1.2.1 Mindscape

“Imagination” and “fantasy,” two familiar words in the texts of contemporary critics of imagined Tibet, continue to be useful in my discussion of the same topic in the context of China. However, it is noticeable that in the course of their alleged intellectual association with the Orientalist mindset, they are more often considered a value judgment only. In my pursuit of a multifaceted understanding of place-human bonding, imagination and fantasy are a part of but not the only human mental activities that occur in response to the external physical environment – namely, place. I’ll discuss how I use the word “place” shortly, however, in working with physical place and human responses to and imprints on it, I see that the juxtaposed use of mindscape and landscape by such scholars as R.J. Zwi Werblowksy (1998, 9) and Allan Grapard (1989, 162) are rather much more ontologically and intellectually generative than “imagination” and “fantasy.”

With this said, the meaning of mindscape in this book refers to a range of reflexes, intellectual reflections, emotional responses, memories, moving images, and mental data storage of scents, colors, sounds, temperatures, and meteorological patterns, all of which originate from human lived experiences enveloped in the external physical environment, namely, landscape, which I will also define. Mindscape in this regard mirrors landscape itself and the social acts and events taking place in it. It can be seen metaphorically as the “inner landscape” (Bunkse 2007, 219) of mountains, rivers, forests, oceans, villages, towns, and cities but it is immersed in one’s depthless and shapeless thoughts, affections, feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams. Like flora and fauna rooted in the external landscape, the “flora” and “fauna” rooted in the mindscape are also animated, not with nutrients from the biosphere but with one’s intellectual faculty and emotionality. In other words, a mindscape consists of one’s intellectuality and emotionality with both a spatial and a temporal structure of its own.

This leads to another critical aspect of mindscape germane to this book, that is, the temporality of mindscape in relation to what Tim Ingold calls “the temporality of landscape,” which “…inheres in the pattern of dwelling activities” (Ingold 1993, 153). Such a pattern is not only materialized as the human built environment and other markings on the landscape but is also inscribed on one’s mindscape as memories, daily routines, and cultural consciousness. To go a bit further, unlike the physical nature of landscape, the temporality of mindscape is what I would call “place in time” meaning that what one has seen and experienced in a landscape does not only become memory in the mindscape but also takes on another active mode of being as a remembered place that continues to speak to the person. This aspect of mindscape is particularly important to my discussion of how Tibet, as a place, speaks to Tibetans when they are away from Tibet and to non-Tibetans after returning from their travel to Tibet. Geographic distance in this respect is overcome in one’s remembered place taking root in the mindscape. Such place in time is the animating force that triggers creative aspirations, existential reflection, spiritual revolution, or nostalgia at a later date.

1.2.2 Landscape, place, and placiality

In anthropology, my own discipline, the works of active scholars of landscape studies such as Tim Ingold, Christopher Tilley, and Barbara Bender have manifested intertextual relations with the works of geographers, philosophers, psychologists, and critical theorists such as Denis Cosgrove, Edward Casey, James Gibson, Edward Relph, and James Ferguson. In this book I continue this line of transdisciplinary practices affirming the inherent mutual saturation and bonding between landscape and mindscape in the case of Tibet. The characteristic approach of the abovementioned scholars does not treat landscape as a distanced object that is soundless, scentless, senseless, and upon which one gazes. Instead, landscape pertains to “spatial experience” (Tilley 1994, 11), “dwelling perspective” (Ingold 1993, 152), “cultural image” (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988, 1), and “the materiality of the world” (Bender 2001, 4). Landscape is what Husserl calls “lifeworld” or Lebenswelt (Husserl 1970, 137), that which embraces all forms of life, their biospheres and cultural domains. In this regard, landscape in this book does not conform to the meaning of its Dutch influenced English heritage (landschap-landscape) referring to the pictorial quality of a given piece of land serving to frame natural scenes for artistic purposes.

As the lifeworld itself, landscape environs us, invades and permeates our body and mindscape with its air, water, nutrients, and its solid surface supporting our bipedal locomotion. It is what Ingold calls the “weather world” (Ingold 2011, 126) and is what Tilley characterizes as a world entering each of us through “a visionscape, a touchscape, a soundscape, a smellscape, and a tastescape” (Tilley 2011, 27–28) before it becomes a memory, an unforgettable image, a sense of nostalgia, or a collective sentiment in one’s mindscape. Therein the emphasis on the sensorial and ecological dimensions of landscape is critical, as all cases of imagined Tibet in the narratives in this book are not fantasies arising out of the mind as though it were unrelated to physical reality, but come from the actual bodily experiences of individuals in the landscape of Tibet whether they are natives or outsiders. These individuals may not have been to every corner of Tibet but every one of them was either born or has set his or her foot in particular places of Tibet. They feel drawn to these places, e. g. villages, nomadic seasonal camps, towns, or sacred mountains and lakes, which share the common geographical location and geological features of the Tibetan plateau. This is what I mean by “place-based human universals” that prompt Tibetophiles’ imaginative relationships with Tibet after they return from their travels.

Throughout this book the ideas of landscape and place overlap one another and therefore are synonymously used in different cases; however, the slight difference between the terms is that landscape is broadly understood as lifeworld while place refers to a particular region, location, site, or community as an integral part of the larger lifeworld. It is therefore a relationship between the whole and the part. Quantitatively the whole and the part are different only in scale. Particularities of place are determined by geology, ecology, or the human built environment. What is crucial is that there is always a give-and-take relationship between place and those lives enveloped by it. In the recollection of his pilgrimage to Mt. Kailas, Lama Govinda narrates, “They [mountains] attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings: the forces of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunderstorms, rains, waterfalls, and rivers. They fill their surroundings with active life and give shelter and food to innumerable beings. Such is the greatness of mighty mountains” (2005, 272). This observation did not require Tibetan language competency but was based on his bodily experience in the mountains. It was precisely his being-there that allowed him to speak of Tibet as a power place on earth.

Like landscape, place can be both naturally and human constructed; however it is essential to reiterate that its physical presence is antecedent to human social and emotional investments in it. Oftentimes among scholars, the humanization of place is understood merely as the result of human initiatives, thus permitting us to perceive place as a passive container or simply a social construct (Greider and Garkovich 1994, 2). In this book, on the contrary, the humanization of place is also understood the other way around: it is a process of place taking root in the human mindscape. This is the “potency” of place (Casey 2000, 184) at work, which, besides sustaining us as a biological species, imbues us with the senses of rootedness (Relph 1976, 38) and memorability (Casey 2000, 200). Once again, such rootedness is a mutual connectedness between place and mindscape. As mentioned earlier, in this intercourse between physical but humanized place and human mindscape, place becomes placeless-place in human consciousness and is akin to remembered place.

Casey opens The Fate of Place with this thetic assertion, “…we are implaced beings to begin with, that place is an a priori of our existence on earth” (1997, x). I wish to add that place is also imprinted in our mindscape as memory, sentiment, or simply a state of the mind. To address the empirical experiences of place and placeless-place in the case of Tibet and its imagined incarnations, I find Casey’s phrase “placiality” (1997, 266) best links the materiality and immateriality of place. While reflecting the physical presence of place, placiality also signifies “nonsensible forms of place” or “psychic place” in the Aristotelian sense, which affirms “the soul as a place or set of places” (Casey 1997, 288). Thus, the employment of placiality as a conceptual vehicle is crucial in my discussion of a variety of manifestations of place beyond geography to include poetic narratives, works of art, cinematic images, memoirs, and public discourses concerning topophilia toward Tibet as a high place.

On one hand, my use of placiality is deliberately employed to avoid reaching quick conclusions about non-Tibetans’ poetic and imaginative recollections and reflections of their travels to Tibet as “fantasies” or “hallucinations” as the perspective of existing critiques and criticisms suggest. This is because in my work I find the alleged “fantasies” and “hallucinations” often become more acute, intense, and concentrated during the post-Tibet phase of many non-Tibetan travelers. This could be seen as the rootedness of Tibet in the mindscapes of the travelers or as the place of Tibet establishing itself as a placeless-place in the mindscape of the non-Tibetan. On the other hand, as in other cultural systems, the manifestations of placiality, in both material and immaterial senses, are found in Tibetans’ own terminology, grasping the mutual rootedness between their living place and their mindscape, revealed in the language with terms such as sagzhi-rinpoche (, earth as treasure), sagyang ( the potency or power of place), sa zangngan je degtsan ( geomancy), sa-ur-ur ( roar of the earth), and sa’og rempagu ( the nine supernatural beings below the earth). The list goes on but shows that native Tibetans’ understanding of their homeland also involves their reflexive, reflective, utilitarian, and transcendental absorbing of their living place as “the perceptual unity” (Relph 1976, 4) formed and solidified with lived experiences of place and the knowledge therefrom. The immaterial place of Tibet equally lives in the mindscapes of different individual Tibetans as a property of sem (), or the mind naturally filled with the presence of imagination () and fantasy ( ).

Thus the combined materiality of landscape, place, and placiality finds its immaterial counterpart in the mindscape. Through the dialectics, contradictions, and synergies of both, my book is intended as a visit to different dimensions of Tibet’s placiality.

1.2.3 Eco-aesthetics

In my earlier study of Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage to Tibet, I discussed the eco-sublime experience as a pattern of interaction between the pilgrim and the Tibetan landscape. It is a process of an engagement between landscape and mindscape centering upon a shared sense of greatness that is immediate in place but latent in mind. It is the greatness of the place that activates the latent greatness of the mind. Both eventually become inseparably one and the same (Smyer Yu 2011, 194–195). I see this eco-sublime pattern of non-Tibetans’ pilgrimage to Tibet as a unique experience of crossing a territorial passage whose spiritual impact on the pilgrim is no less than a ritual-oriented rite of passage. The initial emphasis of my discussion is on how “the territorial charisma” (Smyer Yu 2011, 51) of the Tibetan landscape empowers Chinese pilgrims in addition to the religious empowerment they receive from their Tibetan teachers. In this engagement of landscape and mindscape I viewed Tibet as an “eco-Buddhist Tibet” (Smyer Yu 2011, 173).

In this book, I continue to discuss the dynamics of pilgrimage but do not limit it to what, in the earlier stage of my research, I saw as only a “Buddhist” experience. After working with pilgrims, tourists, and Tibetan writers and artists in their post-pilgrimage state, and re-reading the writings of “the great mystifiers,” Tibetans in diaspora, and contemporary travelers, I recognize the antecedent role of place in the popular recognition of Tibet as a hot spot and a power place. In this context the appreciation of Tibetan landscape in the language of positive aesthetics is a common theme of Tibetans’ and non-Tibetans’ experiences of Tibet. It is precisely because of the imaginative and poetic expressions of the positive aesthetics that critics of imagined Tibet often separate the cultural subjectivities of non-Tibetans from geographic Tibet or look upon the non-Tibetan subjectivities as a projection of a fantasy world onto Tibet; thus the “real” and the “imagined” Tibets are distinguished from each other and dichotomized; however, such dichotomization needs to be contextualized case by case.

From the perspective of my anthropological study of landscape, the “real” and the “imagined” are both antecedently conditioned upon Tibet as a concrete place. Because of this concrete place, seekers, travelers, or Tibetans in diaspora begin their imagination; likewise the critics initiate their critiques from the perspectives of their own trained subjectivities. Tibet deserves its own place not only in geographic and historical terms but also in the varied experiences of those who have been to and enveloped by its topography, meteorological fluxes, and cultural ethos.

In this context I propose an eco-aesthetic understanding of why and how Tibet is a potent place generative of cultural, spiritual, and environmental perceptions and critiques. In Western scholarship the original meaning of “aesthetics” based on its Greek etymon pertains to sense-based perceptions; however, its currently popular use is generally associated with the idea of beauty objectively and artistically defined (Berleant 2010, xii) or with the “formal qualities of an object” (Carlson 1979, 100). The sensorial base appears to recede into its etymological background. By adding the prefix “eco-” I hope to re-emphasize the sensoriality and environmentality of aesthetic experiences centered upon what Tilley calls “the lived body” or “the body-subject” as “a mind physically embodied, a body and a mind which always encounters the world from a particular point of view in a particular context at a particular time and in a particular place, a physical subject in space-time” (Tilley 2004, 2). In this regard, aesthetic activities yield particular experiences and knowledge with all senses involved, namely, a synaesthesia (Howes 2006, 161) or a “fusion of the senses” (Tilley 2004, 14). This is the case with most writers and critics concerning Tibet in the twenty-first century and whose claims are often based on their physical travel to Tibet in addition to their historical reading of literature about Tibet.

My eco-aesthetic approach aims to produce two interpretive results from my study of the potency of Tibetan landscape. First, I see that non-Tibetans’ visual articulation of the Tibetan landscape, including mine, reflect our reflexive appreciation of it as a collage of “earthworks” or earth art with the caveat that the magnificent mountains and expansive grasslands in Tibet are the works of the earth’s geological and ecological forces, not of human artistic creativity. For instance, the stunning images of Mt. Kailesh and Lake Namtso possess enough aesthetically suggestive power to prompt an increasing number of people to travel to Tibet. In this respect my eco-aesthetic approach is centered upon the potency of the Tibetan landscape as environmental art with a unique aesthetic force generating “feelings of uplift” (Berleant 2010, 22).

While acknowledging the formal aesthetic qualities of the Tibetan landscape, the critical point of my eco-aesthetic discourse in this book is placed on recognizing the felt empowerment of many pilgrims, writers, and artists from the Tibetan landscape as a result of their immersion in the physical environment of Tibet which sets the premise of their later imaginative recollections and descriptions of their experiences in Tibet. In this context, if a Tibet (or Tibets) is imagined, it is the body of the pilgrim or the traveler that is the medium linking Tibet with his or her mind. In this imaginative process one’s subjectivity is physical and one’s perception is filled with ambient activities (Tilley 2004, 4). Eco-aesthetics in this regard is what Tilley calls “dehiscence” or “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, 30). Thus, the imaginative language of Tibet-related writings is not a pure mental creation of the writer but is a dehiscent entwinement of place, body, and mind, of landscape and mindscape.

The second aspect of my eco-aesthetic approach is to exercise what Ingold calls “a sentient ecology” (Ingold 2000, 24) in which the scenic, artistic, and wholistic qualities of landscape are recognized with a deeper and thicker understanding rather than only the formal qualities assessed in terms of variety, unity, and balance as the keywords of aesthetic appraisal of a given landscape as environmental art (Carlson 1979, 100). By “sentient” I mean that the aesthetic potency of the Tibetan landscape resides in the crisscrossed lineages of humans and earthly deities embodied in mountains and lakes. The shared sentience of people, gods, and the earth deeply moves many pilgrims and visitors who sense the enspirited landscape of Tibet. Landscape in the Tibetan context is seen as “a sphere of nurture” (Ingold 2000, 144) with entwined genealogies of humans and gods, both of which are intertwined in “a rhizomatic world” (Ingold 2004, 140) and are amalgamated into a massive complex of interconnected roots. To emphasize, the sentient ecology embedded in my eco-aesthetic approach pertains to the eco-religious practices and eco-spiritual sentiment embodied in the landscape (Smyer Yu 2011, 59), in which the ancestries of humans and earthly gods are interlocked in a mutually nurturing relationship or an interdwelling relationship.

1.2.4 Affordances

Tibet, as a “hot” spot and a power place, affords Tibetans as well as non-Tibetans the ability to perceive, to imagine, to envision, to engage, to critique, and to transform whatever personal or collective conditions we encounter in or outside Tibet. Engagements between Tibetophiles and Tibet are multitudinal and multifarious. My emphasis is meant to discern an intersubjective relationship between a place and people who are either native or outsiders with deep topophiliac commitment to Tibet. Recognizing the subjectivity of place is the starting point before I move further to affirm the materiality of placial potency as what James Gibson calls “affordances” of place in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986). This long lasting theoretical model continues to find its vitality in different disciplines working at the intersection of place, ecology, perception, and information. An affordance, according to Gibson, is innate in an environment but becomes perceptible when an organism finds utility from it, as he says in this frequently cited quote, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill…It implies the complementarity of the animals and the environment” (1986, 127). The emphasis is mine and indicates that both the environment and the organism enter a relationship which affords the organism values and meanings, be they biological or utilitarian.

Such a relationship is, in fact, a niche for the organism, which “refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives” (1986, 128). An affordance, as a relationship, is present in both the environment and the organism. As a gift of the environment it is latent to start with. The organism is prompted to identify the affordance in the environment. The materialization of this relationship involves invitation, demand, and identification. Random objects in the environment are thus not affordances until they have entered this complementary relationship. A cave would not be a wolf’s den until the wolf takes residence in it. It appears that the relationship between the cave and the wolf are that of an object and a subject, but I prefer to see it from Gibson’s perspective – “An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer” (1986, 129). This perspectival emphasis is meant to highlight affordance as a form of interlocution between the environment and the organism, in which each speaks to the other, and each is a subject rather than an object to the other.

In my interpretation of how Tibet’s placiality speaks to both Tibetans and non-Tibetans, Gibson’s concept of affordance is employed to help me build the case of how landscape engenders internal “tipping points” when one is enveloped in it and when one savors an in-it-experience in a private moment away from it. The phrase “tipping point” is often used in the political and environmental arenas to highlight the imminence of crises or systemic collapses (Shen, Downing and Hamza 2010, 1). Politically, as discussed earlier, Tibet is at a tipping point as indicated in the high number of self-immolation cases. Environmentally the vulnerability of Tibet’s ecosystems is self-evident although it is not at a tipping point leading to a total collapse. Here I am referring to “internal tipping points” to mean that the landscape of Tibet affords multiple inner changes to those outsiders who have physical encounters and to those natives who are in diaspora or who live bilocally between Tibet and elsewhere. Such changes mostly signify intellectual and epistemic insurrection in the Foucaultian sense (Foucault 1980, 81) or in the sense of rigpa ( unhindered vision or realization) in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which subverts or revolutionizes existing worldviews and established values. The word “tip,” as either a noun or a verb, suggests overbalance, imminent fall, or turning over on a high point. From my fieldwork I see the tipping points that Tibet affords its visitors and natives range from the emotional, the aesthetic, and the intellectual to the environmental, the sublime, and the humanitarian. The height and expansiveness of the Tibetan landscape communicates with the human mindscape in myriad ways.

In their study of high places, Cosgrove and Della Dora find, “The human connection with high places is a two-way physical and imaginative dialogue in which geographical knowledge is continuously built and destabilized, shaped, and reshaped” (Cosgrove and Della Dora 2009, 4). Such imaginative dialogue often leads to moments of what they call “purification, eschatology and transcendence” (Cosgrove and Della Dora 2009, 5). So, it isn’t we who exercise a gaze of some sort, e. g. the colonial, Orientalist, or aesthetic gaze, over the landscape; instead, it is the other way around: the landscape gazes at us or through us and makes us self-conscious of our own state of being when we are fully in the embrace of a lifeworld with its mediums, substances, and surfaces in both geological and meteorological senses (Gibson 1986, 19–22; Ingold 2011, 22) and when our mindscape is overpowered by its continuing presence outside its geographic domain.

Historically it was not merely those seekers like Lama Govinda who experienced an internal tipping point in the Tibetan landscape. Military officers like Francis Younghusband (1863–1942) and Li Guozhu (1938 – ) also felt “a deep inner-soul satisfaction” (Younghusband cited by Matless 1991, 273) and “the soul is purified” (Li 2010, 199) in their post-military assignments. In the current transnational spaces where I work and live, many of my Tibetan friends in Beijing feel their homeland becomes bigger when they are away from it. In other words the geographic distance does not diminish but rather increases the size of the Tibetan landscape in their mindscape. This common feature of Tibetans and non-Tibetans’ experience with the Tibetan landscape is at the core of my writing.

1.3.1 Beijing

In Beijing, along with my interaction with Tibetan scholars and students, I also spent time with Tibetan “Beijing-drifters” many of whom are actors, artists, writers, and filmmakers. As mentioned in the earlier discussion on “Tibet-drifters” and “Beijing-drifters,” the latter are independent career seekers and professionals, not formal employees of any institutions or companies. They often start out as freelancers in their chosen fields and their livelihoods in Beijing depend upon paid projects of different kinds, e. g. voice dubbing for a TV show, stage performances, recording assignments for film preproduction, or textual translation. They may have residential permits but not official household registration cards issued by the city of Beijing. Their living space is often shared with several other “Beijing-drifters” since housing in this city is prohibitively expensive to newcomers and to those whose creative works are still in the making. Many established Tibetan artists combine living space with work space. In 2009 I visited the apartment of a well-known popular singer. He was taking a year-long intensive film course at Beijing Film Academy. The monthly rent for his 1,600 square foot apartment was 11,000 RMB (approximately US$1,700), expensive even by North American standards. Six other artists from his home region shared the rent.

In late 2008 I started a film co-op whereby I converted my apartment near the university into a studio, because I wanted to have a space for creative collaboration with my Tibetan friends. The film co-op was initiated in order to share resources, talents, and skills among Tibetan “Beijing-drifters” and students drawn to filmmaking and literary creativity. In less than eighteen months it evolved into a fully functional studio that could handle both preproduction and postproduction work. In the meantime it became a live-work space for me, a recent graduate from Beijing Film Academy, and a screenwriter, both of whom were from Amdo. The small communal space proved to be imbued with critical openness among ourselves and our friends. By “critical openness” I mean mutuality, confidence, ease, and trust not only on a daily basis but also on social occasions. Besides the three of us every other participant in the co-op was simultaneously a learner, an inquirer, and an expert. My anthropological work-mode was both participant observation and observant participation, in which my co-working and co-living experiences with my Tibetan friends prompted me to engage a new study of landscape and mindscape concerning how images and imaginations of Tibet are woven together and reproduced with both personal and collective sentiments in contemporary China.

The height of Tibet is not lessened when it is represented in Beijing. Aside from the state policies of the Tibet Question that continue to make Tibet a global hot spot, the images of Tibet in the popular realm have diversified in travel writings, pilgrimage narratives, photo exhibits, art galleries, film shows, and tourism commercials. What has not changed in this growing range of images is the landscape itself. No matter how a writer, an artist or a photographer wishes to romanticize Tibet and project his or her ethnocentric aesthetic sentiment onto it (as some scholarly opinion suggests), he or she cannot do away with the geological, ecological, and meteorological elements of the Tibetan plateau, all of which contribute to the positive aesthetics or the sublime perception of Tibet. To engage the subjectivities of writers and artists in this midst, my film co-op and visual anthropology class often hosted guest speakers to consider such topics.

Both the Tibetan and Han Chinese visitors had professions or personal interests that reproduced images of Tibet in the forms of fiction and non-fiction writing, painting, and film. Among the Han Chinese guests many of them often emphasized the altitude of their travel routes in Tibet as one of their critical experiences. Being in Tibet, to them, meant both absorbing an exotic culture and its sublime landscape with a mixture of inspiration and fear. The conclusive statements of their talks were identical: the sentiment that Tibet is “the last pureland” (zuihoude jingtu ) on earth was consistently made in contrast to the rapid urbanization of China.

In fall 2009, a senior faculty member of Beijing Film Academy displayed his photos of Tibetan cities, towns, and mountains taken in fifteen days of travel in TAR. While expressing his marvel at Tibet’s natural landscape he was pessimistic in suggesting that Tibet would end up like urban China. To him, modernization will eventually and inevitably transform Tibetan villages, towns, and even the natural landscape into something urbanites of China are all too familiar with. In an attempt to collect or record what he feels is threatened, he spent the summer of 2012 with a Tibetan family in southern Gansu as part of his fieldwork in order to write a script based on contemporary Tibetan families’ stories.

In fall 2010, with a group of Tibetan indie filmmakers I attended the premiere of Once upon a Time in Tibet (2010), a fiction film directed by Dai Wei from CCTV. Said to be a 50-million RMB production, it tells a love story between a young Tibetan woman and an American pilot whose fighter plane is shot down by the Japanese in the 1930s, and is based on Tashi Dawa’s unpublished Chinese language novel Shambhala’s Cat. The film was given mostly negative reviews by my Tibetan friends who thought Dai Wei made too great of an effort to tie China and the U.S. together with Tibet against a common enemy while the love story had too many narrative mistakes. From the angle of my landscape-mindscape studies, I noticed Dai Wei spent much of her preproduction budget on landscape filming including aerial shots. The landscape cinematography was more impressive than the love story. At the premiere I could not help but suspect that a tourism commercial was embedded in the film. Whether or not Dai Wei intentionally embedded this “tourist tease” in her film could not be ascertained, but I did see the landscape of Tibet as a marketable commodity of tourism.

From Tibetan artists and filmmakers whom I know in Beijing I see two on-going debates. On one side the Chinese image of Tibet is similar to its counterpart in the popular realm of the West. This image sustains Tibet as a nation of Buddhism and a paradise on earth. It noticeably frames the emerald summer grasslands, the blue sky, idyllic villages, and high mountains, while simultaneously excluding non-traditional elements as much as possible. On the other side, a growing number of Tibetans advocate verisimilitude in their creative reproductions of contemporary Tibetan social life, religious practices, and natural landscape. This group of Tibetan artists in Beijing describes their approach as “de-symbolizing” or qufuhaohua in Chinese, which might be best translated as “destereotyping.” Many of them feel Buddhist symbols and natural elements of the Tibetan plateau are presented ad nauseum. This symbolic overkill in many contemporary creative works either make Tibet look like a thangka painting with an overabundance of Buddhist elements, or overshadow the current modern realities of Tibet. The Sun Beaten Path (2010) by Sonthar Gyal and Old Dog (2010) by Pema Tseden are prime examples of this growing effort to de-symbolize representations of Tibet.

This is the context of my fieldwork in Beijing, in which I work with both Han Chinese and Tibetans. The mediums of my ethnographic work are our shared photographic equipment, film gear, and editing stations. The spaces of our interactions occur in the studio, classrooms, film review sessions, art galleries, restaurants, cafes, private homes, and en route from Beijing to Tibetan regions for ethnographic assignments, film projects, and pilgrimages.

1.3.2 Qinghai

Toward the tail end of my 2006 fieldwork in which I explored the dynamics of an increasing number of Chinese being attracted to Tibetan Buddhism, I suspected that it must be more than the charismatic lamas and their lineages that draw so many Chinese Buddhists from urban China to Tibet. The gravity of my fieldwork was placed on the interactions between Tibetans and Han Chinese, between Tibetan and Chinese monasteries, and between Tibetan lamas and the Chinese state; so it was a people- and institution-oriented work in which I emphasized the politics of Sino-Tibetan religious encounters rather than what could be called the “place-human interaction.” However, during the revision of my first book, I designated textual space in two chapters to the view that Chinese Buddhists are also attracted to Tibet’s “territorial charisma” (Smyer Yu 2011, 51), a phrase coined from van Gennep’s “territorial passage” (1960, 19) for the purpose of emphasizing that Tibet, to many Chinese pilgrims, is a charismatic place.

My ethnographic work on place-human interaction and bonding began in late 2008. Since then, Qinghai has been the primary site where I work with rural Amdo Tibetans, joining them in their dwelling places and surrounding landscape and in relation to their sacred mountains. Both built and natural environments have been the focus of my research. My participatory fieldwork activities with Amdo Tibetans include co-designing a meditation retreat house, helping to build two solar powered school libraries, volunteering as an assistant to Tibetan lamas’ and yogis’ cave-based retreats, and filming two documentaries concerning place-human bonding among Amdo Tibetans. These hands-on (and feet-on-the-ground) activities in different places in Qinghai have led to many of the textual themes of this book.

In fall 2008 I helped Akhu Norbu, a ngapa ( yogi), raise funds in Beijing to build a house for meditation retreats in his village, I was invited by him to contribute my ideas to the design of the house. His reasoning was that because this intended meditation house would receive his students from urban China, he was looking for some “modern conveniences” that his Chinese students would be accustomed to. Having lived in northern California for over twenty years I thought of the architecture at Green Gulch Zen Center in Mill Valley, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, and a former hippie commune in Albion. These places host fine architecture which blends in with the surrounding hills and the idyllic rural scenery of northern California, while also giving enough familiar functionality to urban visitors. My Californian references were too costly for Qinghai as the price of lumber was rising quickly, but the idea of exchanging a pit toilet for a seated toilet and septic system was approved. During the installation, Akhu Norbu made sure the tank and the pipes had no leaks and the liquid waste would be directed only to the wheat field next to the house site. His careful planning of the waste treatment qualified him as a good environmentalist; however, according to him, the primary importance of his precision and meticulousness was to ensure none of the untreated human waste would offend a kle ( a waterborne, dragon-like supernatural being) living beneath the wheat field where the house would be built.

From Akhu Norbu I began to see a dwelling place as a living space shared with many other beings. In his eyes the seemingly silent sa ( earth; dirt; place) is not merely a physical thing. It comes into human perception in the forms of sand ( hsima), surface ( sa-kha), rock (rdo), field ( hsangsa), place ( sa-cha), region ( sa-khul), domain ( sa-rgya), and topography ( sa-khyad). What is important is that various forms of sa are animated with beings other than humans as shown in Akhu Norbu’s case. This aspect of place-people relationship is also identified by other scholars such as Toni Huber and Poul Pedersen (1997) and Axel Michaels (2003). Landscape, for Akhu Norbu and his ancestors, is sasum () or “the three domains of the earth,” namely sabla ( the celestial sphere above the earth), sadang ( the surface of the earth), and sa’og ( the underworld of the earth).

The realms above, on and beneath the earth are residences of a variety of gods, semi-gods, spirits, and demons. No single corner of the earth or its underworld and celestial firmament is unoccupied. To add to Ingold’s landscape-as-weather-world, I say landscape is also a multidimensional spirit world as well as “a storied world” (Ingold 2011, 141) with not only tales of humankind but also tales of other beings and their encounters with humans. The question of whether or not these beings exist or whether or not they are imaginative products of the human mind is not relevant to this book since their believed or felt existence to human perception is already an integral part of the eco-spiritual worldview and practices of Tibetans with whom I work. To them the place on earth in which they live speaks as well as listens to them.

On an early May morning in 2010 a small film crew and I walked from a meditation cave up to the ridgeline before dawn to film a scene of “cloud herding” by Akhu Norbu as day broke. This long ridgeline is also a “weather-line” over which rain and hail clouds pour from the east into the village’s valley. Dawn broke but no herd-able dark rain clouds converged on us; instead a thick, silvery fog covered the rising sun and blanketed the mountains in front of us. The viewfinder of the camera showed only the small dense droplets of vapor moving in the wind and obscuring the topographic references that indicated the high elevation and the mountainous terrain we were in. My minimum hope from the ridgeline was to capture a few scenes of the sunrise, but even slightly after 6:00 this didn’t seem likely. The sun was rising but was hidden behind the dense fog. However, Akhu Norbu, our documentary subject, was rather optimistic. Upon telling us he was going to break the fog he proposed to have the camera follow him. He began to walk along the spine of the ridge with his ritual recitation. Within fifteen minutes the fog thinned. The mountain tops around us began to appear, like small islands in a retreating silvery sea. Akhu Norbu performed a recitation of sangchod (), verses written to eulogize local deities. To him, the physical contents of fog are indeed tiny water droplets in the air; however fog is more than a meteorological event. It is the work of earth deities, especially those who reside in the celestial domain and on the surface of the earth. By pleasing or sometimes threatening the deities it is possible to work the weather in one’s favor. From this filming occasion I learned again that natural events are not seen as neutral happenings among rural Tibetans. They are willed and manipulated by both supernatural beings and humans.

It has been over a decade since I began my Tibet-related career and most of my fieldwork assignments have been completed in Amdo regions of Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan. I am not native to Tibet and neither have I gone native. However, what should be said about my working in Tibet is that I recognize my empathetic understanding of place-human relationship among Tibetans. I make this statement because my building activities, participation in my Tibetan friends’ pilgrimages to sacred lakes and mountains, and volunteering as an assistant to lamas’ and yogis’ cave retreats has led the state of my mind into an “empathetic insideness” referring to the willingness of an outsider “to be open to significances of a place, to feel it, to know and respect its symbols;” therefore, “to be inside a place empathetically is to understand that place as rich in meaning…” (Relph 1976, 54).

As an empathetically engaged anthropologist, I regard the Amdo region of Qinghai as my primary geographic reference when I evoke the Tibetan landscape in this book. To be noted, Amdo does not represent the entirety of Tibet but its mountain ranges, linguistic identity, and eco-cultural practices are an inherent part of Tibetan civilizational fabric. Works of R.A. Stein (1962), René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1956), John Vincent Bellezza (2005), and Toni Huber (1999a) among others, point to the common eco-spiritual dimension of the Tibetan landscape. Relph once remarked, “The world is peopled with place-spirits and ties to places are spiritual rather than physical” and “…people are their place and a place is its people” (1976, 65, 34). Tibet is such a case. Thus in this book the understanding of the imaginative dialogues between people and high places like Tibet rests upon these inter-braided scholarships of anthropology, geography, religious studies, and Tibetology. In this regard my work in Amdo is a case, not a representation, of such commonality among Tibetans and their native lands.

1.3.3 Lhasa and Shangrila

Between 2008 and 2011 I led U.S. students and faculty members to Lhasa, TAR, and Shangrila, Yunnan Province for field-based courses and faculty seminars on religion and ecology in Tibet. My own fieldwork objective in these two popular tourist destinations was to examine the intersections of tourism as pilgrimage and pilgrimage as tourism. I look upon both as forms of landscape consumption in the commercial and spiritual senses. Lhasa and Shangrila are in two different regions of Tibet and yet they are intimately connected in the current development of China’s tourism in Tibet. The emphasis of my work in these two global tourist destinations is not merely on tourism as a commercial industry. Like my other fieldwork locations, I have focused on the connectivity of mindscape and landscape among tour companies, urban landscape masterminds, the regional economic development drive, and consumer desires for natural landscapes.

“I’m going to Lhasa” or “I just returned from Lhasa” are often uttered with an exclamation among tourists, Buddhists, and artists whom I met. The display of pride in this exclamation draws attentive curiosity from friends, colleagues, and acquaintances and makes many of them envious of going to the high place too.

Lhasa is often the first stop of tourists and pilgrims in TAR via aerial or land routes. Since 2006 when the Qinghai – Lhasa railway was completed, riding the train has been the most desirable means to reach the city. The pop singer Xu Qia-nya’s song “Riding the Train to Lhasa” was among China’s hottest pop hits since 2007. Its Tibetan versions sung by Tibetan singers like Sho’er Dawa (), De-chan Wangmo (), Amuna () often fill the audial space of the train from Beijing to Lhasa and are found in the music collections of Chinese tourists and pilgrims on board. The utterance of “Lhasa,” like this pop song, oftentimes possesses imaginative qualities and the anticipation of tourists and travelers. The representation of Lhasa in this regard is not limited to the city itself but to its role as a gateway opening up to the entirety of Tibet. Both the inner drama and the travel-pilgrimage drama of the traveler begin before he or she boards the train or the plane. In other words the mindscape of the traveler has already been in contact with Tibet through stock images, travel writings, TV programs, and peer stories. The place of Tibet has what I would call a “mirage effect,” a concept I will explore later, but simply explained it is an effect that enables an image to be bounced to far places through the “atmosphere” of mindscape.

Before drafting up my travel course and seminar itineraries I often started with soliciting wish lists from both student and faculty participants about what places they wanted to see in Tibet. The first timers’ lists mostly matched the popular and familiar images of Tibet – Potala Palace, Sera Monastery, Johkang Temple, Barkor Street, Namtso Lake and so on. For more sophisticated participants, those who had read about Tibetan Buddhism and the current state of Tibet, there were requests to visit places like Ani Tsangkong Convent ( ), Tibet Museum, Tibet Revolutionary Exhibit Hall, and other places which are informative of the modern history of Tibet.

In actually touring Lhasa with North American or Chinese scholars and students, I noticed that the ancient architecture of Lhasa amazed them. At the same time the natural landscapes at Namtso Lake, Drak Yerpa Cave Meditation Site, and Mt. Yarlha Shampo excite tourists and pilgrims alike with a different set of aesthetics and inner responses than those elicited by the city of Lhasa. Often the sublime quality of the Tibetan landscape draws emotional currents besides intellectual, philosophical, and environmental reflections from travelers. I would not hesitate to qualify the landscape as what Giuliana Bruno calls an “atlas of emotion” (2002, 6) involving the motion of emotion in both landscape and mindscape in terms of visual-audial stimuli, atmospheric sensations, haptic desires, and imaginative dialogues. The mindscape moves along with the changing terrain. Both are kinesthetic. Each year between 2008 and 2011 at least two or three participants in my field classes and seminars expressed their deep emotional connection with Tibetan landscape in the manner of crying and/or requesting extended private time to “soak up the energy” of the landscape.

In this age of simultaneously occurring late-capitalism and late-socialism in China, the market economy, whether centralized or in a laissez faire state, is always keen on identifying popular desires, aspirations, and trends as potential and actual opportunities for profit. Once a popular desire is amassed around an object, this object, whether a brand name product or a geographic place or a charismatic person, is instantly given commercial value and thus is turned into a commodity.

Åshild Kolås’ Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition: A Place Called Shangrila offers a representative look of this perspective: because Shangrila is “a space of dream” (2008, 104) it is transformed into a tourist commodity as well as a site of place-making, nation-building, and identity contestation. In this regard, as Kolås remarks, Shangrila is an arena for a “representational game” geared toward the contested “authenticity” of Tibetan culture from multiple angles (2008, 120, 124). I also see this aspect of Shangrila in the nexus of tourism and pilgrimage. While touching on this important aspect of the expansion of tourism in Shangrila I steer the emphasis of my work toward what scholars of landscape studies commonly refer to as the “energy” (Ivakhiv 2001, 228) or “potency” of place (Casey 2000, 184). With this said, when a place is turned into a hot commodity of tourism, the “energy” of the place, likewise, also enters this externally discerned “commodity” which becomes a vessel of its mobility beyond its home environment. Shangrila in Yunnan Province is such a vessel of Tibetan landscape in both physical and symbolic terms.

The name “Shangrila” is not native to Kham in Yunnan. Its placial association is fantastically found in Lost Horizon, the 1933 novel by James Hilton. Mr. Hugh Conway, the main character, describes it as a serene world with which he “felt the invasion of a deep spiritual emotions, as if Shangrila were indeed a living essence, distilled from the magic of ages and miraculously preserved against time and death” (Hilton 2006, 261). Shangrila of Yunnan was formerly called Zhongdian in Chinese and Gyaltang () in Tibetan. In 2001, its name was officially changed to Shangrila with approval from the Chinese State. The state explicitly describes Shangrila landscape’s resemblance to Hilton’s original utopian version (ebeijing.gov.cn). Hilton’s fantasy world was thus “discovered” in Western Yunnan Province sixty-eight years after its “creation.”

Shangrila, known as “Little Lhasa” in tourist brochures and travel writings, is split into “new” and “old” sections. It is no secret that the “old” section is also new, meaning that most of it was recently (re)built to resemble Shuhe, another “old town” adjacent to Lijiang, 200 kilometers away from Shangrila. In my work, I find that when asked to choose between the “old” and the “new,” backpackers and tour groups predominantly choose the “old” as the destination of their lodging, sightseeing, and shopping in spite of the fact that these “old” locations are reproductions. Because of the evidenced newness of Old Town Shangrila, I prefer to see its “oldness” as the materialization of a modern popular mindscape desiring a return to a past placiality in which communal intimacy, organic lifestyle, and accessibility to the natural landscape are readily available. The present place is thus made to represent a time of the past. The selling point is definitively the reconstructed “oldness” in the new space of the city.

Both tourism and pilgrimage possess a shared quality of treating Tibet as a sacred site as well as a site of what Yifu Tuan calls “escapism” (1998, 79), a distinct sense of alienation and disconnectedness resulting from the overhuman-ized living and working environments of modern cities. In this regard Lhasa and Shangrila (“Little Lhasa”) are the travel destinations of tourists and pilgrims and, simultaneously, they are both concrete and symbolic places full of varied affordances connecting landscape and mindscape and interlocking both in an intersubjective relationship.