Some people say that the religion of Tibet is “Lamaism” (literally, “religion of lamas,” bla ma’i chos), as if it were a religion not taught by the Buddha, but this is not so. The original author of the sūtras and tantras that are the root source of all schools of Tibetan Buddhism is the teacher Śākyamuni Buddha. . . . Tibetan lamas took these as the basis and root and then listened to them, contemplated them, and meditated upon them; among the main points they did not fabricate a single doctrine that does not accord with [the teachings of the Buddha].75
Here we see the rhetoric of authenticity again at work, upholding (in opposition to the claims of Victorian scholars) the fidelity of Tibetan Buddhism to the teachings of the Buddha and the Indian masters and therefore minimizing Tibetan contributions to the development of Tibetan Buddhism. The response to “Lamaism” by Tibetans has not been unambiguous, however. The first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the United States, founded in 1955 by the Mongolian monk Geshe Wangyal in Freewood Acres, New Jersey, took as its name the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America.76
During the 1960s and 1970s, in the years following Tibet’s invasion and annexation by China, the earlier Buddhological valuation of Tibetan Buddhism (sometimes still called Lamaism) as degenerate reached its antipodes, as young scholars came to exalt Tibet as a pristine preserve of authentic Buddhist doctrine and practice. Unlike the Buddhisms of China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, Tibetan Buddhism had not been tainted by Western domination. Tibet was no longer valuable to scholars of Buddhism only as an archive of the scriptures of Indian Buddhism, long lost in the original Sanskrit but preserved in a highly accurate Tibetan translation.77 The Tibetan diaspora that followed the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 brought with it a great flood of autochthonous Tibetan Buddhist literature, heretofore unstudied, that, largely through the efforts of the Library of Congress office in New Delhi, was made available to the universities of Europe and North America. Scorned by Waddell at the end of the last century as “contemptible mummery,” this literature was now hailed by Orientalists of a new age, both professional and amateur, as a repository of ancient wisdom whose lineage, as the Dalai Lama himself claimed, could be traced back to the Buddha himself.78 The comparisons with Catholicism continued, but with Tibetan Buddhism now being valued as the truer faith, the Dalai Lama was the better pope. Typically avant garde, Artaud wrote in his 1925 “Address to the Dalai Lama,” “We are surrounded by bellowing popes, poetasters, critics, dogs, our Mind is gone to the dogs who think directly in terms of the earth, who think incorrigibly in the present. . . . For you well know what transparent liberation of souls, what freedom of Mind in the Mind we mean, O acceptable Pope, O true Pope of the Mind.”79
What is the site of Lamaism in the late twentieth century, decades after the Orientalists used Lamaism for the rhetorical subjugation of Tibet in anticipation of its colonial subjugation? “Lamaism” is still used as a subject heading by the Library of Congress. It also retains currency among art historians. Pratapaditya Pal, regarded as the leading Western authority on Tibetan art, wrote in 1969, “The word lama is generally used in Tibet to designate a Buddhist monk [in fact, only a tiny percentage of the monks in Tibet were referred to as lamas]; and since in Tibet the monks ultimately controlled both the temporal and spiritual life of the people, Lamaism is particularly apposite to define that form of Buddhism that developed in Tibet.”80 The Victorian view of Lamaism as a mixture of Buddhist elements from India and primitive Tibetan animism persists. In 1991 the Asian art historian Sherman Lee defined the Sanskrit term vajrayāna, used in India long before Buddhism was introduced into Tibet, as “Tantric Buddhism with an admixture of pre-Buddhist Tibetan ‘Bön’ worship of nature deities and demons.”81
The following definition appeared in the free brochure dispensed to the public at the “Circa 1492” exhibition: “Lamaism was a combination of the esoteric Buddhism of India, China, and Japan with native cults of the Himalayas.”82 Among the many observations that might be made about this sentence, it is initially noteworthy that the verb is in the past tense, that Lamaism and hence its substitute Tibetan Buddhism no longer exist but inhabit a static past. Beyond the tense of the verb, there is little to suggest that this sentence was not composed a century ago. There are the same subtle differentiations from true Buddhism: Lamaism is not Buddhism or even esoteric Buddhism (a “late development”), but a combination of various forms of esoteric Buddhism with native cults. (The Victorian scholars would have corrected the erroneous attribution of any Japanese influence on Tibetan Buddhism.) Lamaism is thus a hybrid, a mixture, a concoction of outside influences and native primitivism. It therefore follows that the signifier “Tibet” should occur nowhere in the definition.
Although the power of representation did not lead to Western political domination of Tibet, that power has been appropriated by China, which was finally able to bring Tibet under colonial dominion in a process that began with the invasion by its People’s Liberation Army in 1950. The rhetorical trajectory that began when lama jiao became Lamaism has thus come full circle, as Lamaism, invested with two centuries of Orientalist discourse, has once again become lama jiao and been returned to the Orientals. This is not to suggest that the Chinese do not have their own long history of denigrating Tibetan culture. Yet the term that had been coined during the Qing, and used to isolate Tibet from Chinese culture, is now used to dissolve it into the motherland. In post-1959 Chinese publications on Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism is easily subsumed under the critique of Buddhism and religion in general and condemned for its suppression of the masses. Nonetheless, the Western representation of Tibetan Buddhism as Lamaism, a corruption of original Buddhism, has been appropriated by the Chinese to justify to the West the invasion and colonization of Tibet. In 1964 the only Westerners allowed to visit Tibet were apologists for the Chinese Communist Party. In a 1964 travelogue, The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet, Stuart and Roma Gelder resuscitated the Victorian rhetoric of Lamaism to defend the Chinese destruction of Buddhist institutions in Tibet: “The rich spiritual inheritance which, according to some who fear Communism more than they understand Tibetan Buddhism, is being destroyed by the Chinese, was in fact not there to be destroyed. It existed only in the imaginations of those who mistook the mechanical observance of ritual and religious custom for spiritual experience.”83
The abstract noun, coined in the West, has become naturalized as if it were an empirical object, the manipulation of which has effects beyond the realm of rhetoric. Eventually, Lamaism becomes so particular, so different, so often described as not this and not that, that it becomes unbound and starts to float freely, like “Zen” or “mysticism.” In the process the “original” site of Lamaism, Tibet, loses its boundaries and is declared missing, dissolving into the People’s Republic of China. As an Australian missionary to Tibet observed earlier in the century in The Land of Mystery, Tibet, “Tibetan national existence and Lamaism are one and the same thing.”84 Tibet, unexplored and uncolonized by the European, is absorbed into China. The very use of the term Lamaism is a gesture of control over the unincorporated and the unassimilated, used first by the Qing over Tibet, then as a code word for “Papism” by the British over Catholic Ireland and Europe, and finally by European Buddhology over the uncolonized and unread Tibet. Long the blank spot on the map marked only by the word “Thibet,” the contours have now been drawn, the rivers traced to their sources, the mountains measured, only to have the borderlines, and the name “Tibet,” effaced. Even among the partisans of the Tibetan cause, the focus remains largely on the unsited, on the ethereal and transhistorical, on Tibetan religion as the sole legacy, even the irreducible essence, of Tibetan culture. There is not now and never was Tibet, there was only Lamaism. The term used to mark off Tibet remains; Tibet is nowhere to be found.
Tibetans are said to believe that if the la, the soul, leaves the body, the person becomes unbalanced or insane. With the formation of lama from la, the original meaning of la left lama, causing a loss of equilibrium that res
ulted finally in “Lamaism.” My purpose here has been to attempt a belated ritual of “calling the la” back to its lost abode.
CHAPTER TWO
The Book
Instead of being something said once and for all—and lost in the past like the result of a battle, a geological catastrophe, or the death of a king—the statement, as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
In “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” Jorge Luis Borges ponders the miracle that occurred when a nineteenth-century English eccentric came upon a manuscript of five hundred quatrains by a thirteenth-century Persian astronomer. In his translation of a selection of the poems, the Englishman “interpolated, refined and invented” to produce one of the nineteenth century’s most popular works of European literature, assuring, as Swinburne observed, “Omar Khayyám a permanent place among the major English poets.” The case calls for “conjecture of a metaphysical nature,” and Borges wonders whether Umar was reincarnated in England or whether, around 1857, the spirit of Umar lodged in FitzGerald.1
Like the Rubaiyat, the work known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the product of a chance meeting between a fourteenth-century Tibetan author and a latter-day eccentric, Walter Wentz of San Diego, California. Since its publication in 1927, it has been reincarnated several times. The Tibetan work known by this title, one of many Buddhist texts known by the name Bar do thos grol (literally, liberation in the intermediate state [through] hearing), is a terma (gter ma), a “treasure text,” one of the thousands of works said to have been secreted by Padmasambhava during his visit to Tibet in the late eighth century, works that he hid in stones, lakes, pillars, and in the minds of future generations because Tibetans of the eighth century were somehow unprepared for them. Thus were they hidden to be discovered at the appropriate moment.
The Bar do thos grol is one such work. In its incarnation as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it has been discovered and rediscovered in the West over the course of almost a century; five major (and several minor)2 discoveries of this text, each somehow suitable for its own time, have occurred since 1919. Together they illuminate much about the various purposes that the Bar do thos grol has been meant to serve. Each of the five, in the order of their appearance in the West, will be considered here: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Walter Y. Evans-Wentz (1927); The Psychedelic Experience, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (1964); The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa (1975); The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche (1992); and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by Robert Thurman (1994). From its first incarnation in English in 1927, the work has taken on a life of its own as something of a timeless world spiritual classic. It has been made to serve wide-ranging agendas in various fields of use, agendas that have far more to do with the twentieth-century cultural fashions of Europe and America than with how the text has been used over the centuries of its history in Tibet.
The first and most famous of these is, of course, Evans-Wentz’s work, which has served as the progenitor of the later versions to a greater extent even than the “original” Tibetan text. It alone has had a number of reincarnations, in the form of editions, each successive with more prefaces and forewords added to the text. Since publication in 1927 its various editions have sold more than 525,000 copies in English; it has also been translated into numerous European languages. Its full title is The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering. It was “compiled and edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz.” This was the first of four books on Tibetan Buddhism that Evans-Wentz would produce from lamas’ translations; the others are Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa (1928) and Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), both based on translations by Kazi Dawa-Samdup, and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954), based on translations done for Evans-Wentz by three Sikkimese.3 The first edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains a preface by Evans-Wentz and a foreword, “Science of Death,” by Sir John Woodroffe, an official of the British Raj who, during his tenure as judge of the High Court of Calcutta, became a scholar and devotee of Hindu tantra, publishing works such as The Serpent Power under the pseudonym Arthur Avalon. There is also Evans-Wentz’s own extensive introduction and his copious annotations on Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s translation. The second edition (1949) contains an additional preface by Evans-Wentz. The third edition (1957) brought the book close to the form in which it is best known today, adding a “Psychological Commentary” by C. G. Jung, translated by R. F. C. Hull from the original German version that appeared in Das Tibetanische Totenbuch, which was published in Zurich in 1935. The third edition also contains an introductory foreword by Lama Anagarika Govinda. Finally, Evans-Wentz contributed a preface to the first paperback edition (1960).
Although the first sentence of Evans-Wentz’s preface to the first edition reads, “In this book I am seeking—so far as possible—to suppress my own views and to act simply as the mouthpiece of a Tibetan sage, of whom I am a recognized disciple,” the version of the book that we have today is filled with other voices (the various prefaces, introductions, forewords, commentaries, notes, and addenda comprise more than half of the book).4 Together they overwhelm the translation, the increasing popularity of the work having compelled this unusual assortment of authorities to provide their own explanations of the text.
This amalgam of commentaries appended to a translation of a Tibetan text has become the most widely read “Tibetan text” in the West. Its initial appeal may have been due in part to the resurgence of spiritualism after the First World War and a renewed interest in knowing the fate of the dead. It was then that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for example, turned to spiritualism and tried to contact his son, who had been killed in the war.5 But the text has proved remarkably resilient in subsequent generations, gaining far more readers in its English version (with subsequent translations into other European languages) than the Tibetan text upon which it is based ever had in Tibet. Prior to 1959 “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” (or a Tibetan translation of this title) was unheard of among traditional Tibetan scholars. The Tibetan text upon which it is based, the Bar do thos grol, would have been familiar to scholars who knew the literature of the Nyingma sect; they would have recognized it as the name of a large genre of mortuary texts used by Nyingma lamas. The translation in Evans-Wentz’s work is a portion of a well-known work in that genre.6
Before turning to Evans-Wentz’s text, let me briefly summarize the Bar do thos grol for those of a younger generation who may not have committed it to memory. It is traditionally used as a mortuary text, read aloud in the presence of a dying or dead person. The text describes the process of death and rebirth in terms of three intermediate states or bardos (bar do, a Tibetan term that literally means “between two”). The first, and briefest, is the bardo at the moment of death (’chi kha’i bar do), when a profound state of consciousness called the clear light dawns. If one is able to recognize the clear light as reality, one is immediately liberated from rebirth. If not, the second bardo, called the bardo of reality (chos nyid bar do), begins. The disintegration of the personality brought on by death reveals reality, but in this case not as the clear light but in the form of a mandala of fifty-eight wrathful deities and a mandala of forty-two peaceful deities. These deities appear in sequence to the consciousness of the deceased in the days immediately following death. If reality is not recognized in this second bardo, then the third bardo, the bardo of mundane existence (srid pa’i bar do), dawns, during which one must again take rebirth in one of the six realms: in that of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry spirits, or in hell.
Prior to his encounter with the Tibetan text, Evans-Wentz
studied another system of reincarnation. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1878, he took an early interest in the books on spiritualism in his father’s library and read both Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine during his teen years.
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steele Olcott. Its goals included the formation of a universal brotherhood regardless of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; the encouragement of studies in comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and the investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man. It was in many ways a response to Darwin, yet rather than seeking in religion a refuge from science, it attempted to found a scientific religion, one that accepted the new discoveries in geology and embraced an ancient and esoteric system of spiritual evolution more sophisticated than Darwin’s. The society was founded at the height of late-nineteenth-century America’s interest in spiritualism, the belief that one could contact and communicate with the spirits of the dead through seances, materialization, automatic writing, and other techniques.7 Madame Blavatsky was herself adept at these and other occult arts.
During the eighteenth century Europeans saw India as a land of origin; some claimed that Christianity had begun there.8 During the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries India was increasingly displaced by Tibet, especially by occult movements, as the source and preserve of secret knowledge and as the abode of lost races. Some offered evidence that Jesus had spent his lost years there.9 Madame Blavatsky herself claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet as an initiate of a secret order of enlightened masters called the Great White Brotherhood. These masters, whom she called Great Teachers of the White Lodge or Mahatmas (great souls), lived in Tibet but were not themselves Tibetans. Madame Blavatsky’s disciple A. P. Sinnett explained in Esoteric Buddhism:
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