The account of the visit to Lhasa is filled with contradictions. While the text is replete with criticism of the "vampire priests," "parasitic priesthood," and "sheer barbarians," it also expresses nostalgia for the enigma supposedly lost with the invasion and considers Tibet's "charming land and interesting people" (1905, 448). When visiting Yamdok Lake, Waddell mentions his pleasure at leaving warlike surroundings and entering "again the world of dreams and magic which may be said to be ever with us in the mystic Land of the Lamas" (292-93). Upon approaching Lhasa, he compares his excitement and anticipation to "the emotions felt by the Crusaders of old on arriving within sight of Jerusalem, after their long march through Europe" (326) and exclaims: "Here at last was the object of our dreams!-the long-sought, mysterious Hermit City, the Rome of Central Asia, with the residence of its famous priest-god-and it didn't disappoint us!" (330).
Taking a dig at the theosophist imagination of Tibet as the land of the mahatmas, he writes, "Thus we are told that, amidst the solitude of this 'Land of the Supernatural' repose the spirits of 'The Masters,' the Mahatmas, whose astral bodies slumber in unbroken peace, save when they condescend to work some petty miracle in the world below" (1972, 3). In fact, he writes, the Tibetans were entirely ignorant of any mahatmas living in Tibet, nor had they heard of any secrets of the ancient world being preserved in their country (1905, 409-10). Many commentators disclaimed the theosophist idealization of Tibet and deployed the trope of debasement and negation along the lines of Waddell's assertions, but the idealization of
Tibetan religion gained wider currency during the middle and later half of the twentieth century.
Tibetan Religion as an Answer to the West's Malaise
The Tibetan Book of the Dead has significantly contributed to the valorization of Tibetan religion and to the Western imagination of Tibet as a land of spirituality. It was allegedly written in the eighth or the ninth century and discovered in the fourteenth. It organizes the experiences of the bar-do, the "in-between"-usually referring to the state between death and rebirth. It was introduced to the West by Evans-Wentz (1949) for the first time in 1927 (and since then it "has taken on a life of its own as something of a timeless world spiritual classic"; Lopez 1998, 47).
The most idealized version can be found in Thurman's translation that seeks to represent Tibetan Buddhism as scientific rather than religious. Thurman dedicates the book
to the brave and gentle people of Tibet, who have suffered and are suffering one of the great tragedies of our time… [and prays] May the Tibetan people soon regain the sovereign freedom they have enjoyed since the dawn of history! And may the sunlight of Tibetan Spiritual Science once again shine brightly upon a freshened world! (1998; emphasis added).
In discussing the virtue of pacifism, Thurman argues that during the reign of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617-82), a unique form of government was created that was almost completely demilitarized and gave priority to nonviolence (1998, 9). Representing Tibet as a spiritual civilization, Thurman writes, "In Western culture, the last frontier of our material conquest is the universe of outer space. Our astronauts are our ultimate heroes and heroines. Tibetans, however, are more concerned about the spiritual conquest of the inner universe… So, the Tibetan lamas… [who are spiritually adept, the] 'psychonauts' are the Tibetans' ultimate heroes and heroines" (10).
Drawing upon the themes of Western materialism and Eastern spirituality, Thurman contrasts Tibetan "inner modernity" with Western "outer modernity." This difference of personality underlies the difference between the Western (American for Thurman) and Tibetan civilizations: "While the American national purpose is ever greater material productivity, the Tibetan national purpose is ever greater spiritual productivity" (11).
Thus, the idealization of Tibetan spirituality often goes beyond everyday religious practice, concerning itself with realms above religion. As the Tibetophile Hollywood actor Steven Seagal says, "My agenda has no politics. It has no economy. You see. It goes even beyond religion which is also big business and goes into simple human kindness and the way we're supposed to treat each other as human beings" (Frontline 1998c). A figure that has been integral to the Western imagination of Tibet as an abode of spirituality is the lama.
THE LAMA
At the end of his time in Lhasa, Younghusband wrote about the Ti Rimpoche, the abbot of the powerful Ganden monastery (who was acting as the chief Tibetan negotiator since the Dalai Lama had fled Lhasa before the arrival of the British in 1904): he was a "benevolent, kindly old gentleman, who would not hurt a fly if he could have avoided it" and he "more nearly approached Kipling's Lama in 'Kim' than any other Tibetan" Younghusband had met (Younghusband 1910, 310, 325; emphasis added). Here we see how preexisting images shaped the West's encounter with Tibet. Kipling's fictional lama provided an image of the Tibetan lama against which the British during the early twentieth century measured the actual lamas. With Younghusband begins the tradition of looking for the "Teshoo Lama" figure-elderly yet childlike, respected yet loved, spiritually wise yet with little knowledge of, or interest in, the secular world.
Kim and the Teshoo Lama
Kipling's Kim, first published in 1901, presents the Orient for the visual consumption of the West. The novel is about the adventures of Kim in India-a white orphan boy who has grown up among Indians, easily passing himself off as one of them. He takes to the road as a chela (disciple, companion) of a Tibetan lama and discovers the diversity of north Indian life while "becoming a man." Initially accompanying the lama on his search for the "fountain of wisdom," Kim is picked up by the British and groomed for working in the British secret service.
Though the depiction of individual Oriental characters such as the Teshoo Lama is positive, it in no way disrupts the cumulative picture and the certainties of Orientalism for "no matter how much a single Oriental can escape the fences around him, he is first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental" (Said 1993, 112; emphases in original). In Kim, it is the Europeans who provide the Orientals with the first accurate descriptions and proper explanations of their history, religion, and culture. This is evident in the confrontation of the lama with the British curator of Lahore museum. The curator, a "white-bearded Englishman," speaks to the lama, who is trembling with excitement at the sight of Buddhist images: "Welcome, then, O lama from Tibet. Here be the images, and I am here… to gather knowledge" (1976, 13). The lama tells the curator that he was an abbot at a monastery in Tibet. In reply, the curator brings out a huge book of photos and shows him that very place, suitably impressing the lama, who exclaims, "And thou-the English know of these things?" (14). [37] Throughout the novel, Tibet figures as a place far removed from the lives of those in India. When the lama enters the story he says to the boys playing in front of the Lahore museum that he is "a hillman from hills thou'lt never see" (12). On his journey in north India with Kim, the lama tells stories of "enduring snows, landslips, blocked passes, the remote cliffs where men find sapphires and turquoise, and the wonderful upland road that leads at last into Great China itself" (48). Later, on the second leg of their journey,
he told stories, tracing with a finger in the dust, of the immense and sumptuous ritual of avalanche-guarded cathedrals; of processions and devil-dances; of the changing of monks and nuns into swine; of holy cities fifteen thousand feet in the air; of intrigue between monastery and monastery; of voices among the hills, and of that mysterious mirage that dances on dry snow. He spoke even of Lhassa and of the Dalai Lama, whom he had seen and adored. (232)
One dominant representational strategy operating within the text is infantilization. On the one hand, young Kim is contrasted to the old lama. But a closer reading shows Kim to be the real guardian and caretaker as he is practically wise and the lama is childlike in worldly matters. The lama writes in "clumsy, childish print" (13) and follows Kim's instructions obediently and "simply as a child"
(20). Kim asserts his own importance for the lama when he says to him: "Was there ever such
a disciple as I?… All earth would have picked thy bones within ten miles of Lahore city if I had not guarded thee" (71). Yet in times of crisis, such as when Kim is caught by two British regimental priests and is forcibly enrolled for formal schooling, the lama shows awareness of worldly matters and volunteers to act as Kim's guardian and insists on paying for the cost of his education.
The lama's wisdom in spiritual matters is of course unparalleled and compared favorably with Indian priests of all sorts. He speaks like a "scholar removed from vanity, as a Seeker walking in humility, as an old man, wise and temperate, illuminating knowledge with brilliant insight" (232). Ultimately, the lama finds his "fountain of wisdom" (the "river of the arrow") in his affection for Kim and 'saves' Kim from his illness through his meditation even though Kim has now been trained to be a British spy. He says, "Son of my Soul, I have wrenched my Soul back from the Threshold of Freedom to free thee from all sin-as I am free, and sinless!" (313). Tibet comes to the aid of the West to rejuvenate it spiritually, even as the West retains its secular dominance.
The benign figure of the lama, the one with a "loving old soul" (207), does not preclude Kipling from expressing the general disagreement with Tibetan religion that was prevalent among Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century. For instance, Kipling's lama figure anguishes that the "Old law"-primitive Buddhism- "was not well followed; being overlaid… with devildom, charms, and idolatry" (15).
Even though some might find in the figure of Teshoo Lama a charitable depiction of an "Oriental" (see Hopkirk 1997), he is seen as childish, unthinking, and incapable-to the point of self-destruction-of existence in the real world. This portrayal of the lama results from simplistic idealization and ambivalence. From his early function as a father figure for Kim, he gradually reveals his practical inadequacies, as his childlike dependence on Kim grows more explicit. Later in the novel, as compared to the Western patriarchal figures of Colonel Creighton and Father Victor-the European men combining power and "worldly" knowledge-the lama's virtue and behavior increasingly appear gendered as feminine and thus ineffectual (see Sullivan 1993). Kim's search for identity and his love for the lama are both mediated by the ruling structures of power. [38]
The Dalai Lama
Over the past century, the Tibetan lama figure has come to be crys-talized in the figure of the Grand Lama, the Dalai Lama. [39] The person of the present fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has been instrumental in this. The Dalai Lama's contemporary image has moved beyond the confines of images such as Kipling's fictitious "Teshoo Lama." He is not only a figure of unalloyed admiration in the West; he symbolizes Tibet itself.
Pre-twentieth-century accounts of the Dalai Lama were unflattering. Jesuit missionaries Grueber and D'Orville, the first Europeans to visit Lhasa (1661), declined to meet the Dalai Lama, describing him as "that devilish god the father who puts to death those who refuse to adore him" (in Richardson 1988, 23). In the eighteenth century, Ippolito Desideri reasoned that the "alleged incarnation of the Grand Lama must be a work of the Devil (in De Filippi 1932, 204). Du Halde, in his brief description of Tibet, was clear: "The multitude of Lamas in Tibet is incredible… So long as he [Grand Lama] continues [to be the] Master of Tibet, Christianity will make little or no progress there" (1738, 388). Interestingly, the earliest reference to Tibet in a novel was in Balzac's Old Goriot, where the "Grand Lama" is used as a metaphor for absolute power (Bishop 2001). Positive portrayal of the Dalai Lama is relatively rare, such as in Manning's description of his meeting in 1811 with the ninth Dalai Lama (seven years old): "I was extremely affected by this interview with the lama. I could have wept through strangeness of sensation" (in Richardson 1998, 395).
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Dalai Lama was an enigma. The Younghusband expedition presented the British public with the idea of the Dalai Lama as the "mysterious god-king of Tibet, embodying a line of spiritual predecessors vaguely envisaged as stretching back into the mists of history" (in Richardson 1998, 382). The fact that during the Lhasa invasion the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and was therefore beyond the control of the British added to the mystery. Yet this mystification did not necessarily translate into admiration. For instance, when the thirteenth Dalai Lama was interviewed in 1911 by William Ellis for The Continent, a Presbyterian paper, the interviewer was not deeply impressed. "His face is thoroughly pock-marked… his ears, which are large and pointed at the top, are his most noticeable feature. His moustache is waxed horizontally, while his head, in a lesser personage, would be called bullet-shaped" (New York Times 1911). Of the things the Lama had to talk about, what most pleased his interviewer was his assertion that, upon returning to Tibet at the end of his long exile following the Younghusband expedition, he intended to send young Tibetan men to America for a Western education. There is not much hint of mysticism here but there is a reference to the "strategic" location of Tibet.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Western version of the Dalai Lama as a personification of Tibet has taken a literal form. His exile from Tibet has meant that Tibet has been emptied of its real content (see Barber 1969). "Real Tibet dream comes when you meet his Holiness because then-it's actualized" (Gere, in Frontline 1998b). He is seen as embodying Tibet and Tibetan culture: "He creates images of Tibet, builds community through alliances among resident and exiled Tibetan populations, sustains non-Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist believers, works toward Tibetan self-determination and functions as the central focus of power and identity within the Tibetan diaspora" (Houston and Wright 2003, 218).
Journalistic accounts of meeting with him tend to emphasize elements of Tibetanness in his body or attire or laugh. "The Dalai Lama embodies Tibetan culture and Tibetan cause; he provides the refugees with a concrete example of how to live by the abstract values of their culture" (Forbes 1989, 160; see also Rose and Warren 1995, which calls him the "Living Tibet"). His books are instant best sellers. And yet at the same time, the main reason for his international profile is his internationalism, his status as a global spiritual and moral leader. He "is a symbol of continuity with the spiritual traditions of Tibet… and, for western admirers, a consistent voice of sanity in an age of violence" (Hilton 2006, 29). The Dalai Lama manages to combine nationalism (always already based on particularistic identity) with universal ideas of compassion and peace (see Gyatso 1998) and this is where his appeal lies.
The Dalai Lama acts as a unifying symbol for matters of religion and politics. We may take the celebration of anniversaries in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, particularly the March 10 Uprising Day and Monlam festival, as illustrating this. Taken together these two represent the paradigm of chos srid gnyis Idan (religion and politics combined) with the Dalai Lama on the top. On Uprising Day the secular Tibetan government renews its worldly claims for national independence, using metaphors in currency in the international community. Monlam, on the other hand, attempts to ground the refugee society in the changelessness of the Buddhist doctrine and the priesthood that embodies it. Both represent the dynamic of change and continuity, the nation and religion. The unifying symbol bridging both events is the Dalai Lama, the king and the god, the active agent between this world and the next. He presents contradictory images: a "simple Buddhist monk" and the head of Tibetan Buddhism; human and god; world-renouncing as well as world- encompassing (Klieger 1994, 67). Personal loyalty to the Dalai Lama plays a key role in the government-in-exile's efforts to strengthen the sense of a unified Tibetan identity. In Korom's words, "Faith in Buddhism and in Dalai Lama's office has provided cohesion necessary for maintaining a form of 'proto-nationalism' within a broadly dispersed world society'' (1997b, 3). The Dalai Lama is also the chief symbol of the Tibetan cause in the international arena.
The unique role of the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is perhaps the major reason for Tibet's international exposure. His spiritual, nonviolent approach and frequent travels around the world not only generate much interest in
Tibetan Buddhism but also serve to maintain attention to the status of Tibetans and Chinese practices in the region. (Gurr and Khosla 2001, 280-81)
That Sino-Tibetan conflict has come to revolve around the interpretation of the Dalai Lama as an individual is also evident from Bill Clinton's statement in Beijing: "I have spent time with the Dalai Lama, I believe him to be an honest man, and I believe that if he had a conversation with President Jiang Zemin, they would like each other very much" (World Tibet News 1998). On the other hand, critics like Rupert Murdoch support the Chinese occupation by attacking him: "I have heard cynics who say he's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes… It [old Tibetan society] was a pretty terrible old autocratic society out of the Middle Ages" (World Tibet News 1999; emphasis added). These representations fail to convey through their imagery a sense of the process by which the Dalai Lama has come to represent his constituency or that the Tibet he represents is a "political Tibet with a defined territory and customs, or a highly complex society in transition with a wide range of sectors and interests, and a rapidly changing social environment" (Barnett 2001, 300-301). Without denying the cen-trality of the figure of the Dalai Lama to the Tibetan civilization, it can be argued that the current literalization of the Dalai Lama as Tibet is intimately linked to the Western imagination and Western desires. Another facet of this imagination is Tibet as the "rooftop of the world," allowing for a once-in-a-lifetime temporal and spiritual journey by Westerners.
Geopolitical Exotica Page 8