Author: Toni Huber
Translator(s)/ Editors(s): Toni Huber
Publisher: Library of Tibetan Works & Archives
Year: 1999
Language: English
Pages: 403
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186470220
Description
The essays in this volume all attempt to document and interpret ways in which Tibetan peoples have identified and related to different categories of space and place as being unique or of higher ontological value, and as being set apart from many other spheres and sites of human life.
The focus of the collection is intentionally broad, and its very breadth reflects the multitude of traditions of thinking about space and place which can be found in Tibetan culture, and which have also been associated with Tibet by non-Tibetans.
The authors present data from the high Tibetan plateau, but also from sites and peoples in what are now parts of modern Bhutan, Nepal, Sichuan, Qinghai, North India and other areas where related languages, cultures and a shared sense of origin and history can be identified as manifestly Tibetan. Several chapters even go beyond this frame to consider how various non-Tibetan outsiders (e.g. Westerners, Indian Hindus or Chinese colonialists) have also imagined or had a role in defining Tibetan spaces and places as sacred or powerful.
Each easy constitutes a separate chapter and they are arranged into four parts relative to their predominant themes. These parts are: (i) Narrative, Social Identity and Territory, (ii) Ritual Spaces and Places (iii) Hidden Countries and Holy Lands; and (iv) Colonialism and Modernity. There are, nevertheless, many overlapping topic areas and common questions which they share, and which can only be brought together by reading the volume as a whole.
Contents
Preface
PART ONE: NARRATIVE, SOCIAL IDENTITY AND TERRITORY
The Politics of Sacred Space in Bon and Tibetan Popular Tradition
Machig Zhama’s Recovery: Traces of Ancient History and Myth in the South Tibetan Landscape of Khata and Phadrug,
The Mon-pa Revisited: In Search of Mon
PART TWO: RITUAL SPACES AND PLACES
Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor: Rethinking Tibetan Pilgrimage Practice
The Blue Lake of A-mdo and its Island: Legends and Pilgrimage Guide
A Tibetan Guide for Pilgrimage to Ti-se (Mount Kailas) and mTsho Ma-pham (Lake Manasarovar)
Perceptions of Landscape in Karzha: Sacred Geography and the Tibetan System of Geomancy
Internal and External Geography in Spiritual Biography
Taming the Earth, Controlling the Cosmos: Transformation of Space in Tibetan Buddhist and Bon-po Ritual Dances
PART THREE: HIDDEN COUNTRIES AND HOLY LANDS
The Role of Treasure Discovers and Their Search for Himalayan Sacred Lands
Political and Ritual Aspects of the Search for Himalayan Sacred Lands
Ol-mo-lung-ring, the Original Holy Place
PART FOUR: COLONIALISM AND MODERNITY
The British Imperial Influence on the Kailas-Manasarovar Pilgrimage
Ganja and Murdo: The Social Construction of Space at Two Pilgrimage Sites in Eastern Tibet
Gendered Practices and the Inner Sanctum: The Reconstruction of Tibetan Sacred Space in China’s Tibet
Reading the Potala
List of Contributors
Index