It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There are so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day will only last for a month, so go and get some books.
Hi there. Welcome to new books and e-says and studies. I'm your host, Carla Nappy. I just had a great time talking with Karl Yamamoto about his brand new book, Vision and Violence, Lamachang and the Politics of Charisma in 12th century Tibet.
That was published with Brill in 2012. Now, this is a book that's going to be of obvious interest and obvious import to anybody working in Tibetan studies, the history of Tibet, the history or study of Buddhism or anybody interested in reading about those issues. But in addition to that, it's a book that deals with the kinds of concepts and kinds of practices that go into making the story in the history that Yamamoto is telling, that are relevant to many other fields and many other people who may not be primarily interested in Tibetan studies or Buddhist studies may find a lot to learn in this book as a result. Among the different kinds of issues that Yamamoto brings to bear here are issues of how to think about lineage and family in history, issues of genre and how to- how we might think more creatively about what that means and what that looked like in the context of Tibetan history, issues of charisma and sort of how all of these kinds of factors, including others, can be woven together into a story about the integration of a whole from fragments.
So at the base, this is a story about on many, many levels how a whole is created through fragmentary beginnings, fragments. It's very, very interesting. It's really kind of surprisingly integrated in a very wide range of fields. And as you'll see in the course of the interview, this is in no doubt based at least in part on the very unusual and sort of really refreshing and transdisciplinary background of the author.
It was a great hour talking with him and I hope you enjoy it. I hope you enjoy the book as well. Hello, Carl. Hi.
We're here today at New Books and East Asian Studies to talk with Carl Yamamoto about his book Vision and Violence, La Majang and the Politics of Charisma in 12th Century to that. Welcome to New Books and East Asian Studies, Carl. And thanks so much for taking the time to do the testing. Thank you for inviting me, Carl, and I'm looking forward to it.
Of course, oh, we do. So Carl, could you start us off by saying a little bit about yourself in your background? What brought you into Tibetan Studies and its history? I was actually a very late starter and I got into it in ways that most Tibetan studies people don't.
Most of the people I know have traveled to Tibet or Nepal or to Tibetan areas of India. And they kind of fall in love with Tibetan culture. I actually came from a, I was originally a philosopher. I have my masters in philosophy from Yale and just Western philosophy.
I didn't really have that much interest in Asian things. And then I left ABD, I left philosophy for a long time. And I started, in the meantime, I became interested in Buddhism. I was living in New York.
I started hanging out with like the various Dharma groups and such. And at the same time, I was thinking I should go back and finish my PhD on ABD. So as I was sort of researching where I might apply, I came to realize I wasn't that interested in pursuing a PhD in philosophy anymore. And so I gradually started to think, well, maybe I can pick Buddhist studies and that's what I did.
So I went to University of Virginia mainly because they had a very broad diverse program. They had East Asian Buddhism. They had Indian Buddhism. They had Tibetan Buddhism.
And I just went in there cold. They probably don't accept people like that anymore. It's like now you almost have to have your proposal written by the time you apply. But then it was a little bit looser.
And so I just kind of knocked around the department and it became clear to me fairly quickly that the most interesting stuff was going on in Tibetan Buddhism. That's totally fascinating and really inspiring actually. And it's, I know if I'm not mistaken, UVA is also very well known for having a very prestigious and very successful Tibetan language program. Yes, that's right.
Yes. So you started Tibetan language training while you were in graduate school? Yeah, I had no background at all before that. And I've suffered from it.
I certainly have. And I'm just having started much later. It's been a real struggle. Well, I can sympathize with that certainly as is also a late starter into East Asian studies from the sciences and so forth.
Oh, yeah. And I can also attest as someone who's read the book closely, it's excellent and clearly it's been a very successful and very fortuitous change of past. So congratulations and really it's an inspiring story. Thanks.
So you opened the book in the preface by posing a question that arguably or you associate with beginning or for it into the kinds of issues that go on the book. And it seems like a very simple question. But after you think about it, it's not a possible question. And this is a question.
How did Tibet become Buddhist? I think a lot of us and probably a lot of listeners can think about Tibet and Buddhism as really being inextricably related. And what the book really does is really question the history or really to question the diachronic and inviolable connection of these two things in a really productive way. So how did Tibet become Buddhist?
Can you talk a little bit about how that question shapes this project and whether it brought you into this kind of project at all? What was the role of that kind of question in the way you thought about and shaped eventually became the book? Well, actually that question didn't occur to me until very late in my research. I think I was very interested in Lama Shang because he was sort of a colorful, controversial character.
He had an interesting life. He was involved in a lot of different areas of Tibetan Buddhism. So I thought, okay, this looks like a really interesting subject. And I guess I always regarded him as sort of a minor figure.
And I think this is how he's been regarded in Tibetan studies for the most part. I'm kind of interested and colorful, but he was pretty much shunned by the other people in his or in the Kaguy order. And but I guess it was probably even after my dissertation was written, I started to ask this question, how did Tibet become Buddhist? I find it's really useful to ask obviously stupid questions.
And I've had experience of being in a class with a lot of specialists and there's a non-specialist there who asks a really embarrassing question, but it kind of draws things into focus. So I asked myself this embarrassing question because I was starting to see that Lama Shang was not just a colorful figure, an eccentric minor figure, but he was actually crucial to the process by which Tibet became Buddhist. And also it kind of struck me in the middle of my work also that Tibet has not always been Buddhist. I mean, it sounds obvious and any historian will say, yeah, sure, but it really hit home one time.
It's like, whoa, imagine as you say, they're so inextricably connected. Imagine Tibet is not Buddhist. It's just a hard thing to do. And so I'm speaking of seemingly simple issues.
So Lama Shang, is that the way you pronounce it? Yes, that's right. Okay. So I'm saying, of course, as a Chinese specialist here, I'm looking at that name and thinking, oh, it's Jang.
So okay. So that's how it takes a very special century to that. That's a plaza pronunciation. Other parts of Tibet, it might be Jang.
So it's not really standardized pronunciation. Perfect. So this did begin its life as a dissertation. Can you talk a little bit about that transition from dissertation to book?
Were there any major changes or major aspects of the work that you had to either reorder or restructure or rethink in a new dissertation to book? Yeah. I think partly asking stupid questions was one way I was making the transition from dissertation to book because I realized that as a book, well, first I had to cut out a lot of junk like literature review and things like that that wouldn't interest someone who bought the book necessarily. But I also wanted to make it a much tighter focus book.
And so I started thinking in terms of these broad questions. And then once I had these broad questions, it sounded really silly when you make them, you can make it more subtle as you go along, but you still have that broad question that is kind of pulling the thing together. And that's what I was looking for, kind of like a big motif. So the central figure of the book is Lama Shang.
Now I know that's Shang, I had done. And you've mentioned him and we've mentioned his name. And he's a mean figure of the work. And since many listeners might actually, or many readers of the book might not initially be familiar with the author.
Can you introduce him for our listeners? I'm insane little bit about who he was and why he was important in Tibetan history. Well, he's generally known as a founder of one of the branches of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Usually they say now that they're four.
I mean, obviously the history is a little more complicated, but the Kaguya, one of the four major orders of Tibetan Buddhism, and traditionally the Kaguya is grouped into what they call the four grade and the eight lesser and the four grade schools, one of which one of those four grade schools was founded by Lama Shang. So he's definitely ordinarily seen as somebody working within the Kaguya tradition. Probably not that important a person, but there are others who are around at the same time that are better known than him. For instance, well, a couple generations back, Gumpo and Milarepa.
So he's in that same lineage and the first karmapa. People are now the karmapa lineage because it still survives. First karmapa, he was a contemporary of. So he was seen as part of the Kaguya development during that time.
So one of the really interesting things about Lama Shang that comes out early in the book when you're talking about his life and his background is that sort of he's one of the things that we know about him is that his early life was marked by periods of what can be described as cruelty. Yes. This is really striking. I mean, it leads to what we're thinking this leads to a kind of, it seems to be kind of an important transformation.
Can you talk about that really cruelty, but not because I think that this ought to mark him as a figure, but because it's so striking in the account of his life that we see here. Yeah. Well, I don't know how much we can take it at face value or not, really. There's a sort of convention in Tibetan and Hijography of, well, the best known example is Milarepa of having this sort of narrative trajectory of someone who starts out bad and gets to the darmat and is able to cleanse himself of the bad karma created and become a major figure in a lot of ways.
Lama Shang's biography echoes that of Milarepa and he consciously followed Milarepa in a lot of what he did. So the early thing, the cruelty, he did things like swallowing fish and chopping up the rear end off a fly and putting a flower in and then sending it off flying. And he talks about the sort of the karma consequences of it, which is constipation and, I don't know, it's very funny. I mean, he's a very colorful writer, which is another thing that makes him interesting.
But the transition, you know, it wasn't like a flash of insight that changed his life. It's like he was constantly, well, first of all, he was known as a magician for the most part, his magical abilities. And he used to engage in sort of questionable practices involving possibly animal sacrifices because of the soccer bowls of blood and the destruction of enemies. Destruction of enemies is the same sort of sorcery that Milarepa was involved in as well.
And he was constantly sort of coming back to the darmat and then backsliding. So that it's a history of sort of backslides. Now, this is actually, I'm really glad that you brought up the issue of magic and sorcery because this is something that, from the perspective of any of us who are writing books about figures and having to rely on sources for reconstructive biography. And you talk very much about the challenges and the kind of constructiveness of that practice in the book.
And I think really helpful ways. But one of the really notable themes is that part of the image of this figure and the history of this figure is this element of magic and sorcery. And the way you treat it in the book is very interesting, right? I mean, you're sort of, you have a way of weaving together these accounts of magic and sorcery in a way that is not judgmental or these are the perceptive of a reader.
Reading these accounts of his practices of magic and sorcery. The reader, at least from my perspective, is not left with a sense of sort of normative judgment by the author writing about this. So this is a very interesting part of the methodology of the book that I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about what does the term mean here, sort of magic as it characterizes La Mijang's practices or the practices of people who's associated with? And how did you decide to approach the concept the way you did?
Because it's not at all a simplistic issue, right? It's not at all the case that the way you approach it is necessarily the only way you could have, right? Although I think it's very fair. And how did you decide to approach it in this way?
I guess I approached it in this way because in the Tibetan tradition, magic and Buddhism are not necessarily separate. They're not seen as opposing in some way. A lot of the Buddhism that came over from India and China and Central Asia was mixed liberally with local, if you want to call it, folk culture. There's still, I mean, it's certainly colored the character of the Buddhism that survives in Tibet today.
The landscape is populated with spirits and there are all sorts of rituals that probably are not of Buddhist origin, but they've been incorporated into the Buddhist discourse that are basically sorcery or shamanism, ways of dealing with pesky spirits who are causing disease and bad luck and things like that. So I think it's really important when you look at Tibetan Buddhism and probably other forms of Buddhism too. I think we've had this sort of abstracted version of Buddhism, which sees it as just kind of a set of ideas or philosophical standpoint, and which ignores the way it's rooted in the local cultures. And it changes, it varies a lot between the different cultures.
So I wanted to keep this element of Tibetan, of the Tibetan local color and the way it shaped Buddhism. So Lamachang, it's not even clear whether what he's doing is Buddhist or not half of the time. And probably the question doesn't make that much sense to even ask. He was just doing what people did.
And one of the things he was good at, and people in Tibet believed in sorcery, they could be Buddhist, but they still believed in people able to create hailstorms and fend off armies and the special powers that people had and destroy enemies of your family. The family of the clans were very big and they were always warring with each other, kind of field McCoy, kinds of things. So I guess I wanted to keep the Buddhism contextualized with all of the other ritual and magical things that you see in Tibet. And of course I wanted to be non-judgmental because I wanted to be integrated into the Buddhism, if that makes any sense.
You've raised a few issues that we're going to certainly talk about later on in the discussion. So issues of clan and family and lineage and what that means in this context and that becomes important to your analysis and also the issue of violence, which is also very important for the study. Before we get there, to kind of set the stage a little bit for what comes later, the book uses Lana Shang's essential figure not just to explore him and different kind of emissenic and historical aspects of what it means to understand and to do Tibetan history and history of Buddhism with him as a figure, but it also uses him as a figure to explore the key moment in central Tibetan history. And this is the medieval Buddhist revival known as the Tibetan Renaissance or the later spread of the teachings.
Can you say a little bit about that moment in Tibetan history, especially for listeners who may not be familiar with this period in Tibetan history at all? Yeah, well, the second spread is what it's called in the traditional history books. The first spread was during the time of the Tibetan Empire, where Tibet had a very large and powerful empire that controlled much of Central Asia, but actually at one time captured the Chinese capital of Chonon and installed their own people for a little while. But so Buddhism is often associated, not necessarily very accurately, but it's often associated with the early emperors or the kings of the early empire.
And when the empire fell apart, Buddhism sort of went underground or it became something that was not institutional, it was more at the local level, and mixing with the local magicians and sorcerers and so forth. But this collapse of the empire and the disappearance of institutional Buddhism was considered a great catastrophe in crisis in Tibet. It's sometimes called the Dark Age, or it's sometimes called the period of fragmentation, or the period of Tibet falling to pieces. So I'm trying to frame this second spread of Buddhism in terms of the crisis period beforehand, this of a society in political pieces, in religious pieces, in cultural, yet some of the writings from the time of evidence, a kind of general malaise, a feeling that we had a golden age, the empire, and it's gone away, and now we've lost our bearings.
So the second spread, I became interested in how Tibet, which was lying in pieces, at least in people's minds it was, was reunited. So I started wondering about things that are sort of social-adhesive, the glue that holds things together. And that's when I started to think of the things like lineage and the creation of different sectarian groups, the institutionalization of groups. And here, this is when Lama Shang became crucial in my own mind.
And this is really interesting because the theme or the kind of the idea of spring together, a whole lot of fragments, it really seems to recur through many, many aspects and many chapters of the book in many ways. And so I think it becomes a kind of trope that we can use to understand not just Lama Shang's life, but also this period of industry. Okay, so after this collapse, and there's a period as you say of consolidation and revival in several respects, and we mentioned two important aspects of this consolidation and revival early in the book, both of them have to do with innovation. So we mentioned innovation in social institutions that sort of grew up to support new religious practices and also innovative approaches to doctrine and practice.
So Lama Shang really fits into the story as a central agent in the historical Buddhistization of Tibet, right? And an agent really of this Renaissance. Yes, it does. So how does previous scholarship treat him?
So before we kind of get into, we'll talk about for most of this time, which is the particular ways that he and himself as a figure who have shaped this consolidation, how have previous authors understood him? And I ask this because you mentioned that he's actually quite a controversial figure in the literature. So who was he? Or how would readers who are familiar with the larger literature before coming to your book have been familiar with him?
What would they have understood about him? Well, there's a number of ways that he's been contextualized. The first encounter I had with him in Western scholarship was as a party to a controversy. It was more or less a doctrinal controversy.
He's always been associated with sort of philosophical meditation system called Mahamudra, which means the great seal. And it's complicated, but roughly you can think of the great seal as kind of an unstructured meditation practice, which is opposed to sort of the increasingly complex and strenuous tantric practices that were also there. So it's kind of a scaling back, return to simplicity. In the process, Lamachang makes a number of hyperbolic statements about Mahamudra as being the only thing you need to reach realization.
Forget about, if you merely merit, forget about doing rituals, forget about reading texts, all you need is to realize Mahamudra. Like I said, given the context, these are kind of strategic hyperbolic generalizations. But a century later, a great lama named Sakyapandita, who's been extremely influential in Tibet, particularly in the development of Tibetan scholarly culture, made attacks on a number of proponents of Mahamudra. And it was understood apparently that Lamachang was one of the principal ones.
And I think this kind of set the states for how he was viewed in the West because people knew about Sakyapandita before they knew about Lamachang. And he was highly respected in the West also as one of the founding figures of Tibetan scholasticism. But I think because of that attack, Lamachang first became known as a sort of party to this doctrinal controversy, which is actually a little bit ironic because Shang himself was not at all scholastic. And he once quipped, I guess it was a quip I can't tell for sure, that he was exposed to all the basic Buddhist literature and he retained almost none of it.
So this is, again, his hyperbolic way of employing a rhetoric for a certain effect. So he was first seen as a proponent of the more extreme forms of Mahamudra that saw it as what they call the single white remedy, or I can't remember the way I translated it, but it's a medical metaphor for the one thing that cures everything and that's all you need. And Mahamudra was seen as that. So I think often he's been, he's been contextualized as an adherent of Mahamudra and is probably one of those who took it to its most extreme point.
Now, as you move into the body of the study from here, there are three major concepts that undergride your story and that you produce us to early on in the book. And it's really shaped so the rest of the chapters of the book can unfold and then the mechanics up. So I want to just take some time to look at them in turn and to ask you to talk about what they mean in the context of your work and also why or how they've become so important to the way you think about Mamashang in the context of 12th century Tibet and into that history. The first of these that you mentioned is the idea of hegemony.
And specifically hegemony, you say as you're gathering it from the work of Gramsci and others who are articulating developments of Gramsci's work, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, all of this was also late in the process. It was actually one of the readers when it was becoming a book asked for a methodology section. But a lot of the structure came very late when I started asking the simple questions.
And so the methodology structure, the request for a methodological section made me think in these more general terms about what my own theoretical assumptions are that I wasn't saying. And hegemony was one of the most important. I mean, I've been interested in the past when I was a philosopher, when I did cultural studies things. So I was familiar with it.
But I don't think I was aware until I had to actually articulate a methodology of how important that concept was in getting an understanding of how a culture in pieces is kind of knit back together. So how, why, I'm a Gemini, can you say a little bit before I move on to the other factors about what that means for you, especially for listeners who may not be familiar with Gramsci's work? And why that particular concept is one that you find helpful in thinking about this phenomenon? For me, it's helpful because it's a very subtle and non-reductionist sort of concept.
It changed a lot with a way a lot of sort of 20th century Western Marxists thought about it theorizing, took them away from sort of more reductive deterministic approaches. And it emphasized the importance of culture in the achieving of dominance by a particular group. As I mentioned in the book, unfortunately, it's come to, in some circles, to be almost as in an impetus dominance as opposed to just dominance. And so it was seen as kind of a bad thing that the strong did to the weak.
But hegemony, Gramsci's notion of hegemony is much more subtle and complicated. And it's not about sort of heavy handed dominance, but it's more about, and it's also doesn't just apply to the dominant group. He was much more interested in it as it applied to the subordinate group. And in that case, it referred to how the subordinate group sort of marshaled its cultural resources to pull itself together to oppose the dominant group.
So, and this is exactly what I saw happening into that, a period of crisis, an attempt to kind of put the culture back together. And I think the concept of hegemony is very well suited to that. Thank you. That's great.
So another concept that is crucial and that you mentioned early on, but it also becomes important at repeated points throughout the book is the concept of charisma and power to, again, create a border. And this is, again, this phenomenon that we've been talking about, creating a border out of fragments. Can you talk about charisma? What does that mean for you and how is it important for understanding the context that you're writing about?
I think, well, I guess just basically charisma, I think of as sort of the authority that attaches to a figure by virtue of special powers that he or she can exercise, whether they be religious powers or facility in political negotiation or whatever it is. So certain powers that are not that are seen to be extraordinary and that become the basis for the authority. In the case of the Kaguba suborder, they've always been a sort of a non-scholastic order, or at least their self-image is a non-scholastic order. There have been a number of great Kaguba scholastics, but certainly at this time they were considered one of the non-scholastic orders.
So the issue of charisma came up because it became clear to me that part of what held the Kaguba together was not necessarily a set of doctrines, not necessarily a common literature or an intellectual standpoint, but it was really this new role that the tantric llama took on. And the tantric llama derived his authority from his powers, as llama shan had earlier, when he was a magician of questionable ethics. Their his power was also a source of authority. So the transition from magician to tantric llama, they're still dealing with power, they're still learning to exercise it, and their mastery of power in that sense is the source of their authority.
So it's sort of charisma that acts in the absence of a doctrinal undergirding as the adhesive. Thank you. And in your discussion of charisma and the importance of charisma, you also talk about the importance of what seems to be the one aspect of this power, and that's the concept of the blessing for understanding Ramacham and his influence in terms of charisma. Can you talk a little bit about what is a blessing in this context?
Because I think it's important to specify, as you do in the book, for listeners, what that means and the fact that it's not what we typically think of, colloquially, if we think of or for most of us, when we think of blessing, we're not thinking about the kind of thing that Ramacham is doing here, how much money it's blessing. So can you, what's a blessing and how does that fit into this bigger picture about charisma and mama shan? Well, this is a very special concept into that called chin-lop, which is generally translated as blessing in English, although the term blessing doesn't really cover all of its nuances. But as I was reading all of this material in the law, I kept, there was this constant message of receiving blessings from the lama, receiving blessings from the lama, and its importance as something without which no other religious achievements are possible.
Without blessings from the lama, your meditation won't work. Without blessing from the lama, your doctrinal ideas will be faulty. And so I started looking a little bit more at this, people have written quite a bit on the idea of blessing. But it's sometimes seen as almost a kind of physical substance or a physical energy that passes from a great figure from a Buddha or from a great lama.
And it can pass into followers and it can pass into objects. So when an object is consecrated, it's basically being imbued with the blessings of a great figure, like a lama or a Buddha. And then pilgrims will travel long distances to be in the proximity of it, and you have to be in the proximity of it and to receive the blessing. A number of instances of blessing in lama shan's life story where it's almost like something struck by lightning.
He goes into convulsions, his body goes rigid. It's that kind of experience, often connected with his first exposure to one of his rublamas. And this is one of the signs that this is a good relationship, the passing of blessings. But the concept also has a longer history and a sort of pre-Buddhist meaning where it was applied to the kings, the great man, the great warriors of the imperial era.
And it can mean something like the power that a king has when he exercises power and even somebody even trays it back to maybe even height. But it's just stature in general, whether it be physical stature or political stature or authority. So this started to sound a lot like charisma to me. And the more I, I mean, you can't just identify the two.
It doesn't work obviously. But I found that it works strategically in this particular situation to bring together a number of concepts that wouldn't have been together before that. So yeah, blessings become kind of like charisma. It's that which passes through a tradition.
I talked a little bit about lineage and the formation of traditions. One of the things that's passed down in a tradition and that sort of keeps a sense of continuity with the past is that the blessings are passed through the lineage. And it's a daily ritual in many Tibetan monasteries. For instance, you begin a ceremony by supplicating the past llamas for blessings.
So it's extremely important in this context. I think. Now, lineage, the issue of lineage comes up and is developed very fully in the chapter on style. So when you had style here, which brings us to the seridivus, the major issues that you bring up early on in the book.
And that's the issue of style. In particular, you mentioned, you talk about the idea of a religious style as inspired, at least in part, by particular aspects of the concept of style as developed by historians of science. And so I think from the perspective of transdisciplinary scholarship, that in itself is very interesting just to kind of see those motivations across disciplines in a way you're conceptualizing this work. Now, you talk about some of the signature elements of La Mashaan's style, or the religious style.
And we've talked about some of them briefly. So you've mentioned issues of his valuation of experiential knowledge over verbal knowledge. Others practice with the idea of second element of the style, that prioritized meditation and ritual. You talk also about two other elements of the style that are really interesting.
And I would love for you to talk a little bit about one of them in particular. Now, these two elements of the style that you talk about are issues of doctrinal deviation. So he's known for stylistically having an unusual or extreme tolerance, but also not unrelated, a kind of a flair as you put it for innovation in his literary language and a mastery of several different genres. So it's this last issue or this last feature of his religious style that I'd love to ask you about because it seems so important for so many elements of the book.
The first thing I want to ask you is this issue of genre. Can you talk about the issue of genre as it pertains in this context? So what is it? What are we talking about when we talk about literary genre in this context?
And related to that, what kinds of literary genres, once we understand what that means, was La Mashaan looking in? Well, I guess the issue of genre came up for me in asking a question where new genres come from because Shang is often seen as one of the innovators, as one of the first autobiographers of the Tibetan literary tradition. And as I was trying to deal with this issue, I realized that there was a lot of cultural baggage that I was carrying, presuppositions about what an autobiography was, how it was created, how it was circulated, how it was read. And so looking at these presuppositions, I started to ask more general questions about genres and how does they work.
So again, what actually helped me was sort of dumbing down my questions. And so I asked where do new genres come from? And my basic answer was sort of new genres come from all genres. This is like the dumb down version.
It's sort of a rephrasing of Harold Bloom's idea of what he's talking about in influence, where he says that new poems don't necessarily come from experience. And we have this sort of romantic notion of the poet as someone who has these experiences and feelings and coming out of his subjectivity. But Bloom suggests that new poems come from other bold poems, their responses to old poems. And so my translation of this was sort of genres, particularly ones like autobiography, which we just think of as kind of spontaneous expressions of subjectivity, actually are very much closely related to the already existing genres.
And this is where I got this idea of genre families that are very closely tied together. And it shows ties that to me seem more important than sort of formal features that are picked out to distinguish genres ordinarily. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of genre family was the autobiography part of? Because it seems like autobiography is a very important example of the genres that he's working in.
And I'm talking quite a bit about this. And it seems pretty super crucial for the kind of work that Lameshong was doing. So can you talk about that in the context of this larger idea of genre families? Yeah, well, I started with an early classification of Lameshong's work that usually you find when a collective works is put together, then there are categories into which the works fall.
And the category of biography was one category. And everything was thrown into that was there were no distinctions made between, say, straight biographies or heiographies and autobiographies. There were just all in there. And there were also sort of lineage accounts put into that same category of biographies.
And I started to wonder why things that seemed very different to me were thrown into the same category. And so I was looking at both biographies and autobiographies. And it became clear to me that some biographies have much more relationship to other genres such as supplications and eulogies than they do with other things thrown into that catch all category of biography. Others seemed to have a lot more relationship to Lameshong's instructions to disciples with a close relationship, giving meditation and ritual instructions.
So the way they worked is in the case of supplications and eulogies, again, this idea of supplicating the past Lameshong's for blessings very much a part of the everyday ritual life of the throughout monastery. And there's a very standard form of the blessings you usually say in a little descriptive phrase about the Lamehong that you're blessing and then you sort of supplicate the Lamehong for blessings. It seems like the descriptive part became more and more elaborate until the descriptive part became a sort of biographical sketch of the Lamehong. And I don't know if this is where the biography started, but there's certainly a strong connection between hagiographies and these prayers of supplication.
And my speculation was that maybe at a certain point the descriptive part of these supplication prayers became detached and became an independent biography of the Lamehong. In the other case, I was talking about autobiography and its connections with another genre which is sort of ritual and meditative instructions from Alama to his disciples. And I found in some of the language was exactly the same as that in Lamehong's autobiography. And when I went to the actual ritual instructions, I could see that he was giving instructions to his disciples and then interspersed with meditation instructions would be little accounts of his life.
And so it seemed to me that his autobiography was probably more closely related to these instructions, the genre of instructions to disciples. And then the biographies and the hagiographies were much more closely related to supplications and eulogies. That's so interesting. I mean, we'll move on from this because there's so much else I want to ask you, but I just want to highlight for listeners.
This is one of many, many ways that I think the book speaks to so many different kinds of issues that may not on the surface be obvious to somebody looking at the title of the book, but issues that are, I think, of interest and of relevance to people who are not working on Buddhism or Tibetan history at all, but who might be interested in thinking more creatively about these issues of genre, issues of how do we understand instructions and rules as part of a literary practice. So I think this is one of many cases in the book. It's one of the things that makes it so interesting that you're developing ideas here that have legs, frankly, that have potentially much wider implications than simply the, albeit very important, case of on a shelf's life and work here. So moving on to the way you're treating and the way we're understanding Lamma Chang's the figure, you mentioned, or we spoke earlier about the issue of charisma, and you mentioned that his influence in the book is based on charisma.
Specifically, the kind of charisma of the hermit, who shuns occlusion in the mountains and comes down from the mountains to assume the role of Lord of the teachings. Now, this is a phrase that seems very important, and it's a phrase that listeners may not be from the very rich. So first, can you speak a little bit to this title and this idea of Lord of the teachings? What is that?
And how is that related to the way Lamma Chang conceptualizes and develops and approaches the idea of the Lama? Well, I think Lord of the teachings may originally just be an apathetic of the Buddha, but in the Tibetan tradition, it came to be a way of characterizing great Lammas as well. So there were a number of other contemporary Lammas who were called Lord of the teachings, but it seemed to me in Lamma Chang's case, it was especially important because it was his way of tying together all of the different aspects of his life, the religious, the meditative, the political, the military. It was a way of pulling them all together under one sort of one heading.
Now, you mentioned the military. This is another thing, the other thing I wanted to ask you about this. One of the things that we talked about earlier in that, indeed, comes up in the very title of the book, is the issue of violence and the sudissomated with that. How ought we understand the role of violence in terms of Lamma Chang's reputation and his place in the tradition that he was associated with?
How do we, in what way is violence, important to the story that you're telling? Well, I guess that issue was one that attracted me to him initially, because the accounts of him, at least in contemporary Western scholarship, saw him as a kind of unhinged psychopath who used sort of tantric justifications to justify what he'd done in terms of military conquests and so forth. That issue, aside from making for a good title, sort of moved a little to the background when I saw that it was much more complicated than that. First of all, it only meant to me.
One thing it meant to me first of all was that Tibetan Buddhism is part of the real world, and it's not really surprising. If you're put in a position of rulership, then you have to execute military responsibilities. So it naturally came with Lamma Chang becoming sort of the principal political figure in the lots of area at a certain time. I think maybe too much is made of the violence aspect.
If you look at the Dalai Lamas, whom everyone seems to revere, particularly like the fifth Dalai Lama, a lot of violence in there. It was just sort of part of his real politic, I guess, if you want to call it. One reason that this issue of violence became interesting was that it was suggested in a lot of ways that there were tantric justifications for the violence, so that it was given kind of a Buddhist polish, but with this implication that it probably wasn't Buddhist at bottom. In tantra, they have something that you call fierce activities, which are activities that a Buddha can perform, including killing, that a Buddha can perform in order to protect the Dharma.
Sometimes these were associated with Lamma Chang's violence that he used that as justification. When I was looking more closely at the material, I realized that there were actually mentions of these fierce activities in Lamma Chang's works and the works of his contemporaries, but they were usually negative. There was a time when his supporters were back into a corner on a battlefield and his disciples asked him to evoke some fierce activities in Lamma Chang and said, no, we don't do that. We don't operate like that.
So that kind of caused dissonance in me because there were other cases where Lamma Chang also said, no, I don't do these fierce activities. So part of what I was trying to deal with was that dissonance between the accounts that did attribute to him these fierce activities and what I saw in the more primary materials. And as it turned out, a lot of the talk of fierce stochastic activities was much later than Lamma Chang's time, like three, four, or five hundred years after his time. So it could be part of the Kagu, sort of retrospectively building their own lineage story.
After we moved from the beginning of the book through the main body of the book, and there are chapters devoted to a lot of these concepts that we've been talking about very briefly, lineage and style, autobiography, genre, and textual economy. It's the idea of the Lord of the teachings and so on and so forth. One of the crucial arguments of the book, and this is an argument that's actually elaborated in conclusion, which brings all this together, is that Lamma Chang was an aggressive figure, a military figure, a political figure, who sustained a community through what you call his multi-dimensional mastery, his ability to gather a wide variety of resources and forge on the two unified whole. Again, we have this fragmented whole scene.
I want to ask you as we move to the last part of our discussion, if you would, if you're willing to talk a little bit about the three most important aspects of this mastery that you argue for in the book, space time and discourse and symbol. So first, let's talk about space. In one way, should we understand Lamma Chang has mastering space? Well, the time that he first came to power was a time of great crisis in Lhasa.
There had been factional fighting between religious factions that resulted in the burning down of the two holiest sites in Lhasa, the two holiest Buddhist sites, the two temples, the Ramachay and the Jokan. So it was really a time of crisis. His own brute lama was called in to mediate the dispute, and he put Lamma Chang in charge of first every soaring of the temples that were damaged, and then of restoring order to the Lhasa area. Initially, Chang was reluctant to do that.
He had originally come to Lhasa to ask his lama if he could go be a wandering mendicant, and instead he got stuck with taking over the reconstruction of Lhasa. I've forgotten the original question. Oh, no, no. If you could talk a little bit about how he mastered space.
And so you do mention as part of this, and he constructed statues, roads and stupas as a way to establish the reunion of the space, the sort of the reconstruction of marking space. You also talk about other aspects of this mastery of space, which include also what the concept of sealing territory. What is sealing territory, and how does that represent the way that Lhasa mastered space? Well, part of what he saw as his role of Lord of the Teachings, another epithet was protector of beings, another epithet of the Buddha that was used a lot for Lhasa.
So he saw his role as Lord of the Teachings as creating a safe space within a chaotic area, Lhasa during this time of the great disorders. Part of what he did was to, in consolidating his rule, was to create a space that was sort of Selba's space. One way he did that was this interesting idea of sealing. There were three kinds of sealing.
They talked about sealing roads, sealing hills, and sealing mountains. And the term seal, or chakya in Tibetan, is an enormously important concept that has a lot of different meanings, as important concepts often do. And so for instance, a tantric meditator will do certain rituals to seal the space around him or her when doing a meditation practice to protect, as kind of protective against bad spirits and demons and so forth. So I think there's a relationship of this concept of sealing that the Lamachan uses also that suggests creating a protective space.
So this is a way of sort of mastering space. It also, later it came to have different meanings. It came to mean being associated with outlawing hunting within a region. And again, this is just like a small part of the protective role of the Lord of the Teachings.
So I think it had a more general meaning in Lamachan's time. It probably included that. It was created protecting the people within that space. And so he had, for instance, monks who would accompany travelers, particularly merchants.
One of the big threats of the disorders in Lhasa was that it kind of cut Lhasa from the economic networks that were so important to its thriving. And so he protected traders and merchants who were traveling, who were otherwise afraid to go into Lhasa. And so this protective function sort of demarcating a safe space as protector of beings that I see this spatial. And also there's all of the material culture things you mentioned too, like all of the buildings and so forth.
Again, this is a way of kind of marking the landscape as Selba's base. Now he didn't only master space as you argue. He also mastered time. And you talk about his mastery of time and the context of the idea of a lineage.
So can you talk about that? I'm next for a little bit. How did he master time? And what does that have to do with the idea of a lineage?
Well, what I saw as part of the brokenness or that the fragmentation of Tibet during the, the dark period or the period of fragmentation was the loss of monastic Buddhism and therefore a loss of connection to the Buddhist past. And a lot of what went on during this Renaissance period was a kind of remaking of those broken ties. And part of this remaking was the reconstruction of lineages and eventually the consolidation of lineages into larger units like orders. So eventually what sort of made Tibet Buddhist was this institutionalization of what had been sort of permanent lineages and into large institutions that sort of became important powers in Tibet and society at that time and reshaped it completely eventually.
So he mastered time. He mastered space. The third thing that you argue that he mastered is discourse or symbol. So now that we understand a little bit more about how he can be understood as having mastered space and time, can you speak a little bit to this last issue of how did Ramashan mastered discourse or sort of master symbols in this larger career?
Yeah. So again, when I was in the summing up phase and I was looking for simple ways of putting together the multitude of interests I had, my interests were in lineage, my interests were in genre. And I started to see that building up a kind of literature was a way of consolidating symbolic resources. Again, it comes from this idea of hegemony as putting together the cultural resources that will hold the community together.
And one book that was especially influential for me in my take on Gramsci's notion of hegemony was that of La Fauan Muf and their theorizing, which really talks about it in terms of discourse theory and the way the importance of hegemony as being this way, creating symbolic unity is where they didn't exist before. And I think that creating new genres, creating a body of literature, a style of writing, creating texts that establish lineages and so forth is another way by which discourse kind of puts together the pieces and relates it both to space and to time. And one of the really cool things that comes out of this, incidentally, for which we might be interested in visual mapping and perhaps becoming from the original humanities even, is that you have a really interesting section earlier in the book where you actually diagram with each in different ways visually. I think it's a really interesting contribution in itself and also, obviously, helpful in thinking about what's become a really important aspect of what we might call digital humanities, what we might not, depending on your particular preference, but that is the visualizing relationships and sort of taking relationships as a focus of an object of study.
I think that's always been sort of my temperament to see things that way. I'm always drawing myself pictures. And so when I was thinking of how Tibet became Buddhist, I was picturing a sort of aerial Google map, I don't think Google maps existed, but a kind of aerial map that showed an area of actual spatial spread of Buddhism and that helped me to picture a lot of the conceptual relationships that I was talking about. And then lineage also, very dependent on the method of representing it.
And I talked about this string of pearls method of representing lineage as a straight line. And when I looked at actual relationships, when I was looking at his lineage documents, the documents that told of his llamas and the teachings received from them, it was a well-ter of relationships. It didn't look anything like a straight line. So I started wondering, well, my first thought, and I've heard other people say this, people falsify their history.
But the more I looked at it, the more I realized this wasn't history at all, it was constructing a lineage. And from the standpoint of modern history, what did 12th century Tibetans know about, really all about 8th century? They didn't, you know, but they had a relationship to their past. And it was through these lineages.
And again, lineage is this symbolic construction, which is why it can be a straight line, but it can kind of stand in for that whole array of relationships to the past, kind of a synchronic key, I guess you can call it neck. Where one strand of that complicated past will be a way of sort of consolidating the identity of the group. And it's very important, as the sectarian groups are larger and started becoming more influential in Tibetan society, that they have this, an identity and a sense of relationship to their past continuity. And is it that before, the last question I'll ask you before we move to the closing, because I know we've taken a lot of your time, is it, you may not be something that you're interested in or familiar with, but just from what you were saying just now, it makes me feel like you might be interested in this.
Is there a discourse right now of this kind of map that we might consider under the term digital humanities, right, into Tibetan studies? Is there any kind of, are there people working in this, basically, on these kinds of problems in Tibetan studies? And if so, or if not, you see this as a potential growth field for Tibetan studies? I'm not really sure if I see it or not.
I guess maybe there's a related development, which is a little more interested in sort of the book history aspect of Tibetan literature, rather than just kind of the great classics sort of standpoint. And this is related to my notion of textual economies, of looking at texts as sort of these material objects that circulate through different spaces that are produced, distributed, consumed, and so forth. So I think there's a broader perspective. And I think I'm not sure how it's related to your question or how it relates to digital humanities representation.
But in my mind, it does, because it's things that hydro pictures of also, and so it helped me to represent it. But I don't think there's that much actual work being done in, well, I mean, there could be a lot of things going on, I don't know anything about it. But I basically had to get some biology software to put together these things. Okay, well, Carl, there's obviously a ton of material in the book that we didn't have a ton of stuff.
There's a lot going on. There's a lot more we could have talked about. Is there anything else in particular that we didn't have a chance to talk about, that you'd like to point out, especially for listeners who may not yet have had a chance to read the book? Well, I can't think of anything offhand except that people who haven't had a chance to read the book, it only cost $178.
This is real. So I don't expect it to see in the windows of Barnes and Noble. Although, PDFs circulate constantly on the Internet of real books, so I'm waiting for that to show up. And we do have libraries.
Oh, yes, libraries, yes. So, my own library actually asked me if I would buy one copy because it was so expensive. Or if I was willing to donate one of my author copies. And I wasn't, I had too many people that I owed favors to in that I wanted to have a copy of the book.
So I get to say something about the funding of State University. Well, aside from the cost of the book or the availability, and again, the listeners can consult your libraries if you're not ready to purchase them. And it's definitely clearly, I feel like it's a book worth reading. So now that the book is out and congratulations, I think it just came out.
What's next for you? What are you working on now and what project is inspiring with them? Well, I've been caught up a lot in sort of, since I started working at House and University and the University of Paris, like a lot of teaching service kinds of obligations. So I haven't really had much chance to get back to my own work.
But what I did want to do at some point, and I've started working on a little bit, is compile a translation of some of La Ma Shang's songs of realization. It's a genre called Gour in Tibetan. It's very important. And again, as with the genre of autobiography, Gour was just sort of developing during that during the 12th century at that time.
So again, Shang seems to be fairly early in the process. Gour is most frequently associated with Miller-Ripa. And La Ma Shang is like two degrees later in Miller-Ripa's tradition. So he's very close to Miller-Ripa and very influential in shaping that genre.
But my thought is actually I'd like to do it, but like a book that's more accessible. And there's a sort of in-between scholarly and popular well-genre, I guess, in books that are sort of aimed at Dharma practitioners, general public people interested in Buddhism, but also have kind of a solid scholarly understructure. That's kind of what I'd like to do with it and do translations of the songs. Well, that sounds great.
And let's talk again after you've done that because I'd love to read that book too. Okay. Karl, thank you so much for being with us today. It's really been a pleasure.
Thanks for making me plan. Thanks for having me, Karl. I enjoyed it too. You've been listening to new books and East Asian Studies.
As always, thanks very much for joining us, and we'll see you again next time. For all of us!