The same observation had been made a year earlier, this time about Tibet, by L. Austine Waddell in his The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism: “For Lāmaism is, indeed, a microcosm of the growth of religion and myth among primitive people; and in large degree an object-lesson in their advance from barbarism toward civilization. And it preserves for us much of the old-world lore and petrified beliefs of our Aryan ancestors.”54 More interesting, however, although not noted by Rhys Davids or Waddell, is the fact that this same (and equally anti-Papist) view had been advanced more forcefully in German by Isaac Jacob Schmidt a half century earlier, although unlike the British scholars he did not distinguish Buddhism from Lamaism. Writing in 1835, he concluded his essay on the term “Lamaism”:
This brief review of a not unimportant subject in the cultural history of humankind . . . should suffice to demonstrate the lack of foundation for the European idea of Lamaism, above all else, however, to refute this bizarre notion that Lamaism somehow owed its existence to Christianity and its organization to the papal hierarchy, an idea that was brought to Europe about 150 years ago by some Capuchins who had visited Tibet as missionaries and that found unquestioning agreement in Europe. . . . This monkish prejudice had absolutely no awareness of the fact that equal circumstances must produce similar results, that just as the earlier semi-barbarism of Europe in its time produced the papacy out of Christianity, so, under equal conditions, the semi-barbarism of Asia, which continues until today, could not find it very difficult to produce a similar dominating priesthood out of the considerably older and no less dogmatically constructed Buddhism, and that it was not at all necessary for one [of those priesthoods] to assist the other. Every spiritual corporation, just as soon as its power is able to reach a certain height and to govern and dominate the benightedness of the ignorant masses arbitrarily through the mental predominance of an elevated culture, will not fail to demonstrate similar manifestations at any time in any country, but these manifestations must gradually grow more obscure and disappear eventually just as soon as the inheritance of all humankind, namely the spirit of examination, discrimination, and knowledge, gradually achieves maturity.55
Schmidt’s hopeful conclusion is perhaps a reflection of Enlightenment social philosophy. Nonetheless, he anticipates the evolutionary model to which Rhys Davids and Waddell subscribed. Here the Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism, figured prominently as the end point in the Victorian version of the history of Buddhism, according to which, after the early centuries of the brotherhood, Buddhism in India followed a course of uninterrupted deterioration from its origins as a rational, agnostic faith to a degenerate religion rife with ritual and superstition. The specific course charted by the British Buddhologists was as follows: With the rise of the Mahayana, the agnostic idealism and simple morality of primitive Buddhism was replaced by “a speculative theistic system with a mysticism of sophistic nihilism.”56 Further deterioration occurred with the rise of the Yogācāra school, which, for reasons that remain unclear, was regarded with particular antipathy: “And this Yoga parasite, containing within itself the germs of Tantrism, seized strong hold of its host and soon developed its monster outgrowths, which crushed and cankered most of the little life of purely Buddhist stock yet left in the Mahāyāna.”57 (The author of these two statements, L. Austine Waddell, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, conducted his research while serving as the assistant sanitary commissioner for the Darjeeling district; in 1889 his “Are Venomous Snakes Autotoxic?” was published in Scientific Memoirs by Medical Officers of the Army of India.) Were this not enough, the progress of the contamination continued as the pure essence of primitive Buddhism was once more polluted in India with the rise of tantrism.
It was this mere shadow of original Buddhism that was belatedly transmitted to Tibet. Prior to the introduction of Buddhism, Waddell recounts, the Tibetans were “rapacious savages and reputed cannibals, without a written language, and followers of an animistic and devil-dancing or Shamanistic religion, the Bön, resembling in many ways the Taoism of China.”58 The introduction of a corrupt form of Indian Buddhism into this atmosphere resulted in something that Waddell calls “primitive Lāmaism,” which he defines as “a priestly mixture of Ṣivaite [sic] mysticism, magic, and Indo-Tibetan demonolatry, overlaid by a thin varnish of Mahāyāna Buddhism. And to the present day Lāmaism still retains this character.”59 Thus the corrupt form of Buddhism that arrived in Tibet was further adulterated with the demon worship of the Tibetans: “The Lamaist cults comprise much deep-rooted devil-worship. . . . For Lamaism is only thinly and imperfectly varnished over with Buddhist symbolism, beneath which the sinister growth of poly-demonish superstition darkly appears.”60 Once again, the discourse of the demonic comes into play, as the superstitions of the non-Buddhist religions, both Indian and Tibetan, portrayed as parasites, eventually overwhelm the Buddhist host. Lamaism thus stands at the nadir of a long process of contamination and degeneration from the origin. In Kim, Rudyard Kipling has the Teshu Lama (as the British referred to the Panchen Lama) express this view: “[I]t was in my mind that the Old Law was not being followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry.”61 Colonel Younghusband, who had led Waddell to Lhasa, was not impressed by one of the great scholars of his age, the Holder of the Throne of Ganden (dGa’ ldan khri pa Blo bzang rgyal mtshan): “And his spiritual attainments, I gathered from a long conversation I had with him after the Treaty was signed, consisted mainly of a knowledge by rote of vast quantities of his holy books. The capacity of these Tibetan monks for learning their sacred books by rote is, indeed, something prodigious; though about the actual meaning they trouble themselves but little.”62 Even Madame Blavatsky, whose Mahatmas lived in Tibet, decried the degradation of their wisdom in the hands of Tibetans: “How the pristine purity of these grand revelations was dealt with may be seen by studying some of the so-called ‘esoteric’ Buddhist schools of antiquity in their modern garb, not only in China and other Buddhist countries in general, but even in not a few schools in Thibet, left to the care of uninitiated Lamas and Mongolian innovators.”63 She accepts the view of Lamaism as a degenerate form of pure Buddhism, writing in Isis Unveiled, “From pure Buddhism, the religion of these districts has degenerated into Lamaism; but the latter, with all its blemishes—purely formalistic and impairing but little the doctrine itself—is yet far above Catholicism.”64
Once identified as an endpoint in the process of degeneration, Lamaism also seemed to creep backward in time. In a discussion of the Mahayana sutras in his 1877 Buddhism, Rhys Davids writes:
The later books were afterwards translated into Tibetan, and a new doctrine attained in Tibet to so great a development that Tibetan Buddhism, or rather Lamaism, has come to be the exact contrary of the earlier Buddhism. It has been worked up there into a regular system which has shut out all of the earlier Buddhism, although a few of the earlier books are also to be found in Tibetan translations.65
It is perhaps noteworthy that in this work Rhys Davids subsumes all of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhisms of China, Japan, and Tibet, under the heading Tibetan Buddhism. All “subsequent” Buddhisms are thereby absorbed under the category of Lamaism, as if the parasite identified by Waddell had spread retroactively to infect all Buddhisms that existed in a form other than the texts preserved in European libraries, all Buddhisms that were not under European control.
Tibetan Buddhism was thus regarded as doubly other in a complex play of Orientalist ideologies: with the discovery and translation of Sanskrit and Pali texts, Romantic Orientalism invented and controlled Buddhism, casting it in the role of the mimetic other—the other that is like oneself—and called it “original Buddhism.” In Victorian Britain this Buddhism was represented as a “religion of reason,” within which morality and free intellectual inquiry were possible without the institution of a church and its rituals. European and American philologists thus became the true and legitimate conservators of this “classical tradition.” Tibetan Buddhism
was then constructed as the other of this other (“original Buddhism”). It was a product not of the religion of reason but of the degeneration of the Indian textual tradition, namely, the Mahayana and tantra, the latter of which had been excoriated for centuries. “Tantra,” a notoriously vague term used generally to designate an Indian movement that made use of activities traditionally proscribed in the religious path (most notably sexual intercourse), was regarded by nineteenth-century Orientalists as the most depraved of abominations. Such regard went back at least to 1730, when the Capuchin missionary Orazio della Penna described the tantric literature of Tibet: “I have not read this infamous and filthy law of Khiute [tantra], so as not to stain my mind, and because it is unnecessary. For to confute it one must know in the abstract of what it treats, and there is little good or indifferent that is not mixed up with much more witchcraft, magic incantations, and obscenity.”66
A nexus of forces were therefore brought to bear to create this degenerate form of Buddhism found in Tibet, “Lamaism.” This history, from its pristine origins in the distant past to the present state of decay and corruption, was derived from two different modes of representation, both controlled by the European Orientalist: what is known of early Buddhism, of primitive Buddhism, of true Buddhism, is based on texts, while the knowledge of “modern Buddhism,” which deviated wildly from the texts, is derived from direct observation. Again, Monier-Williams from the Duff Lectures: “For it is certain that without any practical experience of what Buddhism has become in modern times—I mean such an experience as can only be gained by residing or traveling in countries where Buddhism now prevails—the mere study of ancient scriptures is likely to be misleading.”67 That is, texts can elucidate only true Buddhism; to understand the current state of what Buddhism “has become,” “practical experience” of the missionary and the colonial officer is essential.
Victorian scholars were not unanimous in their portrayal of Lamaism as an extreme deviation from the Buddha’s original teachings. For those connected with the missionaries, such as Monier-Williams, the root cause of the corruption lay in the Buddha himself, who denied the existence of human aspirations to the transcendent, who rejected the possibility of a supernatural force that could aid in the struggle for salvation, who could find no place in his system for a Ruler of the Universe. Thus, despite the high order of his moral precepts, the system of the Buddha was destined to turn into its opposite:
In point of fact it was not a development that took place, but a recoil—like the recoil of a spring held down for a time by a powerful hand and then released. And this resulted from the simple working of the eternal instincts of humanity, which insisted on making themselves felt notwithstanding the unnatural restraint to which the Buddha had subjected them; so that every doctrine he taught developed by a kind of irony of fate into a complete contradiction of itself.68
Lamaism was the collective embodiment of those contradictions. For others who were more sympathetic to their creation of true Buddhism, Lamaism was not a natural outcome of the founder’s original faith but a deviation from it. In either case, however, comparisons with Roman Catholicism served as a further form of condemnation, where “Lamaism” becomes a substitute for “Papism.” The Tibetans, having lost the spirit of primitive Buddhism, now suffered under the oppression of sacerdotalism and from the exploitation of its priests, something that England had long since thrown off. But it is not simply analogy that Pali Buddhism (which by the end of the nineteenth century was largely under British control) is to Tibetan Buddhism (which at the end of the nineteenth century Britain was actively seeking to control) as Protestantism is to Roman Catholicism. It is rather a strategy of debasing the distant and unsubjugated by comparing it with the near and long subjugated, subjugated both by its relegation to England’s pre-Reformation past and to its present European rivals and Irish subjects. For example, Waddell begins his chapter “The Hierarchy and Re-Incarnate Lāmas” with two epigraphs—“Le roi est morte, vive le roi!” and a passage from the Talmud—and then heads a subsequent page with “The First Dalai Lāma-Pope,” associating Lamaists with the French, Jews, and Catholics in only two pages.69 “Lamaism” thus served as a code word for “Papism” in a master narrative that used its representation of the other without to attack the other within. This was not the first time Protestant polemics had figured in scholarship on other religions; such polemics had shaped the study of the religions of Late Antiquity, sometimes referred to as “Pagano-Papism.”70 And just as Papism was implicated in theories of world domination, so also was Lamaism. In Sax Rohmer’s 1917 The Hand of Fu Manchu, the headquarters of the sinister doctor’s conspiracy to dominate the globe is in Tibet, “a mystery concealed from the world behind the veil of Lamaism.”71 In 1937 the Nazi J. Strunk published Zu Juda und Rom-Tibet: ihr Ringen um die Weltherrschaft (On Juda and Rome-Tibet: Their Struggle for World Domination).72
At the end of both his tomes on Tibet, Waddell offers his vision of Tibet’s future, when “its sturdy overcredulous people are freed from the intolerable tyranny of the Lāmas, and delivered from the devils whose ferocity and exacting worship weigh like a nightmare upon all.”73 There is reason for hope, he argues, when one considers that during the twelfth century the Catholic Church seemed in hopeless decay, but then Dante and then the Renaissance appeared. Indeed, Waddell claims, a knowledge of Buddhism might have saved the Catholic Church from the degeneration it suffered soon after “the disappearance of its immortal founder.” Waddell, with apparent magnanimity, next demonstrates his possession of true Buddhism (which the Tibetans lack) by claiming that Christians are finally coming to understand that the teachings of Jesus are more akin to those of the Buddha than they are to Paul, Augustine, or Luther. Completing the gesture of control, he ends by proclaiming that rather than burying Tibetan Buddhism as a decadent cult, it is the mission of England “to herald the rise of a new star in the East, which may for long, perhaps for centuries, diffuse its mild radiance over this charming land and interesting people. In the University, which must ere long be established under British direction at Lhasa, a chief place will surely be assigned to studies in the origin of the religion of the country.”74 Waddell wrote these words not from a position of imperial longing at the border, but at the conclusion of Lhasa and Its Mysteries, his account of the British invasion of Tibet in 1903 and 1904, during which he served as chief medical officer.
Lamaism thus serves as a fundamental trope in the history that late Victorian colonialism wrote for itself. Like all historicisms, it has its fantasy of pristine origin, here embodied in true Buddhism, and its fantasy of the end, here embodied in Tibetan Buddhism, called Lamaism, which is seen as an inevitable end whether it is a perversion of the Buddha’s intention or its fulfillment. As the end point in the process of degeneration, Tibetan Buddhism after a certain stage has no history, only stasis. Change must be introduced from the outside. Whether Tibet was to be cured by the restoration of true Buddhism or by conversion to Christianity, the cure seemed to be in the possession of the West, and the colonization of Tibet was considered by some to be the best means of its administration. By defining Tibetan Buddhism as something apart, as disconnected from the other Buddhisms of Asia, all of which were under the sway of the West by the end of the nineteenth century, it was easier to portray Tibet as entirely other and hence incapable of its own representation.
These nineteenth-century denotations of Lamaism are succinctly captured, under the more archaic “Lamanism,” in the current Oxford English Dictionary:
+ lamanism. Obs. [After F. lamanisme (Huc).] = LAMAISM. So la’manical a. = LAMAIC
1852 Blackw. Mag. LXXI. 339 The Tibetan portion . . . is inhabited by a rough race, . . . retaining many primitive superstitions beneath the engrafted Lamanism. 1867 M. JONES Huc’s Tartary 243 The foundation of the lamanical hierarchy, framed in imitation of the pontifical court. Ibid. 252 It is with this view [of enfeebling the strength of the Mongol princes] that the Emperors patronise lamanism.
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In the 1852 reference Lamaism is not native to Tibet but had at some point been “engrafted” to the primitive superstitions of the people living in the Tibetan region of another country. In the first 1867 reference the Lamaist church is a copy of the original Roman Catholic hierarchy. And in the third reference, which is reminiscent of Qianlong’s declaration, there is a disavowal of allegiance; the Chinese emperor’s support has been a pretense. In all three references, none of which mentions “Buddhism,” Lamaism is portrayed as somehow inauthentic, with that inauthenticity determined in relation to what is more original and more real: in the first reference, Lamaism is an appendage of Tibetan superstition; in the second it is a late copy of an original; in the third it is the object of the pretense of realpolitik.
As is the case with so many of the “isms” in the study of religion, those designated by the term come to use it only when they enter into the fray of defining their “lost culture” and are confronted by the definitions of the West, definitions created by competing ideologies of authenticity. As stated at the outset, there is no term in the Tibetan language for “Lamaism”; Tibetans refer to their religion as the “Buddhist religion” (sangs rgyas pa’i chos) or, more commonly, “the religion of the insiders” (nang pa’i chos). The use of the term “Lamaism” has been condemned by the spokesman for Tibetan culture, whose own name recalls the circumstances of its coinage, the current Dalai Lama. His first book on Tibetan Buddhism, published in 1963 and composed in part for foreign consumption, concludes:
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