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Keeping the Faith: Divine Protection and Flood Prevention in Modern Buddhist Ladakh*,**

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Keeping the Faith: Divine Protection and Flood Prevention in Modern Buddhist Ladakh*,** WORLDVIEWS Worldviews 17 (2013) 103–114 brill.com/wo Keeping the Faith: Divine Protection and Flood Prevention in Modern Buddhist Ladakh*,** Andrea Butcher Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen 38 Fore Street, North Tawton, Devon AB24 3FX, UK [email protected] Abstract In August 2010 the Himalayan Region of Ladakh, Northwest India, experienced severe flash- flooding and mudslides, causing widespread death and destruction. The causes cited were climate change, karmic retribution, and the wrath of an agentive sentient landscape. Ladakhis construct, order and maintain the physical and moral universe through religious engagement with this landscape. The Buddhist monastic incumbents—the traditional mediators between the human world and the sentient landscape—explain supernatural retribution as the result of karmic demerit that requires ritual intervention. Social, economic, and material transformations have distorted the proper order, generating a physically and morally unfamiliar landscape. As a result, the mountain deities that act as guardians and protectors of the land below are confused and angry, sending destructive water to show their displeasure. Thus, the locally-contextualized response demonstrates the agency of the mountain gods in establishing a moral universe whereby water can give life and destroy it. Keywords tantric divination; moral universe; chthonic landscape; protection; development Taklha Wangchuk’s Prophecy In early 2010, the residents of the Lalok valley of Changthang, Ladakh requested Taklha Wangchuk, local protector deity and patron of the Drigung Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, to visit through his oracle. The deity complained that increasing ritual and physical pollution in * This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Fredrick Williamson Memorial Fund. ** Transcription of local terms: throughout I have transcribed indigenous terms according to Ladakhi pronunciation. I italicize nouns, but not personal names. Indigenous pronuncia- tions are transcribed in the main body of text, with written transcription as Wylie’s (1959) “A Standard System of Tibetan Transcription” HJAS, 22: 261-267 included as footnotes. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/15685357-01702002 <UN> <UN> 104 A. Butcher / Worldviews 17 (2013) 103–114 Ladakh was sullying the abodes of the gods—the lha—and warned that they were angry. He instructed those present that in order to restore good relations, Ladakhis should perform extensive sangsol1—ritual offerings of burnt juniper—to purify the atmosphere and “remove” the dirt from the gods’ shrines. Under the auspices of Togdan Rinpoche, the Lalok-born head of the Drigung Kagyu in Ladakh, the people of the area performed the pre- scribed ritual action, and a representative was dispatched to the district capital Leh to warn the Ladakhi Buddhist Association (LBA) of the oracle’s prophecy and ritual prescription. The LBA took no action. Later that sum- mer, villages on the banks of the Indus River were devastated by severe flash flooding and mudslides, the extent of which had not been witnessed according to recent memory. Whilst limited in comparison with the devas- tation occurring in Pakistan further downstream, for the people of Ladakh, this was an unprecedented event, leading to massive loss of life and exten- sive damage and destruction to property and farmland.2 The Lalok valley was unaffected, which its residents believe to be a result of the ritual action undertaken there. Those who were affected angrily insisted that the LBA arrange the necessary sangsol immediately to prevent further misfortune, and Ladakhis everywhere lamented the decline in moral values: people are no longer good, they no longer listen to the lha, they behave incorrectly. “Taklha Wangchuk is no ordinary village god,” Ladakhis began to say. “He is a powerful srungma3 (guardian) and his prophecies are accurate. We should respect him.” This tale emphasizes the interdependence between Ladakhi moral dis- course and the maintenance of correct order, indicated by the condition of water as a life-giving and a life-destroying element. Commercial endeavour, disaster prevention models, and empirical ecology discourse that con- structs the natural world through precise scientific measurement, all oper- ate to dislocate people’s cultural encounters with water and nature (Cruikshank 2005); therefore, narratives linking climate change with sha- manic belief and pollution concerns help to reveal the localized and con- textualized explanations of disaster and environmental management in 1) bsangs gsol. 2) In its Disaster Management Plan for 2011-2012, The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council’s official figures give the total loss of life for the Leh District as 233, with 424 people injured and approximately 79 people unaccounted for. The totals include foreign tourists, but do not account for the migrant workers from the states of Bihar and Jharkhand, or from Nepal. 3) srung ma. <UN> <UN> A. Butcher / Worldviews 17 (2013) 103–114 105 transforming landscapes in ways that empirical ecology studies cannot accommodate. In Ladakh, knowledge of the state, flow, and abundance of water is produced through particular ways of knowing the sentient land- scape and its susceptibility to polluting practices. Social, economic, and religious changes are ushering in new experiences of pollution, creating events seen as impacting upon abodes and temperaments of water spirits. Thus, ritual experts are facing new challenges for maintaining correct human relations with the spirit world, for diagnosing the removal of pollu- tion, and restoring and maintaining order. In contemporary Ladakh, there- fore, water’s flow and movement are used to explain the transformations initiated by the incursion of the “modern” world into the region and of local and religious ambivalence towards development. This paper considers human encounters with the guardians of water, ritual authority and inno- vation in responses towards economic progress, climate change, and the dynamics of locally-owned disaster prevention strategies. Ladakh is a high altitude desert region in India’s northern-most state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Ladakh is divided into the districts of Leh and Kargil, with predominant Buddhist and Muslim populations respectively, and it is the Buddhist response I examine here. The region has short but hot summers with a commensurately brief agricultural season, and long, cold winters. Located in the rain shadow of the high Himalaya, Ladakh receives little rainfall. Agriculture, a major source of income and material wealth for Ladakhis, is dependent upon glacial snowmelt for irrigation; therefore the “proper” flow of water is critical, and the management and control of water is an object of ritual activity. Social agency in Ladakh is determined by rela- tionships with a living landscape, or chthonic beings, that control the flow of water; and human behavior is directed towards keeping these relation- ships pure. Correct social, moral and ritual activity determines the condi- tion of water, with a disturbed, unnatural state being attributed to incorrect human behavior. Water may become sparse as the flow is withheld, leaving the land dry and barren; or it becomes a flood, chulok,4 a destructive force that destroys villages and fields, and takes life. Monastic ritual specialists of sufficient merit, however, can use their expertise and innovation to medi- ate between humans and chthonic beings, ensuring their protection and diverting disaster. Religious and productive life in Ladakh is thus depen- dent upon the protection and participation of the beings who act as guard- ians of territorial domains. They are the focus of Buddhist offering and 4) chu log. <UN> <UN> 106 A. Butcher / Worldviews 17 (2013) 103–114 pacification, leading Mills to assert that, rather than “people” being the focus of Buddhist authority, “it is instead a matrix of chthonic forces and sources of symbolic power, within which ‘people’ . are both constituted and embedded” (Mills 2003: 243).5 The Flood and Its Causes The meteorological explanation for the flood describes an intensive con- vective system developing in the easterly current associated with the mon- soon conditions, which had moved up from Nepal and the Indian plains, intensifying as it did so before bursting over the region (Leh Disaster Management Plan 2011: 16). Due to the usual state of low rainfall, the event was considered an anomaly, and in scientific discussions was generally attributed as a sign of climate instability. The authoritative narratives of the monastic scholarly elite asserted that the flood was borne from karmic con- sequence, lasgyudas,6 and visits from the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Twelfth Drukchen Rinpoche (head of the Drukpa Kagyu School) gave great comfort to Ladakhis, particularly the more traumatized victims. Both told Ladakhis they had borne the karmic consequences of actions taken in pre- vious lives, that with this misfortune their suffering had been dispelled, and now they could begin building better lives both materially and spiritually. The demotic narrative cited the agents of the flood to be the lha-lu,7 and the sadag8: the mountain gods, water spirits, and earth guardians that inhabit the mountains, trees, rocks and water. The lha-lu , the majority of my respondents declared, sent the flood as retribution for the increase in ritual and physical pollution, and a decline in moral values. They declared it to be a
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