Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  At the same time, many, notably Theosophists, held quite a different view:

  A prophecy of Tsong-ka-pa is current in Tibet to the effect that the true doctrine will be maintained in its purity only so long as Tibet is kept free from the incursions of western nations, whose crude ideas of fundamental truth would inevitably confuse and obscure the followers of the Good Law. But, when the western world is more ripe in the direction of philosophy, the incarnation of the Pban-chhen-rin-po-chhe—the Great Jewel of Wisdom—one of the Teshu Lamas, will take place, and the splendour of truth will then illuminate the whole world. We have here the true key to Tibetan exclusiveness.5

  We see here a play of opposites: the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad. This opposition has functioned throughout the history of Europe’s relation to Asia: “West” and “East,” “Occident” and “Orient”—each a historical rather than a geographic construct. As will be evident in the chapters that follow, the play of opposites has been both extreme and volatile in the case of Tibet, and it remains at work in contemporary attitudes toward Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

  The opposition of the authentic and the derivative was also imagined to operate inside Tibet. In his popular 1951 survey Buddhism (which invokes, like so many others, the landscape of Tibet), Christmas Humphreys writes, “The great spaces . . . and the silence where men are scarce and wildlife is rarer still, all lend themselves to introverted thought, to the development of abnormal ways of thought, to the practice of the best and worst of the manifold powers of the mind.”6 For many decades, what interested scholars about Tibet was not Tibetan literature or practice, but the translations of Sanskrit texts lost in India but preserved in Tibet, held as if in deep freeze, safe from the dangers of Muslim fire and monsoon water. These texts, even in translation, were valued as the authentic documents of Mahayana Buddhism, which had been condemned by an earlier generation of scholars as a deviation from the Buddha’s original teachings. Yet Tibetan commentaries on these works and their articulations in various ritual forms were generally dismissed as arid repetition devoid of the animation of authenticity. “Indigenous” Tibetan religion was portrayed as a debased practice. The French explorer André Guibaut wrote of Tibet, “Nowhere but here, in this atmosphere, could the lofty conception of Buddha unite with the dark, primitive rites of ancient Shamanism, to culminate in the monstrosity of Lamaism.”7

  Even those Europeans with a more fanciful interest in Tibet distinguished between the Tibetans’ own religious practice and the secret knowledge of occult masters. The Theosophists believed Tibet to be the abode of the Mahatmas (Great Souls), keepers of the wisdom of Atlantis who congregated in a secret region of Tibet to escape the increasing levels of magnetism produced by civilization; they believed as well that the Tibetans were unaware of the Mahatmas’ presence in their land. In James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, what makes Shangri-La invaluable is not the indigenous knowledge of the indigenous people, but that over the centuries of his long life, a Belgian Catholic missionary had gathered all that was good in European culture—first editions of great books, priceless works of art, musical scores—and that a brotherhood of foreigners (mostly Europeans but some Americans and Chinese) protected them from the impending world conflagration. They lived in the lamasery of Shangri-La, which towered physically and symbolically above the Valley of the Blue Moon, where the happy Tibetans lived their simple lives. For centuries many of Tibet’s devotees have most valued not the people who live there but the treasures it preserves.

  These nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century constructions of Tibetan Buddhism are part of the legacy of colonialism. Yet unlike most of Asia’s Buddhist societies, Tibet neither came under direct European control nor did it make any real attempt to “modernize” (despite certain failed attempts by the thirteenth Dalai Lama) by establishing European-style universities, importing European technologies, or sending elites to Europe for education. Among the many reasons the European powers were deterred is that in 1792 the Manchu Emperor Qianlong declared imperial control over all Tibetan communications with foreign countries. This did not sever Tibet’s longstanding relations with Inner Asia and China. Instead, until the twentieth century, further relations of Europeans with Tibet were conducted from the borderlands. During the nineteenth century, Tibet became a cherished prize in the Great Game played by Britain and Russia, the two great European powers of the region. Both repeatedly attempted to establish relations with the government in Lhasa, and often sent spies, sometimes disguised as Buddhist pilgrims, into Tibet on map-making missions. It was during this period that Tibet came to be consistently portrayed as “isolated” or “closed,” characterizations that meant little except in contrast with China, which had been forcibly “opened” to British trade after the Opium War of 1839. Tibet was thus an object of imperial desire, and the failure of the European powers to dominate it politically only increased European longing and fed the fantasy about the land beyond the Snowy Range. Highly romanticized portrayals of traditional Tibet emerged, some of which continue to hold sway.

  Many of these hyperrealities, ruled by the law of opposites, have come into play in the depiction of the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet that began in 1950. There were times prior to the nineteenth century when India and China were exalted by the poets and philosophers of Europe. China had been a particular favorite of the French Enlightenment, which saw the rule of a huge population by a class of scholar-gentlemen, the mandarins, as an ideal. India was a favorite of the German Romantics, who saw it as an abode of Spirit. This was an early manifestation of the continuing European romance in which the West perceives some lack within itself and fantasizes that the answer, through a process of projection, is to be found somewhere in the East. But by 1800, as European colonial interests in Asia were accelerating, the valuation of both societies had plummeted; they now seemed corrupt and backward, so incapable of governing themselves that their colonization seemed fully justified. During this period of European exploration and colonization, Tibet was closed to Europeans. Bounded on the south by the highest mountains in the world, at a time when mountains signified a cold and pristine purity, Tibet could be imagined as a domain of lost wisdom. Because Tibet did not become a European colony, many of Europe’s fantasies about India and China, dispelled by colonialism, made their way across the mountains to an idealized Tibet. But many myths were of Tibetan making. Long before the Theosophists wrote of the secret region where the Mahatmas reigned, before James Hilton described the Edenic Valley of the Blue Moon in Lost Horizon, Tibetans wrote guidebooks to idyllic hidden valleys (sbas yul).

  During the nineteenth century Tibet and China were regarded by many European scholars and colonial officers as “Oriental despotisms,” one ruled by a Dalai Lama, an ethereal “god-king,” the other by an effete emperor.8 As early as 1822, Hegel, discussing Lamaism in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, found it both paradoxical and revolting that the Dalai Lama, a living human being, was worshipped as God. During the Second World War, the Chinese, and Chinese Communists, were briefly portrayed as freedom-loving, in contrast to the despotic Japanese. After the success of the Communists in 1949, the image of the Oriental despot resurfaced and was superimposed onto Chairman Mao, not as emperor but as the totalitarian leader of faceless Communists. The Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet was perceived not as a conquest of one despotic state by another, but as yet another case of opposites, the powers of darkness against the powers of light. The invasion of Tibet by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950 was (and often is still) represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits, victimizing not only millions of Tibetans but the sometimes more lamented Buddhist dharma as well. Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman. According to this logic of opposites China must be debased for Tibet to
be exalted; for there to be an enlightened Orient there must be a benighted Orient; the angelic requires the demonic. The German Tibetophile who called himself Lama Govinda wrote in 1966:

  [W]hat is happening in Tibet is symbolic for the fate of humanity. As on a gigantically raised stage we witness the struggle between two worlds, which may be interpreted, according to the standpoint of the spectator, either as the struggle between the past and future, between backwardness and progress, belief and science, superstition and knowledge—or as the struggle between spiritual freedom and material power, between the wisdom of the heart and the knowledge of the brain, between the dignity of the human individual and the herd-instinct of the mass, between the faith in the higher destiny of man through inner development and the belief in material prosperity through an ever-increasing production of goods.9

  Since the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959 (a true diaspora in that it was a forced dispersal by an oppressor of a morally superior dispersed), Tibetan Buddhist culture has been portrayed as if it were itself another artifact of Shangri-La from an eternal classical age, set high in a Himalayan keep outside time and history. According to a 1968 documentary, “Tibet seemed not to belong to our earth, a society left on the shelf, set in amber, preserved in deep freeze, a land so close to the sky that the natural occupation of her people was to pray.”10 The history of Tibet was portrayed as pre- and postpivot, having turned, with the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh century, from a society that had been directed outward, to conquer the world, into one that directed all its energies inward, to conquer the mind. As one scholar explains, “[Buddhism] turned their society from a fierce grim world of war and intrigue into a peaceful, colorful, cheerful realm of pleasant and meaningful living.”11

  The Chinese takeover exposed Tibet’s timeless culture to time, time that would cause the contents of the culture to wither and turn to dust like the bodies of those who dare leave Shangri-La. In a closing scene of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, Maria, the young and beautiful Russian, ages and dies when she leaves the Valley of the Blue Moon. In this apocalyptic vision the Tibetans are portrayed as ancient conservators of a timeless wisdom in a timeless realm, now thrust from their snowy sanctuary into history, where time is coming to an end and, with it, their wisdom. (A 1995 television documentary in Time-Life’s Lost Civilizations series was entitled “Tibet: The End of Time.”) In this particular version of the fantasy, those left in Tibet seem lost, while those in exile have to cope with the body blows of modernity, moving, as is often noted, from a country that even in the twentieth century had prayer wheels but no wheels on wagons, multiple metaphoric vehicles to liberation but no carts.

  The ravages wrought by China’s policies resulted not only in the destruction of monasteries, temples, texts, and works of art, but also in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. This would seem to be enough to sustain the contrast with life in Tibet before the invasion. But here again the logic of opposites is at work. To the growing number of Western adherents of Tibetan Buddhism “traditional Tibet” has come to mean something from which strength and identity are to be derived. It represents an ideal that once existed on the planet in high Tibet, a land free from strife, ruled by a benevolent Dalai Lama, his people devoted to the dharma and (we have recently learned) the preservation of the environment and the rights of women.12 The mountaineer Marco Pallis wrote, “Sheltered behind the rampart of the Himalaya, Tibet has looked on, almost unscathed, while some of the greatest traditions of the world have reeled under the attacks of the all-devouring monster of modernism.”13 It is here that we see the volatility of the mythologizing and mystification of Tibetan culture. We often hear, for example, that Tibetan society was hermetic, sealed off from outside influence. Yet the reports of travelers from the early eighteenth century note that Tartars, Chinese, Muscovites, Armenians, Kashmiris, and Nepalese were established in Lhasa as merchants. The monasteries in Lhasa drew monks from as far west as the Kalmyk region of western Russia, between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea; from as far east as Sichuan Province in China; from as far north as the Buryiat region near Lake Baikal in Siberia; and from as far south as the Sherpa regions of Nepal.

  Nor was Tibet, in Georges Bataille’s phrase, “an unarmed society.”14 Tibet did not renounce armed conflict when it converted to Buddhism in the eighth century, or in the eleventh century, or under the fifth Dalai Lama. The fifth Dalai Lama assumed temporal power over Tibet through the intervention of his Qoshot Mongol patron, the Gushri Khan, whose troops defeated the king of Tsang, patron of the Karma Kagyu. Tibetan armies fought against Ladakh in 1681, against the Dzungar Mongols in 1720, in numerous incursions into Bhutan during the eighteenth century, against invading Nepali forces from 1788 to 1792 and again in 1854, against Dogra forces invading Ladakh from Kashmir in 1842, and against the British in 1904.

  Tibet prior to Chinese invasion and colonization has been portrayed in the West as an idyllic society devoted to the practice of Buddhism, a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma, a society in which, through the workings of an “inner democracy,” a peasant boy might become a great lama. But traditional Tibet, like any complex society, had great inequalities, with power monopolized by an elite composed of a small aristocracy, the hierarchs of various sects (including incarnate lamas), and the great Geluk monasteries. The subordinate members of the society included nonaristocratic laymen, non-Buddhists, and women.

  The turn-of-the-century colonialist saw incarnate lamas as “an incarnation of all vices and corruptions, instead of the souls of departed Lamas.”15 In contrast, an extreme form of the view held by many in the West today argues that the Tibetan “gross national product of enlightened persons must have been proportionally higher than any other country ever.”16 Although the sons of peasants were chosen as Dalai Lamas and the sons of nomads mastered the monastic curriculum to become respected scholars and abbots, the system of incarnation was not a cosmic meritocracy above the mundane world of power and politics.

  But the point is not to debunk with a catalog of facts our most cherished notions about Tibet (as useful as such a project might be) to more accurately depict what Tibet was or is “really like.” The search for the real Tibet, beyond representation, lies at the heart of the fantasy of Tibet and contains its own ideology of control, which was put to devastating use during the colonial period. Nor is the point to suggest that Tibetan Buddhism is merely an instrument of oppression exercised in bad faith by power-hungry clerics. The important questions are why these myths persist and how they continue to circulate unchallenged.

  In his 1991 Sacred Tibet, Philip Rawson explained that “Its real interest for us is that Tibetan culture offers powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to Western egotistical lifestyles, our short attention span, our gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions, and our despair when these, finally, inevitably, disappoint us.”17 Tibet is seen as the cure for an ever-ailing Western civilization, a tonic to restore its spirit. And since the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959 there seems an especial urgency about taking this cure, before it is lost forever. Today, however, it is no longer necessary to go to Tibet when Tibet can come to us. Tibetan monks now tour Europe and the United States, chanting and dancing to raise funds to support their monasteries in India. Of the first such show in 1924, an English journalist writing for the Sunday Express expressed a sentiment that would not be shared by today’s audiences: “I cannot imagine anything more likely to kill the romance and mystery of Tibet than this ill-conceived idea of bringing some of the holy men of Buddhism to play in a masquerade of the religion on a London stage.”18

  Indeed, amid the many meanings ascribed to Tibet, it is often tempting to see Tibet as a vacuum, its emptiness attracting assorted influences and associations from the outside, whether Nepalese or Chinese artistic forms or fascist fantasies, which have styled Tibet both as the headquarters of an anti-Aryan conspiracy (in concert with Jews
, Catholics, and Freemasons) and as the preserve, in its caves, of the esoteric wisdom of an ancient Aryan civilization, where all that was imagined to be good and true about the premodern had been preserved.

  In the process, Tibet’s complexities and competing histories have been flattened into a stereotype. Stereotypes operate through adjectives, which establish chosen characteristics as if they were eternal truths. Tibet is “isolated,” Tibetans are “content,” monks are “spiritual.” With sufficient repetition, these adjectives become innate qualities, immune from history. And once these qualities harden into an essence, that essence may split into two opposing elements.19 Thus, Lamaism may be portrayed in the West as the most authentic and the most degenerate form of Buddhism, Tibetan monks may be portrayed as saintly and rapacious, Tibetan artists may be portrayed as inspired mystics and mindless automatons, Tibetan peasants may be portrayed as pristine and filthy. This language about Tibet not only creates knowledge about Tibet, in many ways it creates Tibet, a Tibet that Tibetans in exile have come to appropriate and deploy in an effort to gain both standing in exile and independence for their country.

  In the continual play of opposites, the view of old Tibet as good is put forward by the Tibetan government-in-exile. The representation of old Tibet as bad, so familiar from European accounts of the nineteenth century, is appropriated by the Chinese colonial government (as evidenced in their recent virulent attacks on the Dalai Lama) in their campaign to incorporate the nation of Tibet into China. To recognize this play of opposites strengthens the case against the Chinese occupation and underscores the dangers of romanticizing Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.