Abstract
During the first wave of COVID-19 and the ensuing “anthropause” enforced by lockdown policies, Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa) rapidly emerged as a key interface through which Tibetan, Himalayan, and online communities responded to the spread of the virus. Apart from a host of preventative, protective, and curative measures—ranging from pills to amulets and mantras—the root causes for the pandemic’s appearance and spread were framed through the interrelated lenses of Tibetan medical etiology and morally infused cosmologies. This digital anthropological study is based on an unprecedented flurry of English-language media interviews, webinars, blog posts, and articles by Sowa Rigpa physician-scholars in 2020–21. It builds on a thematic overview of the integrative ways in which they approached COVID-19, further analyzing the highly distinctive more-than-human ecological perspective through a hauntological lens of spectral justice. The essay unpacks how practitioners drew on textual idioms of contagion, spirit provocation, karmic retribution, and Buddhist prophecies of a degenerate age (Sanskrit, kaliyuga) to invoke a particular kind of revenge of nature: mediated by angered earth protectors and mother beings, yet influenced by contemporary environmentalism. Recognizing the emancipatory potential of revenge, I interpret this resurgent kaliyuga as a Tibetan medico-religious critique and refiguration of the Anthropocene.
Although the present has been a good era of righteous conduct, in the final five hundred years plagues will become widespread. At that time, will there be any means to protect oneself and others, or not? If so, one would not be affected while treating others. Protector of beings, please respond!
— Yuthok Yonten Gonpo, The Subsequent Tantra
In this passage from Tibetan medicine’s foundational scripture hailing back to the twelfth century,1 epidemics are presented as a key feature of a coming dark age: a time of strife (Sanskrit, kaliyuga) and degeneration (snyigs ma’i dus). Having deep roots in Buddhist eschatology,2 this prophetic narrative was picked up by practitioners of the Tibeto-Himalayan science of healing—also known as Sowa Rigpa—as soon as the novel coronavirus started spreading rapidly across the globe in early 2020. Initially within China, and soon thereafter across the Tibetan diaspora and among professional associations and educational institutions in the United States and Europe, Sowa Rigpa scholars, clinicians, teachers, and graduates confidently relied on the Four Tantras and its related traditional textual corpus to grapple with COVID-19. This included preventive methods and medical preparations to tackle widespread disease (rims nad), as well as protective pills worn around the neck to ward off malevolent nonhuman beings (mi ma yin).3 Biomedical public health measures such as hygiene, social distancing, quarantine, and masking were also broadly supported and disseminated,4 and many if not all received specifically catered online Tantric Buddhist teachings and empowerments that emphasized and enabled the acceptance of adversity, compassion, and spiritual practice including mantras and visualizations.5
Nevertheless, an unprecedented number of English-language media interviews, webinars, blog posts, and articles outlining Tibetan medical responses to COVID-19 populated the internet during the first two years of the pandemic.6 Their online dissemination—often live—facilitated rapid circulation of ideas, experiences, and practices among practitioners of Sowa Rigpa from a mix of places and backgrounds, including myself, while also facilitating exchange with biomedical doctors, psychologists, Buddhist gurus, and academics.7 Four major categories of practitioner perspectives on the pandemic could be discerned: (1) prevention, protection, and immunity, (2) mental health, (3) clinical integration, and (4) spectral revenge.8 Each highlights a distinct set of heroes, villains, and victims, exemplifying the multiplicity, contextual versatility, and at times contradictory ambiguity of Sowa Rigpa discourse. Besides Sowa Rigpa practitioners themselves, the heroic spectrum includes medical and paramedical professionals, Vajrayana Buddhist teachers, Himalayan community leaders, generous emergency fund donors, and health-conscious consumer-patients.9 Even though SARS-CoV-2 was conceived from a clinical viewpoint as a dangerous external enemy that requires strategic deployment of the therapeutic arsenal (drawing on military metaphors present in classical medical sources), the virus itself was not seen as inherently evil. The failings of biomedical health care and policy were critiqued alongside media sensationalism and misinformation, but overall villainization was not intense or even explicit.10 A major exception, however, is the spectral revenge perspective, which strongly condemns immoral human behaviors on a planetary scale while also naming and shaming specific industries, technologies, and land use. This ecological theme predominates in nearly a quarter of all media sources and articles included, making it one of the most prevalent perspectives, especially considering that environmental culpability was frequently raised in other sources as well.
Covering the 2020–21 time frame of these perspectives, the term anthropause was coined by a team of wildlife biologists and ecologists to denote the “considerable global slowing of modern human activities” following a variety of mobility restrictions aimed at curbing COVID-19 transmission.11 In this period of essential travel and successive lockdowns, the resulting temporary reduction in anthropogenic activities and pollution—as well as images of animals “reclaiming” urban spaces that circulated widely—was celebrated by many netizens as a resurgence of nature. As noted early on by Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull, this prominent discourse, which claimed “Earth is healing, we are the virus,” has several alarming features, including the construction of a destructive neo-Malthusian dynamic, a colonial vision of nature as being devoid of humanity, the romanticization of abandoned landscapes, and a displacement of culpability which leaves “the slow violence of business-as-usual” untouched.12 However, such a quarantine narrative assuming that nature will automatically replenish only played a minor role in the anglophone Sowa Rigpa discourse that is the focus of this article. Although influences by apocalyptic visions of the Anthropocene rooted in Christianity, wide-ranging speculation on COVID-19’s zoonotic origins, and highly politicized and racialized narratives of causation and blame can be detected, Sowa Rigpa physicians approached COVID-19 largely on their own terms.13 Apart from humoral and thermal medical theories of balance and invasion, the articulation of spectral revenge drew creatively on regional histories that contain echoes of past epidemic experiences, including outbreaks of bubonic plague across Central Asia in the ninth and thirteenth centuries.14 Prophetic narratives and the notion of a degenerate era play a key role in the relevant textual sources and therefore also characterized the contemporary pandemic response. Complicating the orientalist East-West binary, this equally applied to “Western” practitioners, who as devout Buddhist converts tended to closely follow the instructions of their Tibetan teachers. The pandemic narrative that emerged thus did not invoke nature’s benevolent resurgence. Instead of nature as a heroic figure, a distinctly unnatural—some would say “supernatural”—and fierce retribution by usually protective nonhumans associated with the land, water bodies, and the sky was said to have been provoked by extremely unethical and polluting human behaviors, leading to epidemic disease and various kinds of environmental disasters. Somewhat akin to “we are the virus,” this narrative framed humans as villains who become the victims of their own villainy, but the causal mechanism, moral implications, and responses of the two views differed.
This article aims to document and analyze this reemerging perspective and to place it in juxtaposition with the more-than-human problematization of the anthropause, which has so far been undertaken from a critical human geography disciplinary angle.15 Bringing together insights from anthropological hauntology and its application to the Anthropocene with salient aspects of Buddhist and Himalayan cosmovisions and environmentalisms,16 I argue that the newly repurposed “revenge of nature” trope mobilized by Sowa Rigpa physician-scholars of both Tibetan and Euro-American heritage cannot be reduced to a simplistic revenge fantasy or discarded as yet another flawed incarnation of the modern human-environment dichotomy. By drawing on Max Haiven’s nuanced theorization of vengeance, I instead frame their response as a form of spectral justice that holds transformative potential vis-à-vis the technocratic tendencies of the Anthropocene, partly through the enrollment of a distinct set of agents that redistributes responsibility and blame.17 Whereas Matthew Gandy mobilizes spectral ecologies to reflect on the affective dimensions of disappearing wastelands and Searle uses them to chart the biocultural afterlives of extinction,18 I adopt this hauntological lens to shed light on Tibetan cosmologies in which nonhuman beings such as ghosts are not just metaphorical devices. In line with an uncanny, nonsecular reading of the Anthropocene, more-than-human here points toward the destabilization of “the distinction between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural.”19 With this, I aim to contribute to the growing relevance of both the Asian and medical environmental humanities in the wake of the pandemic by foregrounding non-Eurocentric interconnections between the health of humans and the places they inhabit.20 My approach dovetails with the cosmopolitical ecologies of Riamsara Kuyakanon, Hildegard Diemberger, and David Sneath by investigating Indigenous etiological conceptions and nonhuman agencies beyond essentialized ontologies and also presents a case study of what Christos Lynteris calls “a pandemic imaginary of human extinction” in which apocalyptic narratives indeed challenge common understandings of mastery and our place in the world.21
In what follows, I first summarize and discuss six particularly insightful representatives of the spectral revenge discourse to introduce key concepts and provide a sense of the discourse’s internal consistency and variation. I then zoom in on the relationship between prophecy, revenge, and responsibility to tease out what this spectral justice entails, before reflecting on its broader implications for Indigenous environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
Resurgent Sowa Rigpa Spectral Ecologies: Six Vignettes
Following the two earliest prevention-themed media items by Tibetans in China and in Indian exile in early February 2020,22 the first two contributions to appear outside Asia were ecologies-focused reflection pieces by younger-generation independent practitioners. In a seven-thousand-word blog post, Eric Jampa Andersson defined COVID-19 as a duruka (du ru ka) disease, paraphrasing his teacher Nida Chenagtsang, as “future epidemic infections that have the capacity to kill many people.”23 The mechanism behind the prophecy alluded to here was then explored further through dön (gdon), one of the four main illness-causing factors in Sowa Rigpa together with unwholesome diet, behavior, and seasonal influences. Dön were presented as “unseen beings” that include microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses, in a medical context, but which more generally refer to harmful influences through spirit provocation. As Andersson lays out, these play a key role in explaining why “our health is dependent on the health of the environment”:
These spirits are affected by our interactions with the environment—meaning that pollution, deforestation, and the depletion of resources have an impact on them. It’s believed that illness develops among these classes of spirits due to environmental imbalance, which is then passed along to humans (and sometimes other animals), who then have the ability to infect one another. The underlying concept here is that infectious pathogens arise from an unhealthy relationship with the natural world.
In this cosmovision, nonhumans are the true owners of places such as forests and mountains—as encapsulated by the designation earth lords (sa bdag)—as well as being the owners of disease (nad bdag). According to Andersson, this illustrates the centrality of interdependence (rten ’brel) in the Tibetan medical worldview.24 Under the heading “Root Causes,” he further stated that we need to address the behaviors that allow epidemics to emerge, including wild animal trade, industrial agriculture, and pollution. He also came up with a defense: “While we might scoff at these seemingly superstitious explanations for scientific phenomena, it’s important to remember how Homo sapiens process and integrate information. We are storytellers by nature, and we’re best able to comprehend complex systems through narrative and inter-relational dynamics.”
Along these lines, Neeshee Pandit (a US Shang Shung School graduate) surmised that “Asian medical systems generally regard treatment as a means of restoring the naturally harmonious relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm.”25 Noting that the concept of dön is rooted in Tibetan shamanism and quoting Terry Clifford’s psychological interpretation of these “demons,”26 Pandit urged his readers to understand their symbolic, archetypal dimensions. In conjunction with seeing the Earth as a living system that will work to balance itself (a statement mirroring the Gaia hypothesis), he concluded that “‘provocations’ can be understood as the immune response of the Earth-world” that is triggered by our obsession with controlling nature for the sake of material progress. Like Andersson, Pandit finds that Sowa Rigpa “champions the doctrine of interdependence” since the felling of trees was already indicated as a cause for provocation in the Four Tantras, and especially given how deforestation destroying “the ‘lungs’ of the Earth” corresponds to the respiratory symptoms of COVID-19. The contributions by Andersson and Pandit illustrate the ways in which non-Tibetan practitioners adopt and explain Tibetan medical and Buddhist approaches, and especially how they creatively link these with current global environmental concerns through the lens of more-than-human ecological relationality. Both narratives place the burden of villainization on “unnatural” (exploitative) economic activities—not particular individuals or groups of people—that disrupt harmonious interdependence, exposing connections between tainted minds and environments.
Pasang Yonten Arya, a senior physician living in Milan and teaching online through the Tibetan Medicine Education Center, was the first English-language Tibetan voice on the topic.27 Trained at Men-Tsee-Khang in its early years,28 Arya agreed with others on the Tibetan medical classification of COVID-19 as a type of aggressive infectious disease known as nyenrim (gnyan rim), and that the coronavirus is a nyen pathogen (gnyan srin). However, he asserted that the treasure text Vase of Ambrosia—which presents itself as a teaching by the eighth-century Guru Padmasambhava revealed five hundred years later—is the foremost resource on epidemics and that it likely informed the Four Tantras.29 Already in the 1980s he was struck by similarities he found there between explanations of nyenrim and modern bacteriology.30 According to Arya, the Vase of Ambrosia cycle’s main thrust is that epidemics are primarily caused by irresponsible human behavior toward the environment, especially when motivated by extreme cruelty and selfishness. When such villainous negative actions continue unabated, the eight classes of gods and demons (lha ’dre sde brgyad) who are normally protectors of the world order, its “natural defensive energy,” are angered because they are not heeded and cannot perform their roles in seasonal harmony and fertility effectively. As a result, the protectors turn their backs on humanity. Instead of looking after the borders of Mount Meru (the metaphysical center of the cosmos), they now face inward toward the mountain, which sets hordes of malignant spirits free. These roaming beings, especially water-associated serpent spirits called lu (klu, Skt. nāga), poison the air through their toxic breath, which then affects humans and animals by entering their bodies. This vaporous breath is said to contain parpata (parpa ta), a type of tiny being (srin bu) that Arya interpreted as referring to viruses. This upheaval in the spirit realm not only results in widespread disease but also leads to various kinds of natural (or unnatural) disasters. However, as we will see below, in line with karmic causality the spectral enactors of retribution are barely marked as culprits.
Like others, Arya offered his students a toolkit of preventive, apotropaic, and treatment responses, but he focused strongly on transmitting a tantric ritual revolving around the Black Garuḍa.31 In a dedicated student seminar on how to put this into practice (April 4, 2020), he clarified that garuḍas are birdlike nonhumans who are the natural predators of and antidote for serpent and landlord spirits and their diseases. With unshakable faith and by reciting mantras, protection would thus be offered alongside spiritual transformation. Admonishing that the field of demonology goes beyond strictly medical knowing and rational enquiry, he added: “These notions might come across as archaic to some, coming from ‘ancient people’ who were supposedly uneducated and unable to make full use of their natural resources. But we have to face the fact that it is modern science and technology . . . which have brought us this thoroughly polluted, disturbed ecology.”32 Like Andersson, Arya perceived the need to defend his traditionalist stance by highlighting its contemporary value as a critical alternative that points the finger at the true villains behind the moral, environmental, and health crisis laid bare by COVID-19.
An online panel discussion devoted to “provocation diseases” (gdon nad, April 9, 2020) also covered “external invisible forces” and how these “help us to better understand the complex causes and conditions giving rise to this pandemic and its connection to the greater environment.”33 Although the value of the modern medical approach was not denied, and the four usual Tibetan medical treatment methods of diet, behavior, medicine, and external therapies were mentioned, the importance of spiritual practice for dealing with these illnesses—and of course for the ultimate salvation from suffering—was highlighted once again. Sowa Rigpa Institute school founder Nida Chenagtsang (trained in Lhasa), however, emphasized a different text along with another subclass of beings. In Yutok’s Heart Drop, wrathful feminine specters known as khandro (mkha’ ’gro) and mamo (ma mo) are primarily said to react in anger, causing epidemics and disasters.34 These “Indigenous spirits of our planet” are referred to as mothers, which Chenagtsang links to the Western notion of Mother Earth.35 Some of them are depicted as holding a “bag of infectious disease” from which they can release viruses as “a kind of biological weapon.” From this angle, rituals that involve confession to and pacification of these mother beings become central, which was also given as a reason why His Holiness the Dalai Lama advised followers to chant the mantra of Tārā (known as mother of all buddhas) and why practices of female protector deities such as Ekajaṭī, Penden Lhamo, and Parṇaśavarī came to the forefront.36
The Shang Shung Institute group equally hosted a provocation-themed webinar later the same year with Malcom Smith, an experienced translator, Shang Shung graduate, and Great Perfection teacher.37 Smith preferred the term nonhuman beings (mi ma yin) over spirits, adding that these invisible entities are associated with existential doubt, which is also why provocations are typically only diagnosed when other options have been exhausted and/or when the disease is not responding properly to conventional treatment.38 In this case, astrological calculation or divination might be carried out by a lama to find out the hidden cause. He went on to refer to five related chapters in the Oral Instruction Tantra that have been glossed as Tibetan psychiatry, each of which presents a different set of dön.39 Emphasizing the importance of looking at Indo-Tibetan mythologies to understand ritual practice, he mainly recommended reciting Parṇaśavarī’s mantra (a wrathful form of Tārā for which Sakya Gongma Trichen Rinpoche gave the empowerment online, April 17, 2020). Together, the two provocation webinars emphasize the centrality of different yet closely related sets of spectral nonhumans embedded in Buddhist cosmologies both for understanding the complex causes and conditions of epidemic disease and for providing means of ritual intervention that grant responsibility and agency to individual religious practitioners.
Last, Dorjee Rapten Neshar (a senior Men-Tsee-Khang doctor with a renowned clinic in Bengaluru) reiterated in an interview-style article that the root cause of all epidemics is closely associated with supramundane forces that govern the environment, maintaining a delicate balance between the macrocosm and our bodies. When this harmony is destroyed by “mankind’s most vicious immoral activities and wanton defilement of our Mother Nature,” the elements wreak havoc in the form of natural calamities such as landslides (earth), floods (water), forest fires (fire), storms (air), and contagious diseases that cross borders (space).40 Neshar repeatedly portrayed these reactions as a partly self-destructive yet potentially recuperative curse of Mother Nature, SARS-CoV-2 being an agent of nature’s wrath. Stating holistic environmental measures to be the only lasting solution, he also held that ritual methods are effective at keeping negative influences at bay.
The six vignettes introduced above are all inspired by a Tibetan Buddhist cosmovision that warns us about the grievous toll of severing respectful reciprocal relationships with nonhumans. Pandemic disease thus becomes part of a much larger metanarrative of moral decline. The invoked globalized spectral revenge is clearly of a different order than more commonly experienced individual hauntings by usually familiar humans, gods, ghosts, or animals demanding interpersonal repair.41 In Neshar’s words in particular, a somewhat personified nature has completely substituted any mention of spirits—likely to not come across as superstitious—while maintaining the same rationale of retribution. These spectral ecologies encourage environmentally conscious ethical behavior while projecting blame onto the modern industrialized way of life of a rather amorphous, villainous humanity. Although its proponents directly pointed toward human mistreatment of the environment as a key problem, the spiritualization that comes with supramundane explanations also strongly directed immediate responses toward ritual pacification and protection. To diagnose and treat this existential disease at its root, a convoluted synergy of Tibetan Indigenous and Buddhist cosmologies was offered as a systemic critique, a source of salvation that dares to stand up to the paternalism of the scientific establishment. The self-identification of Tibetan peoples as Indigenous is contentious and shifting, however, and ongoing tensions between Buddhist and Himalayan shamanic worlds and practices often remain unspoken.42 Critical studies have also questioned simplistic notions of “the green Tibetan” and Indigenous environmentalism.43 Challenging naive narratives of salvation by highlighting the insidious influence of development and Buddhist modernisms, analyses of the shifting roles of beings such as mountain deities and hungry ghosts reveal the politicized nature of more-than-human ontologies.44
The Revenge of Nature in a Degenerate Age
All this climate change happening is human error. All are manmade problems. We also cannot really blame spirits as responsible for this disease [i.e., COVID-19]. . . . Now we have the technologies and idea to exploit everything. These are the consequences.
—Pasang Yonten Arya, “Special Online Session on Corona”
We can infer that the worst is yet to come.
—Dorjee Rapten Neshar, “Understanding and Management of Epidemic Disease”
The senior exiled Tibetan physicians quoted here concurred that the appearance of COVID-19 was not merely an unfortunate series of coincidences but the almost inevitable predicted manifestation of accumulated karmic causes and conditions. Medical prognostication of patient health is a well-known feature of Sowa Rigpa, and Buddhist prophecies of decline and their reemergence in times of catastrophe are nothing new.45 What is more unusual about this pandemic, however, is that twelfth- to thirteenth-century prophecies of widespread disease that were incorporated into the Four Tantras and roughly contemporary texts such as Vase of Ambrosia were considered to have been fulfilled.46 Drawing on strong textual-historical precedents and catalyzed by alarmist environmental discourse, this pandemic imaginary reached global proportions in 2020–21 alongside the spread of the virus. The present era of decline, the last of several five-hundred-year cycles, is characterized by five degenerations: shortening lifespans, cataclysmic events, the proliferation of afflictive emotions and wrong views, and the deterioration of bodies.47 But it was the wrath and retribution of spectral beings that was given a central role in explaining COVID-19’s sudden onslaught.
Several webinar discussants agreed that humanity had to learn a good lesson. It was payback time. They expressed the need to confess and repent, which can take the form of a mamo appeasement ritual, and the wish that we show more respect toward other beings and nature. Statements such as these mirror the much-maligned modern nature/culture dichotomy as well as the derivative revenge-of-nature trope, but I argue that there is more. One key difference that came to the fore in what could be called the Sowa Rigpa diagnosis of the COVID-19 pandemic is its reliance on morally responsive spirits who animate and denaturalize nature itself. The ambiguity of these entities allows for various translations and interpretations that include presentist identification with microorganisms and/or psychological factors, as well as New Age-like glosses such as Mother Nature. Phuntsog Wangmo, for instance, spoke repeatedly about gratitude and reciprocity in relation to “our mother-land.” Different categories of unseen beings were invoked to explain the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, but wrathful mothers were most prominent. It is therefore not very surprising that the Buddhist studies emeritus professor Robert Thurman made the conceptual leap in the first provocation panel introduced above of recognizing Mother Earth, Gaia, as the “head mamo,” and Greta Thunberg “as an oracle, a medium speaking for the mamo.” To fully unpack the multiple layers of these tantalizing equivalences is beyond the scope of this article. Issues that require further analysis include the feminization of nature (which aestheticizes climate breakdown and tends to reinforce white heteropatriarchal norms) and the recent rise in public visibility of women’s anger.48 Notwithstanding feminist critique, it is equally the case that unlike climate justice, Indigenous entities such as the Andean Pachamama (often translated as “Mother Earth”) are not merely modern anthropocentric imports; when not subalternized but taken seriously, such cosmocentric concepts can resist the coloniality of Eurocentric knowledge production and offer radically alternative paradigms.49 Following Diemberger, Kuyakanon, and Sneath I contend that such partial connections and “complex layering of perspectives” that tend to disrespect onto-epistemic boundaries are characteristic of acts of translation in the context of Tibetan cosmopolitical ecologies.50 This also applies to the ontological status of the invoked specters, who embody material as well as immaterial aspects of human-environment relationality and whose agency remains shrouded in indeterminacy and dispute.
For Buddhists, recognizing spectral revenge as a causal mechanism for COVID-19 is inextricably linked to karma, the philosophical doctrine of cause and effect, which posits that each morally charged action affects one’s current and future lives. Even though the accumulation of negative karma is generally held to be the ultimate precondition of all suffering and illness, several practitioners offered nuanced remarks in the context of the pandemic. Andersson argued, for instance, that the virus is not “a kind of divine retribution sent to purge the sinful from the world,” that it is morally questionable to categorize COVID-19 as a karmic disease (usually deemed untreatable),51 and that karma can manifest as intergenerational trauma.52 Arya commented that Vase of Ambrosia presents aggressive infectious diseases as “obstacles that do not respect the law of karma,” comparing this to gunshots that kill indiscriminately.53 Nuances such as these were deemed necessary to avoid the problematic attribution of blame to victims and patients, which would individualize responsibility to the extreme.
At the other end of the scale, however, the repercussions of framing COVID-19 as spectrally mediated revenge on humankind at large mostly remained unquestioned. At first glance, this may seem similar to what the political ecologist Alf Hornborg describes in his critique on the pervasiveness of revenge-of-nature metaphors in sustainability and Anthropocene discourse in 2020. Hornborg maintains that these rely on a typically modern separation of nature and society that takes globalized capitalism for granted, sanctifying the logic of neoliberal free trade and money: “The problem is framed in terms of a disturbed Earth system rather than in terms of a destructive world-system.”54 In this, naturalizing capitalism and anthropomorphizing nature appear to go hand in hand.55 But several physicians explicitly discussed the untenable consequences of extractive industries, unbridled technological progress, and global trade, all the while subscribing to ideas of more-than-human retribution. California Institute of Integral Studies professor Jeanine Canty was invited to speak in a Shang Shung webinar about how “the illness of people and the illness of the planet are not arbitrary things, they’re actually connected,” and that this sickness is perpetuated “by corporate globalization and extreme forms of capitalism.”56 Right after she said that “as humans, we’re animals and we’re nature,” Canty was moved to tears by Wangmo’s sharing of how human-environment interactions should be like a mutually beneficial child-mother or guest-host relationship, describing this wisdom as deep ecology.57 In light of these contrasting findings, I suggest to stay with the trouble of this politicized spectral ecology by following Max Haiven’s call to think constructively with revenge. Whereas, according to Haiven, the unfulfilled desire for retribution in revenge fantasies is a last resort born from powerlessness, a weapon of the weak fixated on particular individuals, an avenging imaginary targets the system and calls for transformative collective action. In this sense, the more-than-human rage evoked by the COVID-19 Tibetan pandemic imaginary can be seen as not just misguided scapegoating or villainization through anthropomorphism. It should rather be seen as a source of empowered agency that is potent exactly because it operates beyond the logic of the dominant order, holding humans responsible again through Indigenous-led reciprocity and envisioning alternate futures.58
Concluding Thoughts
Just as the Buddhist answer to the pandemic was not just meditation,59 the 2020–21 Sowa Rigpa response to COVID-19 went far beyond pills. Online English-language platforms offered a multifaceted array of public health–related perspectives centering around themes of protection, mental health, and clinical integration. In addition to these, the spectral ecological framework was discussed extensively by representatives of each of the three Tibetan medical schools catering to students globally (Shang Shung Institute, Tibetan Medicine Education Center, and Sowa Rigpa Institute), as well as by Men-Tsee-Khang doctors in India and Tibetan practitioners operating in North America. Even though different textual sources and beings were emphasized, an underlying morally infused Tantric Buddhist cosmology of spectrally mediated human-environment reciprocity is evident. In the context of a pandemic that is seen as a herald of a prophesied era of degeneration, the specters are out for revenge for unforgivable human misdeeds. Fused with contemporary environmentalist discourses on climate crisis and ecological collapse, the kaliyuga was reimagined as a Buddhist precursor of the Anthropocene, a nonsecular reenactment of an apocalyptic time in which widespread disease is but one diagnostic symptom.
The Anthropocene and anthropause are generally conceived as events on a linear scale, whereas the end-times of the kaliyuga are of a cyclical nature. The kaliyuga also extends well beyond the thin slice of time of the most recent anthropause. Along these lines, Searle and colleagues recognize that “pausing is not linear or spatially consistent” and that the COVID-19 space-time decompression is unprecedented in its global reach but not without its precursors: the black death (bubonic plague, fourteenth century), the “Columbian Exchange” (smallpox, sixteenth century), and “Spanish” flu (twentieth century).60 Nevertheless, the utility of the anthropause as a concept was critiqued by Searle and colleagues because it assumes looping temporalities of a return to the past. While agreeing on the dire need for environmental relational configurations beyond the postpandemic new normal, I argue that this looping effect is not exclusively reactionary, especially not in the Tibetan medico-religious case presented here. Even though haunting has the uncanny capacity to collapse the past and the present by fusing traumatic memories (of past epidemics, for instance) with anxieties about the future,61 the ghostly re-remembering of circular time—a common feature of Indigenous cosmovisions—does not presuppose ecopolitical inertia. The perspectives offered by Sowa Rigpa physicians were in fact highly adaptive, and their reliance on spectral revenge destabilizes the secularized Christian soteriological temporality that informs much Anthropocene discourse, as well as linear progress.62
This spectral revenge opens up larger discussions on the critical importance and potential limits of Indigenous environmental justice, which cannot be fully addressed here. One remaining issue is that the universalist Buddhist framing—in a way similar to Anthropocene discourse—runs the risk of homogenizing human experience, responsibility, and blame.63 Buddhist ethics generally foregrounds individual mental states and actions and focuses on self-reflection and interdependence in ways that tend to neutralize the villainization of others and collapse subject-object dichotomies. In future research, it would therefore be fruitful to pay more attention to multiple interpretations and implications of karmic forces, and to how planetary spectral beings varyingly manifest and are dealt with across spatiotemporal scales and social institutions. As a Tibetan medical practitioner myself, I struggled with the impression that wrathful apotropaic rituals explicitly targeted negative emotions, disease, and malicious spirits and their pathogens, but the villainous political structures and economic actors that had been recognized to sustain the systemic injustice leading to epidemics and disasters were not called by their names. While this certainly reflects my own Eurocentric upbringing and engaged Buddhist stance, the Sowa Rigpa pandemic imaginary outlined in this article was a broadly shared cosmologically inflected etiology that cannot be easily reduced to a “West vs. the Rest” binary. Nevertheless, there is considerable room for nuance and comparison, especially when including Tibetan-language sources and thick descriptions of lived experiences.
The deployed spectral ecologies are nonetheless decidedly cosmocentric in their focus on a morally bound human-nonhuman reciprocity, resurging as a radical contemporary critique that in fact denaturalizes the instrumentalist separation of nature and society. This is more than a superficial revenge fantasy; it is a wrathful reckoning that is not merely destructive but has strong transformative potential. As Haiven also discusses, referring to Black feminist thinkers such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde, rage can play a crucial role in emancipatory theory, solidarity, and activism. Yet, by targeting the very foundations of exploitative systems and institutions in an abolitionist fashion, avenging imaginaries often appear to those invested in maintaining power as a monstrous reaction, a ghostly haunting. It is therefore high time to come to terms with the nonsecular spectrality of the Anthropocene in the pandemonic times of COVID-19. In this there is much to learn from Indigenous, yet cosmopolitan, traditions such as the Tibeto-Himalayan science of healing, which thrives on the uncanny amalgamation of materiality and metaphor in coming to terms with the unseen complexities of nonhuman agency and pathogenicity. The wrathful protectors and mothers of this Tibetan medical hauntology are conceived neither as heroes nor as villains, but they seek justice nonetheless. Ambiguity is part and parcel of their dangerous more-than-human powers as they mediate and mirror back the horrible effects of an age of deep loss of reciprocity, overturning the hubris of human domination. Instead of pathologizing the vengeful and explaining away this invocation of spectral justice as justice that was spectralized because it is impossible to obtain otherwise, I therefore welcome the specters as catalysts—but not self-sufficient agents—of profound systemic change. Unleashing them from kaliyuga onto the Anthropocene, Sowa Rigpa physicians have profoundly challenged technocratic models of both medical and environmental balance, but without demonizing biomedical measures altogether.
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Viola Schreer and Liana Chua for inviting me to participate in the Heroes and Villains in the Anthropocene seminar series and authors’ workshop, and for providing constructive feedback along with the other participants. I also thank my research project colleagues Barbara Gerke and William McGrath for their encouragement and for commenting on an earlier draft of this article. This research was financially supported by the Austrian Science Fund, project P36136.
Notes
Gonpo, Subsequent Tantra, 284. Translation by the author.
Miguel Álvarez Ortega found a similar dual response among highly respected Tibetan religious leaders, endorsing unified health care policy alongside more internally articulated moral, philosophical, and esoteric alternative frameworks (“Global Virus, International Lamas”).
The included sources account for 67.5 hours of recorded video, receiving nearly sixty-four thousand views on YouTube and Facebook (October 13, 2022), and more than thirty-six thousand words of text. Apart from forty-one media items, four academic articles equally fall within the remit: Craig et al., “Global Pandemic, Translocal Medicine”; Tidwell and Gyamtso, “Tibetan Medical Paradigms”; Gerke, “Thinking through Complex Webs”; and Neshar, “Understanding and Management of Epidemic Disease.”
Although the organizers of these digital platforms were predominantly white Euro-Americans, Tibetan voices from both within the PRC and in exile were represented in twenty-nine of the forty-one online media items (71 percent), while eighteen of the fifty-five authors and speakers (32 percent) identified as female.
Coronavirus statistics were widely consulted, but epidemiologists were not flagged as heroes. Similarly, self-limiting measures and vaccines (which only took off in early 2021) were welcomed but not seen as exclusive or sufficient lifesavers. See Lynteris, “Epidemiologist as Culture Hero,” for an anthropological examination of cinematic pandemic narratives and their biopolitical implications.
Dorjee Rapten Neshar’s very frank article “Understanding and Management of Epidemic Disease” is the only instance of overt criticism on the efficacy of vaccination that I could find. His critique portrays vaccines as a money-making business and a temporary solution that neglects the root cause of epidemics. See Gerke, “Sowa Rigpa.”
Rothe, “Governing the End Times?”; Lakoff, “Origins of COVID-19”; Ye et al., “Zoonotic Origins”; Lynteris, “Imperative Origins of Covid-19,” 25–28; Yellow Horse, “Anti-Asian Racism.”
Searle and Turnbull, “Resurgent Natures?”; Searle, Turnbull, and Lorimer, “After the Anthropause”; Turnbull, Searle, and Lorimer, “Anthropause Environmentalisms.”
Good, Chiovenda, and Rahimi, “Anthropology of Being Haunted”; see Smyer Yü and de Maaker, Environmental Humanities in the New Himalayas, for a pioneering collection.
Kuyakanon, Diemberger, and Sneath, Cosmopolitical Ecologies across Asia; Lynteris, Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary.
Shared by High Peaks Pure Earth and Tibet TV; see van der Valk, “Multiple Holisms through Epistemological Pluralism.”
Andersson, “Tibetan Medicine and Covid-19.” The Tibetan term duruka is usually interpreted as a calque of the Sanskrit turuṣka, which refers to the Turks (William McGrath, pers. comm., April 3, 2023). There is a historical association between the invasion of foreign armies into central Tibetan areas and epidemic disease (McGrath, “Vase of Ambrosia,” 216–17).
The Karmapa has also highlighted the notion of interdependence as a basis for positive environmental change (Interconnected). This approach has long been championed by the scholar and environmental activist Joanna Macey, but the validity of her interpretation of Buddhist concepts of causality as a kind of deep ecology has been critiqued. See Schmithausen, “Early Buddhist Tradition.”
Men-Tsee-Khang is the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute, reestablished by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1961 in Dharamsala, India.
Cf. McGrath, “Vase of Ambrosia”; Arya and van der Valk, “Conversation on the Causes of Covid-19,” n10.
This practice of this meditational deity is based on the Vase of Ambrosia, combined with the ritual associated with compounding Garuḍa 5 pills from the Four Tantras.
Ben Joffe (moderator), “Tibetan Medical Approaches to Understanding Covid-19: A Panel Discussion,” Pure Land Farms, April 9, 2020. https://purelandfarms.com/programs/sowa-rigpa-covid-19.
There are clear intertextualities between the Vase of Ambrosia and the historical chapters of Yutok’s Heart Drop (William McGrath, pers. comm., March 17, 2021).
Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama have voiced similar statements generating affective kinship: “The Earth, indeed, acts like a mother to us all. Like children, we are dependent on her . . . . Our Mother Earth is now teaching us a critical evolutionary lesson—a lesson in universal responsibility” (Dalai Lama XIV, “Universal Responsibility and the Climate Emergency,” 22).
See Collins, “Becoming the Gods,” 104–10, for an exploration of Tārā and Parṇaśavarī deity yoga practices employed in response to the pandemic in 2020.
Smith restricted the term spirits to yi dags (Skt. preta), often translated as “(hungry) ghosts.” This excludes nonhumans of higher rebirth such as devas (lha).
Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry. For a recent interpretation of dön as “a category of embodied psychiatric illness shaped by cultural affordances,” see Tidwell, Nianggajia, and Fjeld, “Chasing Dön Spirits,” 13.
As discussed, for instance, in Govindrajan, “Spectral Justice.”
Makley, Battle for Fortune; Tsering Bum, “Tibetan Mountain Deities”; Yeh and Gaerrang, “Pests, Keystone Species, and Hungry Ghosts.”
Nattier, Once upon a Future Time; for Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes, see, for instance, Childs et al., “This Is the End.”
COVID-inspired statements by several prominent Old School lamas equally had a strong degenerate times rhetoric, including Dzogchen Rinpoche’s Facebook post about “this kali yuga virus” being a result of “disrespect of mother nature” (Álvarez Ortega, “Global Virus, International Lamas,” 197–99).
Pasang Yonten Arya, “Special Online Session on Corona” (restricted to enrolled students). Tibetan Medicine Education Center, March 29, 2020.
Quantitative ecopsychological analyses of Australian general public survey data report that in the context of the pandemic, anthropomorphizing nature predicted pro-environmental support, with higher support by those experiencing financial insecurity. These results further problematize Hornborg’s assertions. Borovik and Pensini, “Be Good to Your Mother (Earth).”
Wangmo related this to the Tibetan Buddhist dyad of external world-vessel (phyi snod kyi ’jig rten) and inner essence (nang bcud kyi sems can, i.e., sentient beings). For a pertinent analysis of Tibetan and Mongolian ontologies, see Fjeld and Lindskog, “Connectedness through Separation.”
Salguero, “How Do Buddhists Handle Coronavirus?” For Vajrayana Buddhism, see Álvarez Ortega, “Global Virus, International Lamas”; Shmushko, “On Face Masks as Buddhist Merit”; and Singh et al., “Buddhist Monks as Community Organizers.”
Cf. Rothe, “Governing the End Times?” Christian ecotheological voices have equally argued for reclaiming eschatological environmentalism as a future-oriented alternative conservation paradigm. See Bocci, “Planting the Seeds of the Future.”
