Texts found in the Tibetan and Himalayan religions are filled with events and beings that extend beyond the ordinary world into realms of the supernatural and the superhuman. Speculative fiction, whether in genres of science fiction, fantasy, or horror, explores in its own ways many of the same questions about reality, morality, and possibility posed by Tibetan accounts.This two-hour panel places a variety of Tibetan Buddhist sources in conversation with works of speculative fiction to elucidate or interrogate these questions. In six distinctive papers spanning time periods and genres, presenters will use their text pairings as mutually enriching heuristic devices for thinking-with thematic binaries such as freedom/oppression, imagination/reality, enlightenment/delusion, death/rebirth, and humanity/other sentience. The panel includes Tibetan, East Asian, and Euro-American scholars of Tibetan religion at various career stages, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, tenure-track and tenured professors, as well as a published novelist.
Just as works of speculative fiction address social and ecological concerns through dystopian scenarios, delog (revenant) narratives animate Buddhist ethical concerns and the Tibetan imagination about death and rebirth through visceral images of hellish torment. Accounts of a delog’s visionary journeys into the realms beyond death both edify and generate anxieties about the workings of karma. What if a relative is suffering in hell? What if something we ourselves have done leads to such suffering? This paper takes up literary anxiety, the creation of speculative scenarios in literature that invoke anxieties about possible futures. We place the visionary autobiography of delog Kunzang Chökyi Drolma (b. 1869–70) in conversation with the speculative tale Elsewhere (2022) by Alexis Schaitk about mothers who disappear into the mists in order to explore the edge between the known and unknowable and how literary anxieties over local customs can propel liberative pursuits.
This paper examines narrative control and agency through a comparative analysis of the Tibetan collection of "Zombie Tales" (ro sgrung) and George Saunders' 2022 dystopian short story "Liberation Day." Both works employ speculative fiction to present protagonists who become so engrossed in narratives that they forget themselves and fail to achieve their goals. In the Zombie Tales, a prince repeatedly responds to a captive zombie's stories about karma, compromising his mission. In Saunders' dystopia, a memory-wiped "Speaker" named Jeremy kills his would-be liberators while absorbed in narrating a historical battle. Both works thus explore a central tension: narratives can be vehicles of both control and liberation. This comparative reading highlights a salient feature of Buddhist ethics–though they espouse general moral virtues, they also insist on the irreducibly particularist nature of ethical action.
What does a 17th-century Tibetan travelogue have to do with the novel Piranesi? Taktsang Repa (Stag tshang ras pa, 1574-1651) documented his arduous pilgrimage from Central Tibet to the land of Padmasambhava in Travel Account to Orgyen, the Land of Ḍākinīs: the Steps to Travel on the Path to Liberation, which brims with disarming straightforwardness, candor, and unexpected turns of poetry. In 2020, the British novelist Susanna Clarke, who was by then highly celebrated despite having only published one other novel, released a puzzling new work of speculative fiction entitled Piranesi that took critics and readers alike by surprise. This paper argues that both texts weave the simple act of documenting facts into a grand and startling narrative about the awe and agony implicit in the discovery of truth. Through juxtaposition with Clarke’s radical work of fiction, the narrative moves made by Taktsang Repa centuries earlier are brought into focus.
This paper compares the Thirteenth Dalai Lama's last testament with the British novel Darkness and the Light in order to help better appreciate the content, context, and significance of both narratives. In 1942 British science fiction author Olaf Stapledon published his novel, Darkness and the Light, which narrates a near-future global political order where forces of "darkness" and "light" vie for power. The side of light begins with an independent Tibet's renaissance, where "Young Lamas" lead a scientific and social revolution that spreads across the globe. Just four years later in 1946 Thirteenth Dalai Lama's "last testament" was published in English. The Dalai Lama narrates his efforts toward securing a sovereign and enlightened Tibetan nation. Bound by time, these two texts vividly depict the value of Tibetan voices, both real and imagined, for readerships in a period of world war as they grappled with human suffering and flourishing.
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.
This paper brings three narratives of sacred landscape and place-based personhood into conversation, exploring how the poetics and politics of imagination engage human and more-than-human powers of cultural memory and resistance. In Alai’s novel A Song for King Gesar, the events of the epic intersect with the present-day story of a young Tibetan man navigating a time of cultural erasure. In the myth of Three Sisters Mountain, the mountain’s female-gendered body enacts a multidimensional protective relationality with the masculine bodies of mountains in Eastern Tibet, as well as with Padmasambhava and Gesar. In N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, each borough of New York City takes embodied form as a more-than-human being tasked with defending the city from destruction. Evoking anthropologist James C. Scott’s ideas of the “hidden transcript,” this paper explores how speculative fiction and place-based chronicles of more-than-human relationships engage multiple registers of meaning-making and truth telling.