‘Unseen Beings and Tibetan Eco-Daemonology’ - Presented at the University of Oxford, Tibetan Graduate Studies Seminar
Last November, I was asked to give a talk for the Tibetan Graduate Studies Seminar at the University of Oxford based on Unseen Beings my current research on Tibetan Eco-Daemonology, or ‘nature spirit’ paradigms found in Tibetan cultural and scientific traditions.
Check out the video recording from the seminar below, which you can also view on the TGSS Podcast website here. I am also including a written version of the presentation for you to peruse, along with a bibliography for further research.
Many thanks to the organisers and faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies for having me present on this topic.
What do you think? Leave some ideas in the comments below.
Unseen Beings and Tibetan Daemonology
Erik Jampa Andersson
Presented on 16 November 2023
Abstract
In this presentation, Erik Jampa Andersson will introduce his research on the enchanting and oft-misunderstood world of Tibetan eco-daemonology – exploring the complex ways that evolving ‘nature spirit’ paradigms have informed Tibetan historical perceptions of health, the environment, and more-than-human sociality in a volatile and multicultural world. Erik will shed new light on a diverse selection of materials, including the rGyud bZhi (‘Four Tantras’) medical corpus, ritual manuals from the gCod (‘Severance’) tradition, and the gNyan ‘Bum (Nyen Collection) of the Bön canon, demonstrating a centuries-long continuum of nuanced and multivocal negotiations between Buddhist philosophy and indigenous animistic knowledge. Further attention will be paid to the environmental context of evolutions in ritual technologies and ecological paradigms, supported by both historical and paleoclimatic data. This research challenges longstanding ‘psychological’ approaches to spirit ontologies in Tibet, largely rooted in appeals to ‘rational’ anthropocentric empiricism, instead highlighting the ways in which they have helped Tibetan peoples negotiate the complexities of being human in a more-than-human world. Reflecting upon the challenges imposed by the so-called ‘Anthropocene,’ this timely presentation seeks to inspire more thoughtful and critical scholarship on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Tibet and the Himalayas, and earnest consideration of its relevance to the present ecological crisis.
A Clinical Ecology
Today I’ll be sharing some of my ongoing research on a field of study that I think is quite poorly underexplored in Tibetology, and indeed in many disciplines, for reasons that I will touch on tonight. This is the field of eco-daemonology, or the study of so-called ‘nature spirits.’ But before we dive into the strange and wonderful world of Tibetan ‘nature spirits,’ first I want to provide a little bit of context. This talk is entitled ‘Unseen Beings and Tibetan Eco-Daemonology,’ and as some of you know, this is based on my recent book, Unseen Beings: How We Forgot the World is More Than Human.
Now, I had initially intended for this book to be primarily about Tibetan eco-daemonology and its relevance to modern discussions surrounding climate change. But it grew far beyond that, approaching more of a ‘big picture’ overview of the causes and conditions of our multiple interwoven environmental emergencies.
Importantly, my approach to the very notion of ‘unseen beings’ transformed quite a bit in the process. While I still think it’s essential to leave the moniker open to those beings who indeed completely evade our perception – which includes things like ghosts and invisible spirits, but also microbes and viruses – I think it’s important to also recognise that a being needn’t be invisible to be excluded from our acknowledgment or concern. In many cases, we fail to see ‘unseen beings’ not because they are invisible, but because we have trained ourselves not to ‘see’ them as ‘beings.’ This would include, for many, both plants and many animals. They fade into the background as the scenery and props for our human drama.
In some cases, these two categories of ‘unseen beings’ overlap in highly significant ways – ‘trees’ are clearly not unrelated to ‘tree spirits,’ and both are beings that we have actively unseen. I would venture to say that they might be one and the same – not that ‘tree spirits’ are simply a fanciful elaboration upon ‘trees,’ but rather that the spirits co-emerge with the tree, or at least in the moment that a tree is perceived as an ‘other.’ Rather than regarding a ‘tree spirit’ as an invisible ‘resident’ or ‘personification’ of a disenchanted tree – it is perhaps more reasonable to think of a ‘tree’ as the physical embodiment of a ‘tree spirit.’ Much the same might be said for a forest, mountain, river, lake, etc., which leaves us with a very interesting set of questions – how did we forget about those beings, and what effect has it had on our world?
The basic structure of the book owes a great deal to Buddhism and my own training in Tibetan Medicine, as I follow a four-fold structure that should be familiar to many people: diagnosis, aetiology, prognosis, and treatment.
I begin with the topic of ‘diagnosis,’ exploring both the symptoms and identification of our planetary disease (which we may choose to regard as the Anthropocene), as well as a look at our ‘natural state,’ what Tibetan Medicine calls tha mel nad med, or ‘natural state without disease.’ In the book, I make a point of stretching beyond the human in this regard, looking at the lives of animals, plants, and other organisms, as well as our transformative relationships with these beings throughout human history.
I then go on to the topic of aetiology, i.e. the causes and conditions of the Anthropocene, as well as the progression of our disease across time and cultural contexts. I look at philosophy, religion, science, processes of colonisation, etc. in the institution of a human-dominated world grounded in anthropocentrism.
The prognosis section lays out some thoughts regarded our future, which is quite certain to be apocalyptic, and how we can re-frame our approach to treatment. Though in the final version, this section is mostly used to present some research on Tibetan medical approaches to provocation disorders and epidemics – some of which we’ll discuss this evening.
The treatment section deals with the path to recovery, which I regard as a more important and effective goal than mere treatment. I look at how non-human beings (including spirits) were related to in an array of Buddhist traditions, including Machig Labdrön’s teachings on going beyond projected divinity or diabolism. I also talk a lot about the power of myth and enchantment in this process – enchantment being a distinctly relational experience arising from an encounter with ‘other beings’ (and indeed ‘other minds’).
The book concludes with a critical ecocentric reworking of the Noble Eightfold Path, the Buddha’s own ‘method of treatment’ for the universal disease of suffering that he elaborates upon in the Four Noble Truths.
It is an imperfect book, as all are, but I hope that it demonstrates the broader applications of this kind of work.
Spirited Ecologies - Beyond Nature and Culture
I want to start by providing a little bit of critical context to the ideas of ‘ecology’ and ‘nature,’ as informed by fields like the environmental humanities and critical ecology.
In his paper on ‘Buddhism and the Discourse of Environmental Concern,’ Ian Harris remarks, “The evolution of the modern ecological definition of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ can only be fully understood against the background of the history of western thought itself” (Harris 1997, 380).
This word ‘nature’ is actually profoundly enigmatic, at least in this kind of context. It comes from Latin natura, originally referring to innate or inborn characteristics – the ‘nature’ of a thing (comparable to Skt. svabhāva or Tib. rang bzhin). But here it of course refers to the so-called ‘natural world’ – a monolithic, undifferentiated environmental domain which exists ‘out there’ – across from humanity. This can be defined as a concept of ‘local natures,’ a distinctly European philosophical construct rooted in Classical philosophy and expanded upon in the Enlightenment as a mechanistic world governed by instinct and ‘natural’ physical laws.
In the grand scheme of human cultural and intellectual traditions, this view is an outlier. We may think this is a universal concept, but it isn’t: the vast majority of human societies throughout the vast majority of human history have come to very different conclusions about the basic phenomenological orientation of the world.
The modern field of ‘ecology,’ which was originally terms oeconomy by Enlightenment-era thinkers, arises from a utilitarian interest in the use and management of ‘household’ (oikos) resources. This mentality dominates even modern environmentalism, which is predominantly interested in the sustainable exploitation of ‘natural’ resources, and more broadly with the relationship between an undifferentiated anthropos and an undifferentiated ‘natural world.’ When it comes to Tibet, and specifically historical Tibetan and Himalayan approaches to the more-than-human world, this model has very little purchase. We use it as a basis of discussion not because it is a universal truth, but because the European model has systematically displaced any more nuanced or pluralistic approaches to the environment in global discourse.
We tend to take for granted the idea that ‘humanity’ is a domain of ‘subjects,’ rather than the ‘objects’ found in ‘nature.’ We have agency, awareness, sentience, and (according to some) free will. We perceive humanity as innately valuable, and both bound by and implicated in questions of morality. ‘Nature’ is devoid of all of these things – it is unaware, inert, mechanistic, instinctual, devoid of any value beyond that which can be bestowed by ownership or utility. Nor is it a moral dimension – ‘morality’ only really intersects with ‘nature’ when there is a risk of undermining humanity’s ongoing access to resources. Perhaps most importantly, the human mind is regarded as both the source and domain of enchantment. Nature is mechanistic, not magical. The only magic that we can hope to find is that which our human minds concoct.
While we can (and must) challenge these presuppositions in our own “Western” context, we must also be wary of uncritically predicting their presence in subaltern traditions of knowledge.
As Philippe Descola notes in Beyond Nature and Culture, in most indigenous, pre-modern, and non-modern societies, the world was not divided into two overarching categories of human ‘culture’ and non-human ‘nature.’ He writes, ‘Plants and animals, rivers and rocks, meteors and the seasons do not exist all together in an ontological niche defined by the absence of human beings’ (Descola, 30).
A Buddhist Approach to Nature?
A failure to understand the nuances and divergent assumptions of such systems has led many to question whether or not Buddhism/Tibetan Buddhism has anything at all in common with ‘environmentalist’ ‘green’ values. Many have claimed that much of the modern environmental ethic detectable in Tibetan Buddhism is in fact a function of early conversations between figures like the Dalai Lama and western environmentalists.
David Cooper and Simon James argue that Buddhism is in fact distinctly non-ecological, due in part to its sole concern with individual liberation, precluding “a moral concern for species” (141). Lambert Schmithausen largely agrees, going on to suggest that Buddhist anthropocentrism actually supports the establishment of a human-dominated world, since animals are regarded as lesser (or at least more miserable) forms of life, and the successful replacement of animals with humans would suggest that sentient beings are ‘moving up’ in the existential trajectory towards liberation.
It's notable that issues of paradigmatic translation are rarely addressed in these kinds of discussions. What do we really mean by ‘ecological’? But most importantly to the topic at hand, daemonology is almost always ignored.
In Defence of the Unseen
In his ground-breaking book Haunting the Buddha, Robert DeCaroli notes that, throughout its existence, ‘spirit-deities played a central role in the development and growth of Buddhism in all of its contexts and in all of its forms.’ (187) Buddhist societies have always demonstrated a keen and earnest interest in daemonological affairs, and its openness to cultural and regional variation has produced many opportunities for “foreign” spirits to be integrated into the Buddhist cosmos, many of whom were linked to so-called “natural” phenomena like trees, mountains, rivers, the weather, and even the Earth itself.
Tawni Tidwell refers to such paradigms (particularly in Tibet) as ‘transcultural affordances,’ or ‘affordances that humans encounter across cultural boundaries by way of sharing place and local ontologies in the different sociocultural niches that they constitute’. An affordance, in this context, refers to ‘possibilities for action’, including ‘cultural affordances’ like the use of the written word, as well as ‘natural affordances’ like bipedalism.
Spirit paradigms are identifiable as a ‘cultural affordance’ because they afford a particular set of sociocultural experiences – and the specific transculturality of this phenomenon is quite prominent in places like Tibet which, despite its perceived isolation, was in fact a vibrant cultural and intellectual crossroads for many centuries. It is often the case that, even amongst members of variant cultural and religious groups, overlapping and shared daemonological paradigms can be observed, speaking to pluralistic paradigms through which multicultural relations with non-human beings can be collectively negotiated. In many cases, spirits are also distinctly ecologically and topographically embodied, arising at the crossroads of the human and non-human worlds. Some are directly tied to our visible biological kin (like trees), offering a highly dynamic paradigm through which their inner lives can be perceived.
On Supernaturalism
In what remains the longest full-length English language treatment on the topic of provocation disorders in Tibetan medicine, Terry Clifford characterizes Tibetan spirits as ‘primarily a psychological phenomenon associated with the multitude of mental and emotional obscurations’ (150). While she concedes that they are often perceived as having some form of ‘an outer existence’ as well, they remain little more than an external projection of ‘the forces of [human] life and emotion that can drive the mind insane’ (149). Quoting Theodore Burang, Clifford asserts that for ‘learned Tibetans,’ spirits are strictly regarded as ‘mental entities or projections (mostly of a lower order) or as psychic fields of force’ (149). At one point she describes them as ‘…the id trying to obstruct the super-ego’s higher promptings’ (150).
It’s worth noting that Theodore Burang (1898-1984) was an Austrian writer and self-designated Tibetan Medicine scholar who claimed to have discovered an underground city populated by cannibal sorcerers while living in Tibet for two years. Much like Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Cyril Henry Hoskin (AKA Lobsang Rampa, 1910-1981), he likely never actually visited Tibet, and his supposed expertise is highly questionable. But these kinds of oversights and regurgitated misconceptions are far too common in daemonological studies.
There’s a palpable sense that this is a highly tricky subject. There is, in general, a tendency to prevent overly-‘supernaturalist’ interpretations of Buddhist doctrine – and often to explain it away as allegory, symbolism, or mere ‘folk tradition’ that accidentally became conflated with more elevated philosophies. But this, in many ways, plays directly into the hand of supernaturalism – a framework that arose in reaction to the disenchantment of modernity. Having been told that the natural world is disenchanted, western spiritualists hitched their wagons to an alternative domain of magic and mystery – a purely spiritual or mental domain, largely oriented around the human. Human ghosts, humanoid extra-terrestrials, demons and poltergeists arising from human emotions and sociological tension.
Clifford largely ignores the fact that the vast majority of ‘psychiatric’ or ‘psychological’ afflictions in Tibetan Medicine are wholly unrelated to the phenomenon of provocation (to which we’ll return shortly), nor that a large proportion of provocation disorders are distinctly physiological or even virological in nature. Attempts to avoid modernist allegations of supernaturalism have unfortunately often resulted in unchecked anthropocentrism.
‘Supernatural’ is itself a phenomenally problematic word, and when it comes to beings like tree spirits, water nymphs, gods of the forest, or even spirits of disease, it seems altogether preposterous. As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote in his brilliant essay On Fairy-Stories, ‘Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.’
The Trouble with Terminologies
There are many terms that we could use to discuss the beings dealt with in Tibetan Buddhist materials. Each have their strengths and weaknesses.
‘Spirit’ is helpfully amorphous, but often too spritely and weighed down by philosophical notions about ‘spirits’ and ‘souls.’
‘Daemon’ is useful, referring (in Greek) to powerful entities, usually below the ranking of a god, who populate particular locales.
‘Nature spirit’ gets us a bit closer to the ecological context of these beings, though we still end up with that pesky ‘spirit’ word.
I use ‘Unseen Beings,’ but mostly to capture the dual meaning of ‘unseen’ as in invisible spirits, and ‘unseen’ as in ‘those that we have chosen not to see.’
‘Gods and demons’ is perhaps the most charged of the lot, strongly suggesting a binary divide between the ‘good guy’ gods and the ‘bad guy’ demons. This is not just a modern critique – Tibetan thinkers like Machig Labdrön explicitly rejected this model, since sentient beings (like spirits) cannot be divided into absolute moral categories.
In general, we should be wary of a tendency to systematically organise and categorise phenomena as wily as spirits. They often evade categorisation entirely, and attempts to force them into neat and tidy boxes will only result in a contrived and imperfect taxonomy that obscures and generalises the objects (or indeed ‘hyperobjects’) of study. A solid eco-daemonological approach should, I believe, highlight the dynamic interconnections between daemonic beings and the physical living world, with manifold variations and constellations of relationship.
Establishing and Transmitting Eco-Daemonologies
If we’re going to look at eco-daemonologies more carefully and critically, we will need to familiarise ourselves with a far more diverse array of sources than mere religious doctrine. When it comes to spirits, the role of religion is often to repackage and recontextualise existing ontologies, not to create them ex nihilo. In many cases, this takes the form of a foreign doctrinal authority repackaging indigenous spirits in a new cosmological paradigm. Basically, while religion might seek to assign particular existential roles for daemonic beings, it is the local culture and environment that often provides the stock of actors.
We need to go beyond formal doctrine when seeking information about people’s lived experiences with non-human spirits. We need to look at History and Myth, folklore, medicine, and spiritual and ritual practices (which are distinct from doctrine). Formal doctrine is still valuable, especially since it often concretizes fluid processes of negotiation at a particular moment in time, but they are not the most important. Structures like the so-called ‘eight classes of gods and demons’ (which we’ll unpack in a moment), may appear to evidence a systematic and universal institutional approach to spirit beings, but this is in fact quite misleading – approaches to spirits have always been far more nuanced and complex.
Some Underexplained Sources
Some texts that I’ve consulted with in my research so far, which I think have gone sorely underexplored, include the gDon Nad gSo Ba, or ‘The Treatment of Provocation Disorders’ from the Man Ngag rGyud (‘Oral Instruction Tantra’). This is a core Tibetan medical text composed by Yuthok Yönten Gönpo in the 12th century, based on an array of earlier source materials stemming from Indian, Chinese, Greco-Arabic, and indigenous Tibetan medical traditions. The sections on provocation disorders (or ‘spirit illnesses’) derive in part from Ayurvedic tradition, but there’s quite a bit of material there that can’t be found anywhere else – suggesting that they are either derived from yet-unidentified foreign sources, unidentified indigenous materials, or that they are Yuthok’s own novel contribution to the field.
Another really valuable source is the gNyan ‘Bum (‘Nyen Collection’) of the Bön Kangyur, the study of which has principally been taken up by Samten Karmay and Daniel Berounský. Unlike the more famous kLu ‘Bum, which shows ample evidence of influence from Indian nāga traditions, the gNyen ‘Bum is a far more reliable source of potential pre-Buddhist spirit traditions. Many sections are similar or identical to materials recovered from Dunhuang, and with no Indian analogue for the gNyen, it stands to reason that it would have been less influenced by Indian paradigms overall.
I have also taken an interest in weather-control rituals, namely the gCod Lugs Char ‘Bod sNyan brGyud (‘Oral Tradition of Summoning Rain in the Chöd Tradition’), which was codified by Karma Chagmé in the 17th century, based in part on the works of Rangjung Dorje and Machig Labdrön, as well as the weather-control praxes established in the Great Cloud Sutra. He was also profoundly well-versed in Sino-Tibetan gTo rituals, many of which deal directly with relatively ‘mundane’ magic and interactions with spirits.
Another key genre of material that must be explored are folkloric and mythic traditions, including those from written and oral traditions. It should come as no surprise that storytelling is a profoundly potent method by which spirit ontologies are transmitted. The stories we tell about the living agents who embody and inhabit the more-than-human world are at the very core of eco-daemonology.
Buddhism and the More-than-Human World
What constitutes a Buddhist approach to the more-than-human world? It’s easy to overlook the fact that Buddhism actually has quite a lot to say. Naturally, there is Buddhism’s extension of morality to animals, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. I find it particularly interesting that Buddhism is perhaps the most famous ‘world religion’ to heavily feature trees at the heart of its charter myth. The Buddha’s life story is quite full of trees – from the Sal trees who lowered their branches for Mayadevi to give birth to Siddhartha in a forested grove, to the other Sal trees who mourned over his deathbed, and of course to the Bodhi Tree that came to represent a new axis mundi of enlightenment at Bodhgaya.
In contrast to the harshly anthropocentric ethics of most Western religious traditions, Buddhism is principally interested in the eradication of suffering and complete liberation of ‘all sentient beings.’ But how are the identities of these beings established?
Sentience is usually established on the basis of foundational and sensory consciousness, and capacity to experience suffering. This was not a strictly Buddhist idea, as similar models were used in other shramana movements like Jainism, which likewise posited that non-violence towards sentient beings was critical for attaining liberation.
But while non-human animals (and a great many other beings) have always been regarded as sentient beings in Buddhism, early Buddhist materials are relatively agnostic regarding plant sentience.
Some early texts, like the Vāseṭṭha-sutta, classify plants as ‘animate’ beings which shouldn’t be harmed, while stopping short of identifying them as conscious. The Vinaya also features some admonitions against harming plant life, though the rationale behind this is debated – and in any case, the Vinaya is less concerned with ‘ethics’ than it is with creating a cohesive and peaceful community.
Some East Asian traditions go a bit further, in some cases regarding them as sentient and in possession of Buddha-nature. Others, like the philosopher Bhāviveka saw them as being closer to minerals than animals or humans.
This was in stark contrast to the Jain tradition, which explicitly embraced plants as single-sensory ‘sentient beings’ with a capacity for touch – and thus also suffering. Of course, today we know that plants are actually multi-sensory beings who can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, learn, communicate, and respond to pain – but that’s a topic for a different day. In any case, this difference in approach is interesting, and some (like Matthew Hall) have argued that the extremity of Jain dietary ethics played a key role in influencing the Buddha’s ‘middle-way’ approach. Early Buddhists may have simply deemed it too tricky to accommodate a non-violent attitude towards plants, even though the sutras do often portray them as living agents.
Pre-Buddhist Traditions of Tibet
Turning to Tibet, it’s important to note that before the introduction of Buddhism, there was no single univocal institutional religion. We often speak of Bön, including ‘Prehistoric Bön,’ ‘Old Bön,’ and ‘New Bön,’ but it’s important to understand that these are really very different things. When it comes to ancestral ‘prehistoric’ Bön, there was no single unifying doctrine that everyone lived by – it was instead a diverse array of ‘shamanic’ and otherwise spiritual worldviews with a fundamentally animistic (and thus also highly ‘local’) basis. Some later Tibetan spirit paradigms bear clear traces of these traditions, including the veneration of sacred mountains and lakes.
In his highly emic comparative study of Tibetan and Siberian traditions, Dmitri Ermakov notes that, for pre-Buddhist peoples, these mountains, lakes, etc. were themselves ‘actually living beings’ in and of themselves. It was only due to later Indian influence that they were largely reduced to ‘spirit abodes.’
I have heard many Buddhist lamas carefully distinguish, for instance, between the notion of a ‘sentient tree’ and a ‘tree spirit,’ claiming that some trees are inhabited by spirits, but rejecting (on principle) the notion that trees themselves can be sentient beings. I challenge this notion quite directly in Unseen Beings, but it’s important to note that this distinction likely didn’t exist in pre-Buddhist Tibet. For many modern Bönpos in Tibet, Ermakov notes that lakes and mountains often hold a kind of ‘dual status,’ perceived at once ‘as living sentient beings’ and as spirit residences.
Negotiating Animisms
In Haunting the Buddha, Robert DeCaroli demonstrates that Buddhism has always taken a keen and earnest interest in spirits. Spirit ontologies are present in all traditional forms of Buddhism across Asia, and can be detected even in the earliest teachings of the tradition. Of course, Buddhism didn’t invent these spirits – they had long been attested in Indian and Indo-European cultural traditions, including pre-Vedic Indian traditions, Vedic Brahmanism, and the Indo-European cultural and linguistic milieu of the Buddha’s own Greater Maghada region.
But as Buddhism spread, it didn’t simply transplant Indian spirits into new geographic regions – it actively incorporated local daemonology. In Tibet, there was already a robust ‘spirit ecology’ full of non-human beings that folks certainly regarded as ‘real.’ This required nuanced negotiations between these systems in the establishment of ‘Tibetan’ Buddhism
Some spirits did come from India, like the lha min/asura, who were functionally ‘adopted’ by Tibetans due to their prevalence in Buddhist doctrine. Others, like the gnyan, btsan, and the’u rang, were retained from indigenous Tibetan tradition with some light ‘Buddhicisation.’ In some cases, like the klu-naga, Indian and Tibetan categories were combined through a process of assimilation – reflecting, perhaps, an assumption of ‘mutual discovery’ in these disparate cultural streams. There are many nuances within this process, creating a complex and multicultural system of daemonology.
The most common overarching classification of these beings in Tibet is certainly the so-called ‘eight classes’ (sde brgyad), which we’ll look at in a moment. But we shouldn’t place too much stock in a literal octopartite division. Tibetan spirits are manifold, and largely evade neat classifications
Most importantly, these beings are not allegorical or symbolic phenomena, and they never have been. They were always regarded as actual sentient beings, often closely tied to the other-than-human ‘natural’ world.
The “Six” Realms
Before we approach the ‘eight classes,’ we need to first examine the ‘Six Realms’ of classical Buddhist cosmology. In some cases, there are only five realms attested, but Tsongkhapa’s preference for a divide between devas and asuras helped to solidify this sixfold model in Tibet.
We of course know the devas, asuras, humans, animals, and hell beings. But as soon as we attempt to insert spirits into the mix, things get complicated. For instance, we’re told that gandharvas are a kind of lesser god, and sometimes nagas are as well. But then again, nagas are sometimes regarded as asuras, and sometimes as animals, even though their caste-based social structure seems distinctly human in nature. Perhaps most commonly in Tibet, nagas are regarded as a special kind of preta, based on the idea that pretas can be divided into two broad categories – those that are fixed in their miserable hungry ghost realm, and those that move through space as the so-called ‘eight classes’. Of course, the ‘eight classes’ are properly known as the ‘eight classes of gods and demons,’ which raises the issue of classifying gods/devas aspretas. And what about these ‘demons’? Aren’t they the ones doing all of the torturing in hell? It's all very complicated.
Of course, we have further issues when we consider the fact that humans are, in every way, a kind of animal. Is there a solid line between humans and other apes? Where would Denisovans or Neanderthals have fit into the mix? We also have the issue of plants, who are completely absent from this model. Not to mention fungi. In some circles, especially medical circles, microorganisms are squeezed into this model as a particular kind of preta, with some going so far as to suggest that all the ‘unseen beings’ of the Tibetan Buddhist cosmos are actually just microbes – a theory which is particularly interesting given the multiple connotations of srin.
On the Spatial and Existential Orientation of Non-Human Beings
It is likely that we shouldn’t get too attached to this sixfold scheme, particularly since Buddhist cosmology actually identified at least 31 different realms in which sentient beings can exist, the boundaries of which are often fluid and inter-penetrable. As Jamgön Kongtrul (1813-1899) states, ‘Even the mountains, cliffs, trees, temples, and homes of this human realm, wherever suitable, may serve as the habitat or environment for any of these forms of life.”
Now let’s return to these ‘eight classes,’ which are variably presented as the lha srin sde brgyad, lha klu sde brgyad, lha ‘dre sde brgyad, etc. Where did this construct come from? Its first descriptive use in Tibetan is found in a translation of the Golden Light Sutra, where it is used to translate Aṣṭasenā (the ‘eight legions’), who are eight classes of spirits who sought teachings from the Buddha and became protectors of the Dharma. There are other references in Dunhuang manuscripts to these eight classes, but without any indication of their members.
Eventually, this very specific model became embraced as a categorisation scheme for all of the many types of spiritswho are seen to exist in the phenomenal world. But this only works symbolically, since there are in fact hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete spirit types discussed in Tibetan sources. In his paper on the topic, Pascale Dollfus notes that, for most Himalayan villagers, the notion of ‘eight classes’ is regarded as a relatively antiquated and stuffy monastic paradigm with little relevance to people’s actual experiences with these beings.
Variations in the ‘Eight Classes’
As we can see, there are seemingly countless variations of the so-called ‘eight classes.’ Dollfus notes that even seasoned ritualists often fail to identify a definitive listing when asked, either ending up with more than eight, or struggling to present the same list more than once. This approach may be neat and tidy – but it isn’t very practical. It’s also worth noting that, in early times, enumerations of the ‘eight classes’ largely focused on Indian spirits mentioned in Buddhist texts. But over time, they were joined and even largely replaced by indigenous Tibetan spirits.
In this 14th century enumeration, Orgyen Lingpa uses the standard ‘outer, inner, secret’ paradigm to squeeze 24 spirits into the eightfold classification. But even then, many prominent spirits are still left out.
The Trouble with Taxonomies
In truth, taxonomies can be highly problematic. Even when it comes to highly empirical phenomena, like plants or animals, attempts to systematically classify everything into existential categories of stock characteristics is a reductive and slippery procedure. This was what guided Linnaeus to classify every ‘species’ on Earth, complete with Latin binomials, reducing everybody – with all their diversity and variability – into a fixed ‘type.’ He infamously extended this process to humans, establishing the ‘scientific’ model of human racism, which we are still struggling to fully transcend.
Things are no easier with spirits. As Christopher Bell notes, ‘Spirit taxonomies consistently lack uniformity and systematization, despite attempts over the centuries by numerous religious authorities to establish such consistency. This indicates that Tibetan spirit types, their traits, and their values are context specific and relative to the regional communities in which they are encountered’ (Bell 2002, 18).
Spirited Engagements
Before we turn to some primary sources, I want to take a moment to examine the diversity of voices involved in negotiating engagements with spirits in the Tibetan Buddhist world.
Eco-daemonology is not a form of belief, but rather an ontological paradigm arising through dynamic interactions with the more-than-human world. It is a ‘cultural affordance’ that allows for a wide range of environmental and ecological phenomena to be experienced as living agents – or at least under their influence. This affordance was already very well established in Tibet, although it was not fixed or impenetrably dogmatic. For Buddhism to demonstrate its applicability to the Tibetan experience, it needed to offer a compelling avenue for this phenomenological paradigm to be negotiated in a Tibetan Buddhist world. Over time, some approaches have become more-or-less ‘orthodox,’ leading to an assumption of univocality in Tibetan Buddhist attitudes towards daemonology. But things were, in fact, far more complicated.
Feeding vs. Fighting
We must, of course, acknowledge the most famous daemonological paradigms established through the dominant charter myths set in Tibet’s Imperial Era – stories like Songtsen Gampo’s physical suppression of the Srin mo who embodied the Tibetan landscape, and Padmasambhava’s systematic subjugation of Tibetan and Himalayan gods and demons in the time of Trisong Detsen. These stories, which rose to prominence in the Tibetan Buddhist Renaissance period, represent only one line of thinking in this process.
Nevertheless, this paradigm of subjugation became a prominent trope in Tibetan Buddhist myth and ritual arts, preserving the prominence of powerful spirits while largely stripping them of their ambiguity and individual agency. In many cases, ritual violence was explicitly used to quell spirit obstacles hindering the institutionalization of Buddhism in Tibet. But again, this was not the only approach.
Machig on Devils and Demons
Other systematisers, like Machig Labdrön (ca. 1055-1154), rejected the ontological framework of ‘gods and demons’ as a delusive function of our attachment to polarities of good and evil. While she’s more widely known for her teachings on the ‘four devils’ or ‘four bdud/māras,’ Machig’s teachings on more mundane daemonology provide some equally-valuable insights into the nature of spirits.
Machig famously declared:
བདུད་ཅེས་པའི་གཟུགས་ཆེ་ཞིང་ཁ་དོག་ནག་པོ་གང་གིས་མཐོང་ཡང་འཇིགས་ཤིང་ཡ་ང་བ་ཅན་ནི་དངོས་སུ་ཡོད་པ་མ་ཡིན་ནོ།
བདུད་ཅེས་བྱ་བ་ནི་ཐར་པ་སྒྲུབ་པའི་གེགས་སུ་གྱུར་པ་གང་ཡིན་པ་དེ་ཡི་བདུད་ཡིན།“That which is called (bdud/)māra is not some actual great big black thing that scares and petrifies whomever sees it. A devil is anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom.” (Harding, 117).
This teaching on maras has sometimes been misconstrued to suggest that non-human spirits are themselves non-existent or imaginary beings. But Machig is not really talking about spirits here, but rather about ‘devils’ or ‘demons.’ In a philosophical sense, devils are not external beings, but rather obstacles to liberation arising from the mind. She may as well be speaking about diabolical humans – in essence, she is saying, “Those scary people over there are not devils. Devils arise from the mind.” So what are those people, then? It’s simple – they’re just people.
Machig’s Three Faulty Paradigms of Daemonology
Shortly after making this statement, one of Machig’s students says (paraphrasing), “Alright, but I’m sure I’ve heard people use the term ‘devil’ or ‘demon’ in other contexts. What are they talking about?” To this, she presents a fascinating teaching on what I call her “Six Paradigms of Daemonology.” In it, she deconstructs the binary classification of ‘gods’ and ‘demons,’ differentiating between the useful applications of such ideas – for instance, to differentiate between nirvana and samsara, awareness and ignorance, or positive and negative karma – versus the useless binary classification of beings and experiences as ‘good’ or ‘bad.
The first paradigm that she introduces is the most foundational – ‘Jig rten pa’i kun btags kyi lha ‘dre (Gods and Demons as Designated by Worldly People) – which exposes a relatively universal tendency to collapse all phenomenal appearances into categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ based on momentary subjective perceptions of help and harm. That which we regard as helpful we call a ‘god,’ and that which we regard as negative we call a ‘demon.’ But she considers this to be preposterous, as truly helpful things can sometimes appear demonic, and truly unhelpful things can sometimes appear divine. For Chödpas, she says, this kind of thinking should be rejected as the “lewd talk of fools.”
This feeds directly into her second paradigm, which is most important to this discussion – Ngo bor gnas tshul gyi lha ‘dre (Gods and Demons by their Essential Mode of Being). This is the paradigm that gets us the ‘eight classes’ of so-called ‘gods and demons,’ an operation by which we use a sentient being’s temporary existence as a deva, asura, preta, etc. to classify them as a good ‘god’ or a bad ‘demon.’ She rejects this not because these beings don’t exist, but rather because the idea of ‘gods’ and ‘demons’ is far too charged to apply to morally ambiguous sentient beings caught in samsara. We might call worldly devas ‘gods,’ but they cannot afford us liberation, nor can worldly ‘demons’ drag us into the lower realms.
The last faulty paradigm that she mentions deals with ‘Gods and Demons as Superimposed on Observable Phenomena’ (mThong snang sgro btags kyi lha ‘dre), which is essentially a refutation of the superstitious association of phenomena like rainbows, dreams, etc. as portents of divine blessings or demonic curses.
Feeding, Not Fighting
We don’t need to look very far to see the real-world applications of this framework in Machig’s tradition. One of the ‘Ten Obligations’ that she places on her disciples is an ethic of non-violence towards spirit beings. She says,
‘Do not beat down, drive out, or torture other beings by instigating harm on hostile, nonhuman sentient beings through charmed substances, wrathful mantras, or doing wrathful practice […] the method to tame demons is to give up your cherishing fixation on the body and give your life and limb to those demons without hesitation.’ (Harding, 207).
This is most famously reflected in a core teaching, often quoted in Chöd materials, which states:
‘With a loving mind, cherish more than a child,
The hostile gods and demons of apparent existence,
And tenderly surround yourself with them.
Nourish them always with your warm flesh and blood.
With the hook of love and compassion,
Befriend them and never dismiss them.’ (Harding, 207).
When we consider the close association between non-human spirits and the so-called ‘natural world,’ statements like this become highly relevant to questions of Tibetan Buddhist environmental and ecological ethics – arguably influenced both by Mahayana Buddhist philosophy and indigenous animistic (not shamanic!) paradigms.
Provocation: Provocation and Traditional Medicine
With our remaining time, I want to look at a couple of interesting source materials dealing with spirit matters, including a selection from the rGyud bZhi (‘Four Tantras’) of Tibetan Medicine, and a peek at a couple of weather control rituals, including one from the Chöd tradition. These texts will help us to better understand Tibetan approaches to eco-daemonology, and also to situate them within their proper historical and evolving cultural context.
The first text we will look at is the gDon Nad gSo Ba, or ‘The Treatment of Provocation Disorders’ materials from the Tibetan Medical tradition, and its insights into the phenomenon known as ‘provocation’ or gDon.
Speaking in terms of Asian medical traditions more broadly, Tibetan Medicine is uniquely situated to offer insights into the traditional management of spirit-related afflictions. The politics of spirit illness in modern traditional medicine are highly complicated. They were once a prominent feature of Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Tibetan medical systems – but today, they are rarely discussed in the former two. Adam Krug notes that there is a common tendency in both Indian and Chinese medicine (although arising from very different causes) to marginalize spirit illness and characterize it as a component of ‘fringe’ movements that stood outside the bounds of mainstream traditional medical science. This is explicitly not the case, but one can see why such a position might be taken in the modern ‘traditional medicine’ marketplace.
Tibetan Medicine has fared somewhat differently for a number of reasons, though this is beginning to change. As we saw in Clifford’s assessment, there are certainly efforts to repackage provocation studies as a kind of Tibetan psychiatry. But in many cases, spirit influences are presented as distinctly external aetiological factors in the emergence of disease, and their influence is in way restricted to psychological disorders.
The gDon Nad gSo Ba
gDon is a complicated word with many potential glosses. I tend to follow Namkha’i Norbu’s translation of ‘provocation,’ based on the verb ‘to provoke,’ partly because its rather confusing ambiguity nicely accommodates the complexity of the topic at hand. Malcolm Smith once told me that we should use the term ‘provocateurs’ when using gdon as a noun, but I think this jumps to a bit of a hasty conclusion. It is far more interesting for us to sit with the open question of “Who is the provocateur?”
The gDon Nad gSo Ba is a collection of five chapters in the Man Ngag rGyud, the ‘Oral Instruction Tantra’ which deals with the finer points of pathology. In my textbook in medical school, additional chapters were appended on Children’s Provocation (Byis gdon), which is conventionally included in Paediatrics, and a discussion of Abhidharma.
Historical evidence suggests that spirits were regarded as being highly involved in disease processes in early Tibetan Medicine, arguably more than in the Ayurvedic tradition. Yuthok appears to have adopted some of his approaches from indigenous medical paradigms, but he somewhat limited the scope of their involvement. It is a small minority of diseases that have a spirit component in Tibetan Medicine – but those that do can offer some valuable insights into the intersection of spirits, health, and the environment.
The late Dr. Yang Ga Trarong has done extensive research on the history of the rGyud bZhi, particularly on the source materials that Yuthok used in his compositional process. It’s worth noting that, of these five categories, only Psychosis, Amnesia, and perhaps Possession can be regarded as psychological afflictions. gZa’ Provocation and kLu Provocation are strictly physiological.
Furthermore, ‘Byung po Possession is the most closely modelled on Ayurvedic materials found in the Ashtangahridayasamhita. While Ayurveda touches on Psychosis (Unmāda) and Amnesia (Apasmāra), they are not regarded as having anything to do with spirits. And the last two chapters, on gZa’ and kLu provocation, don’t appear to have any basis in extant Ayurvedic textual traditions. I am naturally most interested in these last two chapters.
Provocation and Conflict
The kLu gDon gSo Ba is particularly interesting, as it includes a kind of preamble that offers a unique perspective on the causes of provocation. Here he is speaking specifically about the causes of mDze nad (a collection of serious lymphatic/cutaneous conditions including leprosy), but there is reason to believe that this represents a broader aetiological model for provocation disorders, potentially derived from indigenous Tibetan tradition.
He writes,
ས་གཉན་རློག་ནས་སྤང་ཐ་ཞིང་དུ་འདྲུ། །ཆུ་གཉན་དཀྲུགས་ནས་ནེའུ་གསིང་རྫིང་དུ་བསྐྱིལ། །ཤིང་གཉན་གཅོད་ཅིང་རྡོ་གཉན་རྩ་བ་འདེགས། །མི་གཙང་ཐབ་གཞོབ་ཤན་དམར་འཇོལ་ཉོག་སྤྱོད། །བན་བོན་ནུས་པ་སྒྲུབ་པའི་ལོང་མེད་ནས། །གཉན་ས་དཀྲུགས་པས་དགྲ་རྣམས་ཐུལ་ལ་རེ། །དེ་ཚེ་ཀླུ་གཉན་ས་བདག་ལྷ་སྲིན་འཁྲུགས། །རེག་མཐོང་ཁ་རླངས་བསམ་པའི་དུག་འཕྲོས་བས། །ཙི་ཏི་ཛྭ་ལ་འབར་བའི་བསྐལ་བ་དར། (144)
“Upturning the earth gnyan by digging up turf and fields,
Disturbing water gnyan by damming waterways and flooding meadows,
Cutting down tree gnyan and uprooting stone gnyan,
Performing wanton acts like burning impure substances,
Contaminating the hearth, killing beings in sensitive places,
Buddhist and Bönpos disturbing nyensas in hopes of subduing their enemies and hastily gaining power.
On such occasions, one disturbs the lu, nyen, sadak, lha, and srin, who spread their toxicity through touch, sight, the vapour of their breath, and recollection – ushering in an era of blazing tsi-ti-dzwa-la.”
Yang Ga Trarong does not identify a source for this text, but it is self-evident that at least the discussion of gnyan cannot have come from Indian traditions, since the gnyan is not an Indian spirit.
Epidemic Infections
This reflects, in many ways, the teachings on epidemic infections found in Tibetan Medicine, which likewise suggest that by provoking the indignation of non-human spirits, encounters with pathogenic ‘droplets’ from their mouths or the toxic vapour of their breath can make people sick. This then results in an infectious disease which can be passed from person to person (rims) without direct spirit influence.
These spirits of disease, or nad kyi bdag, preside over very real physiological diseases, further challenging notions that provocation studies are a form of psychiatry. Furthermore, there is a recurring direct link between these processes and environmental or ecological disturbance – a link that seems to be more closely rooted in Tibetan animistic ontologies than Indian Buddhist or medical philosophy.
Indigenous Influences?
Naturally, it’s quite difficult to establish pre-Buddhist sources for materials like this, but there are some intriguing clues to be found. The gNyan ‘Bum (‘Nyen Collection’) of the Bön Kangyur is a particularly valuable source for indigenous spirit beliefs. This collection is one of four volumes pertaining to spirit affairs, known as the ‘Bum bZhi . These include the kLu ‘Bum, gNyan ‘Bum, Sa bDag ‘Bum, and kTod ‘Bum. Karmay notes that the gNyan ‘Bum was likely codified around the 10thcentury CE, and Daniel Berounský places their composition to somewhere around Pomra, in East Tibet. Many sections closely match materials found in the Dunhuang library, further evidencing the antiquity of the knowledge being presented.
Like many of the other texts, the gNyan ‘Bum features charter myths (rabs) and rituals (gto) pertaining to the gNyan, including some very interesting stories about prehistoric relations between humans and indigenous Tibetan spirits. There is, in general, a much stronger case to be made for the indigeneity of this collection than others, like the kLu ‘Bum.
Mitsen Ngapa’s “actions against nature”
In Jose Cabezón’s Tibetan Ritual, Samten Karmay provides a translation of one particular story centred around a prehistoric man named Mitsen Ngapa, who quite foolishly participates in what Karmay calls ‘actions against nature,’ including ‘cutting down trees; digging up stones from the ground; polluting lakes, springs, and rivers; and hunting wild animals’ (Karmay, 59).
In a rather ecocidal proclamation, Mitsen announces,
‘I will kill hundreds of thousands of the beasts of the white snow mountain.
I will kill hundreds of thousands of snow cocks and grouse of the blue slate mountain.
I will kill hundreds of thousands of beavers and otters of the rivers.
I will cut the trees of the Nyen.
Dig up the stones of the Nyen.
I will plough the land of the Nyen as my field.
I will irrigate my home land with the water of the Nyen.’ (63)
There are clear similarities between this proclamation and the warning in the rGyud bZhi. And just as Yuthok warns, these actions have grave consequences for Mitsen and his livestock, who are afflicted with both disease and disaster, having their souls (bla) stolen by the gNyan and concealed behind nine concentric rings of padlocked walls. Mitsen consults with a gShen priest/shaman, who gives him a list of items and sacrifices he must procure in order to unlock the padlocks. Only once he’s done this are their souls and health restored.
This is not a singular or fringe mythic lineage – in fact it ties into the core charter myth of the ancestral Bön tradition, whereby having sewn discord in the spirited landscape, prehistoric Tibetans were forced to call in knowledgeable gShen priests/shamans to provide Tibetans with suitable ritual methods for averting harm and maintaining balance.
Apology and Restoration
Another text with some notable similarities to the kLu gDon preamble is Karma Chagmé’s 17th century ‘Prayer of Apology to the Earth Lords,’ or the Sa bdag bshags ‘bum bsdus pa, translated here by Adam Pearcy.
ཀྱཻ། བདག་དང་རྒྱུ་སྦྱོར་ཡོན་བདག་གིས། ལྷ་ཀླུ་གཉན་གསུམ་ཁྱེད་རྣམས་ལ། ཕ་མ་སྔ་རབས་འདས་པ་དང་། བུ་ཚ་ཕྱི་རབས་ཡན་ཆད་དུ། ས་གཉན་རྐོས་དང་རྡོ་གཉན་སློང་། ཆུ་གཉན་དཀྲུགས་དང་ཤིང་གཉན་བཅད། དུར་བཏབ་གཤིན་ལས་གང་བྱས་སོགས། མ་རིག་དབང་གིས་ཅི་བགྱིས་པ། མཐོལ་ལོ་བཤགས་སོ་དག་གྱུར་ཅིག
‘Whatever we practitioners and our patrons have done towards the devas, nāgas and nyen spirits, including the actions of our ancestors from the past, and our descendants in the future –
Transgressions, such as digging up the spirits of the earth, raising the spirits of stone, stirring the spirits of water, cutting the spirits of trees, disturbing burial ground and funeral rites, and the like –
Whatever we have done in our ignorance, we hereby declare and confess: may it all be purified!’
Beyond the languaging of harm caused to the gnyan, I think it’s important to note that this is truly an ‘apology,’ rather than a confession. Absolution is achieved not by petitioning the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to cleanse our sins, but rather to apologise to the spirits themselves. To make amends in hope of forging a healthier relationship in the future.
Changing Climates: The Ecologies of Weather-Control
A curious aspect of Tibetan eco-daemonology is the way that it allows for climatic changes to be perceived and responded to as a more-than-human social phenomenon – rather than an uncontrollable ‘natural process’ over which humans have no power. This provokes some interesting questions, particularly as we make our way through the bowels of the Anthropocene.
Some have argued that, because small-scale premodern societies had a far less destructive impact on the planet than our modern industrial world(s), there is reason to question whether this was really a function of values or simple inabilityto create significant change. As Cathy Cantwell notes, ‘If premodern Tibet was ecologically sustainable purely, a) because it was too sparsely populated to make much environmental impact and b) because its culture, although anthropocentric, at least did not actively encourage environmental exploitation, then any attempts to build an ecological ethics on the basis of Tibetan ideology would seem to involve a complete reinterpretation of Tibetan cultural symbolism.’ (Cantwell 2001, p. 112) In other words, assuming that Tibet was ‘ecologically sustainable’ mainly by virtue of its low population density and lack of exploitative ambition, applying Tibetan Buddhism onto modern conversations surrounding the environment requires a certain degree of reinterpretation. Cantwell points to works like those of Joanna Macy as an example of this reinterpretation, namely of Early Buddhist materials.
Indeed, a great deal of modern Tibetan Buddhist ‘environmentalism’ has certainly emerged in modern times, partly out of interactions between Buddhism and the environmentalist movement. The Dalai Lama has been prominently involved in this process.
But there is reason to question whether or not Tibetans truly had a minimal impact on their environment, and more importantly, whether or not they would have seen it that way.
Water Wizards
Droughts and famines have been recorded in Tibet for as long as written records have been kept. In fact, the ability to protect against climatic disaster was a very specific and highly-valued magical ‘skill’. The mentions of Padmasambhava in the sBa bZhed specifically identify him as an ‘itinerant water specialist’ with expertise in ‘water engineering and magic.’
Of course, weather magicians are still a part of Tibetan societies. Ngakpa Yeshe Dorje famously served as the official weather magician of the Dalai Lama for many years. But weather magic is a complicated thing. We may think of them as simply powerful sorcerers or mantra-turners, capable of changing the weather at will through their immense spiritual power. But Buddhist weather-making is a far more relational process, based primarily on interactions between human and non-human beings – often in times of crisis.
Tibetan Famines
Both historical and paleoclimatic data demonstrates that the Central Tibetan river valleys experienced extensive drought and famine from the late 13th to the mid-15th centuries. An account from the Third Karmapa, Rangjung Dorje, written in 1327 speaks directly to this, reporting that people were ‘crying out as they died on the road. A few people ate the flesh of others: a few sold their children for food. Others, wracked with hunger, jumped in the river […] their skeletons were barely covered with the skin that hung off them’ (113). Dorje notes, ‘Rain does not fall […] the harvests are poor, and the little that does grow is carried away by frosts and hail’ (113).
For Rangjung Dorje, this was not a random or uncontrollable occurrence, but rather a specific function of human behaviour and political corruption. Spirit provocation (gdon) was regarded as a key factor, but in these cases it is expcitily humans who act as the primary provocateurs. By disrespecting the environment, even in ostensibly ‘minor’ ways (by today’s standards), Tibetans believed that they could directly impact the climate. Thus, whether or not it was entirely ‘true’ for Tibetans at the time, it was understood that humans play a direct role in the causation of climate crises, as well as their potential mitigation.
The Serpent and the Storm
In Indian tradition, nagas are the primary spirits associated with rain and weather. This is first attested in the early Vedic period, as discussed in the Atharvaveda (ca. 1200-1000 BCE). This role of nagas was expanded upon in later Puranic materials (ca. 300-1000 CE).
In Buddhism, the locus classicus of naga-based weather modification is the Mahāmeghasūtra (‘Great Cloud Sutra’).This important text was immensely popular throughout Asia, sparking weather magic traditions in many Buddhist societies. It came to Tibet sometime in the Imperial Era, will ritual manuals based on it found in the Dunhuang library cave. One such ritual is found in the Dunhuang spell book (pre-10th c. CE) presented in Sam van Schaik’s Buddhist Magic.
The structure of this ritual begins with a peaceful approach – offering medicine and torma in hopes that the nagas will bestow rain with little struggle. If there is no result in 3-7 days, then a more forceful approach is used, whereby the ritualist presses down on the nāgas’ heads with a strong mantra and sprinkle their abode with empowered water. If there is still no result, the nāgas are then beaten with a wooden rod. If this still doesn’t work, a ritual fire is used to incinerate the entire nāga abode as a punishment for their impertinence.
A Spiritual Response to Climate Change?
Weather making became increasingly systematised throughout Tibetan history, with perhaps the most popular manual composed in the 17th century by Karma Chagmé. Chagmé was a famed ritual master and redactor of the Rinchen Trengwa (Rin chen ‘phreng ba) Chöd corpus, based in part on the previous work of Rangjung Dorje and reported visionary encounters with Machig Labdrön (ca. 1055-1154)
In his colophon for the Tshogs las sadhana – the core of the Rin chen ‘phreng ba cycle – he writes, ‘Hold this [Tsogley ritual] and the rain-making ritual as the most important [practices].’ I always found this statement quite interesting, given the otherwise ‘elevated’ positioning of Machig’s tradition. Why would Chagmé be promoting such an ostentibly ‘mundane’ ritual alongside the Tsogley?
It turns out, the 17th century saw a widescale cold and dry period across much of the Northern Hemisphere, which was linked to numerous global crises. In western Tibet at the time, the Guge Kingdom fell to Ladakh after 700 years due, at least in part, to crop failures caused by climate change. Karma Chagmé’s teacher, the 10th Karmapa, would have witnessed these effects during his trip to Kailash in 1629, and it’s reasonable to think that Chagmé may have been responding, in some way, to this crisis. Chagmé wrote other rain-making manuals, as well, including a somewhat more pithy and practical guide to the craft based on numerous sources, potentially in an effort to make this ritual ‘technology’ more readily available to those who needed it.
Overview of The Oral Tradition for Summoning Rain
The Oral Tradition for Summoning Rain in the Chöd Tradition (gCod lugs char ‘bod snyan brgyud) has roughly four major parts:
Preliminary preparations performed in suitable location inhabited by kLu-nāga and other gZhi bdag spirits, with special attention paid to auspicious sites, experiences, and dreams.
‘Overwhelming with Splendour’ (Zil gnon) as Tröma Nagmo to summon local nāgas and gnas bdag.
In new location, main ritual involves capture of spirits, ‘invocation of truth,’ expulsion of weather-disturbers, and binding of rain lords under oath. Rousing compassion in the spirits is notable feature.
Offering of various banquets/feasts and tormas. Includes peaceful and forceful approaches. Tonglen section.
The Art of Persuasion
The Tibetan Buddhist weather wizard does not summon rain merely by willing it, nor by casing spells or propitiating supreme gods. Instead, they summon rain through negotiation, grounded in ongoing relationships between human and non-human beings. The nagas are summoned, propitiated, apologised to, instructed, threatened, and diplomatically negotiated with, appealing to their highly personable characteristics.
Notably, this is not always a friendly negotiation, nor does it need to be to reflect a paradigm of ecological ethics. While this may not align with normative ‘green/environmental’ ethics, it does reflect a radically different starting point from modernist conceptions of an inert ‘natural world’ devoid of agency.
Conclusions
As Cathy Cantwell, Lambert Schmithausen, and many others have noted, it may be possible to construct a kind of Buddhist (or Tibetan Buddhist) ‘environmental ethics,’ but it is likely to a) align rather imperfectly with modern environmentalism and b) require a certain degree of renegotiation. When it comes to the role of nature spirits, Cantwell argues:
‘it is conceivable that fear of the vengeance of earth deities could be integrated into an explicitly ecological ethics’ that could ‘motivate ecological thinking and behaviour’ that aligns with ‘contemporary Green ideas about, “nature striking back”’, but she concludes that ‘it would seem extremely unlikely that any modern form of Buddhist environmentalism would choose to encourage an ideology of angry earth deities taking revenge’
(Cantwell, 116)
While I agree that it does seem unlikely that modern Buddhist movements, particularly in the West, would centre a robust 21st century ‘environmental ethics’ on this basis, and while I would also agree that a narrative centred on revenge and fear of retribution has its limitations, I would argue that a more critical and nuanced approach to Buddhist eco-daemonology would offer us with a wealth of new tools for grappling with the complexities of environmental crises.
The Eco-Daemonological Turn
I argue that we need to move away from strictly psychological, symbolic, and philosophical interpretation of spirit paradigms, and spend more time investigating their interconnectedness with ecological and other environmental phenomena. It would behove us to also acknowledge the transculturality of daemonology, particularly in a modern multicultural world. Daemonology has the fascinating capacity to undermine both anthropocentrism and what Victor Mair calls the ‘academic pathology’ of ‘extreme indigenousness.’
Spirits are not one-dimensional – they are very much the denizens of the crossroads, including those of a cultural, biological, geographical, and ecological nature. In my opinion, perhaps the greatest asset afforded by eco-daemonology is a capacity for human beings to grapple with the personhood of non-human beings who may, at first glance, appear to be very different from ourselves. Through spirit paradigms, we can accommodate the welfare and needs of a mountain, river, lake, forest, tree, or sprawling cliff face – and more importantly we can relate to these phenomena on an emotional, and not just theoretical, level.
Taking Indigenous Knowledge Seriously
Shifting the focus away from anthropocentrism, and indeed even away from anthropology, and towards the non-human beings themselves is itself a process of taking indigenous knowledge seriously. It has become all-too common for indigenous and traditional forms of ecological knowledge to be casually written off as a ‘cultural’ product, rather than a form of legitimate embodied knowledge. It is not the same thing as circle dancing, and rather than focusing on honouring the finger pointing to the sky, it is far more meaningful for us to seriously consider looking to where it is pointing.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) must be understood on its own grounds, rather than being forcefully and uncritically squeezed into normative ‘ecological’ and ‘environmental’ paradigms. To do this, we need to get over a certain degree of preconditioning informed by our own cultural and scientific biases. When it comes to Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist traditions, it’s essential that we acknowledge some degree of animistic thought as an innate component. Nature spirits are not cultural relics or superstitious bathwater – the Buddha himself (whoever ‘he’ was) was most certainly concerned about the welfare of non-human spirits, including and especially those most vulnerable to harm by humans.
A Critical Approach
All that said, it’s important to take a critical approach to the very notion of ‘nature’ – and its existential sundering from ‘culture’ – in modern western society. Cantwell notes that Tibetan Buddhism offers some valuable models for going beyond this ‘nature/culture’ binary, while also acknowledging that no such duality exists in Tibetan cultural and linguistic traditions,
But there are elements of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology which can be critically analysed for their potential impact on non-human beings and environments. There is no small degree of subtle anthropocentrism, and potentially also zoocentrism, to pick apart, and the detrimental impact on locales like the once-densely forested mountains surrounding Samye are worth investigating. The role of charter myths like the Padmasambhava mythos and the ‘taming of the srin mo’ should also be more deeply investigated as a method of establishing institutional dominion over the human and non-human landscapes of Tibet.
Tales of the Anthropocene
In light of our contemporary climatic and ecological crises, it is essential that we investigate alternative ways of conceptualising humanity’s place in a more-than-human world. We need new stories – and indeed often old stories – to help us see our challenges more clearly. For many reasons, it is critical that this involves indigenous, subaltern, pre-modern, and non-modern perspectives, just as it must involve more acute attention paid to non-human beings. Investing other planetary forces and our own non-human biological kin with agency, awareness, and intrinsic value can help us move away from anthropocentric exploitation and disregard, inspiring other ways of living in dynamic relationship with others in a more-than-human world. As Bruno Latour writes in his 2017 essay on ‘How not to (de-)animate nature,’ in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime:
“Animation is the essential phenomenon; and deanimation is the superficial, auxiliary, polemical, and often defensive phenomenon. One of the great enigmas of Western history is not that ‘there are still people who naïve enough to believe in animism,’ but that many people still hold the rather naïve belief in a supposedly deanimated ‘material world.’”
On Supernaturalism
In closing – because I certainly couldn't have delivered a lecture at Oxford without mentioning J.R.R. Tolkien – I want to share a quote from the Professor that I find quite relevant to this discussion, from his essay On Fairy-Stories. He writes,
‘Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural; whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such as their doom.’ (On Fairy-Stories, 28)
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