's a small patch sewn into that corner.
And if you look at it closely, it very helpfully identifies the name of the painter Tashi Wang from Ruo J.
J. Tashi Wang um as the painter. And then it tells you the subject.
Chuckling Senang uh. Goba.
Right. So this is, uh, a depiction of Zhang, according to the visions of Lingpa.
So, uh, with this, I was able to then go through Nam and, um,
find a passage where he describes his visionary journey to the copper coloured mountain, and it matches up absolutely.
Precisely. Scene by scene, uh, throughout the entire painting.
Uh, so one of the articles that Rob mentioned that I published about this was a study of a part of that account, but there were no images there.
So I wanted to spend a little time looking at the actual Tonga painting and describing it as well.
So this, combines elements that we find in many, many different accounts of visionary journeys to copper clad mountains.
So in the book, I translate this account and offer a commentary.
It's the most sort of detailed explanation of the journey, and it really is an extraordinary text.
And we're so fortunate to have these images preserved. I'll just mention that in the colophon to the text.
Um, Shoghi Lingpa describes that, uh, after he returned from this, uh, visionary journey,
he immediately sketched what he had seen, and he summoned painters and asked them to paint, according to his sketch.
Uh, exactly his vision.
And, um, uh, he was able to find, uh, patron to sponsor copies of this painting being made and distributed to all of the monasteries in calm.
So the fact that, you know, I stumbled across two of them, we can trace that directly back to this action of Kruger Lingpa himself,
right, in the 19th century, that that he, um, after the vision sketched it.
He also mentions that when the painters completed the painting, he made corrections in his own hand to to areas that he thought needed correction.
Right.
So this depicts the the beginning of the visionary journey when he's invited, um, by, uh, Gramsci's messengers, who appear as a group of five deacons.
He is in meditation at uh, the hut known as karma, um, in Nang chan.
And, uh, early in the morning during his retreat, he hears music, smells incense,
and sees through the mist of dawn, these five dakini flying towards his meditation hut.
They explained to him that they've been sent by Padmasambhava, and that he's invited to come visit him at the copper coloured mountain.
They ask him to sit on this crossed vajra, which you can see the detail depicted here as he sits in lotus posture across atop the crossed vajra,
that they then lift up and start his flight towards the copper coloured mountain.
As they're flying in the text it describes.
They're flying across the landscape and he will see something from high above, like looking down from an aeroplane.
And [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] say to the Dakini in a very kind of colloquial language.
He keeps asking like, what's that over there? What's what's over there? And they explained to him.
They say, oh, that is Samye Samaya Monastery. And, uh, he, um,
as someone who spent his entire life in Qom at this point is delighted to be able
to see it and so many of the sacred sites of Central Tibet he sees from above.
He describes seeing the Five Peak mountain. In the article, I talk about some of the complexity around the geography and the location of these areas,
but here I'll just mention that this is one part where he asks the dakini.
He says, I'd really like to go down there to talk.
Could we go, you know, can we get down for a moment? So they, um, they make a landing en route and he gathers soil from the earth there.
So this is, um, uh, something that I see as a very interesting convergence of, uh,
neoclassic literature and the actual, uh, conduct of pilgrimage in Tibet, um, mixed into this visionary journey.
So there's no question that, uh, he's travelling in an extraordinary way,
and yet he's still interested with the materiality of the earth, of the sacred sites and gathering some of it to bring back with him.
Um, the geography gets more confusing and mixed as he leaves Tibet.
And this is the spot here where they landed at Doc missionary.
Then the sites of Buddhist India that are known um from a distance in 19th century Kham appear so Niranjan a river,
of course, where Siddhartha had spent the years in fasting.
Um. And that is then connected with Udayana itself. Um.
And he identifies Udayana as being sort of located at the margins of Buddhist India.
And he also identifies the Sindhu River, and that they have to cross that by a bridge in order to reach Chamunda.
So one of the other articles that Rob referenced was an article I published in
Himalaya Journal that looks at the location of the copper coloured mountain.
And there's a chapter in the book that's a sort of expansion of that,
considering all of these questions about geography and cosmology and how they come to
be sort of mixed together in these different accounts of attempts to to locate that.
But this detail from the painting highlights that very well.
Right. Um, in terms of the narrative of the journey, they are prevented from crossing over the bridge from Udayana to comradeship by the, uh,
the guard, the bridge, uh, guard, the sampan, uh, and, um, the Dakini need to make a sort of a payment to him in order to let them cross.
There's an interesting dialogue and interaction there. Um, before they get access, um, here's the bridge itself to enabling or.
Um, and then in the painting it depicts what are called these 13 uh, sinu, the lands of the Rakshasas.
And, uh, this is a fascinating aspect of the text where we get what I sort of refer to as an otherworld ethnography.
Uh, he describes for each of these 13 lands, the architecture, the diet of the inhabitants, um, and their different activities.
And these are all different forms of, of Rakshasa, um, who have been, uh, tamed by Padmasambhava when, when he lands there.
So here is this nice detail of ascending up the mountain,
finally moving up to the innermost part of the mountain along the Chandra Salam, the secret path of the Dakini, uh,
and finally outside of the palace of Lotus Light itself is where they first encounter the retinue of Padmasambhava,
and then at four temples in the four cardinal directions around the palace of Lotus Light.
The four tantric activities are being performed by the most important figures from Nyingma history,
so he names the various lamas and Tibetan who are engaged in the four activities um around,
and this culminates in a charm performance that is able to join in in the wrathful section.
So here is the the Palace of Lotus Light itself. Um, really, when we're talking about the copper coloured mountain as a pure land,
uh, it might be more accurate, really, to talk about Pema itself as the place where,
uh, Padmasambhava resides and as the Buddha, and that the copper coloured mountain is really the setting,
the environment within which the palace itself is there.
And in this particular vision of the palace, on the three floors, there are three different events taking place on the ground floor.
Padmasambhava explains connections between sutra and tantra in many other representations, particularly in the temples.
The ground floor is where you see a form of guruma representing the um tulku form, the Nikaya form.
Um, in the centre here you have, uh, Guru Padmasambhava teaching again.
Uh, this is more frequently, uh, where you encounter Ken Sieg as the lone Ku or the Sambuca Kai form.
And then on the top floor here we have the five skull garlanded precious gurus.
This is often Amitabha, representing the tulku, the Dharmakaya form, um, on this.
So, um, the. I'll just pause for a moment here.
Uh, the all of these different journeys.
They have various amounts of detail about the travel to the copper coloured mountain,
and there's a various ways of describing what happens when you actually arrive at the copper coloured mountain.
So Sugarland is the one that I've already published about, and it's the most detailed,
but I want to highlight quickly three other versions out of the dozens that I've looked at.
One is of great interest and importance because it's one of the earliest, and this is found in the writings of Guru Tulku Wangchuk,
the very important 13th century um successor to Niagara in terms of the project of the Apotheosis of Guru Rinpoche.
And here in particular is a text. This is the version from the Bach Collection that is known as the Black Hat biography,
and that is together with the Nilam Karma, the White Horse Dream.
This is also the same text is found within this published version from 1979.
That is. And here it's called the Chuong Nam dilemma.
Right. So the dream biography.
Um, and part of what's very interesting about Guru Chung's version is that it very much emphasises that this takes place in dream, um, and the,
uh, the text, I think, raises very interesting questions about the relationship between dream and reality and visionary experience itself.
So the two different versions that I mentioned, the VDC version and the printed version.
I have there's an interesting discrepancy which you know, we could be making too much out of a scribal error,
but I find it quite interesting that in one in the manuscript we have this line of, um, uh, Muslim.
Muslim. Right. So, um, it was, you know, uh, actual or a dream.
Um, and then in the block print version, we have Mustang Milan.
So this is describing the contents of the entire text.
Um, and already we see some ambiguity around the relationship between something being actual and something being a dream.
That's an ambiguity that Guru Chong as an author really explores and plays with in the way that he writes about this.
So in his account, he begins the dream by saying that there are two different dreams he's going to describe.
In the first dream, he's describing, um, the his actual family home where he lives.
And in the dream, he's on the rooftop of the home and he describes, um, uh, moving down into the main living space.
So the ground floor is for animals. The second floor is where the family lives.
And he describes coming into that space, and he describes in detail the coverings of the windows, the items that are on the shrine.
But all of this is described with the sort of wonder of a dream experience and some kind of ambiguity.
He's not quite sure exactly what's happening, but he's describing his his own home, and I find it very interesting.
At first I was really puzzled about what is this doing in this account.
And there's a way in which I think the attention and the description,
this dreamlike description of the mundane environment of his everyday reality is a very powerful but
subtle way of sort of dislodging our unquestioned assumption in the veracity of the empirical world.
He's actually making the ordinary day to day world seem very uncertain and dreamlike.
And then in the second dream, when he shifts into similar to juggling but being invited, and there when he travels to Samaya,
he has a direct encounter with Guru Dorothy Drusilla, who is the sort of gatekeeper to his journey to the copper coloured mountain.
There he describes everything in a very different way,
with much more sort of solidity and a matter of fact ness about everything that's being experienced.
So the way that we might normally associate the narrative style of a description of our
everyday surroundings that's challenged by this dreamlike experience of his own space,
and then the precision and certainty with which he describes the dream experience gives a lot of power to that.
Um, and this carries over throughout his journey into his actual experiences at the copper coloured mountain.
Um, another account is from, uh, quite a bit later, the 17th century.
Um, and this is in George's, um, writings.
Um, and this is, uh, another very detailed account of a journey to the Copper Mountain.
And here in my reading of this particular version, I'm primarily interested in two things that really stand out to me.
One is the emphasis on the role of Yoshitsugu as central to the entire tradition.
So in this version, he encounters a woman who he doesn't recognise as on the journey.
And, um, he is.
And she she's blocking his path and not allowing him to enter.
And when he confronts her about this and asks the reason why, she explains that in a previous life he was a student of Retina Olympus,
and while they were camped in Apo on their travels, she said at that time she was a beggar who was considered very unattractive and looked down upon,
and she had come to the encampment to request teachings, and he ignored her and turned her way and she said,
because of that, um, you know, you have these obstacles now that you're not able to enter.
And he is sort of overwhelmed with a sense of regret, and he confesses before her and asks for forgiveness for this act in a previous life.
She then reveals herself to actually be a Pomo, and as a Pomo, she eats him, and he then is sort of digested through daughter Pomo,
and then is birthed from the lotus of of Dodge Pomo back out, and only then is he able to enter into the copper coloured mountain.
This is a fascinating scene that I spent some time sort of reflecting upon in a number of different ways,
but as he enters the copper coloured mountain for almost all of the Terrytoons.
Yoshitsugu in some form is a guide, and and most of them describe not recognising her immediately,
and at some point that suddenly dawns on them wait, are you?
Yes. You know. And in this case, when Dumbledore, uh, realises what's going on, he has just been, you know, sort of birthed out of her at that point.
So, uh, he's he's recognising that something is a little unusual.
And, uh, but when they get inside, she welcomes him and addresses him and praises him and says, you know, we're so happy to have you here.
And he says, how could it be possible that that Yasuko could know me?
You know, I'm this just, you know, uh, monk who's really has hasn't really amounted to anything, and he finds it inconceivable.
And then she says to him, well, know, at the time when Padmasambhava was in Tibet, at that time, I was Yoshitsugu.
She she says, that's not who I am anymore. And she lists five different names that she's known by at the copper coloured mountain, she says.
At that time, I was Sylvia and you were in LaSalle. You were one of the 25 close disciples of Grimké.
So of course I know you. She's saying, you know, she kind of corrects him.
And so these relationships, um, and how they carry across the, the territories as a whole,
generally are amazed to discover that they are known or that the teachings of other Tibetan lamas are known at the copper coloured mountain.
They're saying this is a pure land of a Buddha, and they're chanting the prayers composed by Long Jumper.
This is extraordinary. And then they're reminded and said, no, we were all together before, you know, at that time.
So, um, those are some of the elements. One other, um, piece in this particular account that is somewhat unusual is that here we see the,
uh, shadow of sectarian politics that has been cast throughout.
So much of Tibetan history reaches even into the copper coloured mountain.
When Dumbledore finally does encounter Padmasambhava himself.
It's described just as a meeting of a lama and a disciple who haven't seen each other for a very long time,
and Padmasambhava asks him and he says, how you know.
Um, how are the genetic teachings going in Tibet these days, you know?
Are people really teaching widely and how's it going? And he says, yeah, you know, it's pretty good.
But, you know, he says there's there's some difficulties that there's this, um, a lot of people are praising this guy, and I don't really know.
I'm not, not, not so sure about him. And he says, and then there's, there's someone else who is really denigrating the teachings of Lingpa,
and he doesn't name any names in the text, but, um,
it's clear that this is reference to the Fifth Dalai Lama and the fifth Dalai Lama's campaign against, um, and, uh, um,
Dumbledore says, you know, he's kind of, um, telling giving an update to guruma about the situation back in Tibet.
And he says, uh, you know, there are some people also who if the if the ruler of Tibet is praising Lingpa, they praised Lingpa.
And if he denigrates Lingpa, they denigrate. And he says, but I'm not like that.
I can't. I have to tell it like it is. And he says, you know, a guru was very, very clear about this situation to me.
Padmasambhava gave me very, very clear instructions about them, but I'm afraid to write them down.
So I'm not going to write them down here. Right.
So there's a way in which in his vision and of course, this was a moment of immense, um, danger and political upheaval and violence.
Uh, and at the sort of, um, uh, verge of a period of severe persecution of the more broadly and,
um, is very concerned with these issues and seeking sort of help and advice.
Um, even if he's afraid to, to, to share it specifically. All right.
Uh, I'm going to wrap up with one more account.
Um, and, uh, this is an account by a 19th century lama from Mustang, um, named Denzil Nima.
And the thing that really stands out to me about this account is it's the first one that I have
come across that locates the coloured mountain at an actual geographic site in the Himalayas.
Here, the mountain known in Nepal as d'Algérie, which in Tibetan is called Malekan,
so in Tanzania was account of his visionary journey to the copper clad mountain.
He's in meditation at a cave near Mount Allegory, and when he's invited to travel there, he travels to this specific mountain itself,
and a door opens up and the copper coloured mountain is located within that particular mountain.
So I'm fascinated here by the way in which this entire tradition this is to borrow a chart from an article by Charles Ramble, a Charles Ramble,
about the various genres that are included in the traditions of Tibetan pilgrimage, hagiography, biography, geography, tantric literature, travelogue.
All of those converge in this material as well, and in Tanzania's account, where he's talking about a specific place that becomes very clear.
So this is the page from the manuscript that I was consulting here.
And just to look at a couple of lines. So here's a photograph of the mountain aerial photograph of the area itself.
And this is where it's located. Um, here is an early map from David Snellgrove publication.
And this, um, uh, Guang Shan is the mountain and the sun here.
This is where Tanzania was meditating when he had this vision.
And so he was very close to the mountain itself. Um, and, uh, here are photographs of the site.
It is a pilgrimage site to this day. The cave, um, where Tenzin Nima had this vision.
Um, and, um, these photographs, I think, are helpful in kind of bringing this discussion back to, uh, Himalayan communities even today.
These are, uh, photographs. I can't see the name here, but.
Sorry. Um, oops. Um, that, um.
Oops, I did not. Sorry.
I've lost the name of the photographer who a friend kindly provided to me.
I have not been able to visit, but these were just taken last summer at the site that's still active.
So in cinemas account there is, as you might expect, much greater attention to aspects of the landscape itself.
He spends a lot of time, a lot more time than I've seen in any other accounts, by any other teardowns describing flora and fauna of the site.
So here the Copper Mountain really is located within the physical geography of the Himalayas in a way that's that's very distinct.
And that I think, um, provides an opportunity.
Yeah. Here is a very clear expression of the identification of these two right from the outer perspective.
um, uh, tiny Mulligan, right from the outer perspective, it's Mulligan and, uh, uh, young daughter with inner vision, uh, song Doc Bowery.
Right. So, um, this is, um, the line where he claims most clearly the identification of these of these two, um, which is very interesting.
And here is a slide that, um, shows that the outer and the inner, um, uh, together in this vision.
So, um, some of the themes that I mentioned in, uh, Sugarland account where we see pilgrimage literature,
uh, intersecting with this, uh, visionary experience. So accounts of travel to places we can visit ourselves in the Himalayan landscape, um,
merge together with places that are only possible to vision, to, to visit through pure vision and with the in darkness.
Uh, they are joined again here in Tanzania account where he sees both of them together in one site.
And uh, the other aspect that I'll mention here,
when he does encounter guruma in a lot of their conversation is focussed on the topic of the burial tradition.
And that's something that also intersects more widely with this tradition.
But this is the most exhaustive and focussed discussion of Bible and guruma prophecies, the opening of several burial in the vicinity.
And he actually lays out a kind of, um, cosmology where, uh, Mulligan is at the centre of a whole network of different burial,
and Mulligan itself becomes the centre of a new vision of the sacred geography of the Himalayas,
with guruma at the very centre with, with Mulligan at the very centre.
So this also raises interesting questions about centre and periphery in Tibetan Buddhist imagination.
Of course the author is a lama from Mustang.
This is around the time of the Nepal Tibet War, and his efforts to sort of place his own area.
Mustang at the centre of Guru Vision are very interesting to consider within those contexts.
Um, I don't want to take up any more time than that than I already have,
in the hopes that we might have some opportunity to, um, reflect on these together.
And I'm very happy to answer questions about what I've presented or other aspects of the project that I did not touch upon yet today.
But thanks so much for your patience as I, uh, ramble through these different areas of the tradition.