Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering, and to lead them—each of whom has been our mother in the past and yet has been led by ignorance to commit immoral acts—to Amitābha, the buddha of infinite light. My offering of light is for all living beings, even as insignificant as lice and nits, to dispel their pain and to guide them to the state of enlightenment. I offer this sacrifice as a token of longlife offering to our root guru His Holiness the Dalai Lama and all other spiritual teachers and lamas.

  The reasons for the self-immolations are many, and it has been noted that they originated in the People’s Republic of China not by Tibetans to protest Chinese repression of Tibetan culture but by Han Chinese as a form of protest against the seizure of property. One of the elements unique to the Tibetan cases, however, is the evocation by some of the butter lamp (mchod me; literally, “offering fire”) to describe self-immolation; one is combusting one’s own body for the cause of Tibet because there is nothing else to offer in a culture that is no longer able to produce its own accursed share.

  Still, the state of Buddhism in Tibet over the past two decades has not been unremittingly bleak. With so many Tibetan monasteries and temples razed to the ground since 1950, the distinguished Nyingma lama and treasure discoverer (gter ston) Jigme Phuntshok (1933–2004) sought to find Tibetan Buddhism beneath the earth, discovering numerous treasure texts and the remains of the palace of the mythical king, Gesar of Ling. Jigme Phuntshok’s followers established not a monastery but an “encampment” (sgar) in Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province. The encampment was ostensibly something more temporary than a monastery, yet it was populated by tens of thousands of monks, nuns, and lay disciples who seemed to have emerged from underground like the bodhisattvas in the fifteenth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, building all manner of makeshift dwellings from plywood on the surrounding hillsides. Painted in the maroon color of monastic robes, the site became a photographer’s dream. Called Larung Gar (bla rung sgar), it was destroyed by the Chinese authorities in 2001, only to rise again, like the stūpa that emerges from beneath the earth in the eleventh chapter of the Lotus. In 2016, the Chinese authorities ordered a drastic reduction in the size of Larung Gar, destroying thousands of dwellings and evicting thousands of monks and nuns.

  . . .

  Georges Bataille describes Sir Charles Bell as the first white man to have a sustained relationship, what he calls “a kind of friendship,” with a Dalai Lama.14 He is correct, but Bell was not the first white man to have such a relationship with a Tibetan Buddhist hierarch. The Scotsman George Bogle (1746–1781) joined the East India Company and arrived in Calcutta in 1769, at the age of twenty-two. Learning Persian and Hindi (or Hindustani, as it was called at the time), he rose through the ranks, gaining the attention of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal. In 1774, the third Panchen Lama sent a letter and some gifts to Hastings. The third Panchen Lama, Lobsang Palden Yeshe, was a beloved figure in the long line of incarnations, renowned as a scholar. Because the eighth Dalai Lama was in his minority, the Panchen Lama held particular political authority as well as religious authority.

  Hastings promoted Bogle, then registrar of the Court of Appeals, to the position of envoy to the Lama of Tibet, dispatching him to his seat at Tashilhunpo Monastery. After four months in Bhutan, Bogle and his companion entered Tibet on October 23, 1774, the first Britons to do so. They stayed for about six months, returning to India in June 1775 after two more months in Bhutan. Bogle’s purpose was to establish trade relations with Tibet and to pursue the possibility of a British delegation to the Qing Court.

  Bogle and the Panchen Lama seem to have developed a genuine friendship, enabled in part by the fact that they were able to converse easily in Hindi, a language that the Panchen Lama had learned from his Ladakhi mother. In a time of Occidental suspicion of Oriental intrigue, Bogle had nothing but praise for the Tibetan potentate: “I will confess, I never knew a man whose manners pleased me so much, or for whom upon so short an acquaintance I had half the heart’s liking.”15

  The Panchen Lamas are considered to have a special connection to the kingdom of Shambhala and to the Kālacakra Tantra. The third Panchen composed perhaps the most famous of the guides to Shambhala, called the Shambha la’i lam yig, in 1775, the year of Bogle’s visit. In this work he provides a detailed description of the route but declares in the end that one needs more than a map in order to arrive in the kingdom; one needs also the power of mantra and the power of merit, otherwise one will meet with certain death along the way. Describing one of their last conversations before his departure for Bengal, Bogle writes, “He then showed me the images and the dress which he intended to send down to Bengal . . . in order to put up in the temple which he proposes to build on the banks of the Ganges. He desired me to inquire particularly about the situation of a town called Shambul, about which he said the pundits of Bengal would be able to inform me.”16

  What is noteworthy, and poignant, here is that the person most learned in the Kālacakra Tantra in his day, the Tibetan lama who that very year would complete his guidebook to Shambhala, did not think that Shambhala was located somewhere in Tibet. He did not, in fact, know where it was and turned to a foreigner for help in locating “a town called Shambul,” hoping perhaps that he might hear of it in his travels or, if not, that he might know whom to ask.

  Although he could not understand it, the Panchen Lama apparently liked to hear Bogle speak English; Bogle reports that he would recite passages from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” published in 1751. It is a meditation on death, the equal of any chapter on the uncertainty of death (’chi ba mi rtag pa) in a Tibetan Buddhist text:

  The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

  And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

  Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

  Five years after Bogle recited the poem to the Panchen Lama, they would both be dead, the Panchen Lama at age forty-two, Bogle at thirty-four. In 1778, the Panchen Lama had accepted an invitation to visit the Qianlong Emperor at his summer palace in Chengde, where replicas of Tashilhunpo and the Potala had been built. The Panchen Lama was received with great pomp, and, according to the detailed account by Konchok Jigme Wangpo (1728–1791), the Qianlong Emperor showed great respect and fondness for the Panchen Lama.17 From Chengde, the Panchen Lama proceeded to Beijing, where he died of smallpox on November 12, 1780. His body was placed in the lotus position inside a golden stūpa, which was in turn placed inside a copper stūpa that was suspended on poles and carried on a journey of seven months and eight days from Beijing to Tashilhunpo, where it was entombed. Five months later, on April 3, 1781, George Bogle died in Calcutta. He is buried there in the South Park Street Cemetery.

  Governor-General Warren Hastings was determined not to lose the relationship that the East India Company had established with the Lama of Tibet. Thus, in 1783, he dispatched Lieutenant Samuel Turner (1759–1802) from Calcutta to Tashilhunpo. Prior to Turner’s return to India he was granted an audience with the recently discovered fourth Panchen Lama (1782–1853). The toddler was seated on a throne, and Turner was instructed to address him directly, being assured that although the child could not speak, he could understand. Calling him the “Teshoo Lama” (from “Tashi Lama”), Turner described the child’s reaction: “Teshoo Lama was at this time eighteen months old. Though he was unable to speak a word, he made the most expressive signs, and conducted himself with astonishing dignity and decorum. His complexion was of that hue, which in England we should term rather brown, but not without colour. His features were good; he had small black eyes, and an animated expression of countenance; altogether, I thought him one of the handsomest children I had ever seen,”18

  Later that day, Turner was visited by two of the Panchen Lama’s attendants, They assured Turner that should the Panchen Lama, “when he began
to speak, happen to have forgotten it, they would early teach him to repeat the name of Hastings,”19

  Hastings’s name would soon be repeated in the halls of Parliament as he faced charges of mismanagement and corruption in a long impeachment trial that began in 1788. The prosecution, led by Edmund Burke, would fail, but Hastings would suffer financial ruin, Others in our story would also meet sad fates. Before leaving Tibet, Ippolito Desideri wrote sophisticated refutations of the doctrines of rebirth and emptiness in excellent Classical Tibetan.20 He would return to Italy at the time of the suppression of the Jesuits; his works were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. In Tibet, over the course of the nineteenth century, a series of Dalai Lamas died young.

  In 1946, the year that Georges Bataille began writing The Accursed Share, Gendun Chopel was arrested by the Tibetan authorities in Lhasa and charged with treason. He emerged from prison a broken man, providing several explanations for his arrest. According to one, after his translation of the biography of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, the British approached him about remaining in India and doing other translations for them. When he refused, the British representative in Lhasa, Hugh Richardson, spread rumors about him among Tibetan aristocrats, leading to false charges against him and to his arrest. He died in 1951, a month after watching troops of the People’s Liberation Army march into Lhasa.

  The lineage of Panchen Lamas continues into the present day, but the whereabouts of the current Panchen Lama—at least, the Panchen Lama identified by the current Dalai Lama—remain unknown. The eighth Panchen Lama, the most recent incarnation of the man who befriended Bogle and the brown-skinned child who enchanted Turner, disappeared in 1995. In 1998, he was called “the world’s youngest political prisoner.” In 2018, he is still a political prisoner, no longer the youngest. The cause of Tibetan independence is proclaimed less often than it was twenty years ago. The Dalai Lama has not yet given the Kālacakra initiation in Beijing. And so, in this realm of saṃsāra, we continue our search for a town called Shambul.

  Acknowledgments

  The greater part of this book was written at the scholars’ Shangri-La otherwise known as the National Humanities Center, where I held the Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship, which is endowed by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. I received additional support from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan.

  The writing of this book would have been much more difficult without the support of excellent staff at the National Humanities Center, under the direction of Robert Connor and Kent Mullikin. I would especially like to thank two of the librarians, Eliza Robertson and Jean Houston, whose indomitable efforts gave me access to scores of obscure books, long unread. That the resulting book may sometimes appear to be little more than a string of potent quotations is due to the riches they provided me with such skill and dedication. Susan Meinheit of the Library of Congress kindly provided photocopies of a number of Tibetan texts that would have otherwise been unavailable to me.

  The days of writing were punctuated by stimulating conversations with my fellow fellows, among whom I would like especially to thank David Armitage, Paul Berliner, George Chauncey, Constantin Fasolt, Jane Gaines, Jacquelyn Hall, Joy Kasson, William Ray, Charles Stewart, and Paul Strohm.

  For reading the manuscript in whole or part, I am grateful to Janet Gyatso, Clare E. Harris, Elizabeth Horton Sharf, Robert Sharf, and especially to Catherine Bell. Alan Thomas of the University of Chicago Press provided patient and wise counsel throughout the project.

  One of the pleasant coincidences of my fellowship at the National Humanities Center was that the Center is located near Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, where my wife, Tomoko Masuzawa, serves on the faculty. Thus, my fellowship provided the rare opportunity, understood only by other commuting couples, to live with my spouse. This book is dedicated to her, with my heartfelt gratitude for the many ways she has sustained me over the ten years of our partnership.

  Introduction

  At the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a work entitled “Call to Nature,” by Mickey Hart, percussionist of the Grateful Dead, was performed. It began with the chant of a Tibetan monk from Gyuto monastery. In 1993 chants of Tibetan monks from the same monastery were broadcast at deafening volume by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Waco, Texas, as part of their psychological assault on the Branch Davidians. The 1995 film Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls finds the protagonist living in a Tibetan monastery, doing penance for having failed to rescue a raccoon. He is dressed in the red robes and yellow hat of a Geluk monk, seeking to attain a state of “omnipresent supergalactic oneness.”1 On June 16, 1996, fifty thousand people gathered at Golden Gate Park for a “Free Tibet” benefit concert, which featured performances by Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, Yoko Ono, and John Lee Hooker (among others). Prior to performing, the bands were blessed by Tibetan monks. The 1992 Christmas issue of Paris Vogue had as its guest editor the Dalai Lama. In the 1990 series Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper tells the local police force, “Following a dream I had three years ago, I have become deeply moved by the plight of the Tibetan people and filled with a desire to help them. I also awoke from the same dream realizing that I had subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique involving mind-body coordination operating hand in hand with the deepest level of intuition.”2 In the better grocery stores one can purchase Tibetan Root Beer: “gently invigorating cardamom and coriander in a Tibetan adaptation of Ayurvedic herbs.” In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, Mayor “Diamond” Joe Quimby tells the assembled citizens awaiting the arrival of Michael Jackson, “This is the most exciting thing to happen to our fair town since the Dalai Lama visited in 1952. And so, I hereby declare that Route 401, currently known as the Dalai Lama Expressway, will henceforth be known as the Michael Jackson Expressway.” Thus when we see advertised, under the heading “Booty, Spoils & Plunder,” a “Tibetan Shaman’s Jacket” (for women, $175) in a 1995 J. Peterman catalog we are not surprised to read the accompanying copy that says, “It’s official. Crystals are out, Tibetan Buddhism is in.”

  But Tibetan Buddhism has been in for some time. In the 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the teddy-bear like creatures called Ewoks spoke high-speed Tibetan. In 1966, when the Beatles recorded “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which begins “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,” John Lennon asked the recording engineer to make his voice sound like “the Dalai Lama on a mountain top.” In 1925 the French poet Artaud wrote “Address to the Dalai Lama,” which begins “We are your most faithful servants, O Grand Lama, give us, grace us with your illuminations in a language our contaminated European minds can understand, and if need be, transform our Mind, create for us a mind turned entirely toward those perfect summits where the Human Mind no longer suffers. . . . Teach us, O Lama, the physical levitation of matter and how we may no longer be earthbound.”3 In 1948 the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace (vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, 1940–44) foundered when it was revealed that he had written letters to a Russian Tibetophile that began “Dear Guru.” And in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Sherlock Holmes accounts for his whereabouts during the years he was assumed dead—after plunging with Professor Moriarty over Reichenbach Fall—by telling Watson, “I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend.”

  On September 6, 1995, the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer carried on the front page a color photograph of the Dalai Lama being embraced by Senator Jesse Helms, under the headline “Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right.” The next day the photograph appeared on T-shirts in Chapel Hill. But by then, the words below the picture seemed redundant. They read “Anything Is Possibl
e.” This book is an attempt to understand how it is possible.

  Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have long been objects of Western fantasy. Since the earliest encounters of Venetian travelers and Catholic missionaries with Tibetan monks at the Mongol court, tales of the mysteries of their mountain homeland and the magic of their strange—yet strangely familiar—religion have had a peculiar hold on the Western imagination. During the last two centuries, the valuation of Tibetan society and, particularly, its religion, has fluctuated wildly. Tibetan Buddhism has been portrayed sometimes as the most corrupt deviation from the Buddha’s true dharma, sometimes as its most direct descendant. These fluctuations have occurred over the course of this century, at its beginning as Tibet resisted the colonial ambitions of a European power and at its end as it succumbed to the colonial ambitions of an Asian power.

  Typical of those who have held the negative view is Susie Carson Rijnhart, a medical missionary who traveled in Tibet from 1895 to 1899. In her account of her journey, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, she writes:

  But nothing could be further from the truth than the belief entertained by many occidentals that the lamas are superior beings endowed with transcendent physical and intellectual gifts. On the contrary, they are mere children in knowledge, swayed by the emotions that play on the very surface of being. During all our four years’ sojourn among the Tibetans of various tribes and districts, we did not meet a single lama who was conversant with even the simple facts of nature . . . , for the great mass of them we found to be ignorant, superstitious and intellectually atrophied like all other priesthoods that have never come into contact with the enlightening and uplifting influence of Christian education. They are living in the dark ages, and are themselves so blind that they are not aware of the darkness. Ten centuries of Buddhism have brought them to their present state of moral and mental stagnation, and it is difficult to believe that any force less than the Gospel of Christ can give them life and progress in the true sense.4