Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, by Donald S Lopez,
by Donald S Lopez

Reviewed by Donna Seaman

Booklist
Vol.94 No.18 (May 15, 1998)
p.1568

COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association

            Lopez, Donald S. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the 
            West. May 1998.

            Tibet has long stirred Western imaginations, and inspired some 
            amazing adventures. These groundbreaking books examine the collision 
            between fantasy and fact when outsiders go inside and face both 
            Tibet's splendor and its sorrow. 
            Heinrich Harrer's story is better known, but the still controversial 
            tale of Alexandra David-Neel, the first white woman to enter Lhasa, 
            is far more mystifying. Long fascinated by her exploits, the Fosters 
            zestfully chronicle David-Neel's astonishingly chimerical and 
            adventurous life, and attempt to fathom her unique and confounding 
            personality. David-Neel not only trekked across the deserts, 
            glaciers, rivers, and mountains armed with a pistol and disguised as 
            a poor pilgrim to elude the authorities and marauders but also 
            became a Buddhist mystic and scholar responsible for translating key 
            Tibetan Buddhist texts. She lived for an entire century, 
            transforming herself at will from a political radical in France to a 
            student of yoga in India, a chanteuse in Europe and Indo-China an 
            intimate of the prince of Sikkim, the disciple of a Himalayan holy 
            man, and, eventually, the author of 30 books. So extraordinary are 
            David-Neel's experiences they read like fiction, but the authors 
            hold to the truth as best they can given the fantastic nature of 
            their subject, and never waver in their deep respect for this 
            high-spirited traveler. 
            Lopez's inquiry into the West's mythologizing and romanticizing of 
            Tibetan culture offers a stimulating counterpoint to the Foster's 
            portrait of David-Neel. Lopez is intent on disclosing the evolution 
            of our "notions" about Tibetan Buddhism, impressions that have 
            helped raise awareness of Tibet's plight under Chinese rule but that 
            now threaten to serve as conceptual prison detrimental, in the long 
            run, to helping free Tibet. Proceeding with care and precision, 
            Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like 
            intellectual colonialists, mining the treasures of a foreign belief 
            system to bolster their own. He makes this point with great finesse 
            in his rigorous discussion of the various English incarnations of 
            The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a mortuary text little known in Tibet 
            yet renowned in the West as a classic guide to life. This sort of 
            "radical decontextualization" has been applied to all aspects of 
            Tibetan culture, fueling our foolish fantasies of Shangri-La. 
            Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could 
            have done it as resoundingly as Lopez. 
            YA/M: Foster--For teenagers interested in Eastern religions and for 
            women's studies collections.