Prisoners of Shangri-La
Page 5
In 1775 during the reign of the Manchu Emperor Qianlong we find perhaps the first official usage of the Chinese term lama jiao, one of the sources from which “Lamaism” seems to derive. Jiao is the standard Chinese term for “teaching,” being employed in terms such as dao jiao (the teaching of the dao, “Daoism”), ru jiao (the teaching of the literati, “Confucianism”), and fo jiao (the teaching of the Buddha, “Buddhism”). By the reign of Qianlong, “lama” had come to be used as an adjective to describe Tibetan religion in contexts that in the past would have simply used the term “Buddhist.”14 In 1792 Qianlong composed his Lama Shuo (Pronouncements on Lamas), preserved in a tetraglot inscription (in Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, and Tibetan) at the Yonghe-gong (today known to tourists as the “Lama Temple”) in Beijing. Here Qianlong defends his patronage of a Tibetan sect the Chinese called the “Yellow Hats” (the Geluk) from his Chinese critics by claiming that his support has been merely expedient: “By patronizing the Yellow Church we maintain peace among the Mongols. This being an important task we cannot but protect this (religion). (In doing so) we do not show any bias, nor do we wish to adulate the Tibetan priests as (was done during the) Yuan dynasty.”15 Here are some of Qianlong’s comments on the term “lama”:
[Buddhism’s] foreign priests are traditionally known as Lamas. The word Lama does not occur in Chinese books. . . . I have carefully pondered over its meaning and found that la in Tibet means “superior” and ma means “none.” So la-ma means “without superior,” just as in Chinese a priest is called a “superior” (shang-jên). Lama also stands for Yellow Religion.16
Qianlong had clearly learned the standard Tibetan Buddhist gloss of the term as “highest.” He seems determined to place the term “lama” at some distance from his reign, to declare to the subjects who speak the four languages of his realm that lamas are foreigners and that his patronage of them has been motivated by political expediency. We also see in Qianlong’s discussion an example of the implication of the term “lama” and, later, “Lamaism” in Manchu imperial projects directed toward Tibet. In this case, Qianlong, who had been a generous patron and dedicated student of Tibetan lamas, sought to assure his Chinese subjects that foreign priests exercised no influence over him. As the term “Lamaism” gained currency in Europe, it would gain further implications and associations from other imperial projects, as during the nineteenth century Tibet would become an object of European colonial interests. European ideologues, however, would be far less explicit than the Manchu emperor about the political connotations of their use of the term.
BEFORE MOVING to Europe and the nineteenth century, it would be useful to have some sense of what Europeans knew about Tibet. By the middle of the eighteenth century, knowledge of the world, gathered from the accounts of explorers, traders, and missionaries, was compiled in works like Bernard Picart’s The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World, published in London in 1741. His description of Tibetan Buddhism follows, although nowhere do the words “Tibet” or “Buddhism” appear. Instead he describes the religion of the Mongols (called Tartars) and the Kalmyks (“Calmoucks”—Mongols living in the region of Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea), suggesting that this knowledge was gained from travelers to those regions rather than from travelers to Tibet. Picart describes Tibet’s religion as Marco Polo described it almost five centuries earlier: as idolatry. During the seventeenth century, only four religions were identified: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Idolatry. And here we see the seeds of the association of this form of idolatry with Catholicism, in terms like “convent” and “pontiff,” and in the glossing of “lama” as “priest.”
The Mongolian Tartars, Calmoucks, and others, according to them, have, properly speaking, no other God but their Dalai-Lama, which signifies, as we are informed, Universal Priest. This Sovereign Pontiff of all the Tartarian Idolaters, and whom they acknowledge as their God, resides toward the Frontiers of China, near the City of Potola, in a Convent, situate on the Summit of an high Mountain, the Foot whereof is inhabited by above twenty thousand Lamas, . . . who have their separate Apartments round about the Mountain, and, according to their respective Quality and Function, are planted nearer, or at a greater Distance from their Sovereign Pontiff. . . . The Term Lama, in the Mongolian Language, signifies Priest; and that of Dalai, which in the same Language implies vast Extent, has been translated in the Language of the Northern Indians, by Gehan, a Term of the same Signification. Thus Dalai-Lama, and Prete-Gehan are synonymous Terms, and the Meaning of them is Universal Priest.
There are two Monarchs, one Temporal, and the other Spiritual, at Lassa, which, some say, is the Kingdom of Tanchuth, or Boratai, or Barantola. The Spiritual Monarch is the Grand Lama, whom these Idolaters worship as a God. He very seldom goes abroad. The Populace think themselves happy, if they can by any Means procure the least Grain of his Excrements, or Drop of his Urine; imagining either of them as infallible Preservative from all Maladies and Disasters. These Excrements are kept as sacred Relicks, in little Boxes, and hung around their Necks. Father Le Comte imagines Fo [the Chinese term for “Buddha”] and the Grand Lama to be one and the same Deity; who, according to the Idea of these Tartars, must for ever appear under a Form that may be felt or perceiv’d by the Senses, and is supposed to be immortal. He is close confined, adds he, to a Temple, where an infinite Number of Lama’s attend him, with the most profound Veneration, and take all imaginable Care to imprint the same awful Ideas of him on the Minds of the People. He is very seldom expos’d to View, and whenever he is, ’tis at such a Distance, that it would be morally impossible for the most quick-sighted Person to recollect his Features. Whenever he dies, another Lama, who resembles him as near as possible, is immediately substituted in his Stead; for which Purpose, as soon as they perceive his Dissolution drawing nigh, the most zealous Devotees, and chief Ministers of the imaginary God, travel the whole Kingdom over, to find out a proper Person to succeed him. This pious Intrigue is carried on, says he, with all the Dexterity and Address imaginable. The Deification of the Lama, if we may depend on the Veracity of Father Kircher, was first owing to the extraordinary Trust and Confidence which those People repos’d in their Prester-John.17
There are hints of blasphemy here, as a mere mortal is regarded as God, and of pollution, as the populace worships human waste. There is also a hint of the sinister, as Picart, unaware that the new Dalai Lama is found only after the death of the present one, explains that the priests search the realm for a credible substitute when the death of the Dalai Lama draws near. Finally, there is the familiar suggestion, which we will encounter again, that anything authentic in this religion is due to the influence of a Christian. Here Picart explains that the people once placed their faith in Prester John, the fabled Catholic priest whose utopian kingdom was located sometimes in Asia, sometimes in Africa. Only later was their trust transferred to a false god, the Dalai Lama.
Tibetan religion was not only described but also explained. Thus, in a fascinating entry on Tibet in his 1784 Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, Johann Herder speculated that the religion of the lamas (still not identified as Buddhism) could not have originated in the robust northern zones of Tibet, but must have come from a warmer clime because it was “the creature of some enervate minds, that love above all things to indulge in bodily rest, and freedom from thought.” He concludes: “If there be a religion upon Earth, that deserves the epithets of monstrous and inconsistent, it is the religion of Tibet.”18 Such condemnation of Tibetan religion was widespread. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau makes a reference to “the religion of the Lamas,” which, along with that of the Japanese and Roman Catholicism, may be classified as “the religion of the priest,” a type of religion that “is so clearly bad, that it is a waste of time to stop to prove it as such.”19
Perhaps the first occurrence of the term “Lamaism” in a European language appears in the reports of the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who traveled through t
he realm of Catherine the Great for the Royal Academy of Sciences in Petersburg. His reports of 1769, translated into English by the Reverend John Trusler and published in 1788 in his The Habitable World Described, contain a long description of the religion of the Kalmyks, based largely on conversations with Kalmyk converts to Christianity. There Pallas refers to the “religion of Lama” and the “tenets of Lamaism.”20 In 1825 Jean Pierre Abel Rémusat, in his “Discours sur l’origine de la hiérarchie lamaïque,” uses the term des lamistes.21 In the account of his travels in western Ladakh from 1819 to 1825, William Moorcroft refers to “those places where Lamaism still predominates.”22 Hegel discusses Lamaism in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion of 1824 and 1827 and in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, delivered between 1822 and 1831, in which he finds the notion of a living human being worshipped as God, as he describes the Dalai Lama, paradoxical and revolting, just as Picart had almost a century earlier. Hegel writes, “The Abstract Understanding generally objects to this idea of a Godman; alleging as a defect that the form here assigned to the Spirit is an immediate [unrefined, unreflected] one—that in fact it is none other than Man in the concrete. Here the character of a whole people is bound up with the theological view just indicated.”23
Hegel seems to have based his discussion on some version of the reports of Catholic missionaries rather than on any Tibetan text. When the first translations from Tibetan into English became available the impression they created was of a religion not nearly as coherent as Hegel had postulated. The French explorer Victor Jacquemont, in a letter from Ellora on May 22, 1832, described the translations done by the Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös: “They are unspeakably boring. There are some twenty chapters on what sort of shoes it is fitting for lamas to wear. Among other pieces of preposterous nonsense of which these books are full, priests are forbidden to take hold of a cow’s tail to ford a swift river. There is no lack of profound dissertations on properties of griffins’, dragons’, and unicorns’ flesh or the admirable virtues of hoofs of winged horses. To judge by what I have seen of that people and what M. Csoma’s translations tell us about them, one would take them for a race of madmen or idiots.”24 It would seem then that neither access to translations of Tibetan texts nor eyewitness description could consistently dispel European fantasies about Tibet. There were, however, occasional voices of dissent.
In his 1835 essay “Ueber Lamaismus und die Bedeutungslosigkeit dieses Nahmens” (On Lamaism and the Meaninglessness of This Term), Isaac Jacob Schmidt (1779–1847), who had studied Buddhism among the Kalmyks in Russia from 1804 to 1806, explains that la means “soul” and ma means “mother,” and challenges an assumption that would persist far into the next century:
It is well-known that the Tibetan and Mongolian peoples, as far as their religious faith is concerned, were until not long ago almost universally called Lamaites (Lamaiten) and their religion, Lamaism. Indeed, even now there are many people, otherwise quite well-informed, who imagine that there is an essential difference between Buddhism and Lamaism. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the non-existence of this imagined difference and to show at the same time the extent to which the religion of Tibetans and Mongols represents a particular manifestation in the history of Buddhism. It seems hardly necessary to remark that the term Lamaism is a purely European invention and not known in Asia. The peoples of that faith call themselves followers of the teachings of the Buddha and are consequently, according to the European expression, Buddhists; the meaning of this term agrees completely with the Sanskrit Bauddha.25
Schmidt (a Mongolist) seems unaware of the Chinese term lama jiao, from which “Lamaism” may derive. Nonetheless, his assertion that Lamaism is essentially a European category remains remarkable, both for its insight as well as for the fact that it has gone unnoticed in the long history of Western discourse about Lamaism.
To trace the movements of this discourse we must go back before the late Qing dynasty in China and the early nineteenth century in Europe to the time of Marco Polo and other early European visitors to the Chinese court during the Yuan dynasty. It is there that we hear the first recitations of the similarities between Tibetan Buddhism and Roman Catholicism. The trope is employed differently by two distinct groups of European exegetes of the Orient, first the Catholic, then the Protestant. One of the earliest Catholic observers was the Dominican Jourdain Catalani de Séverac, who visited the empire of the “Grand Tartar”:
In that empire, there are temples of idols and monasteries of men and women, as there are at home, with choirs and the saying of prayers, exactly like us, the great pontiffs of the idols wearing red robes and red hats, like our cardinals. Such luxury, such pomp, such dance, such solemn ceremony is incredible in the sacrifices to idols.26
The Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Andrade, writing in 1626 after a Tibetan lama had watched him perform the Mass, learned from the lama that the “Grand Lama in Utsang [Central Tibet] offers small quantities of bread and wine, that he drinks of them himself and distributes the remainder to the other lamas and that he blows and breathes with his mouth over the wine he presents to God, which he alone and no one else may do. And he added that this Grand Lama wears on his head a tiara like mine but much larger.”27 The German Jesuit John Grueber, who reached Lhasa in 1661, observed of the Tibetans:
Thus they celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass with Bread and Wine, give extreme Unction, bless married Folks, say Prayers over the Sick, make Nunneries, sing in the Service of the Choir, observe divers Fasts during the year, undergo most severe Penances, and, among the rest, Whippings; consecrate Bishops, and send-out Missionaries who live in extream Poverty, and travel bare-foot through the Desarts as far as China.28
Once such a similarity was observed it had to be accounted for, and Catholic missionaries to China and Tibet turned to history and theology to explain why Tibetan lamas looked like priests of the Holy Mother Church. The Vincentian missionaries Huc and Gabet, who traveled in China and Tibet from 1844 to 1846, noted the affinities between what they called “Lamanesque worship” and Catholicism:
The cross, the mitre, the dalmatica, the cope which the Grand Lamas wear on their journeys, or when they are performing some ceremony out of the temple; the service with double choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer, suspended from five chains, and which they can open or close at pleasure, the benedictions given by the Lamas over the heads of the faithful; the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, spiritual retirement, the worship of the saints, the feasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy water, all these are analogies between the Buddhists and ourselves. Now, can it be said that these analogies are of Christian origin? We think so.29
They then recount a story about Tsong kha pa (1357–1419), the deified “founder” of the Geluk sect, which by the time of the Vincentians’ visit had wielded political control over Tibet for two centuries. They tell of the young Tsong kha pa’s encounter with a lama “from the most remote regions of the West,” who took him as his disciple and “initiated [him] into all the doctrines of the West” in the few years before his peaceful death. What was remarkable about this lama, besides his unfathomable learning, were his gleaming eyes and his large nose. Huc and Gabet predictably speculate that this stranger with the prominent nose was a Catholic missionary. “It may be further supposed that a premature death did not permit the Catholic missionary to complete the religious education of his disciple, who himself, when afterwards he became an apostle, merely applied himself, whether from having incomplete knowledge of Christian doctrine, or from having apostatized from it, to the introduction of a new Buddhist liturgy.”30 The implication and regret, of course, is that if the Catholic missionary had lived longer, Tsong kha pa would have received full instruction in the dogmas of the Church and so could have converted Tibet to Christianity.
Here is perhaps the most common strategy for explaining similarity, called borrowing or, more properly, “genealogy” (also known as “diffusionism” in a
nthropology)—that is, accounting for coincidental phenomena or traits by appealing to historical influence. The recourse to genealogy attempts to establish not only a direct historical relation, but also a hierarchy based on the chronological proximity of the influencing agent to the originary ancestor. Hence Huc and Gabet could lay claim to all that they found “authentic” in Tsong kha pa’s Buddhism by ascribing its origin to one of their own, and at the same time dismiss Tibetan Buddhism as deficient because Tsong kha pa’s instruction in the Gospel remained incomplete, their own mission thereby legitimated as the fulfillment of the mysterious Westerner’s work. The Europeans thus claimed a position of power, indeed the power of origin, over Tsong kha pa, whom they perceived as the most important figure in the history of Tibetan Buddhism.31
The first European encounters with Tibetan Buddhism occurred long before the rise of the science of philology, long before any notion of an ancestral heritage of “mankind” that could attempt to explain the manifestation of parallel developments in different parts of the globe. Thus, there were only two possible (but not necessarily mutually exclusive) explanations for the apparent similarities between Tibetan lamas and Catholic priests: they were either the result of the work of one of their own or they were the result of the work of another. Those who believed the former included the Jesuit missionaries to Cathay and Tibet, who were motivated by the belief (which persisted into the eighteenth century, as evidenced in the passage from Picart) that they would find remnants of the church of Prester John, who some thought may have been the first Dalai Lama.32 If this was not the case, then the similarities must be the work of an other, a cause not for the delight expressed by Huc and Gabet, but for a deep anxiety, reflected in the words of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (apparently Picart’s chief source), who in 1667 described the adulation afforded the Dalai Lama: