Members of the Maṇḍala: Environmental Agency and State-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bhutan

When Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594–1651), the founder of the Bhutanese state, emerged from retreat in 1625 and announced his establishment of a new polity in the Himalayas, he dispatched an edict to power places throughout the natural world, commanding local deities, earth lords, and spirits of the region to submit to his rule and take their place as protectors of the Buddhist teachings. This paper takes this founding act seriously as a political gesture, asking what conception of political community it implies and what it means for a polity to include non-human forces as members with standing rather than as backdrop or metaphor. Reading Tsang Khenchen Jamyang Palden Gyatso's Song of the Great Dharma Cloud as a founding document of the Bhutanese state, it recovers a framework in which the natural world is not a resource to be governed but an agent that participates in governance.