National Review
1996.10.28
Pp.73-74
Copyright by National Review Inc.
THE New York Times noted recently that the number of Buddhists in
the U.S. had reached 800,000, and there are probably two or three
times that if you include the legions of chic white people who don't
know much about the religion but fancy it nevertheless and call
themselves ''Buddhists.'' There are even Buddhist celebrities,
including Richard Gere and Columbia's Professor Thurman, father of
Uma. I have never seen anything in NATIONAL REVIEW's pages to
suggest that it has a very large number of Buddhist readers. But to
those who are, I would unreservedly recommend Professor Thurman's
book. Can I recommend it to non-Buddhists?
Suppose a Catholic were asked to collect the ''essential'' texts of
his religion. We might have the texts of the great Councils, the
writings of the early Fathers, some Aquinas, some Augustine, de
Caussade, Newman, extracts from the Bible, the Missal, the Divine
Office, perhaps one encyclical on modern times. Of course we
--Catholics, other Christians, and non-Christians in Christian
cultures -- can read these and understand them in part. So we might
take it for granted that people from other cultures can. I doubt it.
It is what you bring to the text that counts. It exists in a
tradition. Those Christians who have fled the modernizing Catholic
and Anglican churches for Eastern Orthodoxy report a continuing
strangeness. And Orthodoxy is a branch of the same religion.
Essential Tibetan Buddhism produced three sets of reactions in me.
They were interest and respect, bafflement and refusal, and alarm.
The book starts with a long introductory essay which is a
masterpiece, in the sense that it shows enough of a strange religion
to arouse interest and respect. Tibetan Buddhism has found a very
effective champion in Robert Thurman. His essay discusses the
centrality to Tibetan Buddhists of real Buddhas living among them.
It discusses the founding teacher and his ''angelic disciples,'' the
essential teaching, the enlightenment movement, the history of
Buddhism and its spread through India and Asia, asceticism and
monasticism, the renaissance of Buddhism and the great flowering of
the Tibetan variety and its spread beyond Tibet, the sad story of
the Chinese occupation and the exile, and the way Tibetan Buddhists
read spiritual intent into plain history. The second section is a
collection of essential Tibetan Buddhist texts: ''Mentor Worship,''
''Seeing the Buddha,'' ''Meeting the Buddha in the Mentor,''
''Practicing Transcendental Meditation,'' ''Practicing the Loving
Spirit of Enlightenment,'' ''Practicing the Liberating Wisdom,''
''Practicing the Creation Stage,'' ''Practicing the Perfection and
Great Perfection Stages.'' These are the equivalent of Augustine's
Confessions or de Caussade's letters. Here are a few lines:
NAMO GURU MANJUGHOSHAYA!/May the glorious, precious root Mentor/sit
in the lotus of my heart/and sustain me with his great kindness./May
he grant attainments of body, speech, and mind./I invoke the
glorious Losang Drakpa,/who lovingly teaches just as he sees/the
complete essence of the path of all Sutra and Tantra,/who holds the
complete holy Dharma of the Victor.
The reaction of a non-Buddhist, or at any rate of this non-Buddhist,
to this and most of the other extracts is complete bafflement. Then
bafflement turns to rejection. This stuff is completely foreign.
Either I determine to take it seriously, and that means not just
study it but somehow become a part of it, or I stop now. To toy with
it, dabble in it, extract helpful bits from it would be sheer
cultural tourism. It's a bit like French cooking. Do it properly or
not at all. You can embrace it, reject it, even persecute it. But
don't play with it.
The last text is an address given in Oslo by the Dalai Lama upon
accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. This great, baffling religion and
one of its greatest men suddenly give way to ecumenical
internationalese, a United Nations type of address on the
interrelatedness of all things and the centrality of the planet. And
oh what familiar cliches: ''Today we are truly a global family . . .
to pollute the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some
short-term benefit, would be to destroy the very basis of our
survival . . . We must develop a sense of universal responsibility .
. . in respect of the different issues that confront our planet . .
. the young people of many countries have repeatedly called for an
end to the dangerous destruction of the environment . . .'' There's
more and worse, such as the idea that vicious regimes can be made to
change through peaceful protest -- not a mention of the willingness
of the West to spend on arms to contain and defeat vicious regimes.
No, it's not rot. It is talk calculated not to offend: insights
about personal renewal preceding political renewal but diluted with
eco-speech and the obligatory genuflections to ghastly young people.
Christian leaders, of course, do this sort of thing all the time.
Vatican II and papal encyclicals are full of it. The style and
rhetoric are horribly familiar. At least the strangeness of the
ancient texts induces respect. The greatest problem that religions
have today is that people see them as small things, hobbies, easily
mastered, lightly worn. The great religions are, on the contrary,
''thick,'' deep in the sense of profound but, more important, wide
in the sense of impinging on all aspects of life. Why do their
present-day leaders, holy men like the Dalai Lama or Pope John Paul
II, men usually so robust, allow themselves to be caught talking,
albeit on untypical occasions, in a way that sells religion short?