This paper examines the role of storytelling and creative authorship in Tibetan religious cosmology through an analysis of two Tibetan texts: Choné Yum Tsering’s contemporary work of speculative fiction, The Meeting of the Mountain Gods, and Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha, a terma, or treasure text, revealed in the 14th century by Rikdzin Gödemchen and attributed to Padmasambhava in the 8th century.
Choné Yum Tsering (co ne yum tshe ring, b. 1977) is a scholar of Tibetan and Chinese literature with a PhD from Sichuan University, in addition to being an author of short stories and novellas, essays, and poetry composed in both Tibetan and Chinese. The Meeting of the Mountain Gods (lha gnyan gros tshogs) is a fictional story that reflects Yum Tsering’s rich knowledge of Tibetan literary traditions, both written and oral. It is the account of an emergency meeting between local mountain gods and regional protector deities who have tried and failed over many years to stop the escalating damage humans are inflicting on the environment, driven by their insatiable greed and ignorance. In addition to curbing the destruction of their environments and repairing their relationships with humans, the mountain gods wish to end the civil wars that have broken out among themselves as a result of those disturbances.
The story is told through the first-person narration of Dondrup, a young herder who comes to realize he is also a god who was sent as an emissary years ago to the human world to intervene, when he is visited by his own regional deity, Amnye Rimdung, and is whisked away through the sky to the meeting. Through the course of the story, other types of non-human characters appear and the mountain deities relate Tibetan stories of the origin of humans and the ancestral mountain deities. There are two aspects of the story, though, that distinguish it as a work of speculative fiction, rather than an adaptation of religious myth or work of magical realism, as some have categorized Tibetan fiction with supernatural elements.
First is Yum Tsering’s world construction. Although Amnye Machen hosts the meeting, and other famous Tibetan mountain deities are in attendance, there are also representatives from regions all over the world, including Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The story imagines a world where values, relationships, and practices that are typically cast as folk religion—specific to the land of Tibet and integrated into, yet separate from, the universal and transcendent tradition of Buddhism— apply to all nations and cultures. Furthermore, Tibet becomes the site of authority and its regional deities the arbiters of this global crisis.
Second is a narrative device in which the characters in the story refer to the story itself and make predictions about its emergence in the world and its benefit for humans, the gods, and the environment. Before returning him to his human family, Amnye Rimdung tells Dondrup not to speak of what he has seen to anyone. But he also says that someone named Palden will write a story about the meeting many years in the future.
A similar narrative device exists in classical Tibetan Buddhist literature: the terma (gter ma), or treasure text. These are teachings that were said to be hidden by Padmasambhava and his consort Yeshe Tsogyal in the early period of Buddhism’s spread to Tibet in the 8th century, to be revealed centuries later when people were capable of understanding them or the circumstances were more conducive to their flourishing. Padmasambhava, a tantric master with semi-mythical origins, was invited to Tibet by the emperor Trisong Detsen in order to quell the local deities and demons of the Tibetan landscape who were disrupting the construction of Tibet’s first monastery.
Clouds of Offerings for Nyenchen Thanglha is a terma revealed by Rikdzin Gödem (rigs ‘dzin rgod ldem, 1337–1408) in the 14th century. In it, Padmasambhava addresses the mountain god, Nyenchen Thanglha, encouraging him to keep his vow to protect Buddhist practitioners and the well-meaning inhabitants of the land, while destroying their enemies. The prayer also describes Nyenchen Thanglha’s territory and the reciprocal relationship that will grow between him and the people he protects. The prayer contains several elements of older styles of Tibetan literature, such as onomatopoeia and riddle. In his introduction to the prayer, Robert J. Kohn suggests that in ascribing authorship of an “indigenous prayer” to Padmasambhava, it renders “the act of conversion, at least in part, a literary task.”
I argue that both of these works reflect the importance of storytelling in creating and maintaining relationships between humans and non-human agents and environments. In my comparison, I draw out specific elements of the content that achieve this, such as descriptions of the land itself and characterizations of interdependent relationships. But I also argue that in their narrative devices both texts imply a relationship between literary creativity itself and the creation of intersubjective realities.
Works Cited
Co ne Yum Tshe ring. 2020. Lha gnyan gros tshogs. Sbrang char. 4.
https://www.tibetcm.com/contemporary/novel/2021-03-19/8977.html
Rig ʼdzin rgod kyi ldem ʼphru can. 2002–2014. “Gnyan chen thang lhaʼi mchod phrin.” In Gter chos rtsa gsum gling pa, Scanned provided by Trulku Gsang Sngags Tenzin Rinpoche, 2:894–900. Pharphing, Kathmandu, Nepal: bKaʼ gter sri zhu e waṃ dpe skrun khang, Accessed March 5, 2025. BDRC: MW4CZ1042_EB92AF
Kohn, Richard J. 1997. “A Prayer to the God of the Plain,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 387–394. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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.