Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  We may be disillusioned to learn that Tibet is not the place we have dreamed of. Yet to allow Tibet to circulate in a system of fantastic opposites (even when Tibetans are the “good” Orientals) is to deny Tibet its history, to exclude it from a real world of which it has always been a part, and to deny Tibetans their agency in the creation of a contested quotidian reality.20 During the past three decades fantasies of Tibet garnered much support for the cause of Tibetan independence. But those fantasies are ultimately a threat to the realization of that goal. To the extent that we continue to believe that Tibet prior to 1950 was a utopia, the Tibet of 1998 will be no place.

  THE CREATION MYTH of this book began when I attended a conference on Tibet some years ago. The keynote speaker gave a public lecture that romanticized Tibetan history and demonized the Chinese. At the conclusion of the speech, the audience rose as one in a standing ovation. It seemed clear that several hundred people had been converted to the cause of Tibetan independence. The question that the lecture raised for me was whether it was possible to make the case for Tibetan independence, which, one assumes, all people of good will (when presented with the facts) would support, without invoking the romantic view of Tibet as Shangri-La. Invoking the myth seems at times almost irresistible; without it the Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet seems just one of many human rights violations that demand our attention. What sets the plight of Tibet apart from that of Palestine, Rwanda, Burma, Northern Ireland, East Timor, or Bosnia is the picture of Tibetans as a happy, peaceful people devoted to the practice of Buddhism, whose remote and ecologically enlightened land, ruled by a god-king, was invaded by the forces of evil. This is a compelling story, an enticing blend of the exotic, the spiritual, and the political. But I have become convinced that the continued idealization of Tibet—its history and its religion—may ultimately harm the cause of Tibetan independence.21 I set out to investigate some of the factors that have contributed to the formation and persistence of the romance of Tibet. This book is the result of those investigations.

  It is not a history of Western relations with and attitudes toward Tibet; the materials that I have examined derive largely from the last century. It is not a detailed social history, within which the romance of Tibet would play a highly allusive role. I have not attempted to catalog every case of Western intercourse with Tibet, even during this century. Nor have I considered in any detail, for example, the substantial body of popular literature about Tibet, both travel accounts and fiction (including Tintin in Tibet),22 written both by those who have crossed the Tibetan frontier and those who have never approached it.23 I have not considered the role of British, Russian, and Japanese espionage in the formation of knowledge about Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism: just as, during the ninth century, Indian paṇḍitas walked into Tibet carrying rosaries and perhaps prayer wheels, Indians and Tibetans of the nineteenth century, working as British agents (known as “the pundits”), walked into Tibet disguised as pilgrims, their rosaries used to measure distance, their prayer wheels emptied of mantras to conceal a compass.24 The two groups of pilgrims, separated by a millennium, each played a role in the formation of an archive and in the delineation of the Tibetan state, the first by acting as translators, making a sacred canon for Tibet, the second by acting as surveyors, making maps for the British.

  In 1942 the United States Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) sent two army officers, Captain Ilya Tolstoy (grandson of Count Leo) and Lieutenant Brooke Dolan, to survey Tibet for routes for roads and sites for airfields, both of which would be used to transport materials from India to China.25 Tibet’s neutral government refused permission to the Allies to convey any war materials across Tibetan territory. On November 30, 1943, an American C-87, a cargo plane flying the “hump” from China to India, ran out of fuel and its crew bailed out, landing near the monastery of Samye. They were rescued by Tibetans and escorted safely back to the Indian border.26 Although a landing strip was not constructed until after the Chinese invasion, flights of fancy and imagination had been launched from “Tibet” for centuries. Some returned to earth, sometimes in Tibet, sometimes elsewhere, only to refuel and fly off again. But most have remained in orbit. Some, launched at the same time, took off in opposite directions, their paths crossing only high above the earth where it is neither day or night. Without constant propulsion, however, a satellite, drawn by gravity, will eventually fall into the earth’s atmosphere.

  This book attempts to plot the trajectories of a few of these flights, noting their points of origin and their routes, decoding the signals the satellites send to earth, tracing the intersections of their orbits, investigating what keeps them aloft and why they occasionally fall flaming to earth. They include a name (Lamaism), a book (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), an impostor (T. Lobsang Rampa), a mantra (oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ), an aesthetic (Tibetan Buddhist art), an academic discipline (Tibetan Buddhist Studies), and a prison, in which Tibetan lamas in exile and their students are at once the inmates and the guards. Each ship is launched from Tibet through a complex network of discourse, and one often finds simulacra in Tibet: the hidden valley, the memory of a past life, the secret meaning of a mantra. In each case, however, it becomes clear that, once free of the specificity of Tibet, anything Tibetan begins to attract associations, whether Roman Catholic, sexual (the meaning of a mantra), or psychedelic (the reading of a Buddhist text); things Tibetan become not particular to a time and place, but universal, and in the process Tibet is everywhere and hence nowhere, functioning as an element of difference in which anything is possible.

  This book does not set out to apportion praise and blame. Neither is its purpose to distinguish good Tibetology from bad, to separate fact from fiction, or the scholarly from the popular, but to show their confluence. The question considered is not how knowledge is tainted but how knowledge takes form. The book then is an exploration of some of the mirror-lined cultural labyrinths that have been created by Tibetans, Tibetophiles, and Tibetologists, labyrinths that the scholar may map but in which the scholar also must wander. We are captives of confines of our own making, we are all prisoners of Shangri-La. This book, then, is not written outside the walls of the prison, nor does it hold a key that would permit escape. Hidden in its pages, however, some may find a file with which to begin the slow work of sawing through the bars.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Name

  It hardly seems necessary to remark that the term Lamaism is a purely European invention and not known in Asia.

  ISAAC JACOB SCHMIDT, 1835

  Altogether, therefore, “Lāmaism” is an undesirable designation for the Buddhism of Tibet, and is rightly dropping out of use.

  L. A. WADDELL, 1915

  Lamaism was a combination of the esoteric Buddhism of India, China, and Japan with native cults of the Himalayas.

  NATIONAL GALLERY BROCHURE, 1991

  A 1992 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., entitled “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration” contained four rooms devoted to Ming China. Commenting on one of the Ming paintings, a well-known Asian art historian wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.”1 The painting was of an Indian Buddhist monk, a disciple of the Buddha. The non-Chinese audience for whom the work was produced perhaps included Mongol or Tibetan Buddhists. However, the complicated theology that China’s aesthetic wealth was made to serve was not identified as Buddhism, or even Tibetan Buddhism. The art historian used the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not appear in the Tibetan language but has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate.

  “Lamaism” is often regarded as a synonym for “Tibetan Buddhism.” The terms, however, have different connotations. “Tibetan B
uddhism” suggests a regional version of a world religion, as distinguished from Japanese Buddhism or Thai Buddhism, for example. “Lamaism” carries other associations. The art historian’s comment echoes the nineteenth-century portrait of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism. Lamaism was seen as a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free of its Tibetan abode, and that abode would vanish.

  In the discourse of the Christian West, we find, among its many associations, a rather consistent pairing of “Lamaism” with “Roman Catholicism.” For example, a 1992 book review in the New York Times said of Tibetan Buddhism, “It has justly been called the Roman Catholicism of the East: ancient and complex, hierarchical and mystical, with an elaborate liturgy, a lineage of saints, even a leader addressed as His Holiness.”2 The reviewer seemed unaware, however, of the long history of this particular comparison, one that began centuries before Ogden Nash reminded us that “A one -l lama, he’s a priest. A two -l lama, he’s a beast.”3 It is as if a certain amnesia has set in, under which the association of Tibetan Buddhism, called “Lamaism,” with Roman Catholicism seems somehow free, somehow self-evident, even to be construed as somehow also objective by recourse to theories of causation, influence, borrowing, and diffusion. But the association of Lamaism with Catholicism, like all associations, is not free.

  Europe refused to identify any legitimate ancestors of Lamaism in Asia; it seemed unlike anything else. And it is in this state of genealogical absence that Lamaism was most susceptible to comparison, that it could begin to look like Catholicism. The use of the term “Lamaism” in European discourse as a code word for popish ritualism, and as a substitute for “Tibet,” is, in its own way, not unrelated to the recent disappearance of Tibet as a nation. During the nineteenth century Tibet’s existence was both threatened and contested by Britain and China. And during the twentieth century Tibet’s absence became manifest in art-exhibition catalogs and maps of Asia as it was forcibly incorporated into China. The history of these effects begins with the particular vicissitudes that led to the invention of the term “Lamaism” through a process that the nineteenth-century philologist Max Müller might have termed “the decay of language.”

  This chapter will trace this process of decay. It will begin with the term “lama,” which today conjures the image of a smiling, bespectacled Buddhist monk, but in fact is derived from Tibet’s pre-Buddhist past. Only during the ninth century did it become the official Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit term “guru.” From Tibet, the term traveled to Mongolia and to China, where it eventually came to signify not simply a Tibetan Buddhist teacher but also his teaching. It was perhaps from Mongolia, perhaps from China, that Europeans derived the abstract noun “Lamaism,” which would name the religion of Tibet, and by the late eighteenth century the term was being used to serve a wide range of agendas. One of the constants during this period was the comparison of Lamaism with Roman Catholicism. The comparison was first drawn by Catholics, who felt constrained to account for the many similarities they observed between this form of heathenism and their own true faith. The comparison would later be drawn by Protestants seeking to demonstrate that the corrupt priestcraft observed in Tibet had its counterpart in Europe. With the rise in Europe of the academic study of Buddhism, Lamaism was the term used to describe the state to which the original teachings of the Buddha had sunk in the centuries since his death. As with much European discourse about Tibet, Tibetans have been largely absent from the scene: the term Lamaism has no correlate in the Tibetan language. It was only after the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled to India in 1959 that they confronted the term, which they have generally regarded as pejorative, suggesting as it does that their religion does not deserve the designation “Buddhism.” Yet the term, so deeply engrained, persists (especially among those who fear that the very use of the term “Tibet” would occasion the wrath of the People’s Republic of China, into which Tibet has now been subsumed), “Lamaism” sometimes serving as a substitute for “Tibet,” and “Lamaist” for “Tibetan.” This chapter will trace some of the trajectories of the term.

  THE TIBETAN TERM “lama” (bla ma) is derived from two words, la and ma. The notion of la, generally translated as “soul,” “spirit,” or “life,” predates the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet. The la is said to be an individual’s life force, the essential support of the physical and mental constitution of the person. It is mobile; it can depart from the body and wander or be carried off by gods and demons, to the detriment of the person it leaves, who will become either ill or mentally unbalanced as a result. There are therefore rites designed to call the la back into the body.4 Even when the la is properly restored to its place in the body, it may simultaneously reside in certain external abodes, such as a lake, tree, mountain, or animal. The person in whom the la resides is in what Sir James Frazer would call a sympathetic relationship with these phenomena: if the la mountain is dug into, the person will fall ill. In an attempt to conquer a certain demoness, the Tibetan epic hero Gesar of Ling cuts down her la tree and empties her la lake; he fails because he does not kill her la sheep. The identity of these external la is thus commonly kept secret, and portable abodes of the la, usually a precious object of some kind (often a turquoise), are placed in special receptacles and hidden by the person who shares the la.5 Perhaps in relation to the concept of this soul, the term la also has the common meaning of “above” or “high.”

  With the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, Tibetan monks and visiting Indian paṇḍitas undertook the task of translating Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan, in the process inventing hundreds of neologisms. When these exegetes came to decide upon a Tibetan equivalent for guru, the Sanskrit term for teacher, they departed from their storied penchant for approximating the meaning of the Sanskrit and opted instead for the word “lama” (bla ma). Here they combined the term la with ma, the latter having at least three meanings: as a negative particle meaning “no” or “not,” as a substantive indicator (as in nyi ma, “sun,” or srung ma, “protector”), and as the word for “mother.” Subsequent Buddhist etymologies, drawing on the meaning of la as “high” rather than its pre-Buddhist usage as “soul,” were then construed, which explained la ma as meaning either “highest” (literally “above-not,” that is, “none above”) or “exalted mother.”6 Lama came to be the standard term for one’s religious teacher, a person so significant as to be appended to the threefold Buddhist refuge formula: Tibetans say, “I go for refuge to the lama, I go for refuge to the Buddha, I go for refuge to the dharma [his teaching], I go for refuge to the sangha [the community of monks and nuns].”7

  The other common use of the term lama is as a designation of incarnations. The institution of incarnation (sprul sku) has existed in Tibet since at least the fourteenth century, when the then recently deceased Karma pa monk Rangjung Dorje (Rang byung rdo rje, 1284–1338) was identified in his biography as having been the incarnation of Karma Pakshi (1206–1283).8 Since then, every sect of Tibetan Buddhism has adopted the practice of identifying the successive rebirths of a great teacher, the most famous instance of which being, of course, the Dalai Lamas. But there are several thousand other lines of incarnation in Tibetan Buddhism. In ordinary Tibetan parlance, such persons are called lamas whether or not they have distinguished themselves as scholars, adepts, or teachers in their present lives. To ask whether a particular monk is a lama is to ask whether he is an incarnation, and the terms bla chung and bla chen refer to minor and major incarnate lamas. The ambiguity in usage between “lama” as a religious preceptor and “lama” as an incarnation has led the current Dalai Lama in his sermons to admonish his followers that a lama (as one’s religious teacher) need not be an incarnation and that an incarnation is not necessarily a lama.9
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  One Western scholar has argued that “guru” was translated as bla ma to mean “mother to the soul” in order to “facilitate assimilation of the ‘role’ of the guru in Buddhism into the existing shamanic beliefs of the Tibetan people.”10 Whether Tibetan beliefs were “shamanic” or not, the more likely possibility is that lama meant “one endowed with the soul.”11 What is noteworthy, however, is that this meaning is lost in the Buddhist etymologies, that as Buddhism was introduced into Tibet the archaic meaning of la as “life” or “soul” disappeared.

  As the la would sometimes leave the body, Tibetan lamas would leave Tibet, traveling to the courts of Mongol khans and Manchu emperors. And it was in these realms, beyond Tibet, that “lama” would become “Lamaism.” But this process took time, for when Tibetan Buddhist teachers made their way from Tibet to the Mongolian and Chinese centers of power it seems that they were referred to not as lamas but by terms derived from the languages of their hosts. Marco Polo, for example, refers to the Tibetans at the court of Kublai Khan as Bacsi (bakshi, the Mongolian word for “teacher”): “The sorcerers who do this [prevent storms] are TEBET and KESIMUR [Kashmir], which are the names of two nations of idolaters. . . . There is another marvel performed by those BACSI of whom I have been speaking as knowing so many enchantments. . . . These monks dress more decently than the rest of the people, and have the head and the beard shaven.”12 At the Chinese court of the early Ming dynasty, Tibetan monks were simply called seng, as were Chinese monks, and the religion of Tibet was called Buddhism (fo jiao).13