Preserving Offerings, Prolonging Merit: Efficacy, Skillful Means, and Re-purposing in Plastic Buddhist Material Culture in Contemporary Sikkim

Abstract

Despite official bans, public criticism and concern over pollution, plastics are widely used in Buddhist material culture in the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim. Using the framework of the seven bowls of water offerings, undertaken every morning to the Buddhas and deities in domestic shrine rooms, and ethnographic observations, as a way to frame discussions of changing material culture, I will interrogate how plastics are used and waste is re-purposed in Sikkimese interdimensional engagements in offerings to the deities and spirits. I will argue that plastics continue to be seen as efficacious and generative for Buddhist communities due to their ability to be re-purposed and recycled, acting as exemplars of skillful means that allow for Buddhist communities to exercise their own agency in determining the efficacy of material culture and the making of new futures. This paper engages with scholarship from anthropologists and Buddhist studies scholars on Buddhist materiality, plastic, and waste studies to consider the malleability of plastics, even when they are not malleable, and demonstrate how this malleability generates positive and creative engagements across dimensions that allow for nuanced and complex responses to the anxieties people have about plastic waste in the Himalayas.

Buddhism in the Anthropocene: Opening the Global to the Planetary

“…Interconnected with global economic transformations and the exchange of goods, the materials used to produce ritual items at Buddhist temples and within rituals have changed. In some cases, formerly biodegradable items have been replaced by plastics, posing new questions about the relationship between spiritual and environmental pollution (Abrahms-Kavunenko 2022;Bhutia 2022;Brox 2022;Brox and Williams-Oerberg 2022;Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2023). As Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko ( 2022), Kalzang Dorje Bhutia (2022), Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa ( 2023), and Trine Brox (2022) have noted, ritual items made from or wrapped in plastics can become deeply ambivalent, being at once a source of purification and generative of pollution.…”