Marginal Spaces, Violence, and Buddhism in Tibet and the Himalayas

In the nineteenth century, Tibetan nomadic pastoralists in Amdo defied the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911), conquered the Qinghai Mongols, and settled the grasslands surrounding Lake Tsongön (Tib. Mtsho sngon; Mong. Kökenuur; Ch.: Qinghai hu). After decades of conflict, Qing officials acquiesced and recognized their right to live in these grasslands. The communities then built their own permanent monasteries, established relationships with territorial deities, and affiliated their monasteries with larger monasteries in farming regions in the east. I argue that these processes constituted a form of Buddhist place-making. The monasteries they built and the regions they settled often took on the communities’ names. Through affiliating their monasteries with large monasteries in farming regions, they established religious teaching networks, pilgrimage circuits, trade networks, and political alliances with eastern Amdo monasteries. By establishing different pastoralist communities as patrons (Tib. lha sde) of the same monastery, they facilitated ties between communities.

This paper discusses non-Buddhist animal sacrifice practices carried out by the Lhop and Monpa communities in Bhutan, and the attempts of Buddhist practitioners to ban these based on the Buddhist principle to not take life. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper looks at the ongoing efforts to prohibit animal sacrifice in the Lhop community, and the abandoning of these practices with the Monpa in the past. It lays out the arguments, the progress of events, and the power relations between the minority groups and members of the mainstream Buddhist culture within the nation state of Bhutan. Understanding animal sacrifice as a key practice to connect to their protective deities, the paper considers the effects of this interruption of human-deity relationships and asks if the banning of animal sacrifice might be the stimulus event for full conversion to Buddhism.