2.1 Eco-aesthetics of an outsider looking in

I first went to Sambha Village in Amdo (northeastern Qinghai Province) in the summer of 2005, having heard of it while doing fieldwork in a nearby village. I accompanied Akhu Norbu, the ngapa ( tantric yogi) from Rachekyi ( ) mentioned in the introduction, to visit his cousin’s family in Sambha. The distance between Rachekyi and Sambha is less than twenty kilometers but because it is tucked in a valley surrounded by mountains it feels less accessible. The county bus goes there only once a day in the late afternoon. Once the bus leaves the provincial highway, the narrow dirt road winds eastward between cliffs and Machu () which feeds the Yellow River, into Sambha. On our late afternoon ride, the sun gradually set behind us and the blue waters of Machu steadily but forcefully headed in the same direction as our bus. The mountainous landscape along Machu was both the object of my distanced aesthetic appreciation of the Earth and an encompassing, moving subjectivity that included the motion of the bus and my mind as well as the smell of the diesel exhaust and the mixed sounds of the engine, the tires pressing the gravel road, and the passengers’ conversations. The landscape kept moving eastward, new terrain unfolding while my mind tracked its own conflicting desires: one part wanted the bus to continue so as to unfold new, aesthetically pleasing scenes to my view and another wished to freeze or frame segments of the moving landscape as if I were a living camera. These parallel states of the moving landscape and my mindscape continued until the driver honked, signaling the bus’s approach to a sharp turn. As the echoes of the horn bounced back from the mountains on both shores of Machu, the bus slowly made a ninety-degree turn. This turning point is not just the gateway into Sambha but is also a vista overlooking the entirety of the village. From that point we saw its wheat fields, the surrounding mountains and the moving river caressing the south edge of the village like a giant blue serpent slowly fading into a narrow gorge toward where Machu eventually becomes the Yellow River.

Looking at the panorama of Sambha through the bus window as the sun set, I was awed, not because I had not seen awe-inspiring landscapes in Tibet before but because I was enthralled by the wholeness of this small human settlement in the embrace of the large mountains and the moving water and it seemed as if it were a place enclosed by itself in a way only possible in fairytales – with nothing lacking and with everything abundant and harmonious. This sudden opening of the vista undoubtedly gave my mindscape a subliminal kick, awakening dormant images of fantasy worlds. My aesthetic and photographic desire was fulfilled later, after I had a contemplative moment at the vista point: I measured the light and clicked the shutter of my panoramic camera, feeling as if, by imprinting the eternity of Sambha through my lens onto the film, my camera had been consecrated by it. In retrospect, during the few minutes in which I framed the landscape of Sambha with my camera, I admittedly treated the totality of this small village and its ambient environment as an earthwork, and as an outsider looking in.

The landscape of Sambha is not as spectacular as that of Amne Machen or Gang Rinpoche (Mt. Kailas) experienced by countless travelers, pilgrims, and professional photographers. My eco-aesthetic sensing of the Sambha landscape stirred up images of the myths of Arcadia and the Shire of the Lord of the Rings, in which self-sustainability, abundance, and harmony are the essence of their ecosystems inclusive of not just humans but also plentiful species of flora and fauna. Furthermore because of humans’ care of and stewardship over both the built and natural landscapes, the Earth in these mythic realms appears especially delightful as it radiates a heightened sense of enchantment to those who encounter it. My first encounter with the Sambha landscape could be said to be an experience of the positive aesthetics of nature (Carlson 1984, 6). My aesthetic experience is centered on an “order appreciation,” which, as Malcolm Budd explains, means “ordered pattern – a pattern ordered by and revelatory of the forces of creation or selection responsible for it” (Budd 2000, 146 – 47). These creative forces are the geological, biological, and meteorological forces by which all natural objects in a given landscape are formed with “equal positive aesthetic value” (Budd 2000, 147). From this perspective, I see the Sambha landscape as an order of its own in an aesthetically pleasing enclosure of both natural elements and human creativity.

I have walked up to the mountains around Sambha in all cardinal directions except where it is precipitous on its north edge. My earlier aesthetic sensing of the Sambha landscape automatically and reflexively contrasted with the urban landscape of Beijing where I had been working and living for the last four years. In such a cross-cultural and cross-ethnic contrast, I qualify Sambha’s landscape as pleasingly balanced in direct contradiction to the urban landscape of Beijing which, in my mindscape, appears too humanized, thus having lost the aesthetic and ecological balance initially intended by the imperial architects of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. By “too humanized” I mean, in Edward Relph’s words, “…the paradox of modern landscapes is that they are dehumanizing because they are excessively humanized…there is almost nothing in them that can happen spontaneously, autonomously or accidentally, or which expresses human emotions and feelings” (Relph 1981, 104). In contrast, the village, though appearing insignificant in size in comparison to Beijing, is comfortably nestled in the embrace of the surrounding mountains and the moving water of Machu. In addition to this horizontal embrace of the village by the natural environment, it is enveloped by the earth below and the sky above. The earth below is fertile enough for farming and stable enough for dwelling, while the sky above brings the villagers profuse sunlight and the starry firmament as well as moisture precipitated from thick, fantastically-shaped clouds. Sambha is in union with the moving sky and the Earth.

Since the first visit, I have returned annually to Sambha for more fieldwork. Each time I look at Sambha’s physical appearance or its formal structure, my mindscape brings forth the aforementioned idyllic, scenic, and self-sustaining images. I am not sure whether the subjectivity of the Sambha landscape speaks to me or if my mindscape converses with the landscape. From Tilley’s phenomenological perspective, I can at least claim that my experiencing Sambha’s different earth formations allows me to gain insights through a “subject-observer’s immersion” (Tilley 2010, 26). Like Tilley, I also sense that “landscapes have agency in relation to persons” (Tilley 2010, 26).

The landscape of Sambha, whether seen from the positive aesthetics of nature or from a phenomenological angle, is an earthwork of both the Earth and humans, but it is most definitely not an earthwork created by hands of professional artists. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake was a pioneering earthwork in 1969 which brought forth “a new artwork, a new world for art,” as Edward Casey commented, “Far from being a mere shadow projected somewhere outside mind and body, in creating such a work Smithson was in a very particular place, Utah, and he was there body and mind in an experience that was nothing other than an ecstasis” (Casey 2005, 192). The uniqueness of an earthwork lies in its intimacy with its artists and viewers in both aesthetic and physical manners, both of whom place themselves in the earthwork when creating, appreciating, sensing, feeling, and letting themselves be enveloped by it and the surrounding landscape. Viewing, or rather experiencing, an earthwork requires sensibility from the participant. In fact it is not merely a viewing process but a self-implacing, moving, process as Casey remarks “…the body’s action on earth, and this action is that of journeying amid matter, making its way in the material world, mapping not only materially but kinetically” (Casey 2005, 104).

Whether sitting on a mountain for hours in the evening or gazing at the night sky from the mouth of a cave, I see the kinesis of the Sambha landscape as an earthwork always in motion with the weather and gradients of light. It does not stop its engagement with my subjectivity; likewise my mindscape, while absorbing the landscape as though its contours, colors, and textures are spread on a canvas, moves with its own speed and on its own intellectual-spiritual terrain and yet utterly grounds itself in the landscape. Like Tilley’s walk in the environs of Stonehenge (Tilley 2010, 63–98), my experience in the mountains around Sambha and along the bank of Machu resonates with Tilley’s reflection, “To understand landscapes phenomenologically requires the art of walking in and through them, to touch and be touched by them” (Tilley, 27). Although my camera could frame a particular moment and a particular view of the landscape, the landscape itself is not static, it encompasses the shifting position of the sun, incoming storm clouds, falling raindrops, loose rocks pushed downhill by high winds, and the entrance of a twittering eagle into the aerial space of the village. The landscape is never the same – it moves and is moved, although its physical structure retains its position on the Earth.

My affective bond with the Sambha landscape is strengthened each time my body and mind move across it, and each time I scan the panoramic photos of Sambha I keep in my office far from the region. My peripatetic movements, both circumambient and vertical, on the high and low edges of Sambha, have also been the movements of my mindscape as I enter an absorptive mode, derived from Casey’s idea of “absorptive mapping,” “that is done from the lived body’s standpoint…from its concrete experience of existing and moving on the Earth, being extended in traction there, tracing out its trajectory, thus literally choro-graphic and topo-graphic; rather than detachment and view…” (2005, 170). In this absorptive mode of sensing Sambha’s landscape with my walking, touching, smelling, and feeling it, I see why and how I reflexively qualify it as an earthwork of unity, wholeness, and delightfulness. In the interactions between my mindscape and the landscape, the idea of nature and being natural keeps emerging, affirming the same affective and reverential mood of many other non-Tibetans’ absorptive experiences with the Tibetan landscape, which I elaborate later. “Nature” in this case is not understood necessarily as an opposite of culture as in the classic debate of anthropology and other social sciences but is that which is seen, smelled, and touched by our moving, sensing body situated in it. In other words, “nature” here consists of what Budd calls “natural substances (gold, water), natural species (animals, insects, trees, shrubs, plants), natural objects (icebergs, mountains, volcanoes, planets, moons), natural forces, (gravity, magnetism), natural appearances (the sky, sunrise and sunset, a rainbow, shadows)…” (Budd 1996, 208). With both the substances of nature and its natural appearance, the Sambha landscape, as an aesthetically balanced earthwork in contrast to over-humanized urban landscapes, contains elemental components of the Earth as well as humans’ willingness to apply these natural elements to building their settlement. Thus, this unique earthwork is a totality of natural elements and powerful but idyllic geological formations in which the ancestors of Sambha’s residents chose to build their homes.

In this regard, Sambha is also a work of environmental art that bears relational dynamics between itself and its settings (Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 2007, 317). The Earth is the fundamental source for the creation of this art. In the case of Sambha, it was not a deliberate act of its original dwellers to “build” the pleasing geological formations as such. Rather, they were persuaded to live there by the natural place of Sambha itself. It was a pre-existing work of the Earth where a large body of water flows from the glaciers and snowy mountains and is self-contained within the natural bounds of the mountains and the river. In other words, Sambha, or the place which was named Sambha by its first dwellers, was an earthwork prior to the current human settlement. Thus, the landscape itself was an existing-in-potential work of art until humans moved into it and built a symbiotic relationship with it. Eventually the mutual absorption between the Earth and people became a union – the current Sambha. So the place is art, and the art is the place, interchangeably: the landscape then is an artwork of the Earth with living beings and natural objects, i. e. mountain tops, caves, rocks, trees, insects, birds, and mountain goats.

The sense of the beautiful I perceive toward Sambha in my mindscape is not a concept or an ephemeral mental phenomenon that could be effortlessly deconstructed or dismissed solely as an “imagination” induced by the “global fetish” of Tibet. Instead this sense of the beautiful evokes images of positive ecological soundness and communal wholesomeness. It touches or springs from something archetypal and universal, and yet relies on our culturally-conditioned aesthetic terms and images to articulate.

2.2 Geopoetic affordances of the Tibetan landscape

Before stunning landscape photos and cinematic productions about Tibet saturated the global mediascape, only a handful of exceptional individuals had traveled to and lived in Tibet in the capacities of seeker, explorer, and imperial officer. Many of them shared with their compatriots their memories and reflections by writing books about their travels. Their narratives are most revealing about their first physical, intellectual, and spiritual contact with the Tibetan landscape. A sense of awe and contemplative ecstasy is present in their narratives. For instance, Lama Anagarika Govinda (1898 – 1985, born Ernst Lothar Hoffmann) recollected his memory of the Tibetan landscape in the late 1940s when he was crossing an 18,000-foot mountain pass:

I see Lama Govinda’s pilgrimage experience in Tibet as a confession of his affective bonding with the landscape with a transcendental overtone. Many of Lama Govinda’s contemporaries such as Alexandra David-Neel (1868 – 1969) and Walter Evans-Wentz (1878 – 1965) had similar poetic exaltations toward Tibet.

Besides this group of Western seekers’ memories that show their spiritual reflections of the Tibetan landscape, British imperial officers like Francis Younghusband (1863 – 1942), also expressed their affection toward the land after returning from Tibet. Regardless of the post-colonial characterization of Younghusband, the imperial officer leading the British mission to Lhasa in 1905, as a “gentleman” and a “thief” (Carrington 2003), he, the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society, did not lack spiritual retrospection of his Tibet experience. In David Matless’ study of nature-mysticism in the early twentieth century Younghusband is referenced as a mystic of nature. Matless notes, “Alone in the hills above Lhasa, the mission having brought him to the ‘highest pitch’ of his existence, Younghusband felt ‘a deep inner-soul satisfaction’, which remained with him for many years after, a sense of the world as fundamentally good…” (Matless 1991, 273).

This stream of early, non-native, spiritual responses to Tibet did not recede into the historical background; instead it continues, manifesting itself in the current contexts of Tibet’s humanitarian issues and religious revitalizations. An increasing amount of knowledge available about Tibet does not “demystify” it; instead it contributes to contemporary Tibetophiles’ and spiritual seekers’ ventures for “unlocking the secrets of the Land of the Snows” (Lee 1996) and seeking spiritual “know-how” in Tibet.

Chen Xiaodong, a freelance Buddhist writer based in Shanghai, shares his first experience with an online audience in China, “I was sitting on a hilltop looking at the endlessly expanding horizon under the blue sky…A bliss began to permeate my body and mind. I didn’t know that my eyes welled up with tears. I bent down to kiss this earth. This is a magic land, a sacred pureland…” (Chen 2002, 5).

After discovering a 108-foot-high waterfall in eastern Tibet, Ian Baker, a mountain climber and a Buddhist practitioner sponsored by the National Geographic in the 1990s, shared his reflection, “With the chrome taps opened wide, and the wild thundering of the waterfall still within me, I could only hope those radiant waters, hidden in our deepest collective being, would never be dammed or diverted but – like the dream of unknown places – carry us beyond all divisions into the currents of the unbound heart” (Baker 2004, 416).

Whether in the colonial era or in the contemporary world, many of these personal narratives about Tibet found in books or on the Internet share a similar aesthetic and spiritual experience which van Gennep called “the territorial passage” (van Gennep 1960, 19), a rite of passage that pilgrims on rough but magnificent terrain might experience. The landscape of Tibet itself then becomes a medium of the person’s spiritual transformation resembling a hero’s journey in the ancient Greek sense (Campbell 1968). Publishers readily provide venues for this niche of personal narratives about Tibet as shown in the blurbs on the back covers of their publications: Adventure Magazine gives accolades to Baker’s book, “Reading the book is itself a big, almost a transcendent, experience” (2004); National Geographic Magazine congratulates Sorrel Wilby, author of Journey across Tibet, as “one of the most talented, courageous, and irresistibly delightful explorers on the face of the earth” (1988); and Booklist promotes Russell Johnson and Kerry Moran’s photo book Tibet’s Sacred Mountain, “Both the vivid description and the awe-inspiring color photographs help to capture the mystical experience of this region and its religious significance” (1999).

In the global marketplace, the Tibetan landscape, in its entirety, is often perceived as a tectonic work of the Earth’s natural forces with the addition of human cultural and spiritual touches. The attributes described by many experiencing their first contact are aesthetically positive and contain such words and phrases: divinely radiant, primeval forces, self-renewing, immaculate, holistic, sublime, magnificent, and splendid. This list can go on and on but it is recognizable that the list characteristically pushes the limits of our lexicon to express appreciation of the Earth as well as the experiencer’s perceived experience of transcendence in Tibet. These indications of non-Tibetans’ aesthetics, over the course of time, cannot be simplistically dismissed as an idealization and/or Orientalization of Tibet; instead it rather deserves to be treated as a unique landscape subjectivity, inextricable from Tibet itself.

Tibet is a gift to those who enter it. I make this statement not to be deliberately poetic as I write up this ethnographic and interpretive text but because it is a recognizable pattern: the traveler or pilgrim usually returns home with poetically-articulated statements of having been initiated by travel in Tibet. It is a unique bond, an affordance, between the traveler and the Tibetan landscape that deserves sympathetic understanding not moral judgment from social scientists.

From the perspective of James Gibson’s ecological psychology, Tibet presents a set of affordances to its natives as well as to its visitors. To reiterate the idea, an affordance is a gift from the environment to an organism (Gibson 1986, 127); however, it is not a pre-made gift waiting for the organism to pick up; instead it requires the organism’s participation in the environment before the gift is identified. This required participation of the organism builds its intimate relationship with the environment. Before a rock is reshaped into a hand axe, it is only one of many random rocks in the environment. It is the toolmaker who recognizes its instrumental potential and subsequently transforms it into a tool called a hand axe. The environment makes the rock available while the toolmaker embodies his or her utilitarian vision into the rock. The complete formation of the hand axe out of the rock signifies the identified affordance from the environment to the toolmaker and thus, the environment and the toolmaker enter a relationship characterized by Gibson as the complementarity of the environment and the organism (Gibson 1986, 127).

Likewise the poetic narratives of the abovementioned non-Tibetan pilgrims and travelers are a result of a complementarity between human consciousness and a unique landscape. Such complementarity builds itself upon the physical environment of Tibet but finalizes itself as an intangible earth-inspired spirituality (Smyer Yu 2011, 191) or a unique state of mind in which the luminosity of the Tibetan landscape overpowers the visitor who, sooner or later, enters a state of ecstasy. By “luminosity” I mean the solar light in its maximum brilliancy and diverse manifestations over the landscape of Tibet in both radiant and ambient senses. No mental imagination can produce such luminosity. No imaginative mind can produce the spectrum of rich colors. The luminous landscape of Tibet does inevitably induce metaphoric, poetic, and imaginative descriptions from pilgrims and travelers when they write up their experiences after their time in Tibet. Take Lama Govinda again as an example, he writes, “The roles of heaven and earth are reversed…while the landscape stands out against it in radiating colors, as if it were the source of light. Red and yellow rocks rise like flames against the dark blue velvet curtain of the sky” (Govinda 2005, 101). In this way as well, my aesthetic response to Sambha was enacted as I stood on the immense, colorful earth that holds the tiny village.

To re-emphasize, the case I attempt to build here is premised upon the condition that all poetic expressions in this book concerning the Tibetan landscape come from individuals who have had a physical immersion experience in the landscape of Tibet. They were physically surrounded by the solid earth, the air, the flux of the weather, the cultural ethos – simply, both the natural and built environments of Tibet. The environed body is irresistibly included in the luminous profusion of light which stimulates the vision of the person and subsequently his or her intellect and spirituality. The luminosity is an inherent part of the sublime quality of the Tibetan landscape. Taking Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception, we can refer to the light as being two different types, namely radiant and ambient. The former refers to the direct light from the sun in the sky, while the latter is understood as indirectly sourced light resulting from the radiant light “reverberating between the earth and the sky, and between surfaces that face one another” (Gibson 1986, 50).

The ambient light is particularly worthy of attention for my ecological understanding of how Tibet is generative of the earth-inspired spirituality expressed in poetic terms. The mountainous landscape of Tibet permits a spectrum of ambient light to bounce off countless mountains. The environment is saturated with different shades of light reflected in different colors. In a way, the solid, uneven surface of the earth is at once “soaked” in light and reproduces the vision-inspiring radiant energy by reflecting the direct sunlight. Furthermore, the air is also a medium of light. Water vapor in the form of fog and clouds produces its own shades of ambient light. The sublime greatness of the landscape is already unarguably magnificent and when the ambient light pervades the “skin” of the landscape, it generates a luminosity that envelops everything and everyone in the environment. Like the mountains, the pilgrim or the traveler is equally immersed in such a luminous environment and also produces ambient light through absorbing and reflecting the incoming light from the sky and the surrounding earth.

In this regard, the geopoetics shown in Tibet-related writings is not solely the mental invention of the writers but is a response to the light saturating the landscape of Tibet. The radiant energy of the light from the solar source above and countless ambient sources in the landscape are the primary stimulus that fire off intellectual and spiritual responses from the person enveloped in the light-saturated, color-vibrant environment. The energy is embodied in the perceiving person and environed in the perceived environment. Perception, as Gibson remarks, is “an act of information pickup” (Gibson 1986, 57) with external stimuli and internal receptors. In such a process, Gibson continues, “The observer, being an organism, exchanges energy with the environment by respiration, food consumption, and behavior” (Gibson 1986, 57). In this sense, Tibet “enters” both biological and psychic receptors of the perceiver. Thus, the body and the mind of the perceiver are both marked and penetrated by the Tibetan landscape. The geo-poetics found in Tibet-related narratives are one of the many affordances or offerings from Tibet as a unique high place. I will continue to address non-Tibetans’ eco-aesthetics and geopoetics later in the chapter, but for now it is crucial to recognize how native Tibetans bond with their homeland.

2.3 Sambha mandalized

My fieldwork has involved both my physical experience of the landscape and life in a home in Sambha, so I am not building a case of Tibet-as-imagination. On the ground level, Sambha is not the Tibetan cousin of Arcadia or the Shire as my image-association spurred by the view from the surrounding mountains suggested. Although it is less affected by China’s advancing modernization project in comparison with larger Tibetan communities in Amdo (Makley 2007; Fischer 2005; Yeh and Henderson 2008), like other parts of cultural Tibet, Sambha has undergone a series of socialist changes brought about by the Chinese state since the late 1950s prior to its encounter of the current modernization project specifically targeting western China. Recent changes are almost all economically induced.

On the first day, after getting off the bus, Akhu Norbu and I walked toward his cousin’s house and saw elders sitting at the roadside and children playing outside their homes. For the next twenty days of my stay I did not meet a single young adult. This demographic dynamic has stayed the same and the village has become quieter each time I return. Tserang, Akhu Norbu’s cousin and a history professor at a provincial university in Qinghai Province, told me that residents above eighteen and below forty-five had gone to other places to work as sa-lee-wa ( construction workers) and gu-wa ( contracted workers who are specifically assigned to dig caterpillar fungi, wild mushrooms, and other tonic herbs). This economically-driven social change is also documented by the scholarly works by Toni Huber (2002), Andreas Gruschke (2008), Daniel Winkler (2008), and Emily Yeh (2004), among others. Tserang’s younger brother left Sambha for Xining where he has a small shop selling Tibetan crafts; Tserang himself lives in Xining as he is tied to his university job. For most of the year, then, only children and their grandparents are in the village. The human gravity of the village centers on the kindred bonding between grandparents and grandchildren. The village school was the communal center. However, in the last three years, more changes have come to the village. All school children are now required by the state to attend larger boarding schools in the county. They return to their homes for short visits once a month. Two kilometers away along the upper stream of Machu, another bridge is being built connecting the provincial highway to a large tract of land across the river where a golf course and a five-star tourist resort are under construction. Directives have already come from the county informing residents that Sambha will also be developed as a tourist resort soon.

In this setting my ethnographic rapport has been established mostly with the older population of Sambha who are above forty-five years of age. Through their narratives and memories I see how the landscape of Sambha has its own cosmology, subjectivity, and sublimity. The interior being of the Sambha landscape resides not only within its aesthetically pleasing geological formations but also in the mindscapes of the elders of Sambha.

The origin of the village name has two contradictory stories. The official name that the county uses is Semba () which literally means “three” but geographically is understood as “the intersection of the three” referring to Sambha as being in the location of two neighboring villages, respectively in the north and the west, with Machu in the south. Semba is widely known to outsiders. Topographically the two “neighboring villages” are separated from Sambha by several mountains; thus the topographic distance is significantly greater than the official cartographic distance that doesn’t consider the varied elevations and gradients of the mountainous terrain. The name Semba became known after the socialist system was established during the latter half of the last century when the originally tribe-based human settlements were placed on the administrative map of Qinghai Province. Many original Tibetan names of locations were replaced by or transliterated into Chinese. For instance, Guide County’s Tibetan name was Chekha () but this is no longer officially used and is fading from use among the younger generation of local Tibetans.

In the second story, told by elders and yogis of Sambha and other villages in the area, the spelling of the village’s name is Sambha (). The difference between Semba and Sambha is not just in its spelling and lexical meanings, but rather in the religious, spiritual, and historical connotations. Sambha is, in every way, concentrated with the history and religiosity of the village in terms of how the initial dwellers decided to build their homes there. The village’s oral tradition says the name of Sambha started in the thirteenth century when a tantric lama named Hsichan Namkhapa ( ) came into the valley from Kham where he discovered a rock-inlaid face print and meditation site of Padmasambhava (), the Indian tantric master responsible for Tibet’s Buddhist conversion. Tserang’s father, an elder yogi, told me that Hsichan Namkhapa also found a rock on which Yeshe Tsogyal, Padmasambhava’s consort, meditated and performed ritual dances. Similar stories from other villages in the area corroborate Sambha elders’ claims.

The dominant form of Buddhism in the area is not monastic-based but rather lay-based. Tantric practitioners call themselves ngapa ( yogi), and ngama ( yogini). Yogis of other villages all know the cave meditation site of Padmasambhava. To the Buddhist yogis and yoginis in the area, the village in the valley is Sambha not Semba, which is clearly derived from the name of Padmasambhava: pedma () means lotus while sambhava () means “truthfully revealing from” or “truthfully emerging from.” Yogis in the area have traditionally held periodic solitary retreats at the cave site that Hsichan Namkhapa found in Sambha. When county administration renamed the village as Semba, local yogis did not overtly resist it but gave justified the change by fully aligning it with their ancient Buddhist association with Padmasambhava. Semba, with its emphasis on the number three, is explained as referring to the three Dharma names of the Indian tantric master: Guru Padmasambhava (), Guru Padmajungne ( ), and Guru Tsokye Dorje (). Regardless of this understanding, the yogis insist that the spelling of the village’s name has to be Sambha not Semba.

The first dwellers of Sambha clearly consecrated the valley with the name and legacy of Padmasambhava. The mountain standing on the east of the village, where the face print and meditation cave are found, was named by Sambha’s ancestors as Sambhadrubgne (). Drub () means expedient accomplishment and gne/gnas () refers to geographic locations that are marked with sacred sites and supernatural power of deities. Thus, drubgne ( ) means a place of expedient accomplishment. In the Buddhist context, it implies spiritual achievement in a given location. In this regard, the spiritual gravity of Sambha is Sambhadrubgne. When one enters the village from the west side on bus or on foot, the spectacular scene of the village with Sambhadrubgne towering behind arrests one’s vision. Proportionally the residential domain and most of the wheat fields of the village extend from the foothill of Sambhadrubgne westward. The closer the distance a house is to the mountain, the older its age is or the longer its resident family can trace their historical connection to Sambha, and vice versa. The construction of the initial homes corresponds to the oral history of village that states that the foot of the mountain, recognized as sacred site, was the starting point of human dwelling in Sambha.

The village is mandalized or consecrated. In his study of Japanese sacred mountains, Allan Grapard points out two significances of mandalas in the context of Buddhism. One pertains to the “representation of the residence of the Buddha…a metaphysical space which provided an insight into what Buddhism called the Realm of Essence” (Grapard 1982, 209). Another spiritual significance represented by mandalas is “the original nature of our heart-mind, free of illusions and passions” (Grapard, 1982, 209).

The Buddhist mandalization of dwelling space or the natural environment is commonplace in Tibet. It is not an exaggeration to state that nearly all Tibetan human settlements are mandalized as sacred space. In comparison, in Grapard’s Japanese case, mandalization appears as almost purely a Buddhist activity in terms of its representations of Buddhist spirituality and cosmology. The Tibetan case of mandalas ( kyilkhor) and mandalization signifies not simply humans’ recognition of a given place as a hierophany of the Buddha-field but involves a type of nested hierarchy in which multiple relationships of humans, spirits, deities, indigenous beliefs, and Buddhist practices are interwoven. These relationships mutually saturate each other regardless of the symbolic fact that everything is subordinated to the spiritual authority of the Buddha Dharma (Smyer Yu 2011, 70). The religious map of the Tibetan landscape shows that a Buddhist mandala, in the sense of an underlying metaphorical structure or view of the land itself, has been laid over Tibet. The historical Buddhist conversion of Tibet is not only an indication of the mindwork of humans, but is also a conversion process for the entire landscape of Tibet which embodied/embodies indigenous earthly deities.

Many scholars have found evidence in Tibetan folk history of a common belief that prior to the entrance of Buddhism, Tibet was the home of what Buddhists call the supine demoness ( shenmo Gangyal) (Miller 1991). This somewhat pejorative term has been filtered through the Buddhist lens to view the pre-Buddhist pantheon of Tibet. The word shenmo () is the translation of the Sanskrit word rākṣasa, referring to demonic humanoid beings popularly known as human-eaters among Buddhists. This pre-Buddhist goddess lies within the landscape of Tibet stretching out to all directions of the historical Tibetan empire. The eventual Buddhist consecration of Tibet was a project that sought to pacify the demonness and subjugate her dominion. Early Buddhist conversion in Tibet was not simply a spreading of Buddha Dharma into the mindscape of Tibetans; instead it initiated a long and complex relationship with the Tibetan landscape that was subsequently also subject to Buddhist conversion. More precisely the deities residing in the landscape were subject to this massive Buddhist conversion project.

In this sense, although the landscape remains the same in terms of its topographical and geological formation, the pre-Buddhist human relationship with earthly deities has nevertheless been transformed, re-ordered, and re-hierarchized. The absolute superiority of the deities over humans and other life forms has been transformed into subordination to Buddha Dharma and to those humans who possess mastery of Buddhist ritual techniques to counter or appropriate the deities’ supernatural power. Fundamentally, Buddhism ideologically and spiritually demoted the earthly deities to the level of sentient beings who are subject to the same cycle of birth and death; thus they are, like all sentient beings, equally situated in existential suffering. In this way the pre-Buddhist pantheon is re-moralized in the Buddhist spiritual hierarchy (Huber and Pedersen 1997, 584). Alliances, gift exchanges, and reciprocity regularly occur between humans and Tibet’s earth-based deities within the sentient realm yet all parties are now oriented toward the Buddha Dharma. In this respect, mindscape and landscape, and humans and deities are interlocked.

Sambha’s Buddhist mandalization is identical to the historical Buddhist conversion of Tibet but on a much smaller scale. Its landscape was re-cosmologized as a Buddhist sacred place centered on the legend of Padmasambhava. The surface of Sambhadrubgne retains the natural formation it had centuries ago; however human markings and inscriptions on it are all monumental and commemorative to Padmasambhava. They are daily reminders to the residents of Sambha of this Indian Guru’s spiritual prowess and of the inherent Buddhist-ness of the landscape. Meditation caves on Sambhadrubgne, like many others in Tibet, are modified with human touches. Their entrances and interiors resemble small cabins rather than natural caves, with wooden structures and masonry having been added to them. Prayer flags fly over the temple on the mountain in honor of Padmasambhava. Khata (), scarves used for honorary purposes, and piles of white pebbles from Machu are laid over the rock where Yeshe Tsogyal, Padmasambhava’s spiritual companion, performed tantric ritual dances. These markings of Buddhist spirituality function as monuments in relation to the landscape on which they stand.

Herein I particularly see the relevance of Tilley’s points on the relationship between a monument and the place where it is situated. Padmasambhava’s cave sites and the yogis’ temple are not visually imposing but are visible from distance. They imbue the landscape of Sambha with “a symbolic reference point” or “a new sense of place” (Tilley 2010, 50) in contrast to its pre-Buddhist natural state of being. Sambhadrubgne, in this sense, reminds the residents in the valley of their Buddhist identity and their moral orientation follows accordingly. Tilley points out, “As a shared set of socially mediated conventional understandings, landscapes can be claimed to be an extension of the social self, providing a series of principles and norms for living, relating to others, and the past” (Tilley 2010, 40).

According to Tserang’s father, the temple on the mountain used to be bigger and hosted numerous annual Dharma events and rituals performed by yogis from the area and afar. In 1966, the year that marked the start of the Cultural Revolution, the temple was completely demolished. In 1980 when the Chinese state became more open to religious practices, villagers raised the funds to reconstruct the temple though it is significantly smaller than the original. Although there are not as many Dharma events as were held in the past, the caves of Sambhadrubgne have been frequented by yogis from the village and other places since the 1980s. Akhu Norbu and his father, who both come from another village, are among the yogis who have made solitary retreats in Sambha’s caves. In this way the surrounding landscape has been re-mandalized through the reconstructed temple and renewed Buddhist activities on the mountain.

It is noteworthy that the resident-initiated surface markings are on the side of the mountain overlooking the village while the mountain’s other side remains natural and without such modifications and inscriptions. In this respect the human settlement of Sambha implaces itself in a sanctuary marked off from other places. Its geological formation has pre-determined the human spiritual association with the pristine realm of enlightened beings. This corresponds to the same pattern of sacralization of human dwellings elsewhere in the world, especially in those communities with distinct geological forms that allow them to establish both physical and symbolic boundaries. In their study of sacred sites and their relation with the Earth, J. Donald Hughes and Jim Swan notice, “The places chosen were almost always distinguished by some natural feature: an impressive grove of large old trees, a spring, a lake, a fissure in the earth, or a mountain peak. These were often landscapes of great natural beauty” (Hughes and Swan 1986, 248). From this angle, the mandalization of Sambha resembles the ancient Greek idea of temenos (Latin templum) referring to “a part cut off” or “a space marked out” (Hughes and Swan 1986, 248). Such places are sanctuaries or temple grounds, for, as Hughes and Swan continue, “What we call a temple is such a structure, but for the ancients the enclosure itself, and everything within it, served as the temple. There the god lived and became manifest. And there a fugitive could seek sanctuary, a sick person could ask for healing, and anyone seeking wisdom…could sleep overnight in expectation of a meaningful dream. There were hundreds of those places in the ancient world.” (Hughes and Swan 1986, 248 – 49).

As Tserang’s father told me, Sambha, in the time of his great grandfathers, was briefly a sanctuary for outlaws. During that time, according to stories passed on to him, Sambha was once called kyamashetoka (). Its literal meaning is “the mountain where the Han did not die.” The story held that a group of outlaws attempted to bury a Han-Chinese man alive but he did not die. However, this was only a very brief period when the Buddhist sacredness of Sambha was compromised.

From this story, I learned that the human mindscape is not separated from the very landscape with which it is always in sensorial, emotional, memorial, and spiritual contact. The nodes of mindscape and landscape are not only the surficial connections of our senses but also the deeply entwined memories of the past, regardless of how we re-shape our memories for our present needs. Herein I reemphasize that landscape is place-based and almost synonymous to place as a vessel or a container in the Aristotelian sense (Casey 2000, 184) though it is not devoid of its own subjectivity.

In the case of Sambha, both human mindscapes and place-landscape are not separate from each other but are inter-subjectively enmeshed. The potency of such place is concentrated with intertwined human memories, surficial monument markings, and positive aesthetics radiating out of the geological formation. The intangibility of the human mind has never ceased being surrounded, enveloped, and saturated by the tangibility of the place where it exercises its cognitive activities and inner reflections on phenomena of the outer world. Thus the biography of a place lives in and through the human mindscape, beyond its physical, objective, anonymous presence in the world. Those who have no conscious knowledge of it simply call it “nature.” The potency of the place of Sambha thus lies in its memorability that is actualized through a passage of time and space in the human mindscape eidetic to its corresponding landscape. What Casey says about place and memorability is most elucidating, “Thanks to its ‘distinct potencies, ’ a place is at once internally diversified – full of protuberant features and forceful vectors – and distinct externally from other places. Both kinds of differentiations, internal and external, augment memorability” (Casey 2000, 186).

Sambha is such a place that interweaves the human mindscape and the natural landscape. Its bio-graphy sustains itself in both. I call this human-Earth relation “inter-dwelling” meaning that landscape is an inherent part of human consciousness and that both mindscape and landscape are merged and mediated by symbolic and physical mediums. In Sambha, the pattern of inter-dwelling is multilayered and multidimensional. What stands out in this pattern is that the collective memory of human history and the myths and stories of the spirit-world are stored in both the human mindscape and the natural, albeit humanized landscape.

2.4 Inter-dwelling with gods and spirits

Sambha’s mandalization was undertaken in ancient times but continues to present its embedded sanctity to both current residents and visitors alike. Its sanctity is not always vertically or hierarchically linked to the sacredness of Buddhism and saints like Padmasambhava, but also horizontally saturates the landscape through the connection with earthly deities, animals, and people – the immediate sentient residents of Sambha. On a few occasions I volunteered to be Akhu Norbu’s caretaker when he entered solitary cave retreats on Sambhadrubgne. I cooked for him and fetched water from the stream. The privilege of a cave-meditator’s caretaker is that he or she has full access to the cave and is permitted to speak with the meditator, usually after eight o’clock at night. The first thing Akhu Norbu did in the morning was recite prayers for the mountain deities and that was the last thing he did at night before we could speak to each other with the addition of an offering of liquor to the deities. The opening and close of day were marked by his invocations to local deities, whom he calls Dharma protectors. As he explained to me, it is essential that a Buddhist cave dweller maintain a reverential attitude toward mountain or other local deities. The offerings help prevent unpleasant or even dangerous occurrences such as sickness or the sudden departure of his caretaker during his time in the cave.

According to Akhu Norbu, sa (), which means “earth” or “landscape,” is not merely the inorganic mass always beneath one’s feet; instead it is seen as sasum () – a three-component world – consisting of the celestial realm ( sabla) above, the surface of the earth ( sadang) in the middle, and the world beneath the earth’s surface ( sa’og). These three realms are not merely a spatial division of the world. Each is a lifeworld of its own, inhabited by beings many of which would not be found in a modern scientific taxonomy of organisms. They are the formless beings often regarded as deities and spirits with supernatural power. In local folk culture they include yul-lhas ( country gods), zhedek ( local deities), and sadek ( soil deities), to name a few. As Akhu Norbu told me, they are supernatural beings who, like human beings, have a strong sense of home. Their power lies in their ability to make destructive weather and inflict illnesses on humans and livestock; however, when these gods and spirits are pleased, their power is also shown in their life-giving, healing, and hindrance-removing abilities. The lifeworlds of these deities and humans often intersect and overlap with each other. Thus, it is considered natural that by offering them prayers and incense, Akhu Norbu keeps a congenial rapport with these formless yet powerful beings who share their dwelling place with humans.

In the valley of Sambha, many families have similar offering routines though they may not be as ritually elaborate as those of a yogi in a cave. Burning juniper incense in the morning is a common offering to the deities and the Buddha Dharma. Both Akhu Norbu and villagers direct their prayers specifically to Ami Megbon (), the mountain god of Sambhadrubgne, whose name is another appellation of the mountain itself.

In Tibet, the name of a mountain deity and the name of the mountain are often the same. This non-differentiation of the deities and the landscape they occupy perceptively makes it easier for people to see the Earth as animated and spirited with these deities (Smyer Yu 2011, 62). Among farmers of Sambha, while they maintain a clearly vertical, reverential, relationship with the Buddha Dharma, in the annual cycles of their farming and other worldly affairs they invoke their local deities to ensure the success of their needs and desires. They both fear and revere Ami Megbon, as he is a fearful warrior god ( dgra-lha). All the trees and the wildlife on the mountain are said to be his subjects and family members.

For instance, villagers are protective of the few trees that survived the twentieth century’s deforestation. Tserang’s father told me a story of how a person from another village died of a festering skin rash all over his body soon after he peeled a large piece of bark off from one of the few trees left on the mountain. Everyone believed he had angered Ami Megbon. The intimacy between the village and Ami Megbon does not rest merely on fear of his punishment but is mostly built upon an exchange of gifts between people and the warrior god. Along with the routine offerings of incense, grain, milk, and liquor, the entire village holds an annual festival called denbe dgra-lha ( festival of warrior gods), specifically designated to Ami Megbon and other warrior gods in the area. The climax of the festival is the ending moments when the ritual-performing yogis insert the names of illness-causing demons and ghosts, and names of some villagers’ personal enemies, into a yak horn. The attendees are instructed as to where the horn, containing undesirable elements, should be buried in the Earth. One’s potential misfortune, hindrances, and illnesses for the coming year then all disappear with the buried horn deeply pressed down into the Earth with the power of the invoked warrior gods. People’s general fear of Ami Megbon is, in fact, an act of reciprocity or repayment to his protection, and this reciprocal relationship is sustained through their caretaking of the body of Ami Megbon – the mountain which also once hosted Padmasambhava and his spiritual companion, and now is home to the village’s temple and yogis’ meditation caves.

The reciprocity between humans and deities does not only happen at higher elevations. The most fertile wheat fields of the village are at the foothill of Sambhadrubgne and the fertility of the Earth in this part of the village is attributed to the presence of the earthly deities, particularly the ones known as klu ( serpent-like deities). Klu are a type of waterborne deity in charge of underground water, springs, streams, and rivers. Any waterborne plants and animals are said to be klu’s family members and belongings. In this part of Sambha, two small springs flow out from underground. The streams are thin but consistent. These two springs are called “klu-chu” () or water secreted from klu. Their water is cool in the summer and warm enough in the winter that they are free of snow and ice. They flow into a small reservoir as a source of drinking water and irrigation, but all water from the mountains and underground enter Machu.

In spite of the impact of modern infrastructural activities, Machu’s symbolic significance is retained by the village: it is seen as a floating, giant turquoise earing signifying wealth and prosperity. All homes in the village face this giant earing, hoping it will bring them fortunes. On that first visit to Sambha, when I took landscape photos from the vista at the entry point of the village, I assumed that villagers irrigated their fields with water from Machu. Later I found out water from Machu was only responsible for a very few family plots because it requires an electricity-consuming pump. The large amount of water flowing in Machu visually dominates the scene of the village; however, it has little practical benefit to the village. In the past before the river was damned downstream for a hydraulic power station, the river was very rapid. The gorge at the east side of the village was called Kebkygga () which means “needle-breaking point.” Kebkygga was also a word used for cursing at one’s personal enemies as if to imply that the person deserved being tossed into the rapids at the gorge where even a needle would not make it through whole. In the past, the bodies of those who died in accidents or feuds underwent a “water burial” at the gorge because the corpse was easily “tenderized” by the rough currents making it easier for fish to feed. Now water burial has become rare as the currents are inadequate for sweeping away a corpse.

The fields near the spring are obviously more moist and fertile than those plots further away, but according to Tserang’s father, they once had a much greater flow of water coming from below ground between four large trees. During the Cultural Revolution, these special trees were identified as objects of superstition because they were wrapped in layers of prayer flags. On a summer day some villagers, led by the Party Secretary, tested the power of gods and nature by chopping down all four of them. The spring dried up. Even after several months, the water still did not return. As this water had been the primary irrigation source of the village’s crops, a group of people quietly planted new trees at the same place. A month later the water resumed though it was drastically less than before. The following year a pond was dug to hold the water and it still serves as a small reservoir. The decreased flow of the water also meant a reduction in the arable plots near the springs. In Tserang’s father’s explanation, the destructive acts toward the Earth are not simply the physical dissolution or alteration of natural objects but, more critically, are offenses to the deities and spirits who reside in them.

A landscape involving the inter-dwelling of people, spirits, and deities is much more complex than that understood by an outsider who looks in with an aesthetic eye only. All residents, whether humans or gods, live in each other’s physical, mental, and symbolic spaces. The subjectivity of each speaks to the other. This is not unique to Tibet and is a way of understanding relationship to place found among many indigenous people throughout the world. Indigenous Andeans, for instance, make ritual offerings to their mountain deities who are believed to be in control of meteorological occurrences and the fertility of land and people (Reinhard 1985, 307). Australian Aboriginals’ dream-tracks are their ancestral trails of migration for both symbolic empowerment and physical sustenance (Morphy 2003).

The Tibetan case is sophisticated, too, in its own context. It is commonly recognized by many Tibet scholars that the eco-religious worldview of Tibetans shows that “the phenomenal world is held to be inhabited by a host of spirit powers and deities who are organized into a single ritual cosmos and must be ritually acknowledged” (Huber and Pedersen 1997, 584). Although many human and natural places in Tibet, including Sambha, are mandalized or consecrated in the framework of Buddhism, their residents nevertheless guard their worldly interests very seriously in terms of health, wealth, and the protection of various species within their landscape. On the folk level, I notice that often it is not the doctrine of Buddhism that many people are afraid of violating, such as the Buddhist injunction to refrain from killing, but they worry about potential harm to their day-to-day worldly life caused by the invisible world of gods, spirits, demons, ghosts, and inter-personal feuds. For those whose livelihood is at the mercy of the meteorological forces manipulated by such an array of supernatural beings, preventing loss and suffering is then not a matter of the Dharma explicated in rational language but requires that people be alert for actual and potential harm. At the same time, they regularly harness both merit and power from their supernatural counterparts by establishing reciprocity through participating in routine performances of rituals, especially offering-making. In their study of native Tibetan meteorological practices Toni Huber and Poul Pedersen point out that to sustain such reciprocity with non-human residents of the same piece of land “ensures a stable environment which yields its bounty” (Huber and Pedersen 1997, 585) and thus minimizes unfavorable natural conditions for crops and unwanted illnesses.

Tibetans in Sambha do not passively defend themselves from the harm of supernatural forces. Armed with ritual techniques, yogis who specialize in weather control can allegedly counter their local deities’ mischievous meteorological acts toward humans and their livelihoods. In this regard, the supernatural power of the deities is not always absolute. Yogis’ ritual weaponry includes slingshots, bows and arrows, and other paraphernalia. All these instruments have a common goal: to maintain favorable living conditions by defeating any actual or potential meteorological violence or causes of illness and inter-personal hindrances. For farmers in Sambha, stopping advancing hail clouds or redirecting the course of a devastating storm are essential tasks of the yogis who are weather-making specialists. According to Akhu Norbu and other yogis, the most effective weapon is made of buckwheat seeds. They are small but prickly and, when ritually empowered as “pellets of secret teachings” (), they are loaded into slingshots or onto the tips of arrows and used as “bullets”. When on weather patrol, yogis who encounter approaching hail clouds shoot these “bullets” into them, targeting the trouble-making deities hiding in the clouds. Instead of seeing the “bullets” reach the clouds, I have seen them all fall back to the Earth. The symbolic act and ritual meaning of the “bullets” is obviously more important than the observable physical trajectory. I find the locally-cherished legend of Yutog Yontan Gonpo (), the ninth century Tibetan medicine man, is telling in its revelation of how the mindscapes of both humans and gods are so entwined with the landscape:

2.5 Ancestral rootedness of Sambha and beyond

The mythopoetic aspect of landscape shown in the above folk story is common elsewhere in Tibet. Humans and earthly deities always appear in some kind of union in both the physical landscape and intangible mindscape, so that a particular place is associated with a story and its appropriate deities. In contemporary landscape studies, the subjectivity of a given landscape is a theoretical focal point for discussion and debate on the question: is there a subjectivity of the landscape itself or is this a projection of human subjectivity onto it? In my reading of theoretical works by leading scholars like Bender, Ingold, and Tilley, I see that such a subjectivity is attached to the landscape but is not entirely the landscape’s own subjectivity. It is mostly the activities of humans that have given birth to this landscape subjectivity. Landscape, as Ingold puts it, is not land, not space, and not nature but dwelling place; therefore “…through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it” (Ingold 1993, 154). The subjectivity of landscape comes to being through what he calls “taskscape” or “the pattern of dwelling activities” (Ingold 1993, 153). To emphasize a bit more, Ingold continues, “the taskscape exists only so long as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling” (Ingold 1993, 161). In this sense, the subjectivity of landscape then depends upon what Bender calls the “materiality of social relationships” (Bender 2002, 104). Such subjectivity is the result of the “interactivity” (Ingold 1993, 163) between people and the piece of the Earth that they choose as their dwelling place. From this perspective, the subjectivity of landscape is heavily contingent upon human activities on the land as “a physical context” (Bender 2002, 104), as a “contoured and textured surface” (Ingold 1993, 154), and as a “ground for all thought and social interaction” (Tilley 2010, 26).

As I see the interconnectedness between people and their place from both ethnographic and theoretical viewpoints, I prefer “intersubjectivity” to “subjectivity” in this context in response to many scholars’ claim of landscape subjectivity based on human activities. To be specific, this intersubjectivity can also be understood as an earth-people subjectivity in which human subjectivity has more weight since the landscape has passively been worked on by humans in both material and symbolic terms. This human trail is well articulated with Ingold’s idea of “temporality of landscape” (1993), Tilley’s “lived body” (2010, 26), and Casey’s “passage of time” (2000, 196), which all point to the inter-relatedness between humans and landscape, and the rootedness of humans in place. In this sense, the materiality of human memories of the past and present activities clearly grow roots downward into and surficially across the landscape in the forms of architecture, agriculture, monuments, and burial grounds.

In the case of Sambha the roots of people and their place-based consciousness started with the initial pre-Buddhist state of being and subsequent Buddhist mandalization of the valley as a site sacred in its connection to Padmasambhava. The first residents also brought in their historical and cultural roots from Ü-Tsang or Central Tibet. These roots from elsewhere are Sambha ancestors’ collective memory and its preservation. The nomenclatural and perceptual interchangeability between the names of mountains and of mountain deities is one noticeable way of preserving the cultural origin of Sambha residents. Besides its positive ecological significance, the perceptual conflation of a mountain with the deity residing in it also preserves the village’s memory of their ancestors.

Ami Megbon is one of the offspring of Ami Machen in Amdo, one of the nine original deity-mountains ( srid pa chags pa’i lha dge) in Tibet, who resides seven hundred kilometers away in Qinghai’s Golok Prefecture. Ami Megbon and Amne Machen, are considered to have either “blood relations” (Smyer Yu 2011, 55) or a social alliance with their human counterparts in Tibet. For instance, Ode Gungyel (), the patriarch of the mountain deities, is also recognized by Tibetans as Mutri Tsenpo (), the second king of ancient Tibet (345 B.C. – 272 B.C.). Yarlha Shompo, another original mountain deity and a son of Ode Gungyel, was enthroned as King Chatri Tsenpo (68 B.C. – 31 B.C.) according to Tibetan folklore (Smyer Yu 2011, 54). These nine mountain deities populated Tibet. Ami Megbon in Sambha is one of their many descendants. His nomad-warrior appearance resembles that of his nine ancestors. The geographic distribution of the descendants of the nine original mountain deities shows the migration pattern of Tibetans since ancient times.

In this regard Sambha residents have two levels of collective memories embedded in their landscape. The actual Buddhist inscriptions on the surface of the landscape recollect their Buddhist ancestor Hsichan Namkhapa () and the saint, Padmasambhava, while Ami Megbon reminds them of where their cultural and ethnic origin is. This people-earth subjectivity in the landscape clearly indicates a passage of a place through time and of time through a place. In other words the landscape embodies time; it allows spaces of past times to be preserved. Such complex preservation of myths, histories, religious sacredness, and ancestral origins occurs simultaneously in both the landscape and mindscape. Through this passage of time-space the landscape has become “a living process” or “a process of incorporation” (Ingold 1993, 162). Undoubtedly the temporality of landscape is social and filled with human activities (Ingold 1993, 159), and it is in this way that the human mindscape is rooted there.

This rootedness can be understood as “place-memory” or the state of being in which the content of human mindscapes is incorporated into particular places and thus become the content of the place itself (Casey 2000, 184). A bio-graphy of a place thus constitutes its geographical evolution as well as its intimate and almost kindred relationship with the humans who live in it. This idea of place-memory helps us understand the nation and identity of Tibetans. Nation in this sense retains most of its etymological meaning as birthplace. It is particularly relevant for us to understand place-based identity, whether it is land-specific or on the move. In current nationalism studies, Benedict Anderson’s idea of nation as an imagined community (Anderson 1991) is widely applied in various human constituencies and national contexts. Its perspectival weight is more on the ideology of nationhood as a production of modernity and its modern mediums than on the place of nation. This theoretical vantage point is an eye-opener for us to see that the origin of the fundamental structure of the modern nation-state lies in the ideology and religiosity of the Enlightenment idea of liberty, equality, and democracy. Nation in this sense is idea-based, or “a state of the mind, an act of consciousness” (Kohn 1944, 10). In the overall trend of nationalism studies the role of place/landscape in shaping a nation and its identity is often relegated to the past tense, and is overlooked or under-researched.

Everything is on the move in this era of globalization but within context-specific places and landscapes. The place/landscape of Tibet plays a vital role in shaping the sense of home and nation among Tibetans both inside and outside Tibet. Tibetan farmers and nomads are constantly reminded of their ancestral and spiritual origins when deity mountains or mountain deities enter their vision and other sense-scapes. Tibetans who are in diaspora or exile also express their place-based sense through nostalgia. In his autobiography, the 14^th Dalai Lama begins his narrative with his birthplace, Taktser, in Amdo. The first topographic element of Takster in the description of his home is a mountain of significance:

This childhood experience of Tibet’s ultimate spiritual teacher is identical to that of Sambha’s residents where Ami Megbon, as a mountain god, is the protective deity of the village. Like common Tibetan folks, the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist national identity is deeply embedded in the landscape of Tibet. His mother’s memoir confirms the idyllic scene of their homeland, as she writes in Dalai Lama, My Son, “My earliest memories are of a land that nature had made a plentiful paradise. It was a wealth of forests, lakes, hills, mountains, and fertile soil. This is how I remember the village of Churkha, in the district of Tsongkha, where I was born” (Diki Tsering 2000, 18).

Deity-mountains and scenes of nature are commonplace in human settlements throughout Tibet. When the place-ness of home is invoked, especially in a nostalgic mood far from home, this leitmotif of deified and personified place occurs frequently. The late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche also begins the recollection of his home place with its topography rather than with his kinsmen. In Born in Tibet, the natural awesomeness of Pagö-pünsum, the highest mountain in his home region, monumentally ushers readers into the home of this legendary tantric master, “Centuries before Buddhism was brought to Tibet, the followers of the Bon religion believed that Pagö-pünsum was the home of the king of spirits, and the surrounding lesser peaks were the abodes of his ministers. Myths linger on among the country folk, and these mountains have continued to be held in awe and veneration in the district” (Chögyam Trungpa 1995, 23).

In this interplay and interlocking of place and memory, the lived body is a place of its own which implaces everything encountered and lived, into its mindscape. The bio-graphy of a geological and humanized place has its own physical evolution since place is always in a process of its own making and being made (Tilley 1994, 33); however, its perceived counterpart residing in the lived body via its mindscape undergoes a different path of evolution especially when the lived body has moved away from its physical place. This evolution of place-memory in human mindscapes takes root in emotional currents, existential circumstances, and nostalgic recollections of the past. The elements of place, whether natural or religious or cultural, are deposited into the mindscape of the lived body. The sediments of the mindscape are reproductions of the physical counterparts but are ordered according to the current lifeworld and circumstances. The difference between the sediments of physical landscape with both geological and human elements, and of human mindscape lies in the malleability, plasticity, and agility of the lived body. In a geological order of place, the deeper a sediment resides in the Earth the older it is. However, the order of the mindscape’s sediments is not definitively set as pure records of the past; instead they comply with the current situatedness of the lived body. This is how place and memory interact with each other and finally unite with each other. Memory grows roots in place and vice versa, but both place and memory grow roots in the lived body as a mobile place. In this regard, past events and scenes of place in memory return to the present, as if they were eternally framed in time, and yet present themselves as if they had never changed. One’s earthly paradise could be lost to human destruction but it is invoked time again into the present and thus its past life relives in the mindscape.

The physical surface of the Dalai Lama’s birthplace has been transformed into another site of China’s urbanization; however his and his mother’s published memories have become what I call “a memorial place” for Tibetans in diaspora, where memory sustains place and national identity. Thus this memorial place is undoubtedly a national place in Tibet except that it is globalized. Because it is physically detached from geographic Tibet, it could be seen as a placeless “imagined community;” however, it does not rest itself on the Enlightenment-based, modern idea of nation; instead its rootedness is found in the place of Tibet in both symbolic and geographic terms. This is what Casey refers to as the paradox of body and place: “…the power of place is most fully manifested at the very moment when place and body fused and lose their separate identities” (Casey 2000, 200). In the case of the Tibetan diaspora, the emotionality of this united identity of body and place further increases the memorability of the Tibetan landscape in a nostalgic fashion appearing as a severe state of homesickness which “admits no remedy other than a return to the homeland” (Casey 2000, 201).

In this case, rootedness to a place does not start unidirectionally from the person to the place. It is rather overwhelmingly the other way around, that is, from the place to the person. The antecedent here is the immersion of the person in the place in which he or she does not just “occupy” a space but is fully engaged with and environed by all elements of his or her lifeworld (Ingold 2000, 135). The “dwelt-in world” (Ingold 2000, 42) never stops filling the body and the mind of the person with nutrients, cultural ethos, and social events. Herein, physical landscape and intangible mindscape could be visualized as a combined placiality in which one finds the past present and the dead very much alive. Such placiality permits us to see place as moving between the dwelt-in world and the world of memory. It is a mobile “rhizomic world” (Ingold 2000, 140) whose complex roots intertwine place and memory, and landscape and mindscape. In his studies, Ingold sees place-based identity formation as resting on these five key phrases – ancestry, generation, substance, memory, and land (Ingold 2000, 132). I would also add the earthly gods and spirits as an integral part of such placiality in the Tibetan case. If landscape is “storied” with human history (Ingold 2011, 141), mindscape can be “storied” with the presence of earthly deities and human memories as shown in the cases of Sambha, the Dalai Lama, and the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The lived place and the remembered life, in both tangible and intangible terms, are a sentient realm in which the land nurtures the body, the gods nourish the psyches of the people, and the mind becomes an inner field of roots grown from both the land and the gods.

2.6 “Place has its own being…”

To understand landscape/place as more than merely background or as recipient of human actions, it is essential that we recognize that it has its own subjectivity, that this subjectivity is intangible in nature but manifests itself in tangible geological and topographic forms. Likewise, this intangible Earth-subjectivity can be seen as an independent being. The materiality of this independent being is not defined by the human taskscape to start with, but is expressed through its physical forms in geological and topographical terms with latent eco-aesthetic and eco-spiritual affordances.

In The Fate of Place, Casey writes, “…place has its own being, on the basis of which it is a ‘cause’ (aita) and not something merely inert or passive (argos, adranēs) – something caused by something else in turn” (Casey 1997, 90). Likewise I see the place of Sambha as having its own being, too, as its relationship with humans has manifested differently with different residents in history and current non-Tibetan visitors through the affordances it offers. The history of how Sambha was named indicates that the a priori being of its landscape spoke to Sambha residents’ ancestors through those affordances at different times. Both their Buddhist and outlaw ancestors recognized the landscape as a sanctuary but with two different moral orientations. To the Buddhist ancestors, the landscape was a Buddha-field because of the alleged marks left by Padmasambhava and his consort; to the outlaw ancestors, the landscape was a perfect haven for a hideout. In those different times, both groups of ancestors farmed the same land protected by the high mountains and the rapid river. Both groups regarded the valley as their home environment. Settling there was not an accident. What the place speaks through the form of what it can give to the humans, its affordances, plays a pivotal role in people’s decision to settle there. Dwelling is not one-sided and place is antecedent to the creative directionality of human activities. Place is the mythical and historical prerequisite to dwelling.

Sambha is one of countless cases of rural human settlements in Tibet with the pattern of inter-dwelling with gods and spirits who share the same ecosphere with humans. Humans, gods, and other beings dwell in each other’s midst with only a porous boundary between them. In the Tibetan worldview, whether they are humans or gods, the fact of sentience connects everyone (Smyer Yu 2011, 70). There is no clear-cut dichotomy separating humans from gods, as occurs in the relationship between humanity and divinity found in Semitic religious traditions. Furthermore, the natural environment in the case of Tibet is not necessarily a separate domain without human presence. Nature in this sense is not cognized as “wilderness” or “wild nature” (Fisher 2003, 667) with a clear modern civilizational bias. This is where I would like to differentiate my eco-aesthetic approach from what is known as “environmental aesthetics” based upon a view that sees the natural environment as an object of artistic appreciation (Fisher 2003, 667). Environmental aestheticians often express their positive aesthetics toward this humanless nature, holding that “all virgin nature is beautiful” (Carlson 1984, 10) and that anything “…untouched by man has mainly positive aesthetic qualities” (Fisher 2003, 671). This man-nature relationship apparently requires that the only human involvement be a distant gaze on pristine, untouched nature.

Tibet is a critical reference for worldwide environmental activism and many parts of its physical landscape contain no human dwelling; however, its sustained sublime quality, besides its geological force and topographic immensity, is saturated with human eco-religious perceptions, ancestral memories, daily prayers intended to please earthly deities, and seasonal renewal of human bonds with sacred sites. When the physical presence of humans is not found in a place, the presence of human consciousness is still most likely extended there. Naming mountains and recognizing them as abodes of gods is a common way of marking natural places where people haven’t necessarily established their built environment but where they are nevertheless intimately connected through mythological, religious, ancestral, and psychic terms.

If a non-native person wishes to understand how a deity mountain is simultaneously a mountain and a deity as many native Tibetans do, it requires his or her inner vision or imagination to connect the presence of gods and spirits in both landscape and mindscape. Herein I restate what I wrote in my earlier work, “It [Tibet] both is an imagination and it generates imagination itself” (Smyer Yu 2011, 190). Tibet holds imaginative affordances to both natives and non-natives. It subjectively, not objectively, engages its visitors with its vibrant colors, weathered, storied landscape, and the presence of divinity in the sentient realm. All begins with the unique landscape of Tibet.