Entering a Bolted PlaceThe Navel of the Demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in Highland Nepal. By Charles Ramble. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Abstract

This is an extraordinary book. It is unconventional in its focus and original in the exposition of its subject matter; it is exemplary in its approach, combining philological investigation of written documents with personal observation of ethnographic detail; it enters unknown territory in its reflections and comes up with unexpected theoretical conclusions; and as a piece of writing, it has style, following its own flow from the title to the last line. The main title may sound sexy, but above all it leads directly to the central scene of action: to Te, or Tetang, an isolated village in the High Himalaya of southern Mustang. Certain topographical features of Mustang can be read, in illustration of a widespread legendary tale, as physical evidence of an epic duel between Guru Rinpoche, the ubiquitous disseminator of Buddhism in the Himalaya, and a local demoness called Balmo, who resisted his missionary activities in the area. The hegemonic battle ended, so the story goes, in victory for the saint, who completed his subjugation of the demoness by nailing her to the ground with a number of Buddhist edifices erected at key points on her prostrate body. One of these points was her navel (te or teba), where Guru Rinpoche built a stupa; topographically speaking, it is at the small plateau (thang) where the future village of Te-thang would rise. The cover photograph of the book exposes this navel, the fortified walls of Te, surrounded by parts of the demoness’s body, the high, curvy walls of the mountains around it. The color cover photo is repeated in black and white as a frontispiece, and the navel is also on the spine of the book. Thus illustrated, the title makes additional sense. Te is indeed embedded in a majestic physical environment, a landscape corpus of mythic suggestivity. This can be attested to by another book, Sacred Landscape of the Himalaya, coedited by Niels Gutschow, Axel Michaels, Charles Ramble, and Ernst Steinkellner (2003). Here, too, a view of the village is featured on the cover, and inside this picture book various portraits of