| Abstract |
How can a person learn to see a mountain as a divine mandala, especially when—to the ordinary eye—the mountain looks like a pile of rocks and snow? This is the challenge that the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition poses to pilgrims, who are told to overcome their ordinary perception to see the hidden reality of the holy mountain. This book analyzes how Tibetan pilgrimage literature texts approach this goal of transforming perception, and how the tradition creates and maintains wondrous sacred landscapes experienced by pilgrims as real. The book draws on multiple genres of Tibetan literature, including founding narratives of holy places, polemical debates about the value of pilgrimage, written guides to holy places, advice texts about the ethics of pilgrimage practice, and personal diaries, which date from the 1230s to the 1950s. It argues that the pilgrimage tradition develops practices of seeing that juxtapose pilgrims’ ordinary perception of the material world and their imaginative vision of the extraordinary sacred landscape. In other words, they juxtapose two understandings of reality: one, the ordinary reality pilgrims see every day, and the other, the deeper, extraordinary reality that pilgrimage texts claim lies beyond illusory ordinary perception. The pilgrimage tradition leads pilgrims back and forth between these two ways of seeing, weaving the ordinary perceived world and extraordinary imagined world together in their experience. These practices of seeing thus structure the pilgrim’s encounter with the material landscape, creating the conditions in which the extraordinary nature of the mountain is experienced as real and materially present. |
