A New Sacred Site on the Periphery of Boudhanath Stupa, and Kathmandu as an Historic and Modern Centre and Border

This presentation contextualises a new sacred space on the edge of one of Tibetan Buddhism’s great mythic centres, Boudhnath in Kathmandu, as a borderland, a pilgrimage-leisure destination and source of multifaceted representations in the modern world. 

In second-dissemination (phyi dar) Tibetan historiography, numerous myths depict Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara as Tibet’s patron deity. However, these elite histories simultaneously display a ‘borderland complex’ of inferiority to the Indic centres where the Buddha lived. This notion was well analysed in seventh-century Chinese Buddhist culture in Antonino Forte, “Hui-chih (fl. 676-703 A.D.), A Brahmin Born in China.” Estratto da Annali dell’Instituto Universitario Orientale 45 (1985), 105–134. In Tibetan Buddhist mythic literature especially, overcoming this feeling meant describing how the legendary subjects of an imagined imperial Tibet (c. 600–850) were constantly tamed by Buddhist masters who represented South Asian Buddhism by being incarnations of famous bodhisattvas, and who were predetermined to discipline these benighted subjects and spread Indic dharma among them.

Many later histories describe the predestination of a triad of important eighth-century figures, including the great Indic tantric master and emanation of Avalokiteśvara, Padmasambhava (fl. 8th cent.). As three brothers, they made aspirational prayers to spread Buddhism in Tibet after constructing a stupa in Magadha. By the fourteenth century, this stūpa was identified as Boudhanath in Kathmandu, and remains a popular pilgrimage site today. Boudhanath Stūpa has long since represented a vital gateway to the Buddhist heartland, either en route to sites of the Buddha’s life in Magadha or as a substitute or more powerful site to these, once Buddhism largely died out on the Gangetic Plain. Newars, maintaining links to Tibet through trade and shared tantric traditions, were more welcoming to Tibetan Buddhists or cultural Tibetans living on its northern borders. Pilgrimage from the Plateau until the post-1959 annexation of Tibet into the PRC made travel across the border harder, yet it is still associated by cultural Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayan border (and in the diaspora) with the historical Buddha, Avalokiteśvara and Padmasambhava.

Padmasambhava may become more central still in the environs of the stūpa, as evidenced by a park built on the periphery of the stūpa grounds after the 2015 earthquake that gives pride of place to a large statue of him. The “Ghyoi Lisang Peace Park,” based on the prosaic Tamang term “backyard pond”, takes up 15,745 square feet of formerly unused land off a small street to the northwest of the stūpa. It is managed by Nepal’s Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation (Shree Boudhanath Area), the Gyalwa’i Nyugu International Meditation Center (presumably connected with Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche born in 1975 in Qinghai) and the Chinese Embassy in Nepal—though the latter two are not much in evidence as curators today—and was built as a ‘symbol of Nepal China friendship’ according to an English-language plaque centrally placed at the entrance to the park. 

This new pilgrimage and leisure site is worth investigating in dialogue with studies of the breakdown of the “religious” and “secular” dichotomy in pilgrimage spaces, such as Justin McDaniel’s Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia’s Museums, Monuments, and Amusement Parks (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017). Visitors perform the outer circumambulation around the park’s northern and southern ponds and then the inner circumambulation around the Padmasambhava statue itself, but the park also acts as a place for relaxation, selfies and socialising. This presentation will describe the daily ritual and (un)paid work taking place around the site, which shows links not only with devotional traditions but also tourism, municipal administration and ecology. It will tease out how these connections, with their sometimes conflicting values, can lead to confusions, innovations and attempts at harmonisation on the part of pilgrims, passers-by and staff.

The ecumenism identified by McDaniel elsewhere is less evidenced here, since Padmasambhava sits centrally between the two parts of the pond. This presentation will chart some of the Tibetan and more local symbolism of the statue with its uncommon dzi (gzi) bead necklace, and Padmasambhava’s eight manifestations dotted around the park.  Contextualised geographically, Padmasambhava faces north to the park entrance and away from the stūpa, whose top is just visible above surrounding houses, cafes and stores. None of these commercial enterprises face the site, and so do not yet form a holistic unit with the park (unlike the stūpa site). The plaque nonetheless connects the pond to the stūpa, as earth taken for the latter formed a hole that apparently provided the inspiration for the park. The site is stated to have been inaugurated in November 2016 at Lhabab düchen (lha babs dus chen), commemorating four events in the Buddha’s life, thus the park’s new narrative channels the holiness of the ancient Boudhanath site and the ancient tradition of worshipping the Buddha’s lifestory into this new site. 

It is too early to predict the park’s success or failure (also a theme in McDaniel’s work), but it is not easily reached and hence represents a periphery to Boudhanath, which is itself both a centre of Buddhism and a former periphery to the Buddha’s lifestory sites farther south. The presentation will thus progress Forte’s ideas and show the site’s connections with older dynamics of Tibetan pilgrimage to Nepal. It will also identify its similarities to newer sites like Lumbini where the Buddha was born—a periphery seldom visited from Kathmandu but part of pilgrim/tourist networks in India. Both sites can be analysed as local centres that are simultaneously peripheries and parts of more “central” pilgrimage, tourist and religio-economic networks. 

This newly created sacred space, peace park and relaxation spot thus helps discuss (and problematise) the application of ‘borderland complex’ discourse to Nepal, as seen through Tibetan eyes. Moreover, it offers a fresh perspective on McDaniel’s themes, through the establishment of foreign-funded building projects and international monastic institutions between India and China and the perception and interaction with them as part of important sacred sites by (representatives of) Tibetans, Newars and culturally Tibetan Himalayan communities today.