Tibet as Method: Reimagining Marginalized Narratives and Religious Representations in Ma Yuan’s Fiction

Abstract

Tibet occupies a central place in the avant-garde narratives of Ma Yuan (b. 1953), whose works significantly advanced the thought liberation movements of the 1980s in the People’s Republic of China. As global interest in the intersection of religion, literature, and cultural identity grows, Ma Yuan’s experimental writings offer a unique lens into the reconfiguration of religious and marginalized narratives in modern Chinese literature. While previous research has focused on his formal and stylistic innovations, this study uncovers how Ma Yuan transforms Buddhist rituals, myths, and customs within Tibetan culture to reexamine the spiritual dimensions of trauma and identity among marginalized groups. By engaging with Tibet as both a cultural reality and a mythological allegory, his narratives explore the interplay between body and soul, sacred and secular, and center and periphery within the late twentieth-century Chinese artistic landscape. This interdisciplinary study highlights how modernist literature reinterprets sacred practices and bridges Tibetan cultural heritage with China’s socio-historical modernization, contributing to broader understandings of cultural and intellectual transformations in the study of religion.

1. Introduction

The 1980s marked a period of profound economic, political, and cultural transformation in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), following Deng Xiaoping’s Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-up, 改革開放) policy introduced in late 1978 (Liu 2004, p. 1). During this period, a phenomenon known as “Tibet fever” emerged, drawing numerous artists to Tibet, where they produced remarkable paintings and photographs inspired by the region’s mysterious and complex religious culture and unique geographical landscapes (Yeh 2013). This wave represented Tibetan culture as part of national heritage while positioning it within modernization initiatives (Harrell 2001a; Gladney 2004).

In the literary sphere of the 1980s, Tibet held a prominent place within the Chinese cultural imagination as a site for narrative experimentation. The period’s climate of aesthetic innovation prompted writers—most notably Ma Yuan, 馬原 (b. 1953)—to engage with Tibetan Buddhism not merely as an exotic motif, but as a source of religious vitality and creative inspiration. This study suggests that Ma Yuan’s experimental fiction draws upon Tibetan rituals and myths to reconceptualize indigenous traditions as living, embodied practices. By doing so, his work positions Tibetan spiritual experience as a significant and integral force within contemporary cultural discourse, thereby enriching and broadening the intellectual and aesthetic debates central to the modernity of the era.

Amid rapid political reforms, economic growth, and shifting intellectual paradigms, critics have described the 1980s as “a chaotic period” (Wang 1996). This era was also characterized by a surge in the translation and incorporation of foreign modernist and postmodernist theories and literary works (Liu 2004, p. 103). Interest in experimental narrative techniques flourished, particularly through the adoption of styles such as stream-of-consciousness narration (yishiliu, 意識流) and magical realism (mohuan xianshi zhuyi, 魔幻現實主義) (Knight 2006, p. 196). These conditions shaped the emergence, rise, and eventual decline of Chinese avant-garde fiction. Also known as “experimental fiction” (Huang 1992, p. 190), this genre emerged in the mid-1980s as part of the broader “New Era literature”1 (Tao 2016, p. 100). This genre gained early prominence with Ma Yuan’s The Goddess of the Lhasa River (Lasahe Nüshen, 拉薩河女神, 1984) and reached its peak around 1987. Notable writers associated with this movement include Ma Yuan; Can Xue, 殘雪 (b. 1953); Ge Fei, 格非 (b. 1964); Su Tong, 蘇童 (b. 1963); and Yu Hua, 余華 (b. 1960) (Hong 2007, p. 385).

These experimental writers not only “characterized the incoming decade as one of disillusionment as well as liberation” (Wang 2021, p. 5), but also “redefined the field of literary innovation through writing about writing” (Zhang 1997, p. 150), earning recognition as the “rebellious sons of the ‘New Period’” (Chen 2015, p. 21). Ales Erjavec (2015) identifies a strong resemblance between Chinese avant-garde movements and their Western counterparts,2 noting they shared features with Western neo-avant-gardes, such as “forming movements [and] perceiving themselves as possessing a historic mission, and so on” (p. 7). However, he contends that their primary aims were distinctly national: “to effect an aesthetic and ethical transformation of Chinese society and to redefine Chinese identity” (p. 8). This revolution in literature and art introduced new aesthetic and narrative forms that reflected broader cultural shifts in late twentieth-century China. Unlike its Western European predecessors, however, it engaged directly with local literary traditions while exploring experimental modes of expression.

Ma Yuan is widely recognized as a pioneering figure in the rise of avant-garde literature in 1980s China. Born in Northeast China in 1953, he graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Liaoning University in 1982. After graduation, he relocated to Lhasa—then an emerging artistic hub—where he lived for eight years while working at Tibetan Radio. His debut novella, The Seaside Is Also a World (Haibian yeshi yige shijie, 海邊也是一個世界, 1982), introduced his characteristically experimental style, yet it was The Goddess of the Lhasa River (Lasa he nüshen, 拉薩河女神, 1984) that secured his position within the literary landscape and established his broader prominence (Schweiger 2019; Laughlin 2002).

In the mid- to late 1980s, Ma published a series of stories—The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains (Gangdise de youhuo, 岡底斯的誘惑, 1985), Fabrication (Xugou, 虛構, 1986), Ballad of the Himalayas (Ximalaya gu ge, 喜馬拉雅古歌, 1986), Walls Painted with Weird Patterns (Tuman guguai tu’an de qiangbi, 塗滿古怪圖案的牆壁, 1986), and The Sail-less Ships of Tibet’s Western Sea (Xihai wu fanchuan, 西海無帆船, 1987), among others—that reimagined Tibet as a site of metaphysical speculation and narrative experimentation. These texts helped shape the contours of avant-garde fiction during this period and exerted a broad influence on other experimental writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong. Ma’s transformative narratives offered a new literary grammar for writers grappling with the limitations of established artistic forms and the search for new modes of subjectivity, historical consciousness, and perception (Qian 2003; Dai 2002).

Critics have highlighted Ma Yuan’s use of “narrative traps”3 and his engagement with global modernist and postmodernist texts and discourses.4 However, relatively little critical attention has been paid to how his stories engage—selectively and often ambiguously—with the lived realities of Tibetan religious practice, ethnic identity, and historical memory. (Yao 2003; Bai 2011) Moreover, Ma Yuan’s fiction engages with dominant literary conventions through its representation of spiritual trauma, sacred rituals, and mythic temporality, yet it critically reworks these conventions by integrating indigenous Tibetan cultural perspectives. (Berg and Strafella 2023, pp. 80–97; Wu 2015) Positioned at the intersection of modernist literary experimentation and China’s broader late twentieth-century thought liberation movements, his work reflects both significant aesthetic innovation and the complexities inherent in cultural representation (Gladney 1994; Dai 2002).

This article conducts an interdisciplinary analysis of Ma Yuan’s avant-garde narratives, examining how they reimagine Tibetan religious and cultural heritages and their role in shaping discourses of modernity and spirituality in contemporary Chinese literary and artistic fields. Focusing on the 1980s—a period of profound cultural and intellectual transformation—this study explores the performative and symbolic significance of these reinterpretations within broader sociocultural contexts. Specifically, it investigates how modernist literature reframes sacred Tibetan practices, bridging cultural heritage with China’s historical modernization progress, thereby enriching scholarly discussions on myth, marginalization, and representation.

To deepen this inquiry, the article addresses two central questions: How does Ma Yuan reconstruct Tibetan religious rituals and mythologies through experimental, metafictional narratives that enact spiritual transformation? And what impact do these narrative strategies have on the cultural representation of marginalized subjects and, more broadly, on conceptualizations of China’s cultural and intellectual modernization in the 1980s, particularly through the interrogation of geographic, ethnic, and cultural boundaries?

This analysis primarily shifts the focus from Ma Yuan’s metafictional narrative techniques to an examination of the hybridizing gaze—a concept that captures the blending of multiple cultural perspectives within narrative structures—applied to Tibet in his fiction. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of the “eye of power” and Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, this transcultural framework reveals Tibet’s unique role in Ma Yuan’s experimental works, imbuing them with marginal and mystical dimensions. Unlike prior scholarship, which predominantly treats Tibet as a mere setting or symbolic backdrop (Schein 2000), this study contends that Ma Yuan portrays Tibet as both a cultural reality and a mythological allegory. Such a representation allows the author to reconceptualize themes like religion, spiritual trauma, and mysticism, enriching and enhancing dominant cultural paradigms and expressions.

This approach further destabilizes the critical binaries—such as the rigid distinctions between form and content, style and theme, authenticity and fictionality, and Chineseness and globality (Zhang 2008; Chen 2002)—that have long shaped discussions of Chinese avant-garde fiction in the mid- to late 1980s. By dismantling these dichotomies, Ma Yuan’s work underscores an innovative mode of cultural and literary expression that emerged within late twentieth-century Chinese artistic fields.

This analysis also examines the representation of spiritual experience in Ma Yuan’s fiction, particularly through depictions of religious ritual and bodily practice. These narrative strategies reveal a complex engagement with cultural traditions, demonstrating literature’s capacity to explore diverse perspectives on suffering, transformation, and meaning-making. Through his creative reinterpretations of myth and mysticism, Ma Yuan offers nuanced portrayals of cultural consciousness within contemporary Chinese literature.

His fiction presents Tibet as a richly textured imaginative space where multiple cultural references intersect. Moving beyond purely formalist readings of his metafiction, this study examines how his work mediates between different cultural frameworks through innovative narrative techniques. The stories’ treatment of ritual practices, mythic consciousness, and experimental form creates a distinctive literary mode for reflecting on tradition and modernity.

Ma Yuan’s literary significance, therefore, lies in his nuanced engagement with Tibetan sacred practices—treating them not as exoticized tropes but as meaningful forms of cultural expression. His depictions of sky burials, pilgrimages, and monastic life frame spirituality as an integral dimension of human experience. Through these narrative choices, his work offers innovative perspectives on authenticity and certainty, thereby enriching the diversity of contemporary Chinese fiction during a period of intense literary experimentation in the 1980s.

By reimagining Tibetan myths, rituals, and concepts, this study demonstrates how literature can serve as a site of intercultural dialogue and epistemological reconsideration. Moreover, it engages with global discourses on minority cultures and their potential to complicate and revitalize dominant narratives of spirituality, marginality, and temporality. Thus, Ma Yuan’s fiction not only reconfigures the representation of Tibet in contemporary Chinese literature but also engages with the global knowledge systems that marginalize spiritual and indigenous perspectives.

2. From Metafictional Narrative to Hybridizing Gaze: A New Interpretive Perspective

Regarded as “the earliest formalist fiction writer in post-Mao China” (Yang 2002, p. 154), Ma Yuan creates complex and often ambiguous narrative effects. As Yang Xiaobin observes, “Ma Yuan’s narrative thus leads not to truth but, rather, to the undecidability of both truth and untruth” (p. 158). Eschewing conventional storytelling that offers coherent narratives to foster reader belief, Ma Yuan instead employs “narrative traps” to destabilize boundaries between reality and fiction. Zhao (1992) identifies strong metafictional tendencies in contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction, positioning Ma Yuan’s works as paradigmatic examples of self-reflexive metafiction. These narratives foreground the narrator’s self-exposure through deliberate fabrication, paradoxically using artifice to provoke heightened awareness of reality. Zhao further suggests that in 1980s Chinese avant-garde fiction, content frequently dissolves into form, sometimes becoming indistinguishable from it. As he notes, “Avant-garde fiction today, with its powerful meta-sensibility, tries to expose all maneuvering of meaning by any meta-language, thus negating the rationality of codes” (p. 99). Zhao’s analysis represents a seminal effort to theorize Ma Yuan’s fiction within established literary frameworks. Consequently, what critics initially termed “Ma Yuan-style narrative” has become widely recognized as a distinctive metafictional technique (Zeng 2005, p. 10).

While the concept of “metafictional narrative” highlights Ma Yuan’s innovative techniques and formal experimentation, it simultaneously exacerbates the artificial divide between form and content and between fictionality and authenticity (Deng 2006). More significantly, this framework overlooks the complex interplay between experimental writing and the reimagining of Tibetan culture and religious experience in his works (He 2020). Such conceptual separation risks obscuring crucial dimensions of Ma Yuan’s avant-garde fiction, particularly its spiritual and intellectual significance.

This oversight becomes particularly apparent when considering the author’s own perspective. In a 2007 interview with Southern Cultural Forum (Nnafang Wentan, 南方文壇), Ma Yuan emphasized Tibet’s unique role in his fiction, stating:

The subject matter of my fiction originates from Tibet, and is also confined to that land. Yet my approach to writing is not that of García Márquez. What concerns me is not history or nation, but rather the Gangdise Mountains, the Lhasa River, vultures, snow leopards, the Barkhor Street, and so on—what truly preoccupies me are the myriad possibilities within Tibet.

我的小說題材來源於西藏，也囿於西藏那個地方，但我的寫作方法並不是馬爾克斯的方法，我關心的不是歷史、民族，關心的是岡底斯山、拉薩河、禿鷲、豹子、八角街等等，關心的是在西藏的種種可能性。

(Ma and Liang 2007, p. 61)

While Ma Yuan presents these features as purely geographical, they are deeply embedded in Tibetan spiritual and cultural practices. Mount Gangdise, for instance, is not merely a physical landmark but a sacred axis mundi in Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, and Hinduism—revered as the abode of deities and an important site of pilgrimage (Huber 1999). Similarly, the circular structure of Barkhor Street echoes the practice of kora in Tibetan Buddhism, transforming urban space into a site of embodied spiritual performance (Yu 2015). Even the vultures and snow leopards that appear in Ma Yuan’s fiction carry symbolic weight in Tibetan folklore, where they often serve as intermediaries between the human and divine realms (Huber 1999).

This implicit cultural resonance is further articulated in Ma Yuan’s essay “Method” (Fangfa, 方法), where he describes his creative process as generating “new experiences”:

When I write fiction, I am creating new experiences… I particularly want to emphasize that the entirely new experiences created by the individual (the writer, the artist) contain a significant transcendental element.

我寫小說是在創造新經驗。…我特別要強調創造的個體（作家藝術家的全新經驗）有很大的超驗成分。

(Ma 2005, p. 97)

While rooted in a personal creative philosophy, this artistic vision demonstrates conceptual parallels with Tibetan Buddhist perspectives on perception and reality (Germano and Waldron 2006). The cultural environment of the southwestern borderlands informs both the formal innovation and thematic depth of Ma Yuan’s work. His narratives, characterized by marvelous landscapes and non-linear temporality, engage with local epistemologies while producing distinct literary effects. In his fiction, Tibet emerges not as a mere setting, but as an imaginative space where geography and cultural meaning dynamically interact.

Building on this interpretation, I argue that Ma Yuan’s Tibetan narratives not only redefine the narrative paradigms through which marginalized experiences are represented, but also reconceptualize the epistemological significance of these experiences. His fiction operates within a matrix of competing discourses: modernist/postmodernist literature versus realism narrative, mainstream concepts versus marginalized discourses, and fictional reality versus authentic fabrication. These contradictions manifest most powerfully through Ma Yuan’s reimagining of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, myths, and customs, generating profound textual ambivalence and ontological uncertainty.

Such narrative experimentation marks a transformative shift in both the methodology and thematic concerns surrounding ethnic minority representation in contemporary Chinese literature. As Daxian Liu (2014) argues, Ma Yuan’s fiction opens new avenues for engaging with marginalized worldviews, thereby enriching and complicating dominant cultural and literary paradigms.

Moving beyond previous critics’ reliance on the term “meta-fictional narrative,” I employ the concept of the “hybridizing gaze”—drawing on Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and Homi K. Bhabha (b. 1949)—to illuminate the complex significations in Ma Yuan’s experimental reconfiguration of religious experiences and marginalized epistemologies. This theoretical framework more effectively captures the transformative potential of his Tibetan stories within the context of late-twentieth-century China’s cultural and intellectual modernization.

The “gaze” foregrounds the narrative perspective in Ma Yuan’s fiction: that of an engaged outsider who maintains both intense curiosity and critical reflection toward indigenous traditions. This approach builds on Foucault’s concept of the “eye of power” (Foucault 1980, pp. 146–65), which theorizes how power operates through systems of visibility. As Foucault demonstrates through his analysis of the Panopticon, such mechanisms create an asymmetrical dynamic where subjects are rendered perpetually visible while the apparatus of observation remains concealed.

The concept of “hybridizing” derives from Homi Bhabha’s (1994) seminal theory of hybridity, which proves particularly valuable for examining literature’s role in mediating cultural and religious identities. This framework elucidates how Ma Yuan reconfigures Tibetan Buddhist rituals, myths, and customs to explore themes of trauma, spirituality, and marginalization in his fiction. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha conceptualizes the “Third Space of enunciation” (Bhabha 1994, p. 37) as an ambivalent and contradictory site that emerges from colonial encounters under globalization, where hybrid cultural identities are produced. This space fundamentally destabilizes what Bhabha terms “the binary thought and essentialist identities produced by colonial knowledge” (p. 276), deconstructing rigid divisions between colonizer/colonized, self/other, and West/East. Within this framework, all cultural forms exist in perpetual hybridization (Bhabha 1990, p. 211), as the third space facilitates continuous cultural negotiations that generate novel cultural expressions (Papastergiadis 1997).

Rather than treating hybridity as a static cultural condition, I propose the term “hybridizing” to underscore the ongoing narrative and intellectual processes through which Ma Yuan reconfigures Tibetan religious and cultural symbols. Hybridizing here denotes the interconnections between ethnographic detail and literary artifice as well as between the narrative experimentation and the spiritual imaginary of Tibet. While Ma Yuan’s stories do not present “authentic” Tibetan voices, they stage moments of cultural entanglement shaped by anxiety, fascination, and critique.

In Fabrication, the writer Ma Yuan intrudes into a Tibetan leper colony, where illness, ritual, and sexuality transform his worldview. The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains employs fragmented narration to weave together multiple narrative threads: Tibetan sky burial rituals, the legend of the Himalayan Yeti, episodes from the King Gesar epic, and fragmentary depictions of Tibet’s mystical landscapes and daily life. Similarly, Ballad of the Himalayas renders Linda village not as a transparent ethnographic site, but as a space shaped by narrative ambiguity and ontological instability. These representations exemplify a hybridizing logic—not a simplistic fusion, but an ongoing process that foregrounds symbolic collision, narrative tension, and intercultural encounters.

In all three works, the Han Chinese narrator occupies an observational position that ostensibly documents disease, love, violence, and death among ordinary Tibetans. As the narrator states in Fabrication: “what I have been talking about is the people there, the environment, and stories that might be in that setting” (Ma 1993, p. 102). However, Ma Yuan’s experimental narrative strategies—particularly his use of fragmentation, unreliable narration, and metafictional devices—systematically undermine the authority of these observations. This approach critiques and deconstructs the discourse that exoticizes Tibet as a primitive “Other,” instead presenting a complex, self-reflexive meditation on cross-cultural representation. Thus, hybridizing in Ma Yuan’s Tibet stories refers less to geographical synthesis than to zones of narrative and conceptual tension—a space where dominant and minor discourses momentarily intersect, collide, and transform.

In this context, Tibet emerges as a hybrid space where heterogeneous cultural techniques and conceptual frameworks intersect dynamically. I argue that the hybridizing gaze deployed in these narratives reconstructs Tibet as simultaneously a lived cultural reality and a mythological allegory—a dual representation that transforms reductive interpretations. This conceptual approach accomplishes two significant critical interventions: first, it enables a re-examination of discourses surrounding cultural and religious identity in 1980s China; second, it activates new possibilities for articulating spiritual consciousness within contemporary Chinese literature and art. These points will receive extended analysis in subsequent sections.

3. Embodied Spirituality: Rituals, Marginalization, and Traumatic Experiences

In a 1995 interview, Ma Yuan articulated his fundamental concern with cultural identity: “When I wrote that story, I was thinking of what makes a person a person—really a person. That’s culture” (Ma and Batt 1995, p. 172). This conception of culture, as observed in his fiction, operates through two distinct yet interrelated modes—Han Chinese and Tibetan cultural frameworks. Significantly, Ma Yuan’s narratives resist portraying these cultural systems in reductive binary or homogenizing terms; instead, they initiate a comparative dialogue through which Han cultural concepts are revitalized by engaging with Tibetan Buddhist epistemologies and embodied practices.

This literary strategy accomplishes two crucial interventions. First, it presents Tibet not as an exoticized other, but as an autonomous cultural reality that transforms spiritual consciousness through embodied religious practice. Additionally, the narrative employs Tibetan Buddhist somatic spirituality—particularly beliefs in bodily rituals as vehicles for transcendence (Samuel 1993)—while simultaneously acknowledging the limitations of any singular perspective (Rojas 2015). Rather than attempting a comprehensive reconstruction of Tibetan spiritual paradigms—a task requiring deeper ethnographic or indigenous collaboration (Samuel 1993)—Ma Yuan’s fiction positions Tibetan Buddhism as a critical interlocutor. His work thus refrains from speaking on behalf of Tibetan subjectivity, instead creating a discursive space in wherein readers are prompted to confront the complex interactions between divergent cultural frameworks (Van Crevel 2008).

Moreover, Ma Yuan’s work extends beyond mere descriptions of corporeality and spirituality. By strategically reorganizing these elements, his narratives highlight the trauma and marginalization experienced by minority groups, thereby enriching representations of Tibetan religious and cultural traditions within 1980s Chinese artistic discourse. In the following section, I analyze how diverse bodily forms participate in religious rituals and how these interactions express distinct spiritual experiences—particularly those of trauma—within marginalized communities.

The body holds profound significance in the sky burial (jhator), a funerary ritual that embodies Tibetan Buddhism’s deep engagement with impermanence (anicca) and the dissolution of the corporeal form. This ritual—performed by specialized morticians (rogyapas)—involves the dismemberment of the deceased’s body at dawn, followed by the summoning of vultures. These vultures are revered as dakinis (sky-dancing deities) tasked with transporting the soul to the pure realms (Gyatso 1998). Rather than rejecting the body, this practice represents a deliberate offering, aligned with the Buddhist ethic of generosity and the understanding of the body as a transient vessel (Huber 1999).

While Tibetan sky burial emphasizes bodily dissolution as a path to spiritual liberation, Confucian and Daoist funerary rites prioritize bodily integrity—not as a marker of “refinement,” but as an expression of distinct cosmological beliefs (L. Watson 1988; Seidel 1987). The perceived “brutality” of the sky burial arises more from cultural unfamiliarity than from any inherent primitiveness (Germano 1998; Yeh 2007)—a tension that Ma Yuan deliberately explores in The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains (Ma 2011). The story introduces Yangjin (央金), a Tibetan girl whose beauty and education position her as an idealized figure. Described as slender, with delicate features—a fine nose, small lips, a graceful neck, and fair skin—Yangjin’s physical allure transcends mere aesthetics; the narrator interprets her beauty as a spiritual manifestation of life’s vitality and meaning. Yet this ethereal portrayal is abruptly shattered by her sudden death in a traffic accident.

Following this tragedy, the narrative transitions to the Tibetan sky burial. Rather than depicting the ritual explicitly, Ma Yuan underscores its spiritual weight through narrative omission and contrast. The ceremony is observed indirectly through the eyes of Han Chinese characters who, though eager to witness the event, are barred from participation by the sky mourners. In this regard, the writer neither confirms nor denies whether the ritual is performed for Yangjin, leaving its reality deliberately ambiguous. This narrative strategy emphasizes the ritual’s sacred inaccessibility to outsiders while inviting reflection on Tibetan death practices beyond assumptions of “mystique” or “brutality.” By juxtaposing Yangjin’s ethereal beauty—a trope familiar within literary aesthetics—with the sky burial’s unflinching corporeal dissolution, Ma Yuan neither fully exoticizes the ritual nor reduces it to a vague metaphor. Instead, by excluding characters (and by extension, readers) from the ritual, he underscores the inherent challenges and necessity of cross-cultural understanding, while simultaneously demonstrating respect for Tibetan Buddhist worldviews on their own terms (Yeh 2007; Huber 1999).

The bodily rituals of sky burial further underscore the resilience of Tibetan rural communities in the face of both natural and human-made adversities. In The In-Between (Zhongjian Didai, 中间地带, 1984), Ma Yuan depicts three families living along the Lhasa River who unite to combat a severe drought. Just as their collective efforts near success, tragedy strikes: Mingjiu (明久), the youngest son of the Tibetan elder Cibazhu (次巴珠), perishes in a sudden explosion.

Rather than detailing the full sky burial rites for Mingjiu, the narrative focuses on evocative symbols—the sky burial platform, a massive stone, the flickering bonfire, and circling eagles. The subdued whimpers of mourners pierce the Lhasa River’s silence, heightening the scene’s sorrow. Central to this moment is the father’s emotional rupture. Having previously smiled with pride upon learning of his eldest son’s heroic death in the Sino-Vietnamese War, he now collapses into uncharacteristic tears over Mingjiu’s loss. This visceral reaction lays bare the vulnerability beneath his hardened demeanor, framing grief as both a personal and communal experience.

The novella concludes at dawn as Mingjiu’s body is consumed by flames, drawing a gathering of eagles—a moment that intertwines destruction with transcendence. Although the families ultimately devise a solution to the drought and receive official recognition for their resilience, these hard-won victories cannot compensate for the irreplaceable loss of a young life. Within this narrative framework, the sky burial ritual emerges as more than a symbol for resilience; it becomes a site of healing, offering a potent lens through which grief and mortality are processed—one deeply rooted in Tibetan cultural and religious conventions. This exemplifies how such practices function not only as mechanisms for processing grief but also as expressions of a profound existential confrontation with mortality.

Beyond illustrating spiritual trauma through mortuary rituals, Ma Yuan explores the intersection of corporeal affliction and Buddhist practice to illuminate the lived experiences of Maqu Village, a Tibetan leper colony, in Fabrication. The villagers endure marginalization not only due to their physical suffering but also because of local Tibetan socio-religious attitudes toward illness, which historically associate diseases like leprosy with karmic impurity (Goldstein 1997). Confined to isolation, the villagers engage in religious rituals—circumambulating sacred trees, crafting tsha-tsha (clay Buddha statues)—practices deeply embedded in Tibetan Buddhist daily life (Buffetrille 2016). These rituals serve both as cultural continuity and as a means of sustaining communal connections amid exclusion.

Among the lepers, the narrator encounters a Lopa man whose skillful crafting of deity statues reflects a common Tibetan Buddhist practice of merit-making. When he gifts the narrator a sculpture, his solemn gesture—kneeling with reverence—aligns with traditional devotional exchanges rather than exoticized spirituality (Germano 1998). The narrator’s observation—“He was worshipping the stone figure. This must be his god, his idol” (p. 139)—reveals a moment of cross-cultural interpretation, yet the act itself is normative within Tibetan Buddhist contexts.

Ma Yuan’s portrayal thus highlights multiple layers of marginalization: the villagers suffer not only from disease but also from socio-religious stigma within their own cultural framework. Their Buddhist practices are neither purely escapist nor confrontational but function as a sustaining force, enabling them to navigate both physical suffering and social alienation while maintaining ties to their cultural heritage.

Moreover, the writer’s exploration of Tibetan trauma extends beyond collective experience to probe its manifestations in individual psychology—particularly through sexuality and violence. Ballad of the Himalayas exemplifies this through a convoluted murder among hunters in Linda, a remote Lopa village. The story is recounted by Nuobu 诺布, whose father, a revered hunter, died mysteriously four decades earlier during an expedition, purportedly at the hands of a rival—a shorter, cuckolded hunter.

Nuobu’s fragmented memories trace the murder to his father’s adulterous affair with the other hunter’s wife. The violence erupted abruptly during a perilous confrontation with two snow leopards, searing the event into Nuobu’s childhood psyche. Ma Yuan deliberately constructs the narrative with irreducible ambiguity: it remains unresolved whether Nuobu’s father was the victim or, in fact, the aggressor. Despite the narrator’s repeated claims of veracity, the account brims with inconsistencies. These deliberate lacunae mirror the psychological dissonance experienced by Tibetan individuals when confronting trauma interwoven with desire, betrayal, and mortality.

In The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, Ma Yuan foregrounds the cultural and epistemological divides between Tibetan communities and external populations, revealing how these differences manifest in customs, daily practices, and fundamental worldviews.

“I can’t understand life as they do. All those things are just forms to me—I respect their customs, but I can only guess what it is to live them. I can only use my logic and my miserable reason to try to deduce what it is to experience those things—that’s as close as we can get to the people here.” (p. 206).

The narrator acknowledges a fundamental divergence between outsider perspectives and local interpretive modes, which are rooted in religious and symbolic frameworks (Gatherer 2021). This approach distinguishes Ma Yuan from contemporaries such as Ma Jian, whose Stick Out Your Tongue (2006) has been criticized for fetishizing and sensationalizing Tibetan otherness (Shakya 1999). While Ma Jian’s narratives have been criticized for reproducing Orientalist tropes (Ma 2006), Ma Yuan’s work is more self-reflexive—interrogating the very processes of observing, interpreting, and narrating the “other.”

This narrative reflects a nuanced engagement with historical cultural frameworks in which distinctions between center and periphery have shaped literary and intellectual discourse (Wang 2014; Harrell 2001b). Rather than reinforcing such binaries, Ma Yuan’s work reconfigures them, presenting Tibetan religious and cultural traditions as dynamic and co-constitutive within broader cultural exchanges. His narratives neither subordinate Tibetan traditions to mainstream discourses nor position them in mere opposition; instead, they highlight Tibet’s enduring significance and transformative potential within contemporary Chinese literature.

In this regard, Ma Yuan’s fiction avoids ethnographically reductive portrayals of Tibetan individuals, instead depicting them with nuance and multidimensionality. In Qingluobu, the Shepherd God (Mushen Qingluobu, 牧神青羅布, 1985), the eponymous protagonist, an impoverished Tibetan herdsman, embarks on a perilous pilgrimage across snow-capped mountains to Lhasa to pray for his beloved—a journey that transforms personal devotion into spiritual transcendence. Similarly, Little Tashi and His World of Wonderful Ideas (Xiao Zhaxi he Ta de Yidadui de Meimiao Xiangfa, 小扎西和他的一大堆的美妙想法, 1986) features a 21-year-old Tibetan man navigating modernity as a Lhasa driver while nurturing aspirations that bridge familial duty and individual ambition. Ma Yuan further diversifies his representation through elderly female characters who embody radical compassion: in Three Techniques for Crafting Paper Kites (Diezhiyao de Sanzhong Fangfa, 疊紙鷂的三種方法, 1985), a destitute woman adopts countless stray dogs despite her own poverty, while in The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, a grieving mother, motivated by Buddhist mercy, intercedes for the man who accidentally killed her child, seeking to prevent further loss of life.

Following this, I suggest that Ma Yuan’s narratives illuminate the traumatic experiences of Tibetan individuals while foregrounding their distinctive modes of spiritual resilience. This resilience is rooted in a syncretic system that blends Tibetan Buddhism (Lamaism)—which combines esoteric Vajrayana practices with Mahayana philosophical foundations—with the indigenous Bon tradition. Together, these traditions are infused with mystical elements and grounded in the Buddhist tenet of innate human goodness. Crucially, Ma Yuan’s portrayal demonstrates how Tibetan subjectivity exists beyond deterministic relationships between physical hardship and spiritual life. Despite enduring backbreaking labor for mere subsistence, his characters consistently cultivate joy and beauty in their daily existence. This resilience manifests a complex cultural and religious consciousness, enriching the thematic innovation of contemporary Chinese literature.

4. Recreating Myth, Temporality, and Modernity

Ma Yuan redefines “myth” not as fabricated narrative but as a concrete yet ineffable presence that permeates Tibetan existence. In his conceptualization, myth operates dialectically—it is simultaneously metaphysical and embodied, transcending ordinary understanding while fundamentally structuring daily life (Xu and Ma 1985, p. 92). This reconceptualization transforms myth from a static cultural artifact into an active force continuously shaping communal consciousness and experience. Through his experimental narratives, Ma Yuan performs a dual recuperation: restoring both the religious significance and cultural authenticity of Tibetan mythos. His works deconstruct the conventional myth/reality dichotomy, reimagining myth instead as the ontological ground of human being—a force both abstract in its spiritual dimensions and tangible in its manifestations.

This theoretical intervention achieves its most potent literary expression in The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, where the narrator’s ethnographic gaze becomes the vehicle for revealing this epistemology:

“Apart from the fact that their entire existence belongs to a mythological age, their daily lives are also inextricably intertwined with myths and legends. Myth is not merely an ornament to their lives—it is their life itself, the very reason and foundation of their existence. This is why they are Tibetans and not any other people.” (pp. 206–7)

In this context, myth operates in a dual capacity: it simultaneously serves as a symbolic system articulating Tibetan cultural heritage and as the phenomenological basis of quotidian experience. This bifunctional nature epitomizes Ma Yuan’s deconstructive narrative strategy—one that deliberately destabilizes conventional binaries between authenticity and fictionality, sacred and profane, as well as between avant-garde literary experimentation and indigenous Tibetan cosmology. Through his innovative synthesis of folkloric motifs, ritual practices, and oral storytelling traditions, Ma Yuan engineers a discursive space that reimagines both mystical experience and modernity’s master narratives. These narrative techniques transcend mere aesthetic innovation; they constitute profound acts of cultural mediation, exemplifying what James Clifford (1988) theorizes as “partial truths”—cultural representations that simultaneously emerge from and exceed their ethnographic contexts. Ma Yuan’s textual incorporation of Tibetan myth and ritual performs dual critical work: it reveals the constructed, processual nature of religious experience while enriching modernization discourses to accommodate diverse cultural concepts.

Ma Yuan’s reconfiguration of myth’s liminality reaches its apogee in The Sail-less Ships of Tibet’s Western Sea, where Tibet becomes a discursive space oscillating between reality and fictionality. By representing Tibet as a “vacant space” that paradoxically overflows with symbolic signification, the writer performs a dual narrative operation: he simultaneously deconstructs the marginalizing imagination of minority cultures while simultaneously exploring their myth-making capacity. This reconsideration fundamentally structures both his narrative techniques and temporal experiments. The Three Temporalities of Life in Lhasa (1986) exemplifies this through its experimental structure—the narrative begins with “tomorrow,” circles through “yesterday,” and ultimately destabilizes conventional chronology in literary narrative, mirroring Tibetan Buddhism’s non-linear temporality.

Ma Yuan’s narrative experimentation creatively engages with divergent conceptions of temporality. While the intellectual discourses of 1980s China emphasized developmental progression, his work simultaneously incorporates elements of Tibetan Buddhist cosmology, which understands time as cyclical and interconnected (Samuel 1993; Lopez 1998). This narrative approach does not simply reject dominant temporal frameworks but rather presents multiple, coexisting perspectives, wherein moments exist as both discrete points in a linear progression and interconnected events within cyclical patterns. Through this formal innovation, Ma Yuan’s fiction expands the possibilities of literary temporality, demonstrating how diverse cultural conceptions of time can inform contemporary narrative practice.

This temporal framework finds its most poignant narrative expression through the lama’s enigmatic declaration: “Within the six directions of existence, twists of fate arise from shadows and errors” (Liuhe Zhinei, Yincha Yangcuo, 六合之內，陰差陽錯). This gnomic utterance encapsulates the Buddhist doctrine of karmic indeterminacy, wherein seemingly trivial actions may generate profound and unforeseeable repercussions. The philosophical weight of this principle manifests tragically in the protagonist’s accidental killing of his cat, an event that resonates with both existential irony and metaphysical uncertainty.

This reconfiguration of temporality and contingency permeates the writer’s reconsideration of Tibetan spiritual experiences. In The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, the transformative moment when shepherd Dunzhu, 頓珠, miraculously masters the Gesar Epic after consuming sacred water epitomizes myth’s tangible presence in lived experience. While the story acknowledges genetic transmission as a plausible explanation, it ultimately privileges the supernatural interpretation, thereby affirming a Tibetan epistemological framework that accommodates transcendent phenomena. This narrative choice is paralleled in a character’s enigmatic encounter with a monumental sheep-headed monolith in Ali’s wilderness—a scene whose deliberate irresolution leaves the stone’s nature suspended between geological formation and divine manifestation. Through these narrative strategies, Ma Yuan creates a hybridizing space where the metaphysical and the material converge. This internally coherent system of knowledge broadens and enriches the discourse on modernization within 1980s Chinese literary and cultural contexts (Zhang 1997; Wang 2021).

The culmination of Ma Yuan’s mythopoetic project emerges in Three Techniques for Crafting Paper Kites, where three destitute Tibetan women incarnate the indivisibility of spiritual practice and material struggle. Their devotion—manifested through monastic alms-giving amid poverty or sheltering persecuted dogs—constitutes what we might term an “embodied theology”: a lived faith unbound by institutional dogma yet saturated with existential significance. By destabilizing the categorical boundaries between myth and reality, sacred and profane, oral tradition and written discourse, Ma Yuan reimagines Tibetan religious and cultural traditions within late-twentieth-century Chinese artistic fields.

Ultimately, this narrative experimentation reconceives myth not as an archaic remnant but as a dynamic, insurgent force actively shaping aesthetic modernity and cross-cultural interaction in contemporary Chinese literature. Ma Yuan thus offers a paradigm for representing marginalized consciousness that avoids both cultural homogenization and exoticization—asserting instead myth’s enduring vitality as both reflective surface and generative engine for cultural persistence and innovation amid modernization.

5. Conclusions

This study demonstrates how Ma Yuan’s fiction destabilizes conventional binaries—such as sacred/secular, body/soul, myth/authenticity, and center/periphery—by revealing their fluid negotiation within the lived experiences of marginalized communities. His narratives bridge empirical knowledge and spiritual belief, secular life and sacred tradition, as well as religious heritage and literary experimentation. This hybridity, analyzed through the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Homi K. Bhabha, reflects not only a spatial displacement but also a dynamic engagement with aesthetic innovation and intercultural dialogue.

Ma Yuan’s reimagining of Tibet as both cultural reality and mythological allegory critiques reductive representations of ethnicity. The writer complicates ethnic representation by situating Tibetan characters within narratives of spiritual trauma, metaphysical inquiry, and existential uncertainty. In this regard, his works move beyond simplified portrayals of minorities, offering instead richly textured depictions of Tibetan life that highlight its emotional depth, spiritual traditions, and philosophical richness. These narratives invite readers to reconsider aesthetic modernity while fostering cross-cultural dialogue within contemporary Chinese literature.

A key contribution of this study is its reexamination of myth in the writer’s fiction. Rather than treating myth as a relic of the past or a mere construct of human imagination, Ma Yuan presents it as an ontological force—an ineffable yet fundamental aspect of Tibetan existence. This reconceptualization frames myth as a living framework of meaning that informs Tibetan worldviews, responses to suffering, and expressions of subjectivity. In works such as The Spell of the Gangdise Mountains, The Sail-less Ships of Tibet’s Western Sea, and Three Temporalities of Life in Lhasa, the writer crafts a literary space where myth is not just recounted but enacted—through cyclical time, spiritual indeterminacy, and sacred geography. This approach transforms the linear temporality dominant in earlier literary works, establishing an experimental narrative mode rooted in religious temporality and marginalized experiences.

This study also highlights the corporeal dimension of Ma Yuan’s religious narratives, foregrounding the body as both a locus of pain and a conduit for transcendence. Whether depicting the dismembered body in sky burials, the afflicted body in leper colonies, or the sexualized body in tales of desire and betrayal, his fiction underscores how trauma is inscribed and transmuted through ritualized bodily practices. These embodied experiences function as critical sites of cultural memory and spiritual expression, exposing the profound interplay between physical suffering and metaphysical endurance.

This study further identifies fruitful avenues for future research. A promising direction involves comparative analysis between Ma Yuan’s Tibetan fiction and other literary works engaging with religious or indigenous cosmologies, such as Can Xue’s surreal allegories (Rothfork 2020), Yu Hua’s depictions of bodily violence (Schweiger 2015), or indigenous narratives from other postcolonial contexts (Wang 2004). Such comparisons could illuminate shared strategies of narrative innovation, trends of demarginalization, and patterns of intercultural encounter within global literature.

Through his hybridizing gaze, Ma Yuan crafts a hybridizing narrative world where myth operates as lived reality, trauma assumes sacred dimensions, and ritual becomes a site of redemption. His fiction simultaneously resists homogenizing discourses of marginality and spirituality while affirming the creative resilience of religious heritage. It is precisely this ability—to write from the periphery while fundamentally reshaping mainstream narratives—that secures Ma Yuan’s enduring literary importance and underscores this study’s contribution to the dynamic field of literary and religious studies.