Oriane Lavolé talks about the history of treasure revealers (tertöns) from 11th-century Tibet to contemporary Nepal, how apologists for the treasure tradition (terma) have responded to skeptics who dismiss its material foundations, and what site guides to sacred territories can teach Western Buddhists about the ecological roots of the religion. Interview by Miles Osgood.

[Prologue]

MILES OSGOOD: Welcome to “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast. Come join us by the tree.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar]

On November 17th, eighteen sixty-six, two Buddhist masters, Chokgyur Lingpa and Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, climbed up a slate mountain in eastern Tibet and arrived at the frozen “Invincible Wild Lion Turquoise Lake,” searching for a treasure buried beneath the ice. What happened next is related to us by Chokling himself.

There were a few dilapidated slate huts left over from past practitioners. In one, we arranged ritual oblations and made feast offerings. Then, supplicating with a special feast offering, my experience rose into direct transcendence and I walked to the center of the frozen lake. After we made a hole in the ice, rainbow light went from my eyes and penetrated the lake so I could clearly see how the profound treasure was lying there. The Gentle Protector [Khyentsé] also had extraordinary visions and forced the water kings to hold true to their oath. Attaching a juniper branch to my belt, I let my lower robe down into the lake, and as I followed [Khyentsé’s] instructions, a rain of flowers fell like sleet. The bodhisattva water kings scattered gold dust like flowers and the lakeshore became flecked with gold. At that moment, the profound treasure was easily revealed and as a substitute, we offered sublime feast substances.

This translation comes to us from our guest, Oriane Lavolé, a Stanford PhD candidate and expert on the Tibetan tradition of treasure revelation, or “terma.” Where some in Buddhist Studies emphasize the religion’s philosophical departure from material defilements, and even those who study the “terma” tradition tend to focus only on “mind treasures,” Oriane uses scenes like the one you just heard to take us back to the land.

In that account, she makes special note of the following details: how cooperative bodhisattvas are found among the water guardians; how the treasure is literal, material gold, but gold gifted rather than mined; how the entire ritual is a restorative exchange with the spirits who inhabit the territory; and, ultimately, how the site itself is treasured as sacred by those who venture there.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: “... revealing treasure has always been part of—of like this move of what they call opening up new sacred sites. So which basically is, kind of, again, like, revealing the sacred nature of a site. And, you know, in order to reveal the sacred nature of a site, you have to guide people into recognizing that sacred nature. And that’s what the site guide does.”

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

Our own site guide today, as I’ve mentioned, is a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism whose dissertation research at Stanford examines the intersection of religion and ecology: Oriane Lavolé.

Oriane has master’s degrees in International Relations from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (or “Sciences Po”) and in Translation, Textual Interpretation, and Philology from the Center for Buddhist Studies of Kathmandu University. There, she wrote the thesis “Gter Ma as Timely Tradition,” a foundation for work on Tibetan treasure revelation that she continues in her PhD.

In her time at Stanford, Oriane has taken part in multiple research groups working on interdisciplinary approaches to ecology, including two sessions of the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry. In February, she also organized her own Ho Center workshop, titled “Territorial Spirits and Sacred Sites: An Ecological Reading of the Treasure Tradition.”

With that, let’s head into the library.

[bell chimes]

MILES OSGOOD: So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Oriane.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, thank you for having me.

MILES OSGOOD: I thought we could start a little bit by talking about the seven years you spent in Nepal at Kathmandu University, because it's there, I take it, that you discovered the thing that is the center of your thesis, there, your dissertation going forward, and this article: the work of ‘terma’ discovery, of revelation or extraction—we'll talk a little bit about the vocabulary around that—the work of Chokgyur Lingpa, or Chokling, in particular, and met our own James Gentry as well. So it seems like a fateful set of years that kind of put you on this path. Can you tell us how you ended up on that research journey and how you ended up with this particular fixation?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Sure, yeah. I mean, I guess in the beginning, it was really more of a personal arc from being very idealistic youth doing development work and then refugee rights work after my—my first master's and kind of being frustrated with that, disillusioned, traveling to India, going to a few Buddhist retreats and being like, "Oh, they actually have something to say about the root causes of suffering," because that's what the Buddhist teachings, that's kind of the—you know, what—the foundation of all the Buddhist teachings. And so I got really curious. I ended up, from India, going to Nepal to study a little bit more, and that little bit more became a whole new master's degree at Kathmandu University at the Center for Buddhist Studies, which is really unique in that it's a university center, but it's housed in a monastery, in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. So it really combines both the academic approach to Religious Studies, such as the one that's employed here at a university like Stanford, with the traditional monastic approach. And you get—you really get both in that program. So that brought me there. And then this monastery is a monastery of the lineage that I now also study, which is the Chokling Tersar lineage, so a lineage of—that's based on revelations and based on 19th-century revelations, which is really interesting because like many big monasteries, they have a monastic university where they teach really in-depth philosophy courses such as the ones that they also teach to the foreigners who are—mostly foreigners, not only—but to the very diverse population that goes to the Center for Buddhist Studies, the students. And so they teach you very classical Buddhist philosophy, very in depth, and then they practice this revelatory lineage. And, you know, what that means and how that fits into the tradition, I think, was my initial impetus.

MILES OSGOOD: Is that taught too in classes or is that taught at sites? What does it look like to pass that tradition along?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: That is—so it's not taught in classes in the kind of, like, academic setting or in the official setting of the Center for Buddhist Studies, but it’s what... When you're in class, which in the new monastery—which was reconstructed after the earthquake... When you're in class, you're right above the temple...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... where they are doing ritual that is practically entirely based on texts that were revealed from the Tibetan landscape 150 years ago. And then when you're interacting with the monks, they're all practitioners of that lineage. And if you receive teaching—so not in the class setting but more in the traditional setting, where a lama teaches certain practices—that's the lineage that they're basing themselves on.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. So—so much of your work is about the ecology of Tibet and the relationship of this practice to the land and to community surrounding particular aspects of the landscape. Can you give us a sense of your own picture of meeting that geography, of meeting people who were maybe going out into the land and engaging in this practice or—or maybe even episodes of witness you might’ve—you might've participated in?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, sure. I mean, pilgrimage is so central to, I think, the whole Buddhist tradition. You know, you go to Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and you have Buddhists from around the world there, and you have entire congregations coming from Vietnam and from Japan and, you know, from every Buddhist country. And so all—all of these are engaging in pilgrimage. And usually when they go to Bodh Gaya, they will also go to Lumbini, the place of the Buddha’s birth and maybe, you know, to Varanasi, to Sarnath next to Varanasi, the place of his first sermon, and so on and so forth. So marking the life of the Buddha in the Indian landscape is already, like, pretty foundational, already from like Aśoka's time, like not long after the Buddha's own lifetime...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ...and then in Tibet—I mean, already in India for other traditions other than Buddhists, there are also all sorts of sacred sites associated with various local goddesses and gods. And in Tibet that—I don’t know, it feels like it takes on such a ubiquitous, massive scale...

MILES OSGOOD: Hm, hm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... with the more indigenous aspect of every mountain being a local deity linked to local populations, right, in like kinship relations. So pilgrimage in Tibetan Buddhism is—is like such—so, like, integral to the fabric of the religion. And they even transposed a lot of the sacred sites from India into Tibet...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... such that they can find the sacred geography of India in Tibet...

MILES OSGOOD: What does that look like?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... and encounter that.

MILES OSGOOD: What's an example of that?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So, for instance, there's certain sacred sites—like one that I've researched quite a bit actually in the Chokling Tersar lineage—there's a site called Tsadra, like “Tsadra Foundation,” because that's the site where Jamgön Kongtrül Rinpoche wrote his “Five Treasuries,” compiled his “Five Treasuries.” So it's quite known for that. It's a hermitage by Palpung Monastery. And according to the site guides—so these like landscape writings that Chokgyur Lingpa revealed—that site is actually... So Tsadra means “like ‘tsa ri tra,’” and “tsa ri tra” is also “Devīkoṭa,” and that is a goddess site in India, which there's a few different versions in India and there's at least four of them in Tibet. So sites can get identified in that way. Like, “Oh, this site has actually the same qualities, the same nature, the same essence...”

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... “as that other site in India.”

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Because anyway, even the site, the original site in India is often seen as kind of a correlate of a site that's more transcendent...

MILES OSGOOD: Oh wow.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... or like in a celestial dimension. So everything can be transposed in that way.

MILES OSGOOD: Right. Yeah, it's interesting because I know in your research you talk about, you know, how much weight to put on the continuity between Indic traditions that are site-specific and Tibetan ones. And I'm thinking about that largely in a sort of figurative sense of sort of like, “Oh, do we understand that we invest land in specific sites with the same kind of meaning,” but to hear it even more specifically that, “No, no, this particular site corresponds to a site in India that corresponds perhaps to a celestial site,” is in fact so much more specific that that continuity has spiritual import in a way. Well, okay, so we want to get back to this and get back to the whole question of sort of how this “terma” tradition evolved, but before that, I want to ask one more question that's biographical about continuities and discontinuities in your own life and your own studies. So you do this work and you discover this tradition and you live in this semi-monastic or monastic-academic environment, and then you come to do your PhD at Stanford. And I know you wrote in an article for "Lekha," I think, in twenty twenty-one, in our newsletter, that you expected this to be just wildly different. And I'm sure in some ways it was, moving from seeing living models of the religion and the practice to maybe a more academic, abstracted, removed version of it. But that doesn't seem to be the complete picture. So could you tell us a little bit about the transition of moving to this university to continue those studies and in what ways it has been continuous or discontinuous?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Sure, I mean, you know, I think the biggest difference is that when you're in Kathmandu, in Boudhanath, which is the majoritively Tibetan or in large part Tibetan Buddhist neighborhood in which the Center for Buddhist Studies of Kathmandu University is located, you're surrounded by Tibetan Buddhists and the people studying there are in large—for the most part Buddhist because it's like, kind of like going to seminary, you know.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So... So, you're studying Buddhism academically, but you're also mostly talking to others who are part of that tradition and you're surrounded by the living tradition. It's not an abstraction. It's not like some theory. And if you want to understand a text from the tradition, you go to an expert from...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... that tradition rather than, I don't know, trying to guess on your own or checking in a dictionary. So it's just a very, you know, like hands-on kind of firsthand witness account of what you're studying—especially if, like me, you're like studying the contemporary tradition versus like, you know, if you're studying an ancient Indian text and that would be a different scenario. But um... So that's one big difference. But then the other big difference for me and the positive for me in coming to Stanford has been the opportunity to really branch out and have like wildly different interlocutors and just really, like, get my material into dialogue with theories and thought from other disciplines, other fields. And that's been really generative.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Wonderful. All right, so into the—into the material of treasure revelation, let's talk about this a little bit. So can you just introduce our audience to the history of this local practice and this tradition that goes back 1,000 years? What is the “terma” tradition? How did it start? How did the the “tertöns”—the treasure revealers— evolve the practice over time and write about the practice? Let's go back to the beginning.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's still a lot that's not fully known. We're still very much trying to figure out: okay, like, what was the actual origin of the tradition? What is it based on? Is it... You know, earlier on scholars thought, "Well, this seems to be really like indigenous Tibetan and linked to Tibetan funerary practices of people retrieving precious objects from royal tombs." So there's different theories. And now maybe I'll explain what it actually is, (Miles laughs) which is basically a practice of finding, recovering sacred texts, objects, relics—let's start with saying, like—from the land of Tibet, from the landscape of Tibet. And those were really—and not just the land, but also often sacred monuments, so stūpas, which are relic domes, and maybe the pillars of temples, like that, right? And so, we have pretty good evidence that the very first treasure revealers were probably in large part doing just that, which is finding ancient texts in old monastery libraries, finding relics, sacred objects, texts that had been lost, that had been hidden somewhere. And one of the first treasure revealers, Nyangrel Nyima Özer, who Daniel Hirshberg wrote a great book about, you know, wrote some treasure histories that give us, or asked, like—texts that can be read as treasure histories—that give us some glimpse into his justifications for that, that...

MILES OSGOOD: What period are we talking here?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So we're talking 11th century.

MILES OSGOOD: Okay. So this is really the beginning of the...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So the very beginning of the treasure tradition. I mean, there probably were 10th-century treasury revealers but we don't have—we don’t know much about them. We don't have any extent treasures. And...

MILES OSGOOD: And the lore is that the treasures were placed there by Padmasambhava in the eighth or ninth centuries?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: That is, like, the standard narrative now.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm, okay. But it wasn’t—

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: But it wasn't necessarily the narrative right at the beginning.

MILES OSGOOD: Ah, okay.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So Hirshberg talks about that, you know: that Nyangrel has like two different texts that show completely different pictures. In one, the concealment of these treasures has really nothing to do with Padmasambhava. It's all because, you know: there was a king who was supposedly persecuting Buddhists after the first establishment of Buddhism. And in order to save the Buddhist treasures—texts and relics, and so on—they hid them...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... they went out, they hid them in the landscape, and then like a century later or two centuries later, Nyangrel retrieved them, right, and others like him. But even Nyangrel has another version of this where it's really Padmasambhava who's at the origin of the texts that are being hidden. And this time, it's more because they were tantric texts that weren't really appropriate for that time or understood at that time, and they're hidden for...

MILES OSGOOD: A time when the...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... future.

MILES OSGOOD: ... when the time will be ripe.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Exactly. Which becomes the more standard narrative of not necessarily that these things were hidden to protect them, but rather because it wasn't the right time.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And...

MILES OSGOOD: Or it's time not on a political scale, but on some kind of spiritual scale or...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah. They're hidden for the benefit of the generation of the people that will have access to them, right? So the revealer is who's appointed, who's prophesied, who's a disciple in the standard narrative, a disciple of Padmasambhava, reincarnated, you know, at this future time where he's appointed and he will reveal that treasure and it'll benefit that particular time and place. And so, a lot of these treasures for the text, they have prophecies, like, “Oh, you know, “when this and that happens—“say when like, Samye burns down, the monastery burns down—then it'll be the time for that revealer, and then you can do this, this, and that to help the people.” So it's really kind of like... It becomes, in the standard narratives that evolve maybe like a century or two later, into the tradition...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: It becomes also like a testament to Padmasambhava's kind of infinite kindness to Tibetans, that he leaves them—he fills the land with treasures that will benefit them in the future.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Okay, wonderful. So what are some maybe telling episodes where a generation seems to get a treasure that it really needs at that particular time? Or the definition, the nature of the treasure itself tells us something about how that generation saw itself, depending on where you put the chicken and the egg, I suppose?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, I mean, in the end, the thing is the treasures aren't that different from material that already exists, and that's also like—a lot of scholars have done this type of philological work of looking at, “Okay, but how...” You know, these... “So it seems like there's new texts being revealed, but how innovative are they actually?” And when scholars such as Rob Mayer, who was here last month, do this type of philological work, they find—I mean, really no huge innovations are being made here. It's like slight—there's these slight edits, slight modifications, but, in large part, it's in total continuity...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... with the tantric material that already existed. So it's not so much about like introducing something brand new that's specific to that time...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... but it's more about like revitalizing lineage.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And especially with all the sacred objects and relics, it's really about this idea—and the texts too, that function as relics, right?—it's really about like materializing blessings from the past in the present. And so, facilitating access to what's seen as the golden age of Tibetan Buddhism, Padmasambhava's time, in the present: so that you can kind of have direct access as if those centuries didn’t...

MILES OSGOOD: Ahh.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... go by.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Nice. So, yeah, a reminder, a revitalization as you say. So you've mentioned this list now a few times, I think of objects, relics, texts of different kinds of categories of what this treasure might actually consist of. And this is a really important animating piece of your dissertation, right? Is that it sounds like for centuries—both within perhaps the revealer tradition or the Tibetan tradition, but especially within the modern academic tradition—we tend to place preeminence on what we might call “mind treasures”—you have this section in your dissertation on “Mind vs. matter”—as opposed to material treasures, that we, maybe especially scholastics, take a special interest in treasures that are textual...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Mmm.

MILES OSGOOD: ... but that's not the whole corpus, that's not all the treasures. So tell us a little bit maybe about the history of that, of sort of “tertöns” who did the work of taxon(omies)—of making taxonomies of different kinds of treasures and how we should see the relative or equal status of these different kinds of objects.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah. So there’s two different things going on here. One is the fact that treasures in general, can be texts or they can be relics, they can be statues, they can be substances.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And then there's how these treasures were revealed. And in the case of texts—only because you can't really mind-reveal objects, in this case—but in the case of textual treasures, they can be actually like... A physical scroll...

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... can be revealed from a rock or it can be revealed within the treasure revealer's mind.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And so, on the one hand, we have different types of treasures being revealed, and, on the other hand, we have basically these two different methods of revelation: “mind treasures,” and the other one which we call “earth treasures.” And the focus has been mostly on textual treasures, whether they're “mind” or “earth treasures.”

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And, you know, like you said, both within the tradition, the Tibetan tradition, and, you know, in terms of scholastic interest. So it's not that, necessarily that, modern academics totally skewed everything in favor of text because there's definitely that bias within the tradition, at least in terms of like the amount of time that traditional apologists and sometimes critics too spend talking about the texts in particular versus the relics and the objects. But when you look at the actual record of revelation of treasure revealers, like the objects are everywhere, right? There's hardly—I mean, in particular, in the case of Chokgyur Lingpa, whom I am researching—like, there's hardly any text that's revealed without also some relics and some objects, right? And, likewise, you know, if we're going for like mind versus matter distinction in terms of “earth treasures” versus “mind treasures,” you know, if you just look at Jamgön Kongtrül’s history of the 100 treasure revealers, of the 100 “tertöns”—where, you know, it's like the, you know, the best compilation we have of like kind of an overview of all the major treasure revealers...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... I think like 80% of that in terms of the length of the book is devoted to “earth treasures”...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... and the rest to “mind treasures.”

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So there's just way more of them.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And the objects and the relics are kind of ubiquitous within that.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And you can see why academics—maybe, maybe monastic scholastics as well—would take an interest in “mind treasures,” or physical text treasures that have this kind of mind component in a way, insofar as there is something there to interpret or a tradition to connect to or whatnot. With that other 80% of things that truly are, you know, fundamentally material, what is the boon that's being offered in the treasure itself if it's, you know—we think about, like, stories that come up in your thesis—if it's gold, if it's precious gems, maybe if it's a relic of some kind: what is the community or the treasure revealer meant to gain or to think about a treasure like that?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, I mean... You know, it’s a—this kind of brings us back to the question of the origins of the treasure tradition.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And there's many strands, it seems, that are being woven together. There's the idea in quite a few Mahāyāna sutras of future revelation. You know, there's obviously the famous story of Nāgārjuna who goes down into the “Nāga Realm” to retrieve the “Prajñāpāramitā,” the “Perfection of Wisdom” scriptures. That's the most famous one that's often quoted in treasure apologia as a precedent for the Tibetan treasure tradition.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: “Look, Indians were doing this and, like, one of our major scriptures is a treasure.” It's, you know—it's like the definition of treasure. It was kept underground by non-human beings, and it was retrieved by the right person...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... at the right time. And there's also some prophecies in various Mahāyāna scriptures that, again, Robert Mayer has written about the “dharmabhāṇaka” as this—so the kind of “dharma preacher”—as this figure who in the future will find the Buddhist sūtras again and kind of preach them at a time of decline of the dharma. So there's that strand in terms of—in terms of, kind of prophesied, revelatory, textual revelations.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. And where the story of the discovery is itself part of the import(ance)—part of the significance.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Exactly, exactly. And then there's the idea that exists both in India and in Tibet in more like indigenous practices of territorial spirits and deities such as the Nāgas, who keep the “Perfection of Wisdom” scriptures, as having—being the guardians of treasures. So in India, you have a lot of Nāgas and Yakṣas, who—by definition, like, that's their role. They keep subterranean resources, you know, they're in control of water and mineral resources, and so on. And so, it's linked to agricultural fertility and to prosperity and all these things. And there's the same going on in Tibet. And so, I think the two get mingled whereas, you know, as you can see in the examples in the Pali Suttas, where the Nagas also are also part of... Like the whole story with the relics of the Buddha.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: You know, The relics of the Buddha get taken by the Nāgas and they're kept underground. And so, these beings are already being associated with the preservation of kind of sacred...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... treasures, because, I mean—it's kind of, you know—it makes sense: like both are precious, right?

MILES OSGOOD: Right.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Like, gold is precious and so your dharma scripture is precious.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And so, both are treasures...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... and so why not have treasure guardians...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... potentially guard both?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And clearly, that's happening in the Tibetan treasure tradition where treasure revealers, you know, as early as Guru Chowang in the 13th century and as late as Chokgyur Lingpa in the 19th century, treasures in this Buddhist sense are said to be, to include, mineral resources like gold and silver and so on, as well as texts, as well as relics. So it kind of spans that whole...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... spectrum.

MILES OSGOOD: And the treasure is important in and of itself, but we also understand its importance in these associations, it seems like, insofar as gold is like a scripture, insofar as it is being protected by a deity, insofar as it belongs to a particular part of the land that then becomes sacred or rendered sacred in the course of the tradition, the treasure revealing itself. You mentioned something in passing that I think is really important here and interesting, which is the need for there to be treasure apologists and Guru Chowang as being one of those: that there is skepticism even within Tibet about whether this tradition is continuous with its Indic Buddhist origins, whether this is playing up some sort of greater relation with maybe pre-Buddhist deities that exist in the area. I wonder if you could just take us into that for a moment, because it seems pertinent particularly to the question of the materiality of the treasures, because there will be... It sounds like there are some who say, “Well, this fixation on things that are material and things that are subterranean must be in some ways corrupted by comparison to the spiritual, you know, immaterial things that we should be caring about.” And then, yeah—and, I guess, I suppose I wonder about the response to that and the argument against—the argument, in fact, in favor of the treasure tradition.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense you have, you know, suddenly people, kind of a marginal group of people, going around saying, "Hey, I've just like revealed this new text from a rock." Right? Obviously, there were skeptics because, you know, skepticism isn't anything that...

MILES OSGOOD: ... we’ve invented.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... that modern academics have invented, right?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. (laughs)

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So there's been critiques of the treasure tradition ever since its beginnings and, you know, and up to the present day.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Even... Even from within the Nyingma school, or the “Ancient” school, to which most treasure revealers belong, there's critiques of the treasure tradition. And within that, there's also just critiques of individual treasure revealers. So some just completely discredit the entire practice, while others are more like, well, you know, there's definitely fraudulent treasure revealers, but that doesn't mean that the entire tradition... They don't throw the baby out with the bathwater basically.

MILES OSGOOD: Right. Right.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: But these two positions exist. And because there were critiques, there were apologists. And it is a really interesting—I mean, it's probably like, one of my favorite passages in Guru Chowang's “Treasure History.” This is a 13th-century text that—you know, it's called a “Treasure History” and it's in large part an apologia of the treasure tradition. And at some point in the text he's kind of, you know, giving, or like responding to arguments against the treasure tradition.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So he's like listing these critiques of the tradition, and then he's giving his own responses or actually telling his reader, "Oh, if someone tells you this, then you can tell them that, right, and then like you'll shut them up.”

MILES OSGOOD: It's a classic philosopher's move of objections and replies.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Exactly. Exactly. And one of these is—apparently the critique is: “Well, you know, you say that you're revealing “basically like dharma texts from the earth, from the water, from the air. So I mean, these are just earth dharmas, they're water dharmas, they're air dharmas. How could you possibly gain enlightenment based on that?” And, basically, the critique, as you've noted is there's kind of like this—this kind of, you know, this fear of the contamination of the elements, right? And, you know, it's not necessarily explained like what the logic is behind it, but there seems to be some fear of associating dharma, associating scripture...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... with that which is defiled.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Right?

MILES OSGOOD: So now we're beyond...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And subject to degradation. ... skepticism to real worry.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yes. Yeah, I would—yeah, I mean, I would say so. Suddenly you're claiming that these scriptures are sacred even though they come from the defiled elements. Right? There's like, you know, in terms of very classic Buddhist philosophy...

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... of the defiled and the undefiled—and you want the dharma to be undefiled, to be unconditioned.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: But you're—like, you're revealing it from the earth, which, you know, by definition, is conditions: it's defiled, right, it's the elements, it's materiality.

MILES OSGOOD: Dirt is dirty.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And dirt is dirty.

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So there's that whole kind of inconsistency, I think, in the detractors’ minds.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And Chowang just... Chowang just like cuts through it all by saying that you can't get anywhere without materiality. Everything... Like, you know... You're talking about scriptures: well, you write your scripture on paper with ink, like all of that is earth and it's water, and the movement of your hand is air, and it happens in space. Everything is dependent on the elements. Your body is made up of the elements, without your body, you couldn't reach enlightenment. So like, how can you say that you can reach enlightenment without the elements? And he goes even further to say, I mean, basically a treasure is something that was hidden and that then is discovered. So if you want to get rid of treasures since you were first hidden in your mother's womb, and then, you know, were revealed, (Miles laughs) then you should just go and commit suicide. So, you know, he takes it, like...

MILES OSGOOD: That’s a rebuttal. (laughs)

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... kind of to its extreme, but there's an interesting argument.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, wow. Okay. Just to take a hard pivot here to the other term that we haven't necessarily put into the “terma” conversation yet, which is the “ecological.” So one of the things that these monastics are writing are stories of revealing treasure and taxonomies of revealing treasure, and then it sounds like also rebuttals and apologias of revealing treasure. But then there's also the site guides that you mentioned in passing too...

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Mm-hmm.

MILES OSGOOD: ... and the importance of these being very specific to parts of the land. And this is something that animates the article that you have coming out. And so, I want to turn to that and ask you about that a little bit. It sounds like from an early point in your research and your work, you were interested in people, in landscape, in the relationship of community to territory. What have you learned by studying this particular history, and seeing its present manifestation, about that?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, I mean, you know, it was hard not to focus on that in the context of the Chokling Tersar, the particular lineage that I studied, because the site guides are just everywhere.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Like, there are so many of them. And in particular, Chokgyur Lingpa revealed kind of a whole gazetteer, like a guide to 42 different sites in Tibet, mostly Eastern Tibet, but also Central Tibet. And this—these 42 sites, or in particular the 25 sites of Kham—of Eastern Tibet—they still in large part govern the way that people in Kham understand their sacred geography. So, you know, modern books have been printed with collections of the site guides around this concept of the 25 sites of Kham. So Chokgyur Lingpa was really influential in establishing—I mean, him and his associates, Kongtrül and Khyentsé—were really influential in establishing a sacred geography of their whole region. And for that they revealed and they composed a lot of site guides. But they're not the only ones because revealing treasure has always been part of like this move of what they call opening up new sacred sites...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... so, which basically is... It’s kind of, again, like, revealing the sacred nature of a site. And, you know, in order to reveal the sacred nature of a site, you have to guide people into recognizing that sacred nature. And that's what the site guide does. So the site guide... And, you know, I went to Tibet this summer, and in a lot of these places—I think it's relatively recent—but in a lot of places the site guides are carved. Or, you know—I don't think I've seen... Sometimes they're printed. But many times they're carved in wood or in rock, like, right in front of the site.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: So you go to the site and you can read the site guide and it tells you like...

MILES OSGOOD: I see.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... there's this mark of that deity here, and if you circumambulate that way, you will find this. So it like guides you through the different features of the site and it identifies the—like, the sacred aspect of it. So it's really about, like, kind of manifesting that sacred dimension of the site for the pilgrim or for the reader of the guide. And that's so intimately linked with the treasure tradition because treasure revelation sites are always like—become sacred or are retroactively recognized as sacred because treasure was concealed there by Padmasambhava. So it's like, it's a new sacred site, but it's always been a sacred site because treasure was there all along, right?

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah. Okay, yeah. So you get the sense of the layers of what makes the site important for particular moments in time—but yeah, looking backward. So, one thing that you write in your article is that this could be a corrective in various ways to ways of thinking about religion, ways of thinking about Buddhism, ways of thinking about mindfulness in particular in the West. So we've talked a little bit about the maybe artificial distinction that we might have between mind and matter or between nature and culture—which is a kind of very typically Western philosophical dichotomy—and how already when we look at these taxonomies and the ways in which these treasures were considered, we can see how that borderline, if it ever existed, is totally blurred out. Then there's this sort of interesting note that you end on about how we think of Buddhist meditation and mindfulness as—especially in the West, it seems—as a kind of individualizing process, as a removal from the land, from the world, from the material, as a kind of personal form of healing or escape. And it sounds like when we're thinking about pilgrimage, when we're thinking about communal rights, when we're thinking about the importance of a landscape that is a homeland, having this kind of power and connecting us to members from a particular history, that's a very different way of thinking about, you know, what this religion is about at the core: not individualistic, not about removal, not about shunning the material. Could you tell us a little bit about sort of what's at stake in your argument to other scholars and practitioners, maybe particularly in a Western context, as you think about what you've witnessed in Tibet and what you've learned from centuries of that history?

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Sure. I mean, part of it is a very, you know—it's a known argument, regarding modern mindfulness-based interventions, which, you know—I mean, these are evolving too...

MILES OSGOOD: Mm-hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... and many newer mindfulness programs are integrating more social and environmental aspects to their interventions as well. So we can't like caricature it too much.

MILES OSGOOD: Sure.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: But the basic critique is you're just cherry picking, taking mindfulness completely out of its context. And even if you go back to the earliest formulations of the Buddhist path, right? Mindfulness is one out of eight...

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... parts of the Noble Eightfold Path. And a lot of the others are mainly ethical, right? And so, it's a lot about your behavior and your orientation to society, to the world. And all eight parts reinforce themselves, and it's kind of this loop: you can't just extricate one from the others. So I think, you know, the thing is like: “How much does mindfulness work, if you take it out of that context?” is part of the big question. And in terms of, you know, the more Tibetan side, then there's also like: well, mindfulness is like such a small part of the practice too. There's so much ritual. There's pilgrimage. There's the ingestion of various blessing substances. And all of these things are like part and parcel of it. And privileging, as—you know, definitely in a—I'd say like in a Buddhist kind of Western practice context—privileging only the meditation, because that appears to us based on a really kind of a 19th-century reading of religion as like the rational and like palatable aspect of it and taking out all the rest... There's just a question about the efficacy of a partial practice of the Buddhist path.

MILES OSGOOD: Hmm.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: And why are we so easily dismissing all these other parts? And so, I think, you know, part of the reason for centering material treasures and relics, and also the role that land plays is to actually give it like kind of the more like serious consideration that it deserves. And, you know, I'm not the only one doing that, but not just dismissing it as, you know, indigenous or cultural or something that just like doesn't really fit with our conception of Buddhism or what Buddhism should be, but rather seeing it as it is expressed by the tradition as actually like a really efficacious part of the practice. It's not just like some, you know, floral, like, addendum.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: But it's really like...

MILES OSGOOD: Or some regional particularism.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: ... Exactly. But it's actually like, first of all, it's coherent in terms of the philosophical explanations of the path and it's like an essential part of it just as much as meditation is.

MILES OSGOOD: Yeah, yeah. That's wonderful. So the idea there of like, the things we can learn from... You know, I think, I know this is something that you think about, even in terms of the translation of these terms, right? Are we dealing with a treasure to be revealed or is this fundamentally etymologically a kind of resource to be extracted? But if it is, do we have to give something back in the way that the treasure revealers themselves gave things back to the deities that they disturbed when they were turning up these treasures? All of this does seem like it should be ethically educational for us and transmittable beyond the particular site of the site guide to a broader world. So thank you so much for teaching us that and for bringing what is your own interdisciplinary kind of manifold work together to get us to think about that more broadly. I think we'll all be excited to see where this dissertation goes and the form that it takes in various publications. But I hope folks will look at your “Journal of Contemplative Studies” article when it comes out for a taste. So thanks so much, Oriane. We really appreciate you having this conversation with us and we look forward to more.

ORIANE LAVOLÉ: Yeah, thanks so much, Miles.

[Epilogue]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, guitar and bells]

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]

Until next time, this has been “The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford” podcast.

[music - Ani Choying Drolma, Oṃ maṇi padme hūm̐]