Abstract
Tibetan and Himālayan Buddhist doctrine and meditative traditions have been extensively studied and are well-known even to non-scholars, but pilgrimage and other non-elite practices have received far less attention. Pilgrimage is one of the most important practices for Tibetan and Himālayan Buddhists, whether traditional scholars, ordinary monks, lay yogis, or Buddhist laypeople. Scholarship on pilgrimage has increased significantly since the 1990s, and has tended to focus on territories within the political boundaries of the Tibetan provinces of the People’s Republic of China. This study looks at a pilgrimage in what was once the far western end of the Tibetan empire, but is now within the political boundaries of India. Being outside of the People’s Republic of China, this pilgrimage escaped the disruption of such practices that occurred within the PRC during the Cultural Revolution and after. Having interviewed people in the region, and performed the pilgrimage myself, this study shows that this pilgrimage possesses features common to Tibetan pilgrimage to sites of tantric power, but also has its own unique qualities. This study provides new data that contributes to the growing body of knowledge of Tibetan pilgrimage and to our understanding of such practices among the Buddhists of Himālayan India.
Highlights
In the opening of his book Pilgrimage in Tibet, Alex McKay (McKay 1998, p. 1) asserts that pilgrimage is a core element of religious practice in the Himālayan cultural world
Having interviewed people in the region, and performed the pilgrimage myself, this study shows that this pilgrimage possesses features common to Tibetan pilgrimage to sites of tantric power, and has its own unique qualities
This study provides new data that contributes to the growing body of knowledge of Tibetan pilgrimage and to our understanding of such practices among the Buddhists of Himālayan India
Summary
In the opening of his book Pilgrimage in Tibet, Alex McKay (McKay 1998, p. 1) asserts that pilgrimage is a core element of religious practice in the Himālayan cultural world. Information about the popular practices that constitute the religious lives of most Himālayan people, whether monastic or lay, has been far less available or sought. Mandala and Landscape (Ramble 2007a), building on the foundation established by Tucci’s Theory and Practice of Man.d.ala (Tucci 1971), contains a wide-ranging set of articles concentrating on Tibet, and includes articles on India, China and Japan. The same year, another important volume, Pilgrimage in Tibet (McKay 1998), collected papers presented at the 1996 conference of the Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden. Having talked to people in Nako village over the past decade, performed the pilgrimage with two well-informed pilgrims, and read and translated the pilgrimage guidebook (gnas yig) (see Appendix A), it will be shown that this Himālayan Buddhist pilgrimage is consistent with many of the features of other Tibetan pilgrimages, but that there are some unique characteristics as well
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