University of Michigan doctoral candidate Jin Li, supervised by Dr. Erik Mueggler, will explore how religious subjects are formed and transformed through the encounter with new religious discourses and material objects. Investigating the encounter between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists in the post-Communist era, this research poses the following questions: Why have Tibetan monks included Han Chinese (the dominant Chinese ethnicity) in their revival of Buddhism? Why have so many urban Chinese abandoned the secularist worldview cultivated by the state to convert to Tibetan Buddhism? Li addresses the questions by looking into a tradition in the Nyingma sect of Tibetan Buddhism, known as gter. Gter is an indigenous term for exploration that brings together the domains of landscape, materiality, human wayfaring and new religious imagination and interpretation. It has eventually formed new Buddhist subjects who weave together the religious ties between Tibet and China.
This research will involve a combination of ethnographic methods: participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival research, analysis of conversion narratives and focus groups. The goal of these investigations is to understand how the religious domain created by treasure hunting can be seen as an assembly, which gradually comes into being through encounters between humans and things. In doing so, it will increase social scientific understanding of the relationship between subject formation, as indicated in conversion, and the broader material world.
This research is important because it will provide a new way for theorizing religion in anthropology. It will also provide data on the newly emerged interaction between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists, a phenomenon that can give a different way to imagine the fraught relationships between Tibet and China. Given the 60 year history of the Tibet-China conflict and ongoing disputes about who leads Tibetan Buddhism, the phenomena of secularist Chinese converting to Tibetan Buddhism has wide-ranging implications. At a time when the Chinese economy is increasingly dependent on a capitalist model at odds with the fundamental premise of communism, it is important to understand the growing conversion of secularist Chinese to any religion, particularly one tied so closely to political independence of a disputed territory. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
This project explores the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary China. It focuses on the center of this religious encounter, a Nyingma monastery in eastern Tibet, called Larung. My theoretical interest brings me to a question regarding the formation and transformation of religious subjects: why have Tibetan monks, in their revival of Tibetan Buddhism, chosen to convert the Chinese? This question is important for explaining the current encounter which is not simply a reiteration of the past ties nurtured by Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists in the Imperial and Republican eras. To interpret such a new thing, we must first ask about their subjects coming into being in a revival time after the retreat of the Chinese Communist state. This question brought me to a Nyingma tradition known as gter, or "excavation of hidden treasures." A mode of religious revelation, it shapes religious subjects through the intimate articulation it nurtures between humans on the one hand, and landscapes and material objects on the other hand. In this tradition, Tibetan revealers (gter ston) wander through sacred landscape, searching for treasures (gter ma). In doing so, they are said to fulfill their roles as the reincarnations of the 25 main disciples of Padmasambhava, the Indian master who concealed the treasures in his introduction of tantric Buddhism to Tibet. This reincarnation link sustains a crucial aspect of experiences expected for a revealer: to "remember" (dran pa) his past lives, and simultaneously "re-collect" the teachings he heard from Padmasambhava. It is this subject formation process about "whom I was" (and should be) that empowers the revealers’ teachings with an authentic aura, which thus has made gter practices a response long in the Nyingma to discontinuation of transmission, when warfare, political repression and social chaos bring damages to Buddhist communities. For the same reason, it is deployed again after the Cultural Revolution, as some Nyingma revealers, in attempts to revive religion, find themselves facing a life world torn apart by Chinese Communists and losing its integrity and continuity. In this picture, anchored in material assemblies, through wayfaring, the creation of religious subjects offers the primary vitality to reassemble religion in a culture dismembered by violence. In contemporary eastern Tibet, no revealer is greater than Jigme Phuntsok, the founder of Larung, and nothing has more powerfully animated his grand project to convert the Chinese than his enigmatic notion that some of his gter teachings, according to Padmasambhava's prophecy, are specially beneficial to the Chinese. In order to interpret this subjective aspect in relation to treasure hunting, I explored his biographies, stories, teachings, thoughts, speeches, childhood memories, and, above all, his revelations. His treasures include material "earth treasures" (sa gter) such as texts, relics, jewels, ritual implements, and even the whole valley holding Larung and which is seen as a treasure. The other immaterial things—liturgies, songs, verses and ritual protocols—are considered as "mind treasures" (dgongs gter) sealed by Padmasambhava in his consciousness. In order for past-life memories to occur, he carefully read the signs encountered in realities, visions and dreams (dngos nyam rmi lam), prepared to be the receiver and realizer of the Padmasambhava's secrete intentions. Any sign-reading process as such implies a kind of subjective operation inseparable from social convention and material base, so the exploration eventually brought me to an ethnographic project focused on the whole lifeworld inhabited by Sertar monks. I explored local tribal societies and their post-1950s history, sacred landscapes and their religious representations, and especially some place guidebooks (gnas yig) used as "narrative maps" to lead pilgrimage and treasure revelation. I gathered prophecies popular in monasteries, whose abstract and ambiguous expressions so loosely articulate the different temporal regimes of the same landscapes that they give religious interpreters like Jigme Phuntsok enough room for creativity. While such a pursuit led me to experience what treasure hunting has done, which is to re-assemble the domains of landscape, materiality, human wayfaring and religious interpretation, it also revealed how this whole picture is endowed with the possibility to propel Tibetan Buddhists forward to convert the Chinese. Consequently, there are two aspects important for this research to contribute to anthropological theories: First, turning away from the anthropological convention to look at the religious domain with a panoptic view, this project sees the domain revived by treasure hunting as an assembly, and explores how it comes into being through encounters between people and things. Second, I ask how religious subjects are created through the encounters. As more and more anthropologists borrow the notion of "assembly" from philosophers like Bruno Latour, I want to show how it could be brought back to more traditional anthropological discussions of subjectivity.
