This panel examines more-than-human sociality as a structural feature of Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist traditions, tracing how territorial spirits and natural forces function as stakeholders, interlocutors, and constitutive members of political, ecological, and soteriological communities. The four papers together ask what it means for a community — a polity, a practice lineage, a cosmological order — to include non-human beings as structural rather than peripheral participants. Spanning contemporary Tibetan literature, nineteenth-century biographical and revelatory materials from eastern Tibet, the intellectual history of early modern Bhutan, and ongoing place-based knowledge on the Tibetan plateau, and drawing on literary analysis, textual history, institutional history, and Indigenous epistemology, the panel argues that more-than-human sociality is not a premodern residue but a sophisticated and coherent framework for thinking about community, knowledge, and power — one with urgent contributions to make to contemporary conversations about ecology, governance, and the limits of the human.
This talk examines how traditional Tibetan understandings of, and practices with, mountains as Territorial Sovereigns inform contemporary Tibetan discourses on climate change and environmental crisis. Drawing on ritual texts, poetic evocations, ethnographic observations, and contemporary Tibetan literature, I explore how Tibetans observe, understand, and articulate the thoughts, moods, and visions of the mountains as essential agents in their world and cosmologies. I place these diverse sources in conversation with each other to consider how Tibetan mountain sovereigns think, experience, and debate about the recent climate and environmental crises. I analyze two short stories— “Snow” and “The Conference of Lhanyen Mountains” —which extend longstanding Tibetan protocols of listening to and engaging with mountains while reflecting on contemporary environmental crises and extractive relations. I argue that Tibetan stories are vital intellectual vessels, offering generative space for reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of understanding places in their fuller being and senses.
Drawing on previously untranslated biographical, ritual, and narrative materials from the Chokling Tersar, this paper examines treasure revelation as an ongoing practice of ecological mediation between land, territorial deities, human communities, and the Buddhadharma. Through close analysis of Chokgyur Lingpa's (Mchog gyur gling pa, 1829–1870) encounters with territorial deities across multiple biographical episodes—and the ritual texts that codify these engagements—I argue that the treasure revealer's ability to navigate these relationships is not incidental to but constitutive of their identity as Padmasambhava's heirs. Foundational narratives of imperial conversion established a relational contract with the land's non-human inhabitants that required periodic reassertion; the treasure revealer, as ecological mediator, is precisely the agent qualified to do so. y propitiating, commanding, and binding territorial deities—and ensuring that each extraction is answered by a substitute that maintains the land's fertility—the treasure revealer simultaneously revitalizes the Buddhadharma for their age and renews the ecological bonds on which its transmission depends.
This paper seeks to explore the more-than-human elements of the Tibetan Treasure tradition (gter ma), specifically the ways in which the Treasure tradition is based on an ethic of exchange between humans and the Tibetan land. The paper will explore three specific dimensions of this ethic of exchange, namely 1) the revelation process as one in which Treasure revealers extract Treasures and deposit Treasure substitutes (gter tshab), 2) the ways in which the Treasure tradition incorporates Indigenous Tibetan land-based presences in the form of Treasure guardians (gter srung), and 3) the expression “samaya bond between sacred land and guest” (gnas mgron gyi dam tshig) as a meaningful expression of a Tibetan ethics of hospitality between the agentic earth and its human guests.
When Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594–1651), the founder of the Bhutanese state, emerged from retreat in 1625 and announced his establishment of a new polity in the Himalayas, he dispatched an edict to power places throughout the natural world, commanding local deities, earth lords, and spirits of the region to submit to his rule and take their place as protectors of the Buddhist teachings. This paper takes this founding act seriously as a political gesture, asking what conception of political community it implies and what it means for a polity to include non-human forces as members with standing rather than as backdrop or metaphor. Reading Tsang Khenchen Jamyang Palden Gyatso's Song of the Great Dharma Cloud as a founding document of the Bhutanese state, it recovers a framework in which the natural world is not a resource to be governed but an agent that participates in governance.
| Janet Gyatso | jgyatso@hds.harvard.edu | View |