Climate, environment and the fortunes of Buddhism during the Tibetan Empire 618-842 CE (original) (raw)
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Central Tibetan famines 1280–1400: when premodern climate change and bad governance starved Tibet
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
From the late-1200s to the mid-1400s, the river valleys of Central Tibet experienced both droughts and political upheavals. This combination of inclement weather and administrative dysfunction led to a series of famines. Although the famines were noted at the time, they were later forgotten in Tibetan narratives, and this is the first time that they are the subject of historical study. In this article we analyse the historical narratives of famine – found in biographies, histories and poems – and compare them with the region's paleoclimatic records, focusing particularly on changes in temperature and precipitation. We begin by discussing the famines’ climatic and political causes and their relationship to broader South and East Asian climatic- and famine-related events. We then outline the Tibetan religious, societal and government responses to these events. These responses include the community's initial reactions, and the multiple magical and managerial strategies they eve...
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to East and Inner Asian Buddhism, 2014
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Holocene cold events on the Tibetan Plateau
Global and Planetary Change, 2010
A lake sediment core from the eastern Tibetan Plateau was investigated by multi-proxy geochemical, sedimentological and magnetic analyses and its age determined using 14 C AMS dating in an approach to use short-lived climate periods for a spatial assessment of the Holocene climate history on the Tibetan Plateau. Six cold events were identified from the Lake Ximencuo record which occurred between 10.3-10.0, 7.9-7.4, 5.9-5.5, 4.2-2.8, 1.7-1.3 and 0.6-0.1 cal ka BP. A comparison with previously published Holocene records from lake and peat sections, ice cores and glacial remains of the Tibetan Plateau revealed that the cold event starting around 4.2 cal ka BP had the most significant and widespread impact on almost all of the examined sites. This cold event lasted about a millennium in the western and central part of the Tibetan Plateau and possibly several hundred years longer at some sites in its eastern realm. The cold event inferred between 7.9 and 7.4 cal ka BP from Lake Ximencuo was recorded at a number of sites on the eastern Tibetan Plateau too and probably corresponds to a cold event identified around 8.2 cal ka BP at the sites on the western and central Tibetan Plateau. The coincidence with the 8.2 ka event of the North Atlantic region implies that the latter exerted a significant environmental impact on the Tibetan Plateau too. The cold spell between 10.3 and 10.0 cal ka BP was recorded at some marginal sites of the Tibetan Plateau but had apparently a less significant environmental impact. The more irregular pattern of cold events between about 7 cal ka BP and the onset of the cold event after 4.2 cal ka BP might be related to the catchment-specific response of the lake sediment and peat accumulation to the termination of the Holocene 'climatic optimum' on the Tibetan Plateau. The final two cold events between 1.7 and 1.3 cal ka BP and in the last several hundred years representing the Little Ice Age are more widely seen on the Tibetan Plateau although they did not reach the significance of the cold event at 4.2 cal ka BP. However, the three cold periods since 4.2 cal ka BP are apparently coeval with the decline and establishment of Chinese Dynasties implying a remarkable impact on the social systems in eastern China. The consistent inference of cold events around 8.2 cal ka BP or a few hundred years later and starting at 4.2 cal ka BP is evidence for a temporary trans-regional climatic response on the Tibetan Plateau in the Holocene regardless of the catchment-specific response of complex natural systems.
Contemporary Tibetan Cosmology of Climate Change
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2012
Open-ended interviews with over 50 Tibetan experts on contemporary Tibetan cosmology of climate change reveal a breadth of interpretation of and belief about developing climatic conditions in the eastern Himalayas and in Lhasa. We group these interpretations into Buddhist, pre-Buddhist/shamanistic, and modern scientific/materialistic constructions. These categories overlap and combine broadly with individual interpretations to the point where neither Buddhists nor scientific scholars would recognize their disciplines. Nonetheless, generally, there are beliefs that the climate is changing, that bad deeds have caused this, and that good deeds will mitigate it (Buddhist), fickle gods must be supplicated and appeased (shamanist), or there are material causes and solutions (scientific/ materialistic). As in our previous quantitative study on perceptions of climate change (Byg and Salick 2009), Tibetans widely agreed that climate change is happening: temperatures are rising, mountain glaciers and snows are melting, tree and shrub lines are advancing, rains are more variable, and agriculture and health are suffering. In the extreme, some Tibetans feel that their traditional culture—food, clothing, livelihoods—is no longer adaptive and that, along with their political woes, Tibetan culture is also doomed by climate change. There is increasing appreciation by climate change scientists and policy makers that indigenous knowledge and participation is important for monitoring, adapting to, and mitigating climate change. However, scientists and conservationists must offer concomitant appreciation of and respect for indigenous cosmologies that are the matrices in which indigenous thought, knowledge, and management are embedded.
Chinese Science Bulletin, 2003
Hunter-gatherer populations in greater north-east Asia experienced dramatic range expansions during the early Upper Paleolithic (45—22 ka) and the late Upper Paleolithic (18—10 ka), both of which led to intensive occupations of cold desert environments including the Mongolian Gobi and northwest China. Range contractions under the cold, arid extremes of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 22—18 ka) may have entailed widespread population extirpations. The high elevation Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is significantly more extreme in both climate and environment than either the Gobi or the Siberian taiga forests, and provides an ideal setting to test fundamental models of human biogeography in the context of regional population fluctuations. The area is presently occupied primarily by nomadic pastoralists, but it is clear that these complex middle Holocene (<6 ka) economic adaptations were not a necessary prerequisite for successful colonization of the high elevation Plateau. Exploratory field-work in 2000–2001 has established that Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers were present on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau by at least 12 ka and possibly much earlier. A speculative model for the colonization process is developed and preliminary archaeological data in support of the model are presented.