How to See the Invisible: Attention, Landscape, and the Transformation of Vision in Tibetan Pilgrimage Guides

Abstract

This article asks how religious traditions make otherwise invisible worlds perceptible and real for religious practitioners and analyzes the specific case of Tibetan pilgrimage literature in order to propose a theoretical account for how they do so. Specifically, I show how the textual tradition of Tibetan pilgrimage guides plays a key role in structuring the pilgrimage experience, particularly in terms of the pilgrim’s visual encounter with the material landscape. Pilgrimage guides are particularly concerned with vision because the Tibetan pilgrimage tradition maintains that holy mountains have both an outer appearance visible to ordinary people and an inner reality that only advanced beings can see. As such, the goal for pilgrims is to transform their perception so as to see the hidden reality of the mountain. To show how guides seek to facilitate such a transformation, I first identify the key literary strategies that guides use to project a fantastic vision of the holy sites they describe. Next, I demonstrate how guides recontextualize pilgrims’ ordinary perception of the pilgrimage site such that they view the ordinary in tandem with the extraordinary. I refer to this facility as “co-seeing,” or the ability to see the place in two ways at once. This co-seeing serves to ground the fantastic vision of the site in the material landscape. The article thus draws on new theoretical developments in the so-called visual turn and new materialism to provide an account of how religious traditions engage both perception and landscape to shape practitioners’ experience of the world.