Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, by Karma
Chameleon
Reviewed by Stephen Owen
The New Republic
Vol.219 No.6 (August 10, 1998)
pp.38-41
COPYRIGHT 1998 The New Republic Inc
Karma Chameleon By Stephen Owen Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan
Buddhism and the West by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (University of Chicago
Press)
The fascination that Tibet has held for the European and American
imagination is surely one of the strangest stories in the history of
the West's relation to its imagined cultural others, the
"non-Western" cultures. Long closed off and unreachable in its
Himalayan fastness, Tibet has become almost an allegory of the
West's engagement with a civilization that is altogether elsewhere.
In the history of the American imagination, the story of Tibet is a
story of Orientalism at its zaniest, from Madame Blavatsky's
Theosophical Society to Timothy Leary's psychedelic commentary on
The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the movie set reconstruction of
Lhasa's Potala Palace in Argentina for Seven Years in Tibet.
Such visions of Tibet are all tenuously related to historical
reality, but they have served as the instrument of our own
inclinations. They are a means to criticize many things we are
disposed not to like, from the crass materialism of capitalism to
the Chinese government. What moviegoer can forget the image, in
Kundun, of the Chinese generals stamping underfoot the sand mandala
so painstakingly constructed by monks hoping only for peace? The
cinematic image arouses powerful indignation. The fact that it never
happened that way scarcely matters.
This remarkable book by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is an account of the
Orientalist saga of Tibet, in which the unreachable fount of
"non-Western" wisdom shifts almost imperceptibly into an equally mad
version of the issues now called "postcolonial." It does not make
things better that these postcolonial issues arise in a culture that
was never colonized by the Western powers--in a culture that was
largely oblivious to them. But Tibet was harshly colonized by its
very large Asian neighbor beginning in the 1950s; and the resulting
diaspora community of Tibetans encountered its own image in the
peculiar transformation wrought by the contemporary Western
imagination. As the impoverished diaspora community entered into
dialogue with the imagined Tibet of their earnest and often wealthy
American and European supporters, they both reshaped the image and
were themselves reshaped by it. Once outside the enclosed social and
spiritual world of geographical Tibet, they had to become the
culture that they were imagined to be.
To this already seething mix of cultural contradictions, moreover,
we must add religion, both traditional Tibetan Buddhism and the
recent religious yearnings of America. The one sought to offer
salvation, the other sought to be saved; and in that happy
complementarity we have a religious moment that transcends
historical culture. For the believer's truth is not necessarily
identical to the scholar's truth. Like Christianity, Buddhism spread
from one culture to another in the hope of saving souls; and
whenever one of these religions of salvation enters a new culture,
it adapts to the customs of the country in the hope of saving new
souls. This was true when Indian Buddhism entered Tibet, and it
remains no less true as Tibetan Buddhism enters American culture.
And the tale runs the other way, too. The way in which a religion
rediscovers itself in new cultural contexts is usually
counterbalanced by a fascination with an old and unbroken tradition.
Again, this was true when Indian Buddhism entered America and it is
true as Tibetan Buddhism puts down roots in America.
The issues raised in Lopez's book are a glorious mess, and they are
presented to us by someone who is both a scholar and a believer. In
his penultimate chapter, Lopez tries to give an account of the
uneasy balance between his two roles; and there is here an uneasy
genius of contradiction, which, as Lopez explicitly explores, is
precisely the problem of Buddhism in America. Lopez looks to a
Tibetan Buddhism of rational argument, which is the realm in which
it can most comfortably be reconciled with the intellectual
commitments of an American scholar. He acknowledges the
supra-rational aspect of Tibetan Buddhism, the side of the faith
that can put a curse on an enemy or exorcise demons, but he and the
Dalai Lama are uncomfortable with it. At the same time he also
recognizes the peculiar twists and turns that Tibetan Buddhism has
taken in response to the spiritual needs of Americans. The believer
here aids the scholar to see the religious core that survives its
social and cultural metamorphoses.
The first chapters of Lopez's book concern the formation of the
popular image of Tibet that took shape in Europe and America, an
image relatively untouched by the participation of real Tibetans.
Lopez is intensely aware that the scholarly field of Tibetan Studies
bears a complicated relation to the history of Tibet's popular
image: it attempts to distinguish itself from that image, yet it is
tied to it at every level. Nothing can more perfectly epitomize the
issues at stake than Lopez's discussion of The Third Eye, the
ostensible autobiography of T. Lobsang Rampa.
What are we to make of a scholarly discipline many of whose founders
were deeply influenced by the book of an English correspondence
clerk and photographer who claimed to have been molecularly replaced
by the spirit of a Tibetan monk, and who then composed the monk's
autobiography (molecular replacement evidently preserving the
linguistic capabilities of the host form)? Lopez initially tells the
story of T. Lobsang Rampa, who was born in 1910 as Cyril Henry
Hoskin, with as straight a face as he can. We are never sure whether
Rampa's/Hoskin's story is a fraud or a self-delusion; but the
self-awareness and the sincerity of the author is less important
than the enthusiasm with which his book was received even after it
was shown that the transmogrified monk had forgotten his Tibetan.
The lesson is simple: the truth of Tibet evidently matters less than
the illusion.
This is Lopez's first lesson, and he drives it home forcefully. His
first chapter, on "Lamaism," begins with three epigraphs. The first
two are from 1835 and 1915 respectively, each decrying the
impropriety of the term "Lamaism." The second expresses approval
that it is dropping out of use. Yet the third, from 1991, continues
to use the term to describe Tibetan Buddhism. Thus we learn from the
very first page that the forces that sustain illusions about Tibet
are impervious to the truth, or to scholarly animadversion.
If we accept this--as I think we must--then this aspect of Lopez's
book becomes a quixotic enterprise itself. It places the "story of
Tibet" in Western cultural history, understanding that we will
always take the imagined Tibet as the real one. Each of his early
chapters treats a different entrance into this imaginary Tibet.
First "Lamaism," then The Tibetan Book of the Dead (which, as Lopez
patiently explains, is actually a very minor example of a particular
genre of religious writing), then the autobiographical The Third Eye
by Rampa/Hoskin, then a chapter on the mantra Om Mani padme hum.
Woven throughout are the cultists from Blavatsky to Leary, and the
beginnings of a historical scholarship seeking to find a place for
itself in the giddy realm of religious and cultural enthusiasm.
When we come at last to the chapter on "The Field," about Tibetan
Studies in the academy, we enter the more troubled territory of
Lopez's book, which also raises some of the most interesting issues.
The very presence of such a chapter is owed to a turn taken in
intellectual circles during the past decade. When one writes on
another culture as object, one must now reflect also on the position
from which one writes--its institutional imperatives, its vested
interests, and the way in which it, too, is part of a culture.
This scruple is excellent in the abstract, admitting that knowledge
is as much a function of the position of the knower as of the object
known. In practice, however, it is a problematic enterprise,
producing excesses of selfjustification, self-flagellation, and
uninteresting confession. To describe "where one stands" may be
impossible, if only because such descriptions are themselves subject
to the same criticism that motivated them.
At its best, however, introspection can lead a writer to the hard
questions. This is what happens here. Lopez undertakes an account of
the formation of Tibetan Studies as an academic discipline. He first
gives an account of early Orientalist studies of Tibetan Buddhism,
beginning in the mid-nineteenth century as an offshoot of the study
of Sanskrit, and then moves to the establishment of Religious
Studies programs in American universities after World War II. Here
he addresses the complicated relationship between these liberal arts
programs in religion and theological seminaries, posing the question
of religious commitment on the part of those who teach religions as
a scholarly discipline. This question of scholarship and faith is a
subtext throughout the book, and it is especially urgent for the
Tibetan scholar who is also a believer.
In a religion whose American version is fraught with
misunderstanding and cultic excess, how do you tell the baby from
the bathwater? After describing the establishment of Buddhist
Studies in the context of Religious Studies programs, Lopez moves to
the establishment of Tibetan Buddhist Studies. The flight of the
Dalai Lama and the Tibetan diaspora seem to Lopez to have provided
credible arbiters of what is the baby and what is the bathwater.
Learned Tibetan monks, rigorously trained in traditions of doctrinal
debate, were invited to teach in many of the new Tibetan programs
established in the United States, which is rather analogous to
having Thomas Aquinas come to the States to teach medieval Christian
philosophy--though one suspects that the intelligent modern scholar
of medieval Christian philosophy would be in equal measure delighted
and troubled by such a resurrection in the classroom.
With evident pride, Lopez describes his own program of study at the
University of Virginia, where visiting Tibetan monks lectured and
the curriculum was at least partially shaped as a miniature version
of Tibetan scholastic training, with students memorizing scholastic
definitions and practicing the set forms of monastic debate. Clearly
this gave students (including Lopez himself) a sense of confidence
and continuity in their scholarship; the critical intelligence at
work throughout Lopez's book shows clearly that the miniature
traditional curriculum did not produce merely a miniature of
traditional learning. Lopez clearly knows how to participate in the
tradition and how to reflect upon it from the outside.
To his credit, Lopez never forgets that religious faith overflows
both the monastery and the courses in Classical Tibetan at
Charlottesville. In looking for a Tibetan Buddhism in America, he
has to confront a community of white American monks who do not know
Tibetan and the tradition of learning that normally would define a
monk. At the same time there is a small community of Tibetan
scholars (including women) who do possess the learning, but they are
not monks. So where is this religion really located? And what really
is this religion, after the radical translation to this continent
and this culture? In a religious tradition centered on an unbroken
transmission of learning from master to disciple, what does it mean
when the disciples are American university teachers, who have
commitments other than the accumulation of merit and the
transmission of faith?
Lopez's final chapter is called "The Prison." It begins with the
Sanskrit legend of the kingdom of Shambhala (the origin of
Shangri-la), a fastness protected by mountains where Buddhism is
preserved in its pure form, awaiting the final apocalyptic battle in
which Buddhist forces would emerge and triumph over their enemies. A
part of the legend involves the kingdom's 35 million brahmans, who
are given a choice to convert to Buddhism or to leave. When they
decide to leave, the king realizes that this cannot be permitted. He
assumes the form of a wrathful deity to frighten them on their
journey, after which he brings them back and allows them to convert
to Buddhism.
In this connection Lopez cites Wilde's great essay "The Decay of
Lying," in which nature imitates art, and continues:
If we extend Wilde's theory, it would seem that Western enthusiasts
of Tibetan Buddhism are more authentic in their Buddhism than
Tibetans precisely because they are more intimate with the
simulacrum of Tibet that is the invention, that is the artifice. But
what happens when the people of such an invented land leave it and
come to the place of its invention? The answer to this question,
involving the flight of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan diaspora, is
not that the "real thing" shatters the illusion. It is, rather, that
the "real Tibetans" join in shaping the illusion and are themselves
reshaped by it.
Thus the Dalai Lama emerged into a culture of "Buddhist modernism,"
in which Buddhist thinkers had already shaped a version of the
religion that could take its place among other world religions. A
more philosophical and universal Buddhism was achieved at the
expense of local practices that did not exactly suit the image that
the cosmopolitan proponents of the faith wanted to present to the
world. Yet Tibetan Buddhism came out of its mountains replete with
such local practices; and it was the Dalai Lama's task to recast the
religion into the form that its foreign enthusiasts anticipated.
Lopez proceeds to an account of the "Shugden affair." Shugden was a
protective deity of the Geluk Sect, of which the Dalai Lama was the
head. In 1976, the Dalai Lama decided to oppose the propitiation of
Shugden. This provoked great resistance from many figures in the
religious establishment. Lopez stresses that this was an ecumenical
move on the part of the Dalai Lama, to deemphasize his role as head
of one sect and to strengthen his legitimacy as head of the entire
Tibetan community. Still, while Lopez assures us that quite a few
Tibetan deities have distinctly demonic traits, let it be said that
Shugden, who would be at home in a blood-and-guts computer game, was
not a particularly reputable deity for an international religion of
compassion and nonviolence. Significantly, when pro-Shugden
hostility to the Dalai Lama surfaced on a visit to England, the
English newspapers came out strongly for the Dalai Lama, portraying
the pro-Shugden group as a cult.
We have here an interesting cultural moment. For a start, the
propitiation of Shugden played an important role in the historically
authentic Tibetan Buddhism of the dominant Geluk Sect. Moreover, we
usually think of a "cult" as a small group of devoted followers
gathered around a charismatic leader and devoted to religious
principles that lack historical foundation; but as the Dalai Lama
reshapes Tibetan Buddhism for the world stage, his Western admirers
respond with glib approval to his authority to determine what does
and does not constitute the proper "religion."
From Tibetan Buddhism, Lopez turns at last to the Tibetan "nation."
It is in large measure a construct of the Tibetan diaspora, of
displaced Tibetans discovering themselves in their mirror image in
the West. (Lopez notes young Tibetans who are disappointed that
monks do not live up to the representations of them in Western
writings.) And finally Lopez arrives at the idealized Tibet, at
"Shangri-la," with the "patron-priest" relationship that once
existed with China now shifting to international patrons. The pure
kingdom of Shambhala exists in the imagination, and it now looks to
a much wider and grander field for the laity that is required for
the preservation of the religion, until the day comes when it will
emerge triumphant. As Lopez observes, it was in the diaspora that
Buddhism came to define "Tibet," as it was transformed into
Shambhala, where the Buddhist Dharma is preserved in its pure form.
But the historical realities are much more complex. In truth, the
Geluk Sect, whose head is the Dalai Lama, held secular authority
over the region around Lhasa; and there were other sects, and other
groups in other regions. Lopez the scholar is aware that religion
continually shifts shape; but here Lopez the scholar collides with
Lopez the believer. Consider the following passage, in which Lopez
describes the roles of monks and laity in preconquest Tibet.
By adopting a certain lifestyle, then, in which the transient
pleasures of married life are renounced, monks provide the
opportunity for the layperson to amass a certain karmic capital. In
return, monks receive the fruits of the labor of the laity--labor
that they themselves have eschewed--in the form of their physical
support. More specifically, monks do what laypeople cannot do
because they generally do not know how: recite texts, perform
rituals, and sometimes mediate. Laypeople do those things that monks
are forbidden to do: till the soil, engage in business, raise
families. Recast in a different rhetoric for different purposes,
this description is essentially the Chinese justification for the
havoc that they have wreaked on Tibetan Buddhism. For if, as Lopez
and others note, l5 percent of the population were (male) monks, we
have roughly every two males supporting one monk. If we exclude
non-working children and the aged from the non-monastic population
in a pre-industrial society, the Buddhist establishment was
receiving one whopping proportion of "the fruits of the labor of the
laity." We are substantially beyond tithing.
So Shangri-la had a dark underbelly. With such a large proportion of
productive surplus going to support the monasteries, a family with
too many children to feed had no choice but to give males to the
monastery, thus perpetuating the system. And it is useful to
remember that the monastic establishment is a place where a
religious point of view and a nonreligious point of view must part
company. From the religious point of view described in the passage
quoted above, Tibetan society before the Chinese conquest was
characterized by a contractual relation between the monastic
establishment and the laity, with religious merit given in exchange
for physical labor. One has to believe strongly in the efficacy of
religious merit to think that this was a good bargain, considering
the very pragmatic social burden that it entailed.
It is, moreover, a dangerous and ethically problematic position to
assume confidently that the Tibetan laity were completely content
with this bargain. There is some truth, then, in the Chinese charge
of monastic serfdom. To be sure, the laity were believers; but there
is a strong element of social coercion in this kind of belief. You
support the monks in the belief that good things will happen to you
if you do and bad things will happen to you if you do not.
From another point of view, of course, the charm of Tibet's
isolation was that it made possible the enforcement of a religious
and social system that admitted no alternatives. This may be another
lesson of the myth of Shambhala that Lopez tells in his last
chapter. For the purity of the kingdom, there must be uniformity. No
outside influences are permitted. Is this what we mean, however,
when we demand "freedom of religion" for the Tibetans? Enthusiasts
are drawn to the "purity" of Tibet as a realm devoted entirely to
the Buddhist Dharma. Yet outside the Himalayas our judgments must be
quite otherwise, when we are confronted with the drive to such
ideological and religious purity.
This is one of those occasions when cultural relativism threatens to
become odious. Should we defend social practices that we ourselves
would never tolerate in the name of protecting the purity of another
culture, which we can then regard aesthetically, as an object of
contemplation? The alternative, of course, may be to destroy the
culture, which is what the Chinese are now doing. There are no good
answers to such questions. But this much is certain: we must avoid
romanticizing. In appreciating the considerable wonders of Tibetan
Buddhism, we must not forget that toiling laity, driven by faith or
fear or force to give a large proportion of "the fruits of their
labor" to the monasteries. We do not know exactly how they felt.
Some probably made their gifts gladly, some bitterly. But we should
not trust the reports of monks in this matter.
Such a spirit of disenchantment allows one to provide a second
ending, and a happy one, to Lopez's book, an ending in keeping with
his vision of a new community of Tibetan Buddhist laity spread out
over the globe. For it is also the fact that the diaspora religious
establishment of Tibetan Buddhism is now free of the ugly social
contract that preserved it in the past. Finally it can continue to
exist by drawing not only on a greater worldwide surplus, but also
on a surplus that is truly given freely.
Stephen Owen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard
University.
(Copyright 1998, The New Republic)