Invisibility, Transgression, & Revelation in Tibet: The Relationship between Invisible Villages and sbas yul (Hidden Valleys)

What is the relationship between Buddhist beyul (Tib: sbas yul) revealed valley refuges and oral folktales about remote, small, invisible, inhabited villages that are sometimes rendered visible through tragedy or error? Drawing on oral storytelling traditions in the Tibetan region of Gyalthang and the literature about beyul, this paper scrutinizes the tensions between revelation through transgression and revelation through realized vision. Folkloric accounts abound in Gyalthang of invisible or hidden villages, locally pronounced zi göh (or yi göh), and their revelation through acts of transgression, inversion, or mischief.

Only a few generations ago a mushroom hunter at the tree line of a steep forest would hear sounds of running water, chickens, and barking dogs – sounds of village life – where there was no discernable village. One day he stepped through a meniscus into a bucolic village with perfect pasturage and gorgeous barley-drying racks. Yet along with the fairy-like (lha mo, literally “goddesses”) people, he could not, alas, remain there, because monstrous wild people (nags myi rgod) would come down from the rocky peaks to invert the products of village labor, flipping the barley racks and turning the new plantings upside down. The human inhabitants had no choice but to depart as refugees from the invisible village of Panlong (sprang slong), and some families in Geza maintain the surname Panlong to this day.

A smooth-skinned trader would periodically come from a seemingly uninhabited valley to the Xidang market selling exquisite cloth for a bag of grain, then vanish mysteriously back into the high valley. A curious, meddling grain-seller cut a hole in the bottom of a grain bag then followed the spilt grain trail, and thus the mysterious man, to a strange boulder, where the grain trail ended. Beneath the boulder what had been the unknown hidden village of Yubeng was revealed.

In yet another tale, this one from Yagra, the veil was lifted through naïve transgression by its inhabitants. “The lha molived there,” explained Yuzum Lobsang, pointing, “high on the mountainside, but we could not see them.” The lha mowould watch Yagra from above. One day the lha mo cremated a deceased donkey, imitating the cremations they had watched the humans perform from afar, yet one is not supposed to cremate a mundane donkey, and this act made the lha mos’ village visible. “They were no longer immortal and thereby were forced to come down and live among us. I have lha mo blood… I’m half-lha mo.”

These and other Tibetan stories from the far southeasternmost reaches of the plateau share patterns of invisibility and revelation, of the unknown and unseen, and the transgressive nature of accidental or deceptive discovery. The tales are explanatory, yet sad. They are performed with a tenor of regret, creating for the audience an ambiance of something lost in revelation. Descriptions evoke a pervasive sense that such utopias (or dystopias) are beautiful (with fruit and jewels) yet impossible. The stories are highly localized and specific. They inscribe local landscape (and social identity) with meaning and valence. The stories are never about becoming invisible.

Such invisible (ma mthong) and hidden places are also rather common. I conducted the research for this paper over the course of more than two dozen religious folklore fieldwork trips in and adjacent to Gyalthang between 2011 and 2020. In this relatively small region in southern Kham, in northwest Yunnan Province in the P.R.C, I’ve identified stories surrounding the zi göh of Natöeyong (still invisible), Panlong (maybe still invisible), Zayzong, Tsenlong, Nizu, Yubeng, the ruins above Yara, Longganyong (still invisible), and Chayul. Yet this is a silly thing to list, as different storytellers from different villages and towns, each with specificity and using verbs connotating direct experience, describe different locations for Panlong. Every village in Gyalthang has tales of nearby zi göh, often with the same name or story. In some cases, the stories are associated with hairy and scary nags myi rgod, who are themselves the subject of folklore saturated with motifs of halves, inversion, apposition, and transgression. Other storytellers insist that nags myi rgod and zi göh tales are unrelated. It is likely that tales of invisible villages are common in the wider region of Tibet, the Himalayas, and southwest China. Counting invisible villages is also inherently pointless.   

The phenomenon of a hidden place becoming revealed and “opened” by a realized Buddhist practitioner is well-studied in Tibet and the Himalayas. Beyul (sbas yul), identified as prophesized refuges by Padmasambhava, are importantly different from zi göh in several regards. Beyul are understood in a Buddhist context, can be large, are revealed intentionally, and are not described or understood to be populated with frightening nags myi rgod or nearly-human, immortal lha mo. One key difference between beyul and zi göh reflects the understanding of realized vision in a Buddhist sense, for beyul are revealable only by those able to apprehend the true nature of reality. Descriptions of beyul do not focus on who lived in the valley before revelation. Zi göh, however, are not framed in Buddhist terms, and are not associated with refuge or with being revealed by a Buddhist practitioner. Zi göh are discovered by accident, transgression, trickery, or mimesis and innocent error. Inhabitants of zi göh don’t want to be found, but sometimes must leave once they are discovered.

Is the narrative function of veiling intended to conceal or reveal? Both beyul and zi göh are about relocation, discovery, rendering the invisible visible, and the idea that there was an amazing place there all along that we could not see until something wondrous happened. Zi göh may be conceptually related to beyul but predate a Buddhist explanatory gloss. My claim in this paper is that belyul were essentially zi goh prior to the Tibetan absorption of Buddhism, or at least that the older concept of zi göh deeply informed and rendered intelligible the Buddhist dynamic of beyul revelation. How might we assess a hypothesized morphological relationship between seemingly contradictory tales of paradise lost and of paradise found?