Nāgas in North America: Ecology, Colonialism, and the Limits of Tibetan Buddhist Practice in Diaspora

When looking for Tibetan Buddhist principles that might occasion positive ecological behaviour, many scholars turn to ideas like interdependence, compassion, meditation, and other pan-Buddhist concepts to articulate what eco-Buddhism can be. Others, however, have looked at the practices of indigenous Tibetans that have built-in human-nature relationships. For example, the practice of propitiating mountain deities (Tib. yul lha) and nāgas (Tib. klu) writes sacredness onto the natural landscape such that littering, pollution, and other environmentally negative practices become an affront to the religious sensibilities of the local populations. Emily Woodhouse et al. have shown how these practices can create positive ecological relationships in indigenous Tibetan populations and can work to green the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

               However, in recent years, these localized yul lha and nāga practices have moved from their native Tibetan context and have followed Tibetan teachers in diaspora. Zasep Tulku Rinpoche has translated and promoted a nāga pūjā practice to help the environment to his North American community, and Lama Dawa Rinpoche has uncovered two termas claiming that these Tibetan cosmological entities live in the Mississippi River in the US and the Popocatepetl Volcano in Mexico. This is a novel kind of transmission in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism in the West in that place-based practices are being packaged and imported to entirely new geographical locations. In the Tibetan context, land is infused with religious meaning and is populated by a plethora of deities, spirits, and other cosmological entities. In this transmission of place-based yul lha and nāga practice, we therefore see a reinscription of North American land with Tibetan cosmological features.

               This paper will detail the particulars of these North American yul lha and nāga practices, look at how this reincription is taking place in these North American Tibetan Buddhist communities, and, most importantly, think through some of the positive and negative implications of this kind of reconceptualization of land. In particular, it will look at the North American transmission of nāga and yul lha practices through two lenses: ecology and colonialism. It will ask how these novel place-based practices might effect positive ecological behaviour in their North American cohort and look at whether the effectiveness of place-based ecological practices translate across geographical settings. Conversely, it will question whether or not the importation of foreign spiritual beings into unceded indigenous land perpetuates colonial logics of domination and how diaspora populations intersect with neocolonialism.

               Ecologically speaking, I expect to find that the pro-environmental behaviour associated with yul lha and nāga practice in Tibet will translate to their new North American communities. As Woodhouse et al. have shown, these place-based practices form the foundation for much of indigenous ecological sensibilities, and the reenchantment of what is otherwise considered to be inert matter in the neoliberal American imagination. As many environmental philosophers have argued, the disenchantment of land and the relegation of the living, natural world to mere inert matter is a prerequisite for extractive modes of production and consumption in our capitalist system. Supplanting this view of the natural world with one in which deities roam and protectors swim can therefore radically disrupt these extractive modes of thought and behaviour. While many scholars have argued for eco-Buddhist iniatives based on ideas (like interdependence), this imminent cosmological approach to ecology may more effectively influence pro-environmental behaviour.

               However, the colonial implications of this kind these kinds of practices may hinder their socioecological benefit. While they may indeed replace extractive conceptions of land with a more positive religious view of land as the domain of the sacred, they also layer this Tibetan Buddhist understanding of land over top of indigenous North American ones. In the case of Lama Dawa Rinpoche’s termas, the Mississippi River is sacred to the Dakota peoples and the Popocatepetl Volcano is sacred to the Nahuas of Mexico. The imposition of nāgas and yul lha on these two respective locales thus perpetuates the removal of indigenous agency and knowledge with respect to the land. Where this gets complicated is in the positionality of the Tibetan population. Tibetans are themselves and indigenous people (in Asia), are a minority in North America, and many Tibetans in North America live in diaspora and many come from a history of themselves or their communities being political refugees. Thus, this paper will work to untie these complicated threads by engaging some of the literature in decolonial studies and understand the politically problematic nature of the importation of these practices.

               Ultimately, the transmission of place-based nāga and yul lha practices to North American contexts is a fascinating development in Tibetan Buddhism in the West. These practices which were confined to particular geographical locations are now being adapted and imported into North America, and their associated cosmological beings are likewise being imported to the natural features of the North American environment. While this adaptation is itself quite interesting, what makes these practices all the more fascinating is their ecological and colonial implications. I argue that these practices create the foundation for positive ecological behaviour in their North American communities. However, they run up against indigenous authority regarding indigenous land and the history of colonialism in North America such that the socioecological benefit of this practice is limited. It is my hope that this paper begins to unpack some of these implications and helps us think through the complicated nature of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist practice in North America.