6.1 “Wherever I travel I can’t wait to rush home!”

Hwadan Tashi () and Akhu Shampa () were my initial documentary subjects. Hwadan Tashi, Akhu Shampa’s nephew, is a tulku – the reincarnation of the late Siddhi Lama ( 1919 – 2000), a visionary master in the Nyingma order. Akhu Shampa, besides being Hwadan Tashi’s uncle, is also his yongzin (), or sutra reading instructor, at their monastery. In 2003 I attended the three-year-old Tulku Hwadan Tashi’s enthronement. At the time I was doing fieldwork with a community of Han Chinese students of the late Siddhi Lama (Smyer Yu 2011, 38 – 45) and since that time I have continued to visit Hwadan Tashi’s monastery. In the winter of 2011 Akhu Shampa asked me if I would join his pilgrimage with Hwadan Tashi to Amne Machen in the coming summer. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as I was planning a documentary project on the eco-religious aspect of the Tibetan landscape and I was exhilarated when Akhu Shampa agreed that the pilgrimage could feature in the documentary.

My goal was not to document our trip in a “run & gun” style, with a shoulder-mounted HD camera following the “actions” and “happenings.” Besides the human activities of a pilgrimage, the landscape of Amne Machen was a critical part of my intended film. It is an epic landscape in both photogenic and folkloric senses; therefore, long takes of landscape scenes and contemplative narratives of the human subjects were planned in my primary documentary framing. There was no strict boundary between who would be before the camera and who behind it. Both Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi participated in filming the landscape at Amne Machen. After our first day on the outskirts of Amne Machen, they naturally assumed themselves into the roles of both pilgrims and filmmakers. What I learned from the first three days was a technical realization and a documentary theme shift. Technically wide angle lenses ranging from 11mm to 21mm were most capable of capturing the magnificence of the mountains and human-place connectivity in which place was not “left behind” as background but was a critical participant in both pilgrimage and documentary making. Thematically during the first three days, each time we filmed or viewed footage, I saw the contemplative, awe-filled, and emotional moments of both Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi. Obviously the physical place of Amne Machen touched them in the viewfinder as well as within their direct perception. I then decided to shift my thematic focus from collecting folk stories of the mountain god to the affective and emotional layers of the mountain landscape mediated through the narratives and physical movements of Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi.

In the late afternoon of the third day, when we were setting up the camera for a few shots of a cave entrance at Jomo Yang-ra ( a cave meditation site) where tantric saints such as Tangdong Gyalpo (), Lhalong Paldor ( ), and the late Siddhi Lama, undertook solitary practices, Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi were fifty yards away adding rocks to the Parents’ Kindness Cairn (). Hwadan Tashi’s giggling echoed in the narrow valley. We moved the camera to the entrance of Ani Sangmo’s Meditation Cave ( ), another cave in which the late Siddhi Lama is said to have meditated, Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi joined us. The camera began to roll when Hwadan Tashi entered the cave while Akhu Shampa stood at the entrance and encouraged him to enter slowly. Admittedly I was hoping to capture some translife connection between Hwadan Tashi and his previous incarnation, akin to how the young Dalai Lama claims the ritual paraphernalia of his predecessor affected him, as shown in the film Kundun.

It appeared that nothing like that happened. The cave was so narrow that I had a hard time imagining how anyone could meditate in there, and with its narrowness and inconvenient entry, I recalled local pilgrimage folklore which stated that if one enters and exits smoothly, one is karmically clean; otherwise, one is stricken with hindrances derived from past deeds of defilement. Hwadan Tashi merrily re-emerged from the exit with a huge grin on his face and we commenced to wrap up. A few minutes later when everyone was moving the gear to a different cave, he quietly stood alone in front of Ani Sangmo’s Meditation Cave with tears running down his cheeks. Our log keeper quietly motioned for us to film the emotional moment. Soon Akhu Shampa came over to comfort him, “Are you all right?” Tears continued to pour out of Hwadan Tashi’s eyes. Seeing it might be best to pause for Hwadan Tashi’s sake, it was also noted that three of the crew members from Beijing had started feeling the effects of high altitude sickness. Feeling responsible for Hwadan Tashi’s “fatigue,” as well as the burden of the documentary schedule, I walked to a narrow, rapidly flowing river, relieved when my senses were enveloped in the roaring sound of the rapids that muffled the contending chatter in my head.

About thirty minutes later Akhu Shampa joined me at the riverbank and told me that Hwadan Tashi had cried not because, as we had assumed, he was fatigued, but because of the release an emotional buildup that I had not noticed for the previous three days. Toward the end of the first day after we filmed their sangchod () or mountain god offering recitation, Hwadan Tashi had told Akhu Shampa that he was feeling sad for no reason. According to Akhu Shampa this had happened before, when Hwadan Tashi visited the late Siddhi Lama’s residence and when he contemplated the pinkish birthmark on his right palm which is identical to that of his predecessor. However, Hwadan Tashi himself did not confide in Akhu Shampa explicitly about why he had shed tears in front of Ani Sangmo’s Meditation Cave. I could only think and imagine along with Akhu Shampa’s assessment that Hwadan Tashi was indeed having a past-life recollection. If I were twelve-year-old Hwadan Tashi, I would feel awed but terrified to envision myself in the body of an old and spiritually fierce man who once dwelled in the darkness of the cave. This is rather a theatrical imagination of mine without confirmation from Hwadan Tashi; however, everyone witnessed his tears when he was staring at the cave. I could at least assume it was a place-induced emotional moment, meaning that the site of the cave triggered the young lama’s emotional reaction.

On the same evening, before sunset, I set up a filmed interview session with Akhu Shampa in front of another cave, hoping he would share more of his thoughts and feelings originating from this pilgrimage. He began with his Buddhist vision of Amne Machen. As a monk he opposed the idea that Amne Machen should be worshipped as a worldly god () who is as sentient as humans are. Akhu Shampa made it clear in the beginning of the interview, “We can’t invoke worldly gods to help us to become enlightened…Perhaps the gods may help you with longevity, happiness, and wealth in this lifetime, but it is futile if you entrust your future lives and your path to the Pureland to these gods.” Akhu Shampa’s preferred vision of Amne Machen is not a god bound by the Earth but is an enlightened being in but not of the world. To be specific, Akhu Shampa sees Amne Machen as a Bodhisattva at the Tenth-Stage or chugye dren () translated as “Dharma cloud” and referring to the highest ground of Bodhisattvahood. According to the Buddhist canonic definition, a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva can spread Buddha Dharma like rainfall to reach every sentient being under the sky (Cleary 1993, 384). It was not surprising that Akhu Shampa, as a Bhikkhu, reinforced this vision of Amne Machen, as he stated at the outset of the interview, “As a monk, I only live in accordance with Buddha Dharma, not with our folklore.” He then emphasized that the seat of Amne Machen is the Dharma Realm of Avalokiteshvara; however he did not affirm whether or not Amne Machen, the mountain god, is an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara. Among Amdowas, Amne Machen’s Buddhist status is widely acknowledged; however, his most popular identities are as a wealth god, a warrior god, an ancestral god, a Dharma protector, and a soul mountain. Akhu Shampa’s initial narrative of Amne Machen put a limit on his reverence for the mountain god merely as an enlightened Buddhist.

Akhu Shampa is one of many Tibetans who prefer to see Amne Machen as a transcendentally pure Bodhisattva beyond and above the worldliness of sentient beings; however, the Buddhist religiosity of Amne Machen has its own continuity inherently woven into the ecological system and the psychic domain of local people and the environment. The Buddhist identity of Amne Machen is young in comparison with its geological evolution, environmental significance, and pre-Buddhist religious meanings.

I am, as an outsider, not able to see Amne Machen as a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva who precipitates Dharma rain; however, from an ecological perspective, I can conceive of Amne Machen as a rainmaker, a snowmaker, and an icemaker, as it is most definitely a water-gathering mountain. Water in different forms – ice, snow, clouds, fog, rain, and rivers – envelopes and saturates Amne Machen. The sound of water is omnipresent. Together with the sound of wind it travels in the air and reverberates in one’s eardrums day and night. The ecological manifestations of Amne Machen’s “Dharma Rain” show the fecund potency of Amne Machen. When we were at the foot of the mountain range, we frequently saw herds of wild goats and deer grazing on the mountain slopes. When we entered deeper into the mountainous landscape, we saw thick bushes, stands of forest, lone red foxes, hares, hawks, and different rodent species. What amazed our recordist and me was the “water music” generated by a few small underground rivers we accidently found, evidence that the mountainous landscape is saturated with water above and beneath the surface of the Earth. The abundance of water as a primary sustaining natural force that benefits the flora and fauna at Amne Machen compels me to recognize the mountain deity as a fertility god.

I do not intend to overlook the Buddhist significance of Amne Machen; however, from both ecological and mythological perspectives, the Amne Machen range appears to be a place full of life-sustaining elements and a supernatural being in charge of the reproduction of countless species. Ecologically Amne Machen is an important part of the Three-Rivers Source Region. The megatons of water released from the area feed into the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Lanchang River (Mekong River). If Amne Machen is a Bodhisattva, he is a “Water Bodhisattva.”

In Wang Wenying’s geological survey, the Amne Machen area has a total of 150 square kilometers of glaciers, which is translated into a water storage capacity of approximately 14 billion cubic meters (Wang 1983, 384). The pre-Buddhist mythology of Amne Machen more realistically translates this life-sustaining power into a set of fertility-oriented eulogies emphasizing the mountain god’s fecund potency bestowed to all life forms within his domain. For instance, the ritual text, titled “Manyan Bomra [another name for Amne Machen] Cleansing Prayers” (), emphasizes that human desires are endless like the sky, but among them the desire for fertility is paramount (Caibei 2012, 183). The ecosphere of Amne Machen has sustained generations of Tibetans in Golok and the surrounding watershed.

As our conversation went deeper, Akhu Shampa showed much affection to Amne Machen as the landmark of his homeland – Golok. His narrative expressed more about the ecological elements of Amne Machen than Buddhist doctrines on the mountain range. From his tone I sensed a homesickness when he talked about his travels outside Golok:

In this narrative, home sets the precedence of Akhu Shampa’s comparisons of Golok with India, Nepal, and the cities of China. It is the center of his life to which he feels he must return. In this age of globalization it is common for people to move from their homelands, with many seeming to prefer uprooting themselves from them rather than growing deeper roots. However, in the case of Akhu Shampa, home is obviously synonymous with rootedness cemented with a deep emotional attachment. As Relph puts it in his study of place, such attachment “constitutes our roots in places; and the familiarity that this involves is not just a detailed knowledge, but a sense of deep care and concern for that place” (Relph 1976, 37). Hearing Akhu Shampa’s sentiments I felt that in preparing for travel he already missed home before he even left it. The emotional and psychological significance of home is of course natural and obvious, but I must emphasize that when Akhu Shampa expressed his strong feelings toward his home, he was sitting outside a cave overlooking a river and a valley covered by lush green grass. He was physically environed in Amne Machen. In this context home enters his body-consciousness as a concrete ecological environment and a pilgrimage site. At the same time I also wonder what he would say about home while standing in the middle of the township of Machen, the capital of Golok Prefecture which is being modernized and rapidly expanding with new buildings and asphalt streets. Would that be what he misses about home? I prefer to understand what he said in a pilgrimage context: the landscape of Amne Machen was drawing out his place-induced emotion.

Pilgrimage, in this case, is an activity that incorporates meaning deeper than the surface of the sacred landscape where legacies of the past saints are found and on which the abodes of gods and spirits are marked; the path of pilgrimage is not only physical. When the pilgrim walks in the landscape, it unfolds an “atlas of emotion” or an “emotional cartography” (Bruno 2002, 2) that it is not merely a two-dimensional map but which moves with the moving body and mind of the pilgrim. Emotion and motion are inherently entwined in a mutual dependency. The moving body moves the mind with all sense-scapes (Tilley 2010, 27–28) allowing the pilgrim to identify sacred sites that receive his homage. In the meantime the dyad of the moving landscape and the moving body-mind triggers emotional responses in the pilgrim to the landscape itself. From an anthropological perspective, the pilgrimage in this case is not merely the process of the emergence of what Turner calls “communitas” or the “essential-we relationship” among pilgrims (Turner 1974, 47) that is a human-oriented spiritual bonding. It also incorporates a place-human communitas. Therein, pilgrimage-inspiring places are not merely the vessel of a sacred person or a sacred event such as a chapel or temple might imply, but they have a life of their own, a combination of geological forces, ecological elements, aesthetically pleasing or inspiring ambience, and, in some places, earth-gods like Amne Machen. In this regard, the landscape of Amne Machen is seen as the organic body of a god. The pilgrim moves on the “skin” of Amne Machen. Both the pilgrim and Amne Machen touch one another with outer tactility and inner emotionality. The terrain of the pilgrimage is a geopsychic terrain – with the landscape having its own “soul” in constant conversation with that of the pilgrim.

It is clear that in the eyes of Akhu Shampa, Amne Machen is the monumental mark of Golok, his homeland. Zemgyab (), his cousin and a well-known folk singer in Golok, was our recordist’s assistant and when we finished filming the interview with Akhu Shampa he began humming a tune before he went to sleep. Early the next morning, while waiting for the predawn light to illuminate Amne Gyag (), a ridge named after King Gesar’s horse whip, we heard him singing his new song in the tent. The melody cut through the thick braid of clouds floating above the valley toward Mayim Dorje Rdolgyal () or Queen’s Peak, as though his song was herding the clouds as an offering to Amne Machen’s mother. After we completed our pre-dawn landscape filming, I asked him to share the lyrics of his composition:

These lyrics could be taken as yet another creative work about Tibetans’ own imagining of their homeland (Brauen 2004, 132); however, understanding the words and hearing the tune in the landscape of Amne Machen required no stretch of the imagination to comprehend their connection with reality; the words and the tune were naturally part of the mountain landscape that we were physically and photographically experiencing. The morning wind was present in the thick white clouds blanketing the bodies of the mountains in the south and also calmly moving down into the valley. The landscape, just as Zemgyab sang, was the field of my vision: the seeing and the seen were inseparable from each other. Later in the day as a rainstorm approached, violent winds disrupted the calmness of the clouds resting on the mountains. The clouds swirled and danced and included us, not as bystanders, but as an integral part of the meteorological motion of wind which tore the clouds into disarray, like a spiderweb hanging in the sky awaiting its absorption into the massive, incoming, dark storm clouds. In its sublime beauty, this was more poetically potent than Zemgyab’s lyrics but I understood what, in this landscape, inspired the emotions embedded in them.

6.2 “You know the origin of my ancestors”

With the exception of Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi, none of our Tibetan crew had previously been to Golok; however, this did not mean that they had no knowledge of Amne Machen. Each of them, in one way or another, had connected Amne Machen with the mountain gods in his or her home village. This pilgrimage often seemed to be a homecoming to them, as though they were about to meet a relative about whom they had already heard a great deal. Jigmed, our second camera operator, was the loudest among his peers in his dash to the glacier at Queen’s Peak, hollering, “Lhagyal-lo [ gods win]!” He was the first to reach the glacier and roll on the ice. He was the one leading everyone else in and out of different crevices in the glacier. Seen from the ridge from which we ran to it, the glacier looked like a thin ice sheet, but as soon as we approached it, the “sheet” became an immensely mesmerizing wavy field of ice humps, walls, and hills, stretching from the foot of Queen’s Peak into the valley. A glacier makes its own music when wind rushes over the surface and enters the nooks and crannies of the ice. There was also the dripping of melting ice echoing inside the ice walls that made us quiet down. Seeing the offerings left by previous pilgrims, including ritual objects and small pieces of jewelry in the crevices of the ice and on the black-graveled edges where the snowmelt sinks into the mountain and flows into the watershed caused our initial celebratory moment to evolve into a mood of outward silence and inward commemorative exchange with the meaning of the place.

After we retreated back up to the ridge from the glacier, I conversed with Jigmed while we were immersed in the breathtaking landscape:

Jigmed made Herdsman as a graduate student. The twenty-minute production, filmed with his HD camera is about a young herdsman who loses his horse and family’s sheep when he falls asleep in the tall, autumn grass. With his brother playing the protagonist, the film was shot on Jigmed’s family’s pastoral ground outside Chapcha, the capital city of Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Jigmed sets the golden landscape as center of his cinematic gravity toward which everything returns: the protagonist falls asleep on horseback and comically stays blissfully asleep even as he falls to the ground; two young thieves are attracted to the sheep grazing in the expanse of grass; and Jigmed’s camera tilts from the sky to the grass on which the protagonist happily snoozes. The film depicts a nomadic life in an elemental fashion: a landscape of tall grass with snow mountains on the horizon, the blue sky, grazing sheep, and the idyllic mood of the protagonist. Everything appears paradisiacal except the theft. Viewers are shown how home is the coziest place and that one can lose everything else but the land itself.

Jigmed’s Amne Machen-inspired wish to make a film of Tibet’s past coincides with a cultural trend seen among Tibetan students, writers, and artists in urban China who find that seeking their ancestral roots and revisiting their birthplace are integral to their creativity. At Amne Machen, Jigmed’s heightened energy was contagious to his peers. Zemgyab was not the only lyric writer among us. When we were at the Queen’s Peak, Tenzin, our recordist who was a classmate of Jigmed, asked Zemgyab to compose a tune for the lyrics he had written over the last two days, titled “You Know”:

Unlike Jigmed, Tenzin is more introverted. At Amne Machen, he often wrote in his notebook before going to sleep. In the lyrics he shared with me, the invoked names are simultaneously the names of gods and ancient kings and ministers as well as the mountains themselves. Except for Yarlharshampo , which is located in the Central Tibet, all the other mountains/mountain gods called upon are found in the Amne Machen range. For instance, Akhu Shampa described Gethung Bragdkar, King Gesar’s minister, thusly “Longpu [minister] Gethung has a white face. His eyebrows and mustache curl upward. He raises his right hand like a treasure-flame and his left hand holds a wish-fulfilling treasure. He sits cross-legged and his Dharma body is red. On his forehead there’s the Sanskrit word ‘sheh’.”

Coinciding with the mountain folklore in Amdo, Amne Machen, along with other mountain deities in Tenzin’s lyrics, is an ancestor god and a warrior god. In these stories his Buddhist identity is not emphasized as it was in Akhu Shampa’s narratives. Both Jigmed’s spirited communication with Amne Machen and Tenzin’s invocation of his ancient ancestors through Amne Machen are illustrative of a unique place-human relationship that is commemorative in nature. The crew members’ pilgrimage experience was a remembering process but it was not a personal journey alone. It is commemorative in the sense that everyone was in a “co-remembering” (Casey 2000, xi) mode of being when walking on the same paths, touching and being touched by the same landscape, and filming and being filmed by each other at the same sacred sites of Amne Machen. What was being commemorated in the mountain was a “place memory,” which refers to “the fact that concrete places retain the past in a way that can be reanimated by our remembering them” (Casey 2000, xi). In this regard, Amne Machen is both a place and a memory. In the co-remembering moments of Jigmed, Tenzin and others, the mountains were animated as mountain gods through the remembering and retelling of their stories. Memory was thus reanimated and no longer stored in the remote past or deep under the crust of the human mindscape; instead, it is and was embodied in Amne Machen. Amne Machen then is a triune whole, a god, a place, and a time (in memory). The nexus of time and place embodied in Amne Machen, in my view, can be regarded as a distinct kind of timelessness. The memory of Tibetans’ ancestral past is embodied in Amne Machen in what I would call “a present past” to each generation of local people. It might also be seen as a “time gate” through which the past emerges into the present or the present returns to the past, a mountain-as-time-machine that is antecedently grounded in a place as a geological location and a cultural monument marking the place-based identity of Tibetans of the region.

Amne Machen as a monument is not a human construction but a natural geological formation that is imbued with a wealth of human cultural meanings. This magnificent monument is exemplary of how an aspect of nature “naturalizes” a cultural memory and how this cultural memory “culturalizes” this unique natural landscape. The division between “nature” and “culture” in this case is dissolved as each converts the other into its own mode of being. The mountain is animated as a deity, as an ageless super-human being embodying human memory, while generations of its human counterparts incessantly establish their communion with it by commemorating and cherishing their ancestral past with the mountain and the mountain god. Like Ingold and Tilley, I then also say landscape is storied (Ingold 2011, 142) and thus has a biography (Tilley 1994, 33), which is inherently part of human mythical and historical memory. In many ways, such a place-biography or a biographed-place is an embodied story of how the union of gods and humans has sustained the bond between place and human.

The monumentality of Amne Machen, in this regard, affords a combined human cultural functionality of “marking,” “referencing,” and “temporality” (Tilley 2010, 38). Its land-marking significance does not stop in its physically awesome magnificence but continues on into the human mindscape as a reference or a temporal compass, which generates mythical, historical, existential, and affective meanings from a remote past to the present and the future. Within the human mindscape, Amne Machen then is a shapeshifter, a timeshifter, and a moodshifter but it is the human psyche bonded with the mountain in all its variety that makes the “shifts”: it shapeshifts the mountain into the mountain god; it shifts the present tense of the mind to a remote past as a spatial corridor connecting the living with the dead; and it shifts the human emotionality from one touching moment to another, e. g. nostalgia, elation, melancholy, and empowerment. Such monumentality is synonymous with memorability as the potency of human memories are deeply entwined with the geological energy and embedded in the mountain. Thus, the mountain and its human counterparts commemorate and co-animate their shared memory of the past. In Hwadan Tashi’s narrative of his dreams, Amne Machen is a warrior god who rides a white horse like King Gesar. He commands thousands of soldiers. In Tenzin’s poetic eulogy, Amne Machen brings the ancestors of Tibet to the present. By shapeshifting the mountains into mountain gods and as storehouses of ancestral treasures and weapons, Tenzin receives the empowerment from Amne Machen. Through an I-thou invocation and imploration, Tenzin embraces the vision and gallantry of his ancestors through Amne Machen. The mode of his “you-know” speech is implicitly an affective, commemorative mode of “I-know-you.”

To reemphasize, in the midst of Amne Machen’s multiple identities and multidimensionality, what is critical is his assumed sentience, which permits humans to establish communication and communion with him as a sentient presence who feels, thinks, and remembers in the same way his human counterparts do except that he has lived through an ageless time in geological, cultural, and religious senses. In this regard, Amne Machen is not an object of human commemoration but is a commemorator or a co-rememberer of a place-human mytho-history. Commemoration in this context does not take place within the human realm alone. It is a collaborative, shared, and communal event of place, gods, and humans.

6.3 “Machen Bomra [] is a living being”

Tserang Dondrub, Pema Tseden’s hometown friend and the screenplay writer mentioned in the previous chapter, joined our filming-pilgrimage to Amne Machen. He came along with us because he had wanted to collect folk stories of Amne Machen for his own writing project. After everyone walked back from the glacier, he sat down with Akhu Shampa on the ridge overlooking the glacier and Queen’s Peak. Hwadan Tashi was gathering rocks in different shapes and piling them into cairns. Tserang Dondrub asked Akhu Shampa about something he had heard, “The rumor is that Amne Machen wants to move to a different place. Is it true? Do you know where?” Akhu Shampa replied:

Tserang Dondrub continued his questions, “Why does Amne Machen want to move away from here?” Akhu Shampa replied:

According to the Qinghai Daily News, the mine at Dernee belongs to Qinghai Westwood Copper Co., Ltd., which began its mining operation in Golok in 2004. The company invested 430 million RMB (approximately US$69 million). The mining site is at the southern slope of a mountain named Dernee, which is adjacent to Amne Machen. According to the company, the mine only produces copper and the reserve is estimated at 570,000 tons (Jie 2006). The photos of the mining site on the company website indicate that it is doing strip mining. At the mining site, the skin of the Earth looks peeled off, with flesh exposed, and while I could not verify if the company has dug a seventy kilometer long tunnel that reaches under the glacier, it is certain that the landscape has been changed in the nearly ten years of operations.

In the conversation between Tserang Dondrub and Akhu Shampa, Amne Machen is naturally addressed as both a god and a person. This is more than a matter of personification in the manner of attributing human qualities to a non-human object. In their eyes, Amne Machen is simply ‘one of us,’ in the sentient sense, except that he possesses supernatural qualities and his body is the uniquely shaped mountainous topography. To Akhu Shampa, Amne Machen is not an ordinary, worldly, god and a person, but a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva. To me as an empathetic listener of their conversation, I can imagine Amne Machen as an earth-god who is losing his paradisiacal home turf, a person whose body is torn and bleeding, and a bodhisattva whose silent acceptance of physical pain and emotional distress is a demonstration of the Buddhist understanding of suffering being part of the cost of sentience. Akhu Shampa prefers to take a higher ground expressing his concern about the environmentally destructive and psychically disturbing qualities of modernization across China.

From Akhu Shampa’s personifying and empathetic understanding of Amne Machen as the prey of the mining company, I have learned that native Tibetans’ eco-religious practices and eco-spiritual bond with the landscape of their home afford them a unique set of visions and skills to work with the land in a mutually embodied rather than a callously exploitative mode of being. By “mutually embodied” I mean landscape is not merely physically external to native Tibetans but it is rooted emotionally, mythologically, and religiously in their mindscapes. To take this line of thought further, the potency of the Tibetan landscape emanates beyond its geological domain. In my previous study of Tibetan landscape, I qualified it with the UNESCO definition of “the associative cultural landscape” as a part of the World Heritage, which possesses “the powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or even absent” (UNESCO). It could also be understood as “the ideational landscape” because its natural feature is embodied with “powerful religious, artistic or other cultural meanings” (Knapp and Ashmore 2000, 9, 12). It is thus “both imaginative in the sense of being a mental image of something and emotional in the sense of cultivating or eliciting some spiritual value or ideal (Smyer Yu 2011, 191).

In the case of Amne Machen, the geological potency, topographical sublimity, felt presence of gods and spirits, and perceived positive aesthetics point to the natural elements of what affords native Tibetans to see and feel the landscape as an animated, supernatural but sentient being. The natural, cultural, spiritual, and psychic attributes of Amne Machen were manifest in my Tibetan colleagues’ emotionality, affection, and distress. What it comes down to is that, for them, the sentience of Amne Machen is a given as the precondition for the information- and thought-exchange between place and people. The potency of landscape affects pilgrims’ worldview and emotional states of being. Tibetans are no exceptions.

Like Akhu Shampa, Tserang Dondrub’s initial vision of Amne Machen was of a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva before we reached Queen’s Peak. While Akhu Shampa emphasized the bodhisattvahood of Amne Machen from his canonical perspective that one should not worship earth gods for spiritual enlightenment, Tserang Dondrub underscored the Buddhist identity of the mountain deity more as an inherent part of Tibetan national identity. In his view, Tibetan Buddhism and culture are one and the same; thus one cannot continue without the other. His view coincides with that of many pro-traditionalist Tibetans working and living in urban China. At Jomo Yangra, I asked him what he thought of Akhu Shampa’s emphatic affirmation of Amne Machen as a bodhisattva and he remarked:

Tserang Dondrub’s initially strong Buddhist vision of Amne Machen seemed to have receded into the background when he sat on the ridge overlooking the glacier spreading out from the foot of Queen’s Peak. As the clouds floated above and the mountain wind gusted, his commemorative mood with Amne Machen and the rest of us affirmed him as the patriarch of mountain deities in Amdo and as a warrior god and a soul mountain ( bla-ri) more than a bodhisattva. As I noticed this perceptual change in him, I asked him, “You’ve lived in Beijing for many years and now you’ve made your first visit to Amne Machen. How do you feel?” He responded:

Machen Bomra is another name of Amne Machen. The saying “Machen Bomra has arrived” is an idiomatic phrase often referring to a triumphant return and charismatic weight of a hero when winning a battle or a contest. It is an expression of the hero’s absolute confidence charismatically felt by his cheering crowd. It was perceptible that Tserang Dondrub felt empowered in the presence of Amne Machen as shown in the tone of his voice and his facial expression. I continued with another question, “What does Amne Machen as a soul mountain mean to you?” He said:

Tenzin, our recordist, interjected, “So, are we a part of Amne Machen now?”

Tserang Dondrub continued:

Tserang Dondrub’s responses to my and Tenzin’s queries coincide with the increasing national status of Amne Machen among Tibetans as shown in Katia Buf-fetrilles’ work (2003, 12). Tserang Dondrub’s talk of Amne Machen as a national soul of Tibetans is not unique to Tibet and is a concept found in modern ethnic nationalisms across the world. From the perspective of Tibetan folklore, Amne Machen is regarded as the fourth son of Ode Gungyel , the patriarch of the original mountain gods of Tibet. In Amdo, Amne Machen as a mountain god, is the patriarch of all mountain gods in Amdo; therefore it is only natural that Tserang Dondrub embraces it as a soul mountain of Tibetans. What is worth mentioning is that in current scholarly research on Tibetan pilgrimage and mountain culture, gnas-ri or sacred mountains, are more often discussed than bla-ri , soul mountains. In Alex McKay’s volume titled Pilgrimage in Tibet, Andrea Loseries-Leick offers her understanding of soul mountain, “Tibetans believe that every region has its own deity which may descend on a mountain which then becomes sacred. The mountain becomes the ‘soul’ of the region and thus protect and secure the wellbeing of the people around” (Loseries-Leick 1998, 158). This assessment does not quite help me comprehend Tserang Dondrub’s expression of the oneness of Amne Machen and pilgrims. In my view, the sacredness of Amne Machen is a given. What needs more insightful elucidation is the deep, “soulful” emotionality that my Tibetan colleagues expressed with each other toward the mountain and the mountain deity.

I find that the works of scholars of Tibetan folklore studies, such as Danqu, Jempal Gyasto, and He Tianhui, are particularly illuminating about the psychic and emotional significance of soul mountains. Their studies present an understanding of a Tibetan archaic life science that continues to be found in contemporary rural Tibet. According to this understanding, the life-force of an organism is not confined within its body but is also present beyond the body. Danqu best explains what bla or soul is and how it operates. He begins with the phrase bla-sog as the totality of a living being, which is the trinity of soul ( bla), life ( sog), and consciousness ( nam-zhes) (Danqu 2005). Sog, loosely translated as life, refers to the life force within the body, which sustains nam-zhes as the consciousness that affords the existential and psychological function of the organism. Bla (soul) is an inherent property of a living being; however, it freely moves in and out of the body. Furthermore, bla is capable of multiplying itself when necessary. Oftentimes it seeks bla-gnas or soul-locations outside the body as its hiding places. What is noteworthy is that bla-gnas then refers not only to physical places such as mountains and lakes, but also to non-human species, such as toads, birds, and bears; thus, bla-ri, or soul mountain, is one of many kinds of soul-locations (Danqu 2005).

In Tibetan folklore, according to Akhu Shampa and Tserang Dondrub, Amne Machen is one of King Gesar’s soul-locations; thus it is revered as his soul mountain. Besides Amne Machen, Tsongoring , Tsogyaring , and Tso-drolring – the three largest lakes in Golok – are also his soul-locations; therefore, they are his soul lakes. Since he was the king of the Ling Kingdom, Amne Machen and the three lakes are also revered as the soul-locations of his kingdom and his people. In this regard, bla (soul) can be understood in both singular and plural terms as the soul of an individual or as the soul of a tribe or a nation. In the findings of Danqu and He Tianhui, bla becomes more powerful when it is outside one’s body, for example, taking residence in a mountain, a lake, or an animal (Danqu 2005). Without bodily confinement it performs magic and miracles (He 1998, 130). The person becomes stronger and more prosperous when his bla is multiplied. In turn, physical places or animals in which his soul dwells become stronger. For instance, when a wild bull is chosen as the dwelling place of a human soul, it becomes more powerful than its peers; and when a tree becomes the soul-location of a tribe, it grows taller and more lush (He 1998, 131). However, in the meantime, bla residing in an external location are vulnerable and subject to attack from an enemy of the person or the tribe. In Jempal Gyatso’s compilation of the King Gesar epic, soul-protection, soul-searching, and soul-destruction are the primary themes of the king’s warfare with his enemies (Jempal Gyatso 2006). Whoever is able to destroy his opponent’s soul-location, e. g. a wild bull, a spotted crow, or a fierce bear, wins the battle. In this sense, the person and his external soul-dwelling place are one and the same. Both prosper or perish together.

Tserang Dondrub’s “soul talk” with Tenzin and me could be understood, from an instrumentalist perspective, as an expression of ongoing Tibetan nationalism where the stories of one’s ancestral origin might be utilized as an instrument of nationalism; however, I see that Amne Machen’s status as a soul mountain has deeper, more complex layers of meanings besides its potential as a nationalist instrument. Through bla (soul) narrated in Tserang Dondrub’s conversation with us and discussed in scholarly works, I find that it is paramount that we do not reduce such “soulful talk” to talk of nationalism but recognize that the history of Tibetans needs to be seen as a history of place, gods, and humans, not just of humans.

In this regard I see the combined lifeworld of place, gods, and humans as a “rhizomic world” (Ingold 2000, 140) because their “roots,” in the senses of mythology, history, and religion, are so entwined that the sphere of each intersects, overlaps, preconditions, and saturates the others; thus, this lifeworld is an embodiment of both the histories of gods and humans. Amne Machen, as a bla-gnas or soul-location, makes the human past present, the supernatural natural, and both realms of gods and humans sentient. Place transgresses time and sentient species with “a fundamental spiritual potency” (Ingold 2000, 54). Through the soul-locations Tserang Dondrub and his compatriots touch and are being touched by their ancestors and gods. Amne Machen, from a local perspective, is a living being who bridges the past and the present in psychic, spiritual, emotional, and haptic terms. This perspective naturally arises out of the place just as it concerns it.

6.4 “Bury them here…”

Amne Machen is ensouled with the souls of people and gods. The sense of oneness people feel with the mountain deity is sustained with rich mythological and ancestral memories in the region. While Tserang Dondrub, Tenzin and I were having the discussion of Amne Machen as a soul place, Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi walked to a lone pole with a string of worn prayer flags hung on it. They beckoned to us.

We were not the only visitors to show affection to the glacier, which had offerings embedded within it. While invoking Avalokitesvara as the Bodhisattva of all Bodhisattvas and reciting OM MANI PADME HUM as the mantra of all mantras, Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi buried a small collection of minerals and semi-precious stones, rare medicinal herbs, soil collected from Bodh Gaya, and pieces of cloth torn from their late masters’ winter coats, all neatly enclosed in several cloth tubes, as offerings to Amne Machen.

Like the items I saw in the glacier, the offerings packed in the cloth tubes are called ter or treasures. The lexical meaning of ter mostly refers to rare minerals or precious metals. Its use in Buddhism and the indigenous Tibetan Bon religion is often associated with terma and terton . The former means hidden religious treasures in the forms of texts, ritual objects, and intangible teachings, which are buried in the earth or stored in the “mind streams” ( sems rgyud) of masters. The latter refers to visionaries who are able to discover the hidden treasures in the earth and the spiritual consciousness of their masters (Fremantle 2001, 17). These standard, encyclopedic explanations of terma and terton are often associated with a mystical, visionary Tibetan Buddhist discovery of spiritual treasures of the past. In the actual occurrence on Mt. Amne Machen, the hiding of a terma is not always an act for the preservation of a given lineage but is intended to strengthen the bond of people with their sacred places. It invests human affection and subjectivity in the land, to put it simply. Such a bond, in our pilgrimage case, monumentally reminds people of their homeland, animated with earthly gods and spirits, as a critical source of blessings and empowerments for their worldly wellbeing. In their mutual saturation, place is people, people are place, and place is the earthly gods who inextricably reside in the “mind streams” of people.

Before burying the cloth tubes Akhu Shampa said to Hwadan Tashi:

All three lamas mentioned by Akhu Shampa were renowned Dharma teachers and visionaries who played instrumental roles in Tibetan religious and cultural revitalizations in the last three decades. Regardless of the fact that they have since passed away, their legacies are remembered in the landscape of the region and in the mindscape of the people.

The body of the mountain is synonymous with the body of the mountain god. It holds the memories and mythologies of people, gods, and place. Besides being regarded as a soul-location, a Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva, and a warrior god, Amne Machen is popularly revered as a wealth god. While he continuously receives treasure-offerings from people, he displays his wealth in the form of medicinal herbs, forests, and precious minerals and metals. What is critical is that the mountain is animated with moving waters, meteorological elements, and a variety of birds and animals. The mountain is thus a life and a source of life itself, a concept that is difficult to accept for those who are trained to see the earth as inanimate material or as a depository of resources for extraction and consumption.

Taking the mining company as an example, it extracts what are deemed precious metals from the mountain without considering the mountain’s ecological, cultural, religious, and emotional significances. Its relationship with it is manifested as a one-sided act of taking with the backing of a scientific reading of its geological structure and utilitarian value. The location of Dernee Mine is described plainly in the geological and meteorological survey literature of the mining company:

Unlike the mining company, local Tibetans’ reverence of Amne Machen as a wealth god rather affirms the mountain as a site of sentient flourishing and existing worldly prosperity in the sense of fertility and health as discussed earlier. Thus, Amne Machen as a wealth god in the local folkways does not imply that the mountain should be mined or plundered. The reciprocity between humans and the god is materialized through the mountain as the body of the god. The imperative embedded in such reciprocity is the felt power of the god, which compels humans to offer gifts first before they receive his blessings and empowerment. The mountain god is both a recipient and a giver. Humans and the god are interlocked in a contracted gift exchange in which, if I describe it in Marcel Mauss’ words, “…this represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are” (Mauss 1990, 20). In the case of Amne Machen, it is both a life (a sentient god) and a thing (a mountain range). What humans give to him are things whereas what the sentient god offers back to humans is an immaterial flow of spiritual solace, commemoration of their past, and blessings for their continuity. In local folkways, what is seen as part of Amne Machen, e. g. animals and plants, is not meant to be taken for humans’ excessive utilitarian purposes.

When we walked along streams and rivers in the mountain we often saw large Himalaya marmots (Marmota himalayana) locally known as phyiba . They are adorably chubby with golden fur and a slow gait that causes them to be the easy targets of poachers. Tenzin told us a story of how phyiba, known in ancient times as a fierce beast, entered a contract of peace with humans:

From Tenzin’s family story I learned that, in the ancient past, Tibetans mostly relied on hunting for the continuity of their lives and expanding their territories. Humans were not alone in the ecosphere but one of many species. Setting environmental ethics or drawing boundaries between species has never been a one-sided decision from the ancient times of the giant phyiba to the present world. Because of actual or foreseeable loss, we often set limits on what we take from the earth, e. g. animals, metals, and fossil fuel. Whether manifested in an unbalanced inter-species relationship or humans’ excessive extraction of resources from the Earth, it is the environment that pressures us to refrain from destructive acts because it eventually leads destruction to ourselves.

My purpose in recounting Akhu Shampa’s treasure offering to Amne Machen and Tenzin’s family story about phyiba is to reject the idea that Tibetans are “instinctual environmentalists” (Ma 2007a, 162) but to demonstrate the native environmental consciousness of Tibetans has adapted its own version of mythological and historical lessons on how to sustain an equilibrium with other species and how to humanize natural environments with minimum human intrusion. Both Buddhist ethics and pre-Buddhist honoring of one’s tribal ancestors are at the root of the environmental ethics, eco-religiosity, and eco-aesthetics of native Tibetans. From both Akhu Shampa’s and Tenzin’s accounts I then see the interplay and inter-bonding of the earth, gods, and humans are a set of eco-religious ethics, which is not often known to non-Tibetans. Thus, it is too often that the magnificence of Tibetan landscape is only appreciated in a conventional aesthetic distance as if it were a piece of literary work or a painting. What is embedded in the landscape then remains as a blind spot.

That evening I continued my conversation with Tenzin, hoping he would shed more light on the puzzle on my mind about the currently polarized images of Tibet – the idealized versus the denigrated, the imagined versus the experienced, and the outsider’s view versus the insider’s view. Tenzin, first of all, expressed his viewpoint that the idea of the beautiful in both philosophical and aesthetic senses are universal but he concurred with me about the split image of Tibet among scholars and the global public:

I empathize with what Tenzin expresses and suggest that it is imperative to recognize that most non-Tibetans’ perceptions are culturally trained and reinforced by the encounter with and internalization of images and literary portrayals of Tibet before they even set foot there. It usually takes a literal rite of territorial passage for the non-Tibetan to recognize such trained perceptions in themselves.

6.5 “Eco-aesthetics of Touching and Being Touched”

Sitting with everyone around a fire on an early evening I jotted down a phrase in my journal, “Eco-aesthetics of touching and being touched.” Now sitting in my home in Göttingen, I recall that I meant to write, “Touching and being touched as eco-aesthetics.”

Whatever the word order in the two phrases, I see an eco-aesthetic act as a bodily act that environmentally and psychically involves reciprocal touches between the body and the landscape, and between the mind and the potency of the landscape manifested not only in its height, immensity, topography, and meteorological fluxes, but also in embodied religious practices, implaced cultural memories, and human emotionality entwined with them. As delineated in the introductory chapter, eco-aesthetics in this context can be understood as what Tilley calls “synaesthesia” or “the fusion of the senses” (Tilley 2004, 3) except that I do not limit the senses to the bodily senses but include one’s culturally-trained internal senses and sensibility, and subsequent perceptual changes occurring along with the moving dyad of the body and the mind in the environing landscape. Aesthetics, then, does not neatly pertain to the intellectual judgments of beauty, taste, order, balance, variety, and unity that are familiar to art critics and consumers; instead, one’s aesthetic judgment evolves and even undergoes sudden estrangement, breakup, or fragmentation, as the energy of the landscape invades one’s body through breathing, sound, vision, and bodily contact with the surface and the atmosphere of the Earth. I could not agree more with what Mark Paterson says, “…through touch, the world is with us. It is through haptic experience that we feel engaged in the world, and through affect that the world and its objects touch us” (Paterson 2007, 101). In actually experiencing the engagement of the world and ourselves, I find that the reciprocal touches taking place between the world and humans, as in the case of Amne Machen, are not always smooth and of equal exchange between people and the landscape. The physical landscape of Amne Machen, in many ways, dictates the pilgrim’s emotional state, aesthetic perception and other internal senses.

That evening I did not write beyond my first paragraph as we had to attend to Zhitan, Moshi, and Pangzi (names changed), three of our crew members from Beijing. Zhitan had worked as a cameraman on my previous projects even though his training at Beijing Film Academy was in directing. He had been to Qinghai before on a few student projects but only to low altitude areas. Zhitan recommended his classmates Moshi and Pangzi to participate as an additional cameraman and assistant. All three of them showed excitement before we set out from Beijing: Tibet sounded energizing to them.

After four days at Amne Machen, they still had not acclimated and their high altitude sickness was progressing. Our pilgrimage obviously was not an orderly traditional one conforming to local prescriptions as shown in Katie Buffetrille’s circumambulation of Amne Machen some years previous (Buffetrille 1997). The filming part of our pilgrimage added more complexity to our daily routines with its physically demanding requirements for those of us handling equipment and finding ways to maximize the optimal performance of our camera. When unexpected circumstances occurred, the ideal clockwise circumambulation of the mountain or relatively uniform speed of our daily advancement was disrupted. On this particular evening Akhu Shampa phoned his friend, Gyalpe, a young doctor working at the clinic in Snow Mountain Township ( gangjong yeltso), to prepare for receiving the three patients the next day. This meant that we had to rush downhill and skip pre-mapped pilgrimage sites.

The newly built clinic was spacious and clean, looking more like a small hospital than a clinic with an inpatient facility and an emergency staff of three doctors and student interns from Xining available twenty-four hours a day. Zhitan, Moshi, and Pangzi were put in the same room, the clinic’s first inpatients since its opening two weeks previous. The room still smelled of fresh paint. Gyalpe, Akhu Shampa’s friend, came in with two student interns, looking like a character in a western movie with a shoulder holster carrying a stethoscope and other medical paraphernalia. After checking his three new patients’ hearts with his stethoscope, he told me that they appeared to be suffering more from low blood sugar than altitude sickness. The interns soon started them on intravenous fluids. Meanwhile, Gyalpe asked me if I could find Chinese food for the patients, implying that they had not eaten enough because they weren’t used to Tibetan food.

Snow Mountain Township has four restaurants and two convenience stores, all on the same street. The owners of three of the restaurants were out of town visiting relatives. The remaining restaurant was only serving lunch as the chef wanted to spend time with his newborn baby. By now, however, it was close to five in the afternoon. The convenience stores were our last resort. After we bought a kilo of apples, canned meat, and crackers we rushed back to the clinic. Pangzi had not improved and was still drowsy, but Zhitan and Moshi looked stable after the intravenous fluids. Pangzi ate only one bite of an apple. Zhitan and Moshi each ate an apple but did not touch the canned meat. Moshi suddenly said to Zhitan in a blaming tone, “Why didn’t you buy warm food? What an awful place!” Zhitan did not know what to say but turned to me. Obviously Moshi was upset with the food situation. I could not think of any better way to comfort them but explained to them about the restaurants we had just visited. In the meantime I surprised myself by making an unrealistic promise, “Hang in there! If no restaurants are open tomorrow morning, we’ll cook for you.”

By now I regretted having joked with Moshi at Jomo Yangra, the cave meditation site. At the time he seemed acclimated and standing next to me while taking a break, he asked me what altitude we were at. I teased, “It’s close to the altitude of the Everest base camp.” “How high is it then?” he pressed on. I replied, “Five thousand meters!” As soon as he heard this he excused himself. When he had not returned forty minutes later, I went ahead to operate the camera by myself. Then I found Zhitan and Pangzi were missing, too. That evening three of them were quiet and began to complain about having headaches and lacking strength. Pangzi looked pale and restless. Obviously altitude sickness is not contagious but it seemed that the psychological implications might have been.

As I was leaving the clinic with the Tibetan crew members, Gyalpe told us to try our luck with the kitchen in the township government building next door. The kitchen was wide open when we walked in. Two cooks had just made steamed buns and a huge pot of noodle soup but none of the food was available for us, as the supervising cook told us the kitchen was contracted out to a geological survey team. Unable to obtain warm food we at least found a room for Akhu Shampa and Hwadan Tashi who got a thermos of hot water for mixing their tsampa; the rest of us went to try our luck elsewhere.

Thus, our pilgrimage trip became a search for hot Chinese food. We began our door-to-door search in town. Amazingly, we got somewhat lucky. A family on a side street had recently closed a restaurant business attached to their residence. The owner was willing to loan us her kitchen and even told us to use up a sack of potatoes by the stove. The kitchen was actually a large Tibetan-style bedroom with the stove in the middle of the room surrounded by beds on three sides. The warm, cozy place was large enough to accommodate six of us, however, because it was late, the convenience stores were all closed. With no ingredients to make Chinese food Zhitan, Moshi, and Pangzi would have to wait until the next day. The rest of us were so exhausted that we went almost immediately to bed.

Based on my experience with other Han Chinese pilgrims and travelers in Tibet I figured it would take up to a week or so for the three to become acclimated. I also hoped that their being young and healthy would assist. The next morning, around seven-thirty, I went out to see if the nearest convenience store was open, but I was too early so I walked to the clinic to check how Zhitan, Moshi, and Pangzi were doing.

As soon as I walked into the clinic, Gyalpe said me, “Your rdol left a mess in our driveway. We just cleaned it up.” When I asked the meaning of rdol , he told me that it refers to the third generation cross between yaks and cattle, but is used as a metaphor for human weaklings. I still did not understand what Gyalpe meant so I asked an intern who told me that Gyalpe’s “rdol” referred to Pangzi because in his weakened and confused state he had defecated in the driveway. It upset Gyalpe so much that he used the word rdol to indicate his assessment of Pangzi’s un-fitness for travel in a high altitude area. Gyalpe overheard my conversation with his intern and said to me, “Don’t mind what I said. These people always say how clean they are and how dirty we are.” I felt very embarrassed and apologized on Pangzi’s behalf though I also appreciated Gyalpe’s honesty and straightforwardness.

Obviously the altitude sickness of Zhitan, Moshi, and Pangzi disrupted our pilgrimage and filming schedules but I had to accept it as an unexpected event just like the changing weather up in the mountains. The sublime embodied in the powerful landscape of Amne Machen is not an intellectual idea springing purely out from the human. Its greatness means not merely the size, the immensity, and the visual magnificence but also the meteorological forces and environmental conditions of Amne Machen, which equally dictate the perceptions and the physical states of the person enveloped in them. The landscape is not merely the solid ground on which we stand but also dominates us entirely with its atmospheric mediums such as air and water, the meteorological commotions and the violence that clashes with the human body through these mediums. The world thus touches us, invades us, and transforms us. In this regard, both the world and the human are carnal beings whose relation is “that of flesh to flesh” and “involves a dehiscence, an opening of my body to things, a reversible relationship between touching and being touched, myself and other, the effect of myself on things and those things on me” (Tilley 2004, 18, 30). However, as seen in this case, such relation does not always manifest itself in mutual affinity.

In the physical sense alone, besides affectionate memories and positive aesthetics, the touches of Amne Machen also produced negative physical conditions among our group, as shown in the experience of the three young filmmakers. Their physical reaction to the Amne Machen pilgrimage shows that when the world touches us, it goes deeper than the skin. Its cutaneous contact with our skin and through the pressure on our walking feet is only surficial. Layer by layer the world touches the skin, sinks into flesh, and finally invades the inner world of the body. In this process of the world’s physical touch, the communication between us and Amne Machen involved what Paterson calls “fluid viscerality” (Paterson 2007, 113): plasma, lymph, mucus, pus, and other bodily fluids that define the (dys)functionality of the body and produce visceral sensations and feelings. Pangzi’s discharge in the driveway of the clinic was a visceral reaction to the touches of Amne Machen. In the medical sense his body failed the environmental rite of passage of Amne Machen; however, place-human communication in this case did not stop at the physical level but evolved into a discourse of differences and identity, all in the emotionally touching manner. Gyalpe’s emotional reaction to Pangzi’s excruciating bodily experience went beyond his medical profession to a matter of purity and pollution or of self and other. Although Amne Machen has its own ageless geological identity, it nevertheless has a Tibetan identity.

Finally, a warm meal was cooked two hours later: fried potatoes with salt and white pepper, and scrambled eggs with tomatoes. We then rushed to the clinic with the food in pots. Moshi and Zhitan were up. Moshi still had the same temper as the day before when he spoke to us, “Where were you? We’re hungry…” Pangzi was still not in good shape. Gyalpe recommended that they be sent home as soon as possible. He emphasized that the best cure for altitude sickness is to move the patient to a lower altitude location. It was indeed the best cure. Two days later, a text message came from Zhitan telling me they were enjoying noodle soup in a restaurant in Xining. Obviously their bodily comfort was found in the low altitude environment. However, I expected that they would have a delayed realization of their aesthetic and even spiritual appreciation of Tibetan landscape after resuming their routines in Beijing, as I had found in other cases of Han Chinese who felt empowerment from Tibet after returning to their home regions (Smyer Yu 2011, 81). To know for sure, I would have to wait and see.