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This paper explores difference within geographical writings in the transition to modernity in nineteenth century China. In some maps, the experiential realities of travelers were valued and expressed. More significantly, landscape maps sometimes pointed to a reality of absence rather than of presence. This contrasted with the arising modern commitment to triangulation, which deleted the phenomenological in favour of an omniscient 'view from nowhere'. It is conventional to treat this transition as an expression of progress in which non-Western scholars started to undo a scientific deficit regarding precision and measurement with the use of new tools, or for postcolonial scholars to propose heroic resistance from native map makers. Against these interpretations, the minutiae in the 1886 Chinese gazetteer Tukao of Tibet do not simply show a progressive or coerced transition, but rather the expression of an inconsistent difference. Tukao reflects different survey methods, producing fundamentally incompatible ontological worlds. The paper shows that the Tukao does not legislate between different practices, and argues that the alterity in Tukao offers lessons for postcolonial theory and practice, avoiding both hegemony of modern science and relativism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few Tibetan figures have left an impression on the Himalayan landscape, both literary and geographic, as indelibly as Mi la ras pa (ca. 1028–1111), whose career as meditator and poet was punctuated by travel across the borderlands of southern Tibet. This essay will begin to address the defining role of place in Tibetan biographical literature by examining the intersections of text and terrain in the recording of an individual's life. In particular, this study examines sites of transformation in Mi la ras pa's biographical narratives, arguing for what might be called a geographic biography by examining the dialogical relationship between a life story recorded on paper and a life imprinted on the ground. It first considers the broad paradigms for landscaping the environment witnessed in Tibetan literature. It then examines ways in which the yogin's early biographical tradition treated the category of sacred place, creating increasingly detailed maps of the yogin's life, and how those maps were understood and reinterpreted. The paper concludes by addressing two specific modes of transformation in the life story — contested place and re-imagined place — exploring new geographies of consecration, dominion, and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based upon five years of ethnographic research among the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, and extensive interviews with the medium of the State Oracle of Tibet and other spirit mediums. It investigates the nature of the oracular phenomenon and its place in the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology as well as the sociopolitical role of the Tibetan State Oracle, or Nêchung. The topics explored include spirit possession, shamanism, and spirit mediums. The central theoretical question addressed is whether or not magico-religious practitioners such as the medium of Nêchung and other Tibetan spirit mediums can legitimately be categorized as shamans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Tibet, certain categories of Buddhist sacra are ascribed the power to liberate through sensory contact. No less than “buddhahood without meditation” is promised, offering an expedient means to salvation that seemingly obviates the need for a rigorous regime of ethical, contemplative, and intellectual training. This article investigates two such categories of sacra, substances that “liberate through tasting” and images that “liberate through seeing” as found in a mode of revelation particular to Tibet and culturally related areas, in which scriptures and sacred objects are reportedly embedded in the landscape as terma or “treasures” (gter ma). The author argues that charisma invested in these substances and images — through an amalgamation of relics and special means of consecration — provides the grounds for the soteriological benefits claimed as a result of sensory contact with them. The question is whether these benefits suggest a notion of grace in Tibetan Buddhism, and if so how it might contravene without contradicting the law of karma. Exploring this question sheds light on the role of the senses and the nature of Buddhist soteriology as it developed in Tibet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]