Hartmann Dissertation 5.5.20
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To See a Mountain: Writing, Place, and Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Literature The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hartmann, Catherine Anne. 2020. To See a Mountain: Writing, Place, and Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37365929 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2020 Catherine Anne Hartmann All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Janet Gyatso Catherine Anne Hartmann To See a Mountain: Writing, Place, and Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Literature Abstract Buddhist thought diagnoses human suffering as the result of a fundamental misperception of reality. As such, Buddhists have developed practices that aim to replace or improve ordinary ways of seeing the world. In Tibet, one such practice is pilgrimage to holy mountains. This dissertation explores this application of the Buddhist project to restructure perceptual experience. Tibetan pilgrimage is structured around the idea that the holy mountain is actually a wondrous palace for an enlightened deity. Of course, most people do not typically see it in that way, but the goal for pilgrims is to learn to see the mountain as a sacred palace through the transformation of their perception. This project asks how Tibetan texts attempted to transform perception, and explores the role of poetic language, as well as the physical landscape itself, in doing so. The project engages a number of different types of pilgrimage texts—songs and letters of advice for pilgrims, founding narratives of pilgrimage mountains, polemics about the nature of pilgrimage, pilgrimage guides to specific holy places, and a pilgrim diary—which span a time period from 1200 to the 1950s. In each case, it asks how these works approach the problem of training people to see the holy place’s theoretically invisible wonders. This dissertation argues that Tibetan pilgrimage texts treat perception as an active process that is malleable and subject to reframing and reinterpretation, and that they develop techniques whereby the pilgrim works with the material world in order to transform perception. Such iii techniques, which I refer to as “practices of seeing,” include specialiZed forms of reading the landscape for signs, practices of writing and reading, and an imaginative juxtaposition of physical and idealized landscapes. These practices facilitate what I call “co-seeing,” a state in which the pilgrim sees the site in two ways at once; that is, they see it in one way with their ordinary perception and in another quite different way in their mind’s eye. Practices of seeing thereby help the pilgrim to elide the gap between ordinary perception and extraordinary vision, thus creating the conditions for potentially transformative religious experiences. iv Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents.................................................................................................................. v Acknowledgements............................................................................................................... viii Technical Note...................................................................................................................... xii Introduction.......................................................................................................................... 1 The Fault Lies with the Blind Man................................................................................ 1 Central Issues................................................................................................................. 9 Practices of Seeing........................................................................................................ 15 Textual Sources............................................................................................................. 20 Theory and Method....................................................................................................... 27 Vision and Culture................................................................................................ 28 Place and Materiality............................................................................................ 32 Texts, Practices, Readers...................................................................................... 37 Contributions to Scholarship......................................................................................... 40 Chapter Outline............................................................................................................. 46 Chapter One: Pilgrimage in Buddhism............................................................................. 50 Prostrating to Lhasa....................................................................................................... 50 Pilgrimage in the Pali Canon......................................................................................... 51 Pilgrimage and Holy Places in Early Buddhism........................................................... 54 Tantric Pilgrimage........................................................................................................ 57 Pilgrimage in the Broader Buddhist World................................................................... 61 Tibetan Pilgrimage........................................................................................................ 62 The History and Prehistory of Tibetan Pilgrimage............................................... 64 Destinations in Tibetan Pilgrimage....................................................................... 66 Tantric Pilgrimage in Tibet................................................................................... 72 Opening the Doors of the Holy Place.................................................................... 74 The Power and Blessings of Pilgrimage Sites....................................................... 75 Social, Political, and Economic Dimensions of Pilgrimage.................................. 80 Conclusion..................................................................................................................... 83 Chapter Two: How to See on Pilgrimage.......................................................................... 86 Introduction.................................................................................................................... 86 Buddhist Approaches to Perception............................................................................... 88 Tibetan Terms for Visual Perception............................................................................. 97 What Does it Mean to See? ........................................................................................... 106 The Body and Mind on Pilgrimage................................................................................ 109 Faith and Devotion......................................................................................................... 118 Conclusion..................................................................................................................... 121 Chapter Three: Against Pilgrimage: Tibetan Ambivalence about Engaging External Places................................................... 124 v Introduction................................................................................................................. 124 Ambivalence about ValoriZing Specific Places........................................................... 128 Ambivalence about Pilgrimage to External Places...................................................... 131 Rejections of Pilgrimage.............................................................................................. 134 External and Internal in Tantric Pilgrimage................................................................. 146 Ambivalence and the Dangers of Pilgrimage.............................................................. 153 Conclusion................................................................................................................... 156 Chapter Four: Not Even Elephants: Scripture, Language, and Perception in the Controversy Over Kailash...................... 158 Opening Questions....................................................................................................... 158 Textual Sources.................................................................................................... 162 Methodological Approach................................................................................... 167 Historical and Political Context for These Debates............................................. 168 One Thing, Many Appearances................................................................................... 171 Material Reality........................................................................................................... 191 Religious Language..................................................................................................... 202 Why Go on Pilgrimage