Ganden Monastery’s Autogenous Miracles (rang byon): A Study in Tibetan Pilgrimage, Material Culture, and Discursive Construction

Established in 1409 in Tibet by the prominent Tibetan monk Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419), Ganden Monastery would become one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the world, with thousands of monastic residents and a formal curriculum in Buddhist scholastic education that attracted students from across Asia. As the home of Tsongkhapa’s reliquary stūpa, Ganden also became one of Central Asia’s most popular pilgrimage sites, a customary stop for all pilgrims and merchants making their way to the city of Lhasa. One of Ganden’s main attractions as a pilgrimage site is its circumambulation route, renowned for its autogenous phenomena (or rangjön), thought to have spontaneously and miraculously manifested in the rockface surrounding the monastery. Even after the destruction of Ganden’s buildings during the Cultural Revolution, throngs of pilgrims continued to flock to Ganden to perform circumambulation, a sign that the fabric of Tibet’s religion and history could not be destroyed as they inhere within the land itself.

Using Ganden Monastery as a case study, the goal of this paper is to describe the significance and function of rangjön in Tibet. On a surface level, rangjön are manifestations in the rockface, and thus instances of material culture. Given they have formed autogenously, they are also religious miracles. As depictions of deities and other religious phenomena, they also function as religious icons. Additionally, their presence marks Ganden as a site of pilgrimage, an important place within a sacred landscape. Lastly, descriptions of rangjön and their attendant rituals and narratives are enumerated within Tibetan pilgrimage guide literature. In sum, rangjön are complex phenomena that are best understood as both material and discursive constructions with implications in the social, religious, and geographic spheres. As a result, they are best studied in a broad and interdisciplinary fashion, one that considers material and literary evidence in concert. However, to this point they have yet to receive sustained scholarly attention.

Unlike natural sites such as mountains and lakes, Ganden is a manmade institution. As a result, its importance as a pilgrimage site required discursive construction via the medium of pilgrimage guide texts. It is within these works that Ganden was made meaningful for visitors by describing the stories, historical events, social identities, and modes of comportment (Hartmann 2020, 32) salient to the site, and it was construed as a place with “both a symbolic meaning and an auspicious…effect” for pilgrims (Roesler 2007, 1, 4). Thus, this presentation will draw upon my existing research and translation of classical Tibetan pilgrimage guide material pertaining to Ganden. These works span centuries and are drawn from multiple overlapping literary genres in Tibet: (a) the first Jamyang Shepa Ngawang Tsöndrü’s catalog (dkar chag) of Ganden (ca. 1700), (b) the first Purchok Ngawang Jampa’s history and catalog of Ganden (1744), (c) two “religious histories” (chos ’byung) of Ganden Shartsé college (1814, 1975), (d) an annals (lo rgyus) of Ganden (1994), and (e) an abridged guidebook (gnas yig) to Ganden (2011).

Within these works, dozens of rangjön are described along with the miraculous narratives that often accompanied their emergence. In doing so, these authors invoke for rangjön the same kind of “innate, natural” power and status used to describe Tibetan mountains (Huber 1999, 61), indicating that rangjön partake of a uniquely Tibetan understanding of the potency and malleability of the landscape. As a result, I argue that the presence of rangjön at Ganden represents a key method by which a manmade Tibetan monastery was able to become a sacred place, one that then played a key role in the growth of the Tsongkhapa devotional cult and the rise of the Geluk tradition. As a corollary, I argue for the thus far overlooked importance of monasteries as pilgrimage sites in Tibet.

The complex nature of rangjön also speaks to broader concerns in the study of religion. Most notably, they argue against the kinds of bifurcations that have long dominated the field. As they represent a miraculous form of materiality, rangjön represent an object of study that have been long neglected, as they confound divides between science and religion, tradition and modernity, or spirit and matter (Dempsey and Raj 2008, 1-2) (Engelke 2012, 212). It is the ambiguity of rangjön—both mundane and miraculous, neither the sui generis sacred of Eliadean Phenomenology (Eliade 1954) nor the sui generis social of Durkheimian Social Constructivism (Durkheim 1912)—that make them a compelling object of study. They reflect the particular Tibetan notion that the spirit (bla) and the physical stuff (gnas) of a place “are always so closely associated that they are considered and treated as identical” (Huber 1999, 79, 83). In doing so, they serve as an important Tibetan witness that informs how we can better understand space and place in the academy.