34
AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF MEMORY
IN THE SECRET VALLEYS
OF THE HIMALAYAS
Sacred topographies of mind in
two Beyul pilgrimages
Hayley Saul
It is the middle of April in 2013 and I am stumbling along a steep trail about halfway up the Langtang Valley in Nepal. After every ten geologically slow steps, I pause bemusedly to survey my weary muscles once
again, panting at the exertion of just placing another foot on the uneven stones. I mentally chastise myself
for persisting with a dinner of ‘Sherpa Dal Bhat’ the night before; the rice soaked in warm yak butter that,
in hindsight, was a theme park for listeria. Barely an hour after eating it I was dragging myself to a sketchy
toilet bowl in my guesthouse to vomit (and would continue to spend the next two solid days doing so
every half hour). And so, it was in this not-so-plucky state, barely able to lift my head, that I entered the
sacred Beyul of Langtang (Tib. sbas yul) for the first time. I had been interested in these mythical landscapes
since reading Ian Baker’s (2004) The Heart of the World; one of the most comprehensive physical and literary
explorations of the Beyul tradition I have come across, and a beautiful rendering of the multi-dimensional
geography of the Tsangpo Gorge (Beyul Pemako). Beyul, as Baker (2004) notes, are valleys hidden by the
powerful intention of Guru Rinpoche (Sanskrit: Padmasambhava) in the eighth century AD. It was in this
early historic period that Guru Rinpoche journeyed throughout the Himalayas on foot, hiding secret wisdoms (as scrolls, objects, or simply thoughts) in rocks, caves, trees, rivers, and even the sky. This tradition of
transmitting wisdom via text or by imbuing an object directly with the power of revelation, is called the
Terma Tradition, so-called because the knowledge ‘treasures’ are named Terma (Tib. gter ma). It is within this
tradition that Guru Rinpoche is also acknowledged to have hidden entire valleys that would one day be
revealed to a few to act as a refuge in times of crisis for humanity. Those Terma that describe how to access
these Beyul valleys are called Neyig.
Not only are they often physically remote, but these landscapes are disguised ‘by barriers formed out of
our habitual ways of perceiving our surroundings’ (Baker 2004: 11). In this sense then, they occupy geographies that transcend to the esoteric; to alternate realities brought about by variations in the ‘ordinary’ perception of space. As a result, discovery of the innermost, secret regions of Beyul is only possible by spiritual
adepts – those that have cultivated a pure mind: ‘naked, immaculate, transparent, empty, timeless, uncreated,
unimpeded; not realizable as a separate entity, but as the unity of all things’ (Baker 2004: 21).These adepts, or
Tertons, as they are known in the Terma Tradition, are often evoked as reincarnations of Guru Rinpoche’s
original disciples, reborn multiple times until such a moment that humanity needs the Beyul and the esoteric wisdoms that inhabit such places.
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What struck me upon further investigation of this remarkable legacy was that revealing those arcane
spaces of the Beyul and the hidden Terma contained within is occasionally likened, in the tradition’s commentaries, to a process of remembering. Both the landscape itself, but also ‘symbolic scripts on scrolls of paper
are used as the key to awaken the recollection of the teaching that has been concealed in the essential nature
of minds’ (Thondup Rinpoche 1997: 61). Only Tertons were bestowed with the revelations of a Beyul’s
hidden geographies originating from the period when the tradition was first established, but anyone willing to invest in his or her own spiritual attainment could benefit from pilgrimages to Beyul. Indeed, the
‘Essential Inventory of Yolmo’ text of the Terma tradition suggests that even the mere intention to travel to a
Beyul is meritorious:
This is a most auspicious sanctuary,
Where longevity, merits and resources all multiply,
Those living in the degenerate age, who would practise what I, (Padmasambhava) have taught,
Go find that sanctuary!
Those who think of it and long for it,
Have accumulated merit over limitless aeons.
(cited in Dondrup 2009: 6)
And so, acknowledging that the phenomenal experience of a pilgrim whilst travelling through/to Beyul
starts from an ‘anamnestic attitude,’ in this chapter I want to explore these hidden valleys as a tradition of
memory work. I pick up on the ways that memories disrupt the perception of place in the Terma tradition
and, conversely, are evoked and transmuted by those disruptions. Further, I seek to engage with the Terma
tradition’s peculiar range of what Olick (2008) refers to as ‘retrospective products, practices, and processes’
that could otherwise be masked beneath the generalising notion of ‘tradition’ or ‘collective memory.’ And
to do this, I draw on auto-ethnographic experiences of pilgrimage routes predominantly to the Langtang
Valley (recognised as the location of Beyul Dagam Namgo [Tib. zla gam gnam sgo]) and to a lesser degree
the valley of the Melamchi Ghyang (revered as the location of the Yolmo Beyul). These are contextualised
by the few published Neyig and commentaries.
Despite the distraction of my ailing health, it was impossible not to be stunned by the beauty of my surroundings. It was the season of rhododendron blooms, and their wispy florets peppered the forested hillsides
in every shade of crimson and magenta up to at least 3,000 metres. Grey langur monkeys peered inquisitively from their leafy branches as I picked my way over fallen logs. Sub-tropical forest plants had started
to give way to the occasional temperate hemlock and larch, their furry foliage thick enough to conceal a
Himalayan black bear, or so it seemed to my dreamily exhausted mind. Memory is a concept that is surprisingly absent from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, at least partly because it presents problems for explanations
of the ego. The recognition of mundane objects through everyday, fleeting acts of recollection – perceiving
something ‘to be’ in the present because of its similarity to the past – is a leading culprit. For in Buddhism,
which considers existence as a constant state of flux, such a recollection is ontologically unfounded, and
therefore vulnerable to falsity (Gyatso 1992).What is more, failing to truly accept this leads to habitual ways
of thinking, what Sarah Ahmed (2004) would call the ‘stickiness’ of things, an intensity of attachment that
underpins a wholly substantialist theory of self-hood. Sticky objects accumulate a patina of thoughtful and
emotional experience which lends them the guise of an ‘I.’ It is the ‘I,’ the ego, that troubles the soteriological pursuits of Tibetan Buddhism, matting the fabric of an otherwise flowing ‘essential nature’ (Tib. Kham
rig) and resulting in a mistaken conflation of habitual perception with unquestionable fact.
Griffith’s (1992) observation that a systematic phenomenology of remembering is missing from Buddhist philosophy holds true because of these unhelpful consequences for the project of salvation. Conversely,
descriptions of striking acts of memory as evidence of a realised state are not uncommon in Buddhist verses;
the Terton master Manjuśrîghosa, for example, could recite the full teachings of Guru Rinpoche simply by
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concentrating on the words so that they arose in his mind (Third Dondrup Chen Rinpoche 1997, cited
in Thondup Rinpoche 1997). The earliest mention of memory of the past from an analytical perspective comes from a first-century treatise called the Mahāvibhāsā, an explanation of the Buddha’s teachings
originating in India mere centuries after his awakening (Walser 2009). The seemingly striking absence of
memory theory in Tibetan Buddhism could, alternatively, result more from a skewed expectation of what
such a body of thought should look like though. Though the landmark framing of the experience of
memory by Bergson (1990) did much to dispel static renderings of ‘memory as a storage device’ and replace
them with appreciations of its active, fluid qualities, those understandings still rested upon the position of
memory as a product of the past. But, this dominant relegation of memory to a backwards-looking gaze,
oriented solely to the past, is to conceive the very nature of memory in narrow, restrictive terms (Gyatso
1992). Furthermore, as this chapter will explore, such a narrow definition serves to illuminate more about
an Anglophone scholarly appreciation of memory than a Tibetan Buddhist one. For a truly comparative
philosophy, we must include an adjustment to our very notion of what it means to remember, and the
social-spiritual affordances of doing so in the Terma Tradition. It was into this thoughtful initiation that
I stepped when I entered the Dagam Namgo Beyul in 2013, conscious only that if a reciprocal thread exists
between perception and memory then the true perception of the Beyul’s hidden aspects might somehow
require me practice a different type of memory work.
Extra-human actants in memory webs
At the summit of each hillock was a vista of arresting beauty. Such is the tremendous incline of the Dagam
Namgo Valley that the scene back down to the trailhead at Syabru Besi cascades in a tumble of forest
blooms, crumbled yak herder huts and a vein of glacial waters. This almost technicolour beauty, I was told,
is a clue about the presence of a Beyul.When walking the valley, the first two days are spent in a steep-sided
gorge, ascending quickly before the valley opens out on the higher pastures and ends in a horseshoe of
crisp white peaks (Figure 34.1). Those moments certainly startled me from the inconsequential mutterings
of my internal dialogue that seemed hellbent on encouraging me to have a nice sit-down. As I descended
from these knolls, out of the sunshine and under the rhododendron canopy, the grand panoramas gave
way to more immediate vistas: gashes made from rockfall, the precarity of the path that wound beside the
monsoon-engorged river, the claustrophobia of the cliffs.This was the broken and weathered underbelly of
the Beyul, unstable and dangerous. Simply the scale of my witnessing provoked its varying aspects. I simultaneously experienced both uneasiness at the unpredictable fluidity of the rocky terrain, and its Romantic
beauty, the latter buffered by tales I’d read of plant hunting explorers (Lancaster 1981), and a rich botanical
material culture that I’d seen in the United Kingdom’s Royal Botanical Gardens, accumulated since the
naturalists of 1802 visited these mountains. These ‘social frameworks in which we are called on to recall are
inevitably tied up with what and how we recall,’ observes Olick (2008: 115), and I was entrapped by their
habitual presence in my mind. Such mediated framings mesmerised every viewpoint, inspiring me to sink
into familiar fantasies of reminiscence.
It is this totalising tendency of collective memory that is resisted in the Terma Tradition. To do this,
known Terma manuscripts are often written in a poetic and indirect script, described by Baker (2004: 10) as
a ‘twilight’ language because of its obscurity. They demand deciphering for the very purpose of disrupting
any a priori conflation of collective memory and knowledge. But this poses a peculiar problem for the transfer of knowledge. The antithesis of totalising narratives – where shared experience makes up the connecting principle between individuals – is something akin to a reductionist reading of memory forwarded by
Bergson (1990) who emphasises the variability of individual memory, and therefore the limits of its reproduction collectively. It is this latter perspective that is championed by the Terma Tradition. In the absence of
any residue of connectivity from shared memory, the Terma Tradition of knowledge is arguably established
on epistemological foundations that design inherent instability into its practice. The tradition allows for
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Figure 34.1
Looking up the Dagam Namgo valley to the horseshoe of white peaks, the physical centre of the Beyul.
collective practice by anyone but excludes the development of awareness to those individuals unwilling or
unable to realise the impermanence of mind, and the inherent fallibility of memory. Recall memory has
no authority in the Terma Tradition (Wayman 1992), and consequently knowledge based on recall doesn’t
either. Habitual patterns of knowledge, acquired through remembered teachings, are navigated around by
charting routes between individual and collective experience.
How can a tradition that guides a mode of awareness do so without recourse to collective representational means? An embodied encounter with the esoteric aspects of the Beyul landscape is one important
way that this happens. For there to be a transfer of knowledge or awareness – a teaching, in other words –
there needs to be a connecting principle linking agents into webs of interaction. Whilst collective memory
is censured in the tradition, it is replaced by the concept of Tantra. Tantra is a connecting principle that is not
oriented to the past, but to the present. A nebulous term, it encompasses all forms of practice that challenge
a sense of separation that arises because of an erroneous belief in an autonomous ‘self ’ (Baker 2004). It is
through Tantra, its own form of memory work directed at the present rather than the past, that practitioners
gain access to and harvest enlightened consciousness that courses fluidly through all form and matter and
can be harnessed to achieve certain creative outcomes that include emancipation (Gordon White 2000) and
expanded awareness. How is Tantra a form of memory work? I would argue there are two main ways, both
of which the Beyul landscape provokes: enduring visualisation and the Vajra body.
Enduring visualisation: presencing memory
If memory is not exclusively that which is directed to the past (and its recollection) in Himalayan cultures, then other candidates for the title of ‘remembering’ must be considered. An important part of Tantric
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practice involves powerful visualisation; in other words, it is a memory praxis that involves creating an
enduring projection (be it image, concept, sensation) that is retained, and its richness enlivened. When
undertaken as a visualisation of the Buddha or Bodhissatva, it is akin to commemoration (Gyatso 1992).
Simultaneously though, the practice of visualisation requires that recollective intrusions into that singular
concentration not be attended to, that they be observed to drift into consciousness and, according to their
fleeting nature, exit unimpeded.The objective of Tantric visualisation is to invest the focus of concentration
so singularly on the thought-form that its qualities are actualised. Those qualities might be conceptualised
as ‘energies’ or ‘intensities.’ Such terms, as Gordon White (2000) observes, are numerous; for orthodox
practitioners ‘teachings’ may be more appropriate, whereas for many of the inhabitants of Dagam Namgo
‘beings’ may make more sense. Capturing their essence lexicologically is problematic because these energetic ‘teachings’ are affective and sensuous.
As such, visualisation as memory is not strongly mind-oriented; mind only serves to translate the sublimity of the macrocosm into mundane embodied affect. It was not to the grand romance of Dagam Namgo’s
panoramic views that I therefore looked for these teachings. The sensations that spilled over me from those
vistas were fleeting and too easily indulged my childhood venturer’s imaginary. It was to the underbelly of
Dagam Namgo that I was invited to dwell on the disquieting sensations of vulnerability that the landscape
and its ‘beings’ elicited at the immediate scale. As I approached the horseshoe of white mountains on the
third day, still weary from food poisoning, and now with heart palpitations from some second-hand antibiotics I’d been gifted from a dusty old tin the day before, I felt dubious about how welcome I was in the
Beyul. On the outskirts of the village of Langtang, my eye was persistently drawn to a cliff face, upon which
black lichen clung, dripping from an elevated moraine bed above, which sat at the foot of Langtang Lirung
mountain. The stain looked like a handprint. A local man, seeing my repeated glances, gestured towards the
cliff and told me it was the hand of Guru Rinpoche, etched onto the stone to hold back avalanches. I was
reminded that most Beyul Terma describe ‘protector deities’ as beings that inhabit Beyul. These protectors
could be either peaceful or wrathful, and both literal forces in the outer world as well as constitutive of resonances within a sensuous, inner world. In Terma, everything external has corresponding affects for the body.
Protector deities arrived into the Buddhist canon from the Bonpö ‘old gods,’ pre-Buddhist divine beings
that were subdued by Guru Rinpoche and convinced to apply their wrathful propensities in the defence of
the Dharma and its Beyul. The handprint was massive and quagmired my thoughts at the level of observation: the search for evidence of danger. For Massumi (2010: 53), ‘Threat is from the future. It is what might
come next,’ and whilst true, the experience of threat is vulnerability, which inflects with the immanence of
isolation and helplessness. I was present, attuned to a pre-cognitive unease at the scale of the handprint and
what that meant for the scale of the avalanche that a wrathful deity could send down.
Other indications of Guru Rinpoche in the form of a series of footprints moulded into rocks are
encountered sequentially as one walks through the valley (Saul & Waterton 2017), each serving to presence
the sublimity of the Guru. At each of these, the local Langtangpa had marked their location with upright
prayer flags on poles, and in one case a footprint lay on top of a large boulder (Figure 34.2), the sides of
which were densely engraved with colourful ‘om mani padme hum’ prayers. Such presencing of divine
power is common to other Beyul too. In the Guide to the Hidden Land of Pemako neyig, the location of the
sacred valley is indicated by, amongst other waymarkers, ‘Guru’s caves of rumination, within which lay the
impression of his feet in solid rock and mantric seed syllables growing from the walls themselves’ (Khamtrul
Jamyang Dondrup Rinpoche 1959: np). Some days later, as I descended the Gosaikund Pass into the adjacent Beyul of Yolmo I would once again witness these miraculous bodily impressions of Guru Rinpoche
at Yangdak Chok meditation cave. In the Variegated Jewel Garland, a neyig about Yolmo by Shamar Chökyi
Wangchuk (cited in Dondrup 2009) this cave is said to be at the centre of the Beyul and, ‘above the cave,
on a broad and even boulder, footprints of the Dakinis1 are quite clear, and there is a Parikrama2 path of
the Dakinis. Inside the cave is the Guru’s headprint.’ Here, Mixter and Henry’s (2017) observation, that
analysing interactions with more-than-human agents in memory processes allows for multiple viewpoints
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Figure 34.2
One of the footprints of Guru Rinpoche that occupies the Dagam Namgo Beyul, sitting atop a boulder
that is intricately carved with ‘om mani padme hum’ prayers.
to be recognised, becomes important not just for their intended work of unpacking the establishment
and legitimation of power relations, but as a method of generating awareness of the phenomenal world
of the more-than-human. In this case, the webs of interactions I was tentatively establishing were with
extra-human agents3 beings on the fringes of ordinary phenomenal experience, responsible for awakening
patterns of visualisation and reflection as a form of transcendent collective memory work specific to the
Terma tradition. What is particularly interesting about those extra-human webs of interaction with Dagam
Namgo’s ‘protector deities’ is that they are an affective provocation; subtle intensities acting upon me that,
despite superficially seeming to be benign ‘stories’ or ‘places,’ exerted malevolence of a sort with effective
agency. At least in part this was because the extra-human interactions expanded and contracted the scale of
the Beyul; it became a landscape that pulsed with divinities. Individually, the impressed footsteps of Guru
Rinpoche that paced through Dagam Namgo were only twice the size of my own, but the stride between
each reached several kilometres. My own phenomenal world was confronted by the swellings of these
powerful beings which left me feeling dwarfed and exposed. But through those ‘fun house’ visualisations
my presence was also invited to magnify and distort with them, and to experience in some small way the
divine alterity of those extra-human others.
The Vajra body: authenticating shared experience
In Tantric visualisation the memory process is not just about generating a visualisation with durability, but
it is about doing so in order that the visualisation can prompt access to perfect wisdom (Tib. Pha rol tu
phyin pa), which is collective at a transcendent level beyond shared reminiscences. The Vajra body is the
instrument for accessing this latent, mutual knowledge. In other words, rather than embodied experience
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proceeding from a generic, undifferentiated ‘body,’ the Vajra is a bodily form disposed towards engaging with
a collective transcendent wisdom that resembles shared memory. A Vajra is a diamond, hard and resistant,
so the Vajra body evokes the powerful possibilities of specific embodied experience that can cut through
illusive perceptions of mind and arrive at authentic wisdom-knowledge. Cultivating the Vajra body is a
reductive process involving sensuous engagement with increasingly subtle ‘energies’ or ‘teachings’ that lead,
ultimately, to a stable core from which to appreciate authenticity.
The process of pursuing a Vajra body, it seemed to me as I perambulated towards the valley-head, led
not just to knowing something from multiple perspectives – an idea that hinges on the Derridean notion
of the inherent dispersion of the ‘object’ world amidst mutable meanings – but knowing the gross and
subtle aspects of those meanings too. It is this latter, attentively introspective praxis that has affiliations with
memory work. Numerous Neyig establish a map-like resonance between external Beyul landscape and
internal excitations (Rawson 2012). In the Pemako Beyul, for example, the Terton Stag-sham-pa received
visions that the valley was a physical manifestation of the goddess Vajravārāhi (Sardar-Afkhami 1996). Traversing through the valley replicated the movement of this goddess’ ‘subtle wind’ (Tib. rlung) – the energies
that animate and sustain life and have tremendous power to transform it if mastered (Baker 2004) – that
course through her body’s chakras4 and energy channels. Attuned to the intensities of the goddess’ rlung by
effectively moving through her body, the pilgrim metaphysically becomes her rlung and can resonate with
the subtleties of divine reality. The sensation of subtle rlung energies is an indication that a practitioner has
cultivated his or her Vajra body.
Back in Dagam Namgo, The Neyig of Rigdzin Gödem (Tib. Rig-‘dzin rGod-lden ‘phru-can) (1337–1408)
mentions ‘four large gates’ to the Beyul, oriented on the cardinal points (Ehrhard 2007: 343). It is commonly
agreed by such a reference that Dagam Namgo, the ‘Heavenly Gate of the Half Moon Form,’ is a mandala,
and it is therefore through this device that the Vajra body is achieved here. A mandala is a complex graphic,
usually composed of mathematically significant arrangements of circles, squares, and triangles, depicting the
ideal realm of existence of a Tantric deity (Baker 2004). Though a two-dimensional construction, mandalas actually exist as a sort of ‘blueprint’ for a three- (or more) dimensional space (Saul & Waterton 2017).
Walcott locates them as powerful ‘dwellings wherein mobile practitioners and spirits could metaphysically
cohabitate’ (2006: 81), in essence, esoteric designs for ‘an ideal environment for the pilgrimage’ (ibid.: 75)
that exists in three spheres: outer, inner, and secret.
The closer I came to the valley head and its horseshoe of white mountains the more densely laden with
stories and special places the landscape became. At around 3,800 metres a boulder caught my eye in the
distance. It was covered in ‘stone men’; little piles of rocks towered into precarious-looking cairns. Upon it
was an impression of a snake, or so it seemed, though I could see no evidence of engraving and nor did it
present itself as some geological phenomenon. Its origins confounded me, and little was mentioned about
it by my local companions except that it was called ‘snake rock’ (Figure 34.3). Could it be that I was (physically, at least) moving from the outer level of the mandala towards the deity in the central palace? Snakes
(called nagas) are common depictions on ‘palace mandala’ designs, located in each of the four quadrants.
According to Walcott (2006: 77) this class of deity symbolises ‘rainbow bridges’ facilitating the traverse from
gross to increasingly subtle teachings.
I make no claims to have experienced even a portion of the subtle rlung of an otherwise spiritual adept.
Though I opened myself up to sensations that challenged the reminiscences of my habitual mind and,
indeed, the exhaustion of food poisoning even helped me to detach from investing in these mundane
memory patterns, I remained a novice at the type of subtle memory work a truly Vajra body could perceive.
What did occur to me as I stood, after several days, in the mandala’s physical centre, surrounded on three
sides by magnificent crystal peaks, was a small meditation on the relationship between memory, authenticity,
and intuition. It is with this culmination that I would like to conclude. Throughout my journey along this
Beyul pilgrimage route, my discomforting encounters with the valley’s ‘protector deities’ in their variously
mighty and modest aspects had accumulated a sensorial intensity with which I had begun to resonate.
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Figure 34.3 ‘Snake rock’, the engraved impression of a naga being, often known as ‘rainbow bridges’ between realms
in the Beyul.
Perhaps this was the process that Rawson (2012: 68) describes when he says, ‘During meditation or ritual
the mandala figures invoked are kept in states of radiant presence. A figure does not just disappear when it
gives place to another. It may either be absorbed into the successor or continue to emanate from it.’ But
to what degree had I resonated with the Beyul’s sublime powers (if at all), and how could I know if this
Terma-specific memory praxis had aroused any latent wisdoms? The answer, I would argue, is a final piece
in the puzzle of memory praxis in the Terma tradition.
At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that recollective memory holds no authority in Tibetan
Buddhism, and that this poses problems in the Terma tradition for the manner in which its teachings –
conventionally something held as collective memory, whether oral or written – can be transmitted. The
Terma-specific practices that resolve this paradox chart a novel route between individual experience and
collective ‘shaping’ of that experience to guide, but not impose, subtle awareness of the ‘essential nature’ of
reality. Those practices harness a special type of memory work that is not directed towards the past, with
its habitual patterns of mind, but to enlivening enduring visualisations of an immediate present. To do so
requires that a practitioner simultaneously hold a visualisation in mind whilst allowing intrusive thoughts
to brush past and dissolve into their changing nature.This form of memory is secondarily supported by the
cultivation of the Vajra body, a mode of Being and experiencing the world that is unconventionally sensitive to subtle intensities of energy that flow through existence. Such a notion finds common traction with
expressions of affect: the ‘name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally
other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us towards
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movement, toward thought and extension’ (Seigworth & Gregg 2010: 1). How could I know whether I had
cultivated Vajra qualities, then? Since the Vajra body is the vehicle for cutting through illusive perceptions
manifest in habitual recollective-patterns, one might rephrase this question as how do I know if I had an
authentic experience of the Beyul? The answer I was led to is an area related to affect theory that is only
modestly explored outside the discipline of psychology: that of intuition.
Though characterisations of intuition share similarities with definitions of affect, the two are not synonymous with each other just as, as Sara (2007: 51) notes, ‘intuitive seemings remain distinctive conscious
states in their own right, without collapsing into beliefs.’ Common to both is their ‘forcefulness’ (Sara
2007, Seigworth & Gregg 2010). However, one might always affect and be affected in encounters (Massumi 2015), but one does not always necessarily intuit. Whilst affective forces build from intensities with an
encounter (Seigworth & Gregg 2010), intuition is probative (Sara 2007), its relationship to encounter is not
always clear. Intuition hones a diffusion of possibilities into a nagging spur of familiarity and definitude. But
insofar as intuition is a felt attraction or aversion to a certain proposition, it inherently arrives with doubt;
the ‘pull of the rejected proposition,’ notes Sara (2007: 51), ‘is not removed but overcome.’ In part, what
seems to distinguish the two classes of impulse stems from the degree of consciousness that goes into them.
Following a reading of Deleuze, affect is non- or pre-cognitive (Pile 2009), in common with the assertion
about intuition that we simply do not inhabit enough of ourselves to be aware of all the deep associations
that are being made by our body-mind (Weintraub 2012). Importantly, in intuition the associations that are
being made through the attractions and aversions of its unconscious forces are multiple and complex, but
rather than persist with their polyvalency and ultimately be characterised by such a diffusion of intensities, as in affect, intuition congeals those pre-conscious recognitions and patterns them into a conscious
sensation of knowing. Intuition, therefore, is commonly conceived as a type of recognition, which places
it within the realm of memory. And yet, it is a process that circumvents rational knowing, with all of the
fallacies of habitual patterns of thinking that can gain no authoritative traction in Tibetan Buddhism. It is
pre-cognitive memory, felt memory, a sensible amalgamation of innumerable experiences, scenarios, and
possibilities that interact in non-linear ways. It therefore sidesteps memory narratives that take their power
as knowledge from the consensus of the collective. Intuition is a felt recollection of authentic knowledge
that surfaces only when one gives in to the dispersion and flow that Tibetan Buddhism advances as the
nature of reality.
Notes
1 A Dakini, or ‘Sky Goer’ from the Tibetan translation, is a female deity, often wrathful, that embodies wisdom (His
Holiness the Dalai Lama 1995).Their affiliation with the sky means they are associated with the energy of movement
through space, and, with that, they embody the potentiality of transformation for a practitioner (Monaghan 2010).
2 A Parikrama is the route of a circumambulation around a site of religious significance. In other words, the path a
pilgrim would take as he or she circles a spiritually important place in a clockwise direction. Again, this reference to
Parikrama refers to the energy of movement associated with Dakinis.
3 See Saul (2019) for a fulsome explanation of more-than-human beings that exist on the fringes of what can be
materially experienced but are still substantial because of their involvement in cause-and-effect entanglements.
4 ‘Pools’ or wheels of rlung energy that are potent centres of transformative potential (Johari 2000).
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