Buddhist Space on the Go

Music: A Crime to be Broke in America by Spearhead

I just had a conversation with my friend D who lives in Boston and recently got an Americorp position at a Refuge resettlement NGO. He and I met in Madison, WI on our primary adventure in the bubble of the isthmus. We were there in preparation for a larger adventure to the Himalaya to live, study, and wonder for an academic year in Nepal.

We initially lived in an area of Kathmandu called Bouddha. Yes, it is a word related to Buddha. It is the location of an enormous Buddhist stupa of ancient date. We often had a conversation that considered the role of the stupa in the neighborhood, the city, and the country. In fact, because we were thinking mainly about the situation of Tibetan refugees, we thought in regional terms as well. The connection there is that Bouddha was the home for many Tibetans, many of whom were first or second generation refugees. I think Bouddha represents an instance of a large network of Buddhist transportation of Buddhist space. In ways, it is also a transportation of Tibetan cultural spaces.

The reason I say that spaces can be transported is that there are senses of space that move with Tibetan refugees. Because Tibetan and Buddhist perceptions and experiences of space moved from Tibet to Nepal, the spaces themselves moved from place to place. They were in place in Tibet in a very deeply rooted and historical way. Buddhist culture had etched itself in the landscape in very direct ways. In some ways the entire plateau had been metaphorically subjugated: the demoness of Tibet was pinned down to the earth. Her wildly animistic body had to subdued by the civilizing and nationalizing force of Buddhism. The missionaries thought that the wildness of Tibet would be better under the foot of Buddhism. Tibet was subjugated such that it would be a place that would constrain and enable social and individual practices. The very landscape and conceptual tags it wore were reoriented so that Buddhism was communicated via relationships with nature, landscape, and environment in the most remote as well as the most urban places. These places were certainly encrusted on the surface of the earth, but they were also understood and internalized as conceptual tags. The world, in large part, looked like the arrangement of the tags on the landscape.

This vision is a worldview that does not change immediately with the transference of its people to another world. In the case of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, the move is very close, but extremely difficult. The highest mountain range in the world stands between Tibet and Nepal. Refugees, who are still leaving Tibet today, face high winds, cold temperatures, treacherous trails, and violent border guards in their exodus from the Tibetan plateau. When they arrive they are funneled through an underground railroad which is not always underground. The refugee trail was opened in 1959 when the Tibetan state escaped with the Dalai Lama. In fact, the routes between Tibet and India and Tibet and Nepal have been traveled for centuries. It was then that a significant block of the Buddhist space was transported from Tibetan places to Nepali, Indian, and other places. Many of Tibet's religious thinkers, practitioners, and leaders left Tibet in 1959. Some them arrived in Kathmadu and settled outside of town near the stupa of Bouddha. Because they brought a lot of physical, golden, and cultural capital with them, they were able to recreate their Buddhist spaces in Nepali places. The recreated place is not the same as the original place, but it is another inscription of Buddhist space in a place. The spatiality of Tibetan society and, in some cases, the space of Tibetan individuals was transported from an inscribed place to another place at which the power (via capital) was capable of inscribing a largely religious cultural order upon a place.