The Narratives that Bind: Establishing and Restoring Relationships Between Humans, Gods, and the Environment in Choné Yum Tsering’s The Meeting of the Mountain Gods and Rikdzin Gödemchen’s Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha

Choné Yum Tsering’s contemporary work of speculative fiction, The Meeting of the Mountain Gods depicts a young man’s experience of attending a meeting of regional gods who are in crisis due to changes in their relationships with humans and each other. Yumtsering employs Tibetan myths about the origin of these relationships in a narrative that probes contemporary realities of environmental degradation and secularizing forces, while also asserting the power of storytelling. Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha similarly addresses a shift in relationships between humans and local gods, in this case precipitated by the new Buddhist regimes of knowledge and ritual technology taking root in Tibet in the 8th century during the time of its attributed author, Padmasambhava, and again in the 14th century, when it was revealed. Both works demonstrate the power of literary creativity to address and construct intersubjective relationships between humans, gods, and the environment.