TRIN-GYI-PHO-NYA: TIBET’S ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT DIGEST Vol. 3, No. 1
By Gabriel Lafitte*
A human ecology of Tibet starts in the minds of Tibetans, especially those, past and present, able to convey how they see the land, the sky, waters, rocks and animals. We turn to the culture heroes of the Tibetan people, the great lamas and yogis, the bards and masters of spontaneous song, the composers of inspirational poetry designed to open minds and hearts.
We draw on the deep well of nature writing composed by lamas, naljorpa, togdens, madmen, yogis, retreatants, pilgrims, lineage holders, who realized the nature of mind and the nature of all that arises. We listen to the voices of Tibet’s great nature poets such as Milarepa, Gotsangpa, Pema Karpo, Jamgon Kongtrul, Shabkar, to name a few. We join them in seeing rocks and valleys, peaks and passes as mirrors, holding up to us reminders of what really matters in life, how to live authentically and confidently, decisively and spontaneously.
“On the vast plain of emptiness
The wild beasts and bull yaks of thought circulate
Breaking their pride with both dog and horse,
Subduing them with both sword and spear,
I kill the wild beasts and bull yaks of thought.
The flesh is eaten in nonduality,
The taste experienced as great bliss.
If I go hunting, that’s how I do it.”[1]
Go Drakpa 1392-1481
These words challenge us to get to the heart of what matters in life, which is to clarify the mind, so as to see clearly. Godrakpa’s violent imagery confronts our romantic idea that Tibetans were all saintly environmentalists. Tibetans did and do hunt, and slaughter their domestic animals. Godrakpa’s poetry works because it takes familiar scenes, as metaphors for the most important work we can do.
From a classic Tibetan point of view, human, animal, vegetable and mineral realms are merged, sharing of the same nature. Rocks have human features, wild animals are omens, to those of pure perception they may be sky dancers or gods. This is landscape energized by the presence of past meditators, whose sacred visions are available to us, in their pilgrimage guides and spontaneous songs. This goes beyond likening the vast pasture to emptiness in which thoughts roam as yaks. To liken this to that is to dwell in this and that, forever comparing, seeking what is beyond, rather than awakening to what is here.
Take The Great Oath Prayer to Tsari. It is a guide to the features of the sacred mountain of Dakpa Shelri, on the border of southern Tibet and India’s Arunachal Pradesh. The translator Toni Huber comments that the prayer is: “the most extensive surviving index of the mountain’s powerful beings, both divine and human. As an oral map it describes and catalogues over sixty toponyms of major landscape feature, including mountain peaks, hills and ridges, passes, ravines, lakes, plateaus, caves, charnel grounds, meditation retreat sites, alpine pastures, paths and even meditative states that one can travel to at particular sites.” [2]
The prayer to Tsari (or Dakpa Shelri Pure Crystal Mountain) says, in part:
“I pray to the white-bodied sky-goer,
Whose abode is the palace of Conch-shell Conduit Lake.
I pray to the four-armed protector
Whose abode is the palace of Demon Lord Vitality Lake.
I pray to the master Choki Gonpo,
Whose abode is Simultaneous Realization Glorious Woodlands.
I pray to the accomplished one, Shawa Ripa,
Whose abode is the palace of Iron Frog Ravine.
I pray to the sky-goers who bathe secretly,
Whose abode is the palace of Sky-goer’s Bathing Lake.
I pray to the twenty-one Drolma goddesses,
Whose abode is the place of Drolma Vitality Lake.” (Huber 73)
These specific places on the pilgrim’s route were named by meditators who sat for days and months, sometimes years, through the seasons, in the landscape, investing it with the awakenings such surroundings fostered. The deities of these places “are not ontologically distinguished from the physical environment that constitutes their abodes. The great saints and meditators of the past who are mentioned are also thought of as still present at the sites of their former dwellings.” (Huber 72)
To the Tibetan poets the path the pilgrim takes through consecrated natural places is, at every turn, a reflection of the path within. The Tsadra pilgrimage, close to Palpung monastery and Derge town in eastern Tibet, is a long and difficult circumambulation, involving squeezing through tight passages, crossing plains, traversing ridges and hills, passing through glens.
“There are four difficult passages:
Difficult passage to Distinguish Between Virtue and Non-virtue
Difficult passage to Eradicate Confusion
Difficult Passage to Decide Between Good and Evil
Difficult Passage on the High Pass Between Cyclic Existence and Transcendence
There are four plains:
Well-arranged Mandala Plain
Dancing Dakini Plain
Fullest Happiness Plain
Expansive Wisdom Plain.
There are four hills of isolation:
Hill of Isolation from the Demons’ Obstacles
Hill of Isolation from the Distractions of Desire and Anger
Hill of Isolation from Emotions of the Eight Worldly Concerns
Secret Hill of Isolation from Suffering and the Increase of Happiness.
There are five glens:
Glen of Clear Wisdom
Glen of Self-arisen Nature of Reality
Glen of the Wide Expanse
Glen of the Changeless Mark of Stability.”[3]
Each place is associated with, and is conducive to specific steps on the spiritual path. Each of the named inner experiences is a stage or realization, which is explained in detail in many texts, and in the oral transmissions of living teachers. A brief poem listing places, classed together as glens or hills, gorges or expansive plains, serves as a mnemonic, readily remembered so that, on arrival, the qualities listed come to mind and are readily engendered. Other texts expand, sometimes at length, on the meditative realizations best suited to specific places.
The modern science of ecology has no place for any of this other than to admire it as poetry, appreciated strictly as art. Nature and culture must be kept apart, in separate realms. China came to Tibet with science as one of its major rationales for conquest and reshaping of the landscape. Science would make the land more productive. Scientific socialism would revive a stagnant civilization, a sluggish and primitive people in danger of dying out, or remaining slaves to nature.
Socialism has disappeared as China’s policy for Tibet, but science has not. In China’s Tibet, there is no space for Tibetan poetry, or for landscape as locus of meditative insight into the nature of reality. That was swept aside, and to this day remains the private knowledge of meditators, not something to be brought into the public sphere of mainstream of Tibetan environmental policy debate and advocacy.
Such materialism is not new. In the 19th century Jamgon Kongtrul said:
“He who always visits sacred places without faith or respect,
With the idea that they only contain ordinary earth and stone,
Is a beast in the body of a man.
Think of this and please exert yourself to cultivate as much merit as you can!
Kye ma Ho!
To those of aberrant minds, this place is just earth, stone, water and trees,
To mistaken intellects, it appears as solid, inanimate objects.
To practitioners, appearances have no intrinsic nature;
To those of pure vision, it is a celestial palace full of deities.
To those with realization, it is the radiant luminosity of innate awareness.” (158-9)
[1] Cyrus Stearns, Hermit of Go Cliffs, Wisdom Publications, 2000, 169
[2] Toni Huber, The cult of Pure Crystal Mountain, Oxford University Press, 1999, 74
[3] Ngawang Zangpo, Sacred Ground: Jamgon Kongtrul on ‘Pilgrimage and sacred geography,’ Snow Lion, 2001, 206-7
*Gabriel Lafitte, an advisor to Tibet Justice Center’s Environment Committee, runs a Human Ecology of Tibet program at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. He can be reached via email.
