The twenty-five great sites of Khams: Religious geography, revelation, and nonsectarianism in ninetheenth-century eastern Tibet

This dissertation is an exploration of a narrative map known as "The Twenty-five Great Sites of Khams." The map is a descriptive list of forty-two religious sites in the southwestern Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It was set forth in two separate versions in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an articulation of regional identity, the map projected religious and social values onto the mountainous terrain and established a geographic representation of Khams that included neither political borders nor administrative structure. Chapter One uses the initial version of the narrative map, produced in 1857 by the treasure revealer (gter ston) Mchog gyur gling pa (1829-1870), to investigate three interrelated issues: (1) the category of "sacred geography," (2) Tibetan strategies of representing space, and (3) the means by which its author used landscape to legitimate himself and his revelations, or "treasures" (gter ma, texts or objects said to have been concealed in the soil of Tibet to be discovered when the time was right). Chapter Two examines the normative tropes of treasure revelation narrative and finds that many elements of a given treasure's history are determined by certain narrative requirements that the tradition continues to maintain. I also argue that in some cases the rituals of revelation were performed not to produce treasure but to consecrate religious sites. Chapter Three examines the second version of the narrative map, composed by 'Jam mgon Kong sprul (1813-1899) in 1867. He composed it at a time when Khams's territorial integrity was threatened by an invading Tibetan army. The author is widely credited in the west with founding the so-called the "Rimay movement" which was supposedly a response to centuries of Tibetan sectarian prejudice and violence. This chapter reads the narrative map in a way that undermines that notion. It argues that while the map was in some ways a model of nonsectarianism, as it included sites associated with nearly all denominations of Tibetan Buddhism, it pointedly excluded from the religious geography of Khams the Dge lugs pa sect which at that time controlled the Tibetan government and army. In this way it established a geographic representation of Khams that symbolically preserved Khams's independence from Lhasa.