Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines natural vernacular features in Tibetan delok (“returners from the afterlife”) narratives, showing how the uncanny character of their descriptions of deathscapes sheds light on both their rhetorical dimensions and the coexistence of plural conceptions of the afterlife.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how natural features appear in a distinctive genre of Tibetan popular religious narratives, that of delok (’das log), the “returners from the afterlife,” and how the notion of the “uncanny” can serve as a hermeneutically relevant tool for understanding their rhetorical dimensions. In these narratives, individuals – often women of humble background – recount their experiences of dying, journeying through the afterlife (most frequently to the hell realms), and returning to the world of the living. While these accounts are strongly didactic and oftentimes stereotypically Buddhist, they nonetheless diverge in a few important ways from doctrinal ideas of the afterlife. Among these, the most immediately striking is the appearance of distinctive natural features, such as valleys, rivers, and mountains, within descriptions of the “intermediate space” (bar do), elements largely absent from scholastic tantric sources. These deathscapes, described as being uncannily similar to those of the living, contribute to the confusion and dysphoria the death-traveller experiences. Drawing on both edited and unedited sources, this paper examines the uncanny as an object of inquiry within Tibetan religious literature, with particular attention to its rhetorical dimensions. More broadly, it argues that the uncanny — and the place it occupies within narrative — offers a useful conceptual lens for the study of deathscapes, in folkloristics and beyond.