Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  Jung argues that Freudian psychoanalysis, working backwards, has been able to discover only the last of the three bardos, the Sidpa Bardo, which is marked by infantile sexual fantasies. Some analysts claim even to have uncovered intrauterine memories. It is at this point that “Western reason reaches its limit, unfortunately” (p. xli). He expresses the wish that Freudian psychoanalysis could have continued even further, to the pre-uterine: “[H]ad it succeeded in this bold undertaking, it would surely have come out beyond the Sidpa Bardo and penetrated from behind into the lower reaches of the Chönyid Bardo” (p. xlii), that is, Freud could have proven the existence of rebirth. Here Jung is reminiscent of classical Buddhist proofs on the existence of rebirth, in which it is claimed that one moment of consciousness is produced by a previous moment of consciousness, and that once it is conceded that consciousness at the moment of conception is the product of a previous moment of consciousness, rebirth has been proven. But more important for Jung is this opportunity to dismiss Freud before moving on to his own project. Some might judge this particular condemnation to be disingenuous, since Jung did not himself pursue the question of existence of rebirth (beyond the symbolic level) in the decades that followed.

  But Jung offers his criticism of Freud only in passing as he moves on to his larger task, evident also in his other commentaries on Asian texts, that is, the incorporation of Asian wisdom into his own psychological theory. He begins with the suggestion that the Westerner read the Bardo Thödol backwards, that is, first the Sidpa Bardo, then the Chönyid Bardo, and then the Chikhai Bardo. The neurosis of the Sidpa Bardo has already been identified. The next step is to move on to the Chönyid Bardo, which is a state of “karmic illusion” (p. xliii). He takes this as an opportunity to interpret karma as psychic heredity, which leads quickly to the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Of the archetypes to be mined from comparative religion and mythology, he writes, “The astonishing parallelism between these images and the ideas they serve to express has frequently given rise to the wildest migration theories, although it would have been far more natural to think of the remarkable similarity of the human psyche at all times and in all places” (p. xliv). Thus, apparently in contrast to Evans-Wentz, Jung sees Asian yogins and the initiates of Greek mystery cults as having had no influence on one another. Instead their ideas are primordial and universal, originating from an omnipresent psychic structure. How else could one account for the fact that the very same idea, that the dead do not know that they are dead, is to be found in the Bardo Thödol, American spiritualism, and Swedenborg? (pp. xliv–xlv).27

  The horrific visions of the Chönyid Bardo, then, represent the effect of surrendering to fantasy and imagination, uninhibited by the conscious mind: “the Chönyid state is equivalent to a deliberately induced psychosis” (p. xlvi). Here Jung reiterates a warning that appears in almost all of his writings about Asia: that the Westerner who practices yoga is in great danger. The dismemberments that occur in the Buddhist hells described in the Tibetan text are symbolic of the psychic dissociation that leads to schizophrenia (p. xlvii).

  Thus, a fundamental distinction between East and West is that in Christianity initiation is a preparation for death, while in the Bardo Thödol initiation is a preparation for rebirth, preparing “the soul for a descent into physical being” (p. xlix). This is why the European should reverse the sequence of the Bardo Thödol such that one begins with the experience of the individual unconscious, then moves to the experience of the collective unconscious, and then moves finally to the state in which illusions cease and “consciousness, weaned away from all form and from all attachment to objects, returns to the timeless, inchoate state” (pp. xlviii–xlix). This sequence, Jung says, “offers a close parallel to the phenomenology of the European unconscious when it is undergoing an ‘initiation process,’ that is to say, when it is being analyzed” (p. xlix). He closes with the statement that “The world of gods and spirits is truly ‘nothing but’ the collective unconscious inside me” (p. liii).

  Jung thus uses the Bardo Thödol (as he did the other Asian texts about which he wrote)28 as raw material for his own theories. Like the colonial industrialist, he mined Asian texts (in translation) for raw materials, without acknowledging the violence (both epistemic and otherwise) that he did to the texts in the process; reversing the order of the three bardos is but one example. He then processed these raw materials in the factory of his analytic psychology, yielding yet further products of the collective unconscious. These products were then marketed to European and American consumers as components of a therapy and exported back to Asian colonials as the best explanation of their own cultures.

  The next preface to the 1948 edition was by Lama Govinda, one of the most influential figures in the representation of Tibetan Buddhism to the West. Lama Anagarika Govinda was born Ernst Lothar Hoffmann in Kassel, Germany, in 1895.29 He served at the Italian front during World War I, after which he continued his studies at Freiburg University in Switzerland. He became interested in Buddhism while living with expatriate European and American artists in Capri, publishing his first book, The Basic Ideas of Buddhism and Its Relationship to Ideas of God, in 1920. (The work is apparently no longer extant.) In 1928 he sailed for Ceylon, where he briefly studied meditation and Buddhist philosophy with the German-born Theravada monk Nyānatiloka Mahāthera (who gave him the name Govinda) before leaving to travel in Burma and India. While visiting Darjeeling in the Himalayas in 1931 he was driven by a spring snowstorm to a Tibetan monastery at Ghoom, where he met Tomo Geshe Rinpoche (Gro mo dge bshes rin po che), a Gelukpa lama. In his autobiographical The Way of the White Clouds, published over thirty years later, Govinda would depict their meeting and his subsequent initiation as the pivotal moment in his life. It is difficult to imagine what transpired between the Tibetan monk and the German traveler (dressed in the robes of a Theravada monk, although he seems not to have been ordained), who spoke no Tibetan, or what this “initiation” may have been (it was perhaps the most preliminary of Buddhist rituals, the refuge ceremony). Govinda’s description of any instruction he may have received is vague. He seems, however, to have understood the term differently from its Tibetan meaning of an empowerment by a lama to engage in specific tantric rituals and meditations. In Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism according to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantra Oṁ Maṇi Padme Hūṁ he writes, “By ‘initiates’ I do not mean any organized group of men, but those individuals who, in virtue of their own sensitiveness, respond to the subtle vibrations of symbols which are presented to them either by tradition or intuition.”30

  After making a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash in southwestern Tibet in 1932, he held brief teaching positions at the University of Patna and at Shantiniketan (founded by Rabindranath Tagore), publishing essays in Mahabodhi, the journal of a Buddhist society in Calcutta, as well as in various Theosophical journals. His lectures at Patna resulted in The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy, and his lectures at Shantiniketan resulted in Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stūpa. While at Shantiniketan he met a Parsi woman, Rati Petit, whom he would marry in 1947. (She also assumed a new name, Li Gotami, and like her husband dressed in the Tibetan-style robes of his design.) During the 1930s he founded a number of organizations, including the International Buddhist University Association, the International Buddhist Academy Association, and the Arya Maitreya Mandala. In 1942 he was interned by the British at Dehra Dun with other German nationals, including Heinrich Harrer (who would escape to spend seven years in Tibet) and Nyānaponika Mahāthera, another German Theravada monk best known as the author of The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.

  In 1947 and 1948 Lama Govinda and Li Gotami led an expedition sponsored by the Illustrated Weekly of India to photograph some of the temples of western Tibet, notably those in Tsaparang and Tholing. (Li Gotami’s photographs, important as archives since the Chinese invasion, appear in Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, and her own
Tibet in Pictures.) During their travels they met a lama named Ajorepa Rinpoche at Tsecholing monastery, who, according to Govinda, initiated them into the Kagyu order. No sect of Tibetan Buddhism has such an initiation ceremony, such that the nature of this ceremony also remains nebulous. As with Tomo Geshe Rinpoche, Lama Govinda is mute on the teachings they received. Nonetheless, from this point on he described himself as an initiate of the Kagyu order or, as he often styled himself, “an Indian National of European descent and Buddhist faith belonging to a Tibetan Order and believing in the Brotherhood of Man.”

  Returning from Tibet, Lama Govinda and Li Gotami set up permanent residence in India, living as tenants of a house and property rented to them by Walter Evans-Wentz. During the 1960s their home at Kasar Devi became an increasingly obligatory stop for spiritual seekers (including the Beat poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg in 1961) until they were forced to put up signs around the property warning visitors away. With the publication of The Way of the White Clouds in 1966, Govinda’s fame only grew, and he spent the last two decades before his death in 1985 lecturing in Europe and the United States. His last years were spent in a home in Mill Valley provided by the San Francisco Zen Center. In 1981 Govinda published what he regarded as his most important work, The Inner Structure of the I Ching, a work that he undertook because “We have heard what various Chinese and European philosophers and scholars thought about this book, instead of asking what the I Ching itself has to say.”31 His study seeks to remedy the situation, unimpeded and perhaps enhanced, it seems, by Lama Govinda’s apparent inability to read Chinese. The book was published with support from the Alan Watts Society for Comparative Research.

  Indeed, throughout his career Govinda seems to have drawn on a wide variety of Western-language sources but never on untranslated Buddhist texts. The translations of the Pali in his The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy (first delivered as lectures at the University of Patna in 1935) are drawn from the British scholars Thomas and Caroline Rhys Davids and from his fellow German, Nyānatiloka Mahāthera. His Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stūpa draws entirely on Western sources. In his book of essays, painting, and poetry published by the Theosophical Society, Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness (which includes the essays “Concept and Actuality,” “The Well of Life,” and “Contemplative Zen Meditation and the Intellectual Attitude of Our Time”), he cites Martin Buber, D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Heinrich Zimmer, and Evans-Wentz. Nonetheless, he represents himself as a spokesman for Tibetan Buddhism in ways that are above all reminiscent of the Theosophy of Evans-Wentz:

  The importance of Tibetan tradition for our time and for the spiritual development of humanity lies in the fact that Tibet is the last living link that connects us with the civilizations of a distant past. The mystery-cults of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, of Incas and Mayas, have perished with the destruction of their civilizations and are for ever lost to our knowledge, except for some scanty fragments.

  The old civilizations of India and China, though well preserved in their ancient art and literature, and still glowing here and there under the ashes of modern thought, are buried and penetrated by so many strata of different cultural influences, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the various elements and to recognize their original nature.32

  Like Evans-Wentz, who portrayed himself as a mere mouthpiece for Kazi Dawa-Samdup, Lama Govinda suggests that his musings derive from teachings he received from Tomo Geshe Rinpoche, to whom his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism according to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantra Oṁ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ is dedicated: “The living example of this great teacher, from whose hands the author received his first initiation twenty-five years ago, was the deepest spiritual stimulus of his life and opened to him the gates to the mysteries of Tibet. It encouraged him, moreover, to pass on to others and to the world at large, whatever knowledge and experience he has thus gained—as far as this can be conveyed in words.”33 The fact that this work contains an interpretation that appears in no Tibetan text may explain (as we shall see in the case of Evans-Wentz) why he describes them as “esoteric teachings.”

  In his introductory foreword to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lama Govinda, like Jung, draws on a psychological vocabulary when he says that “There are those who, in virtue of concentration and other yogic practices, are able to bring the subconscious into the realm of discriminative consciousness and, thereby, to draw upon the unrestricted treasury of subconscious memory, wherein are stored the records not only of our past lives but the records of the past of our race, the past of humanity, and of all pre-human forms of life, if not of the very consciousness that makes life possible in this universe” (p. liii). Govinda thus seems to combine Jung’s notion of a collective and archaic repository of memory with Evans-Wentz’s belief that The Tibetan Book of the Dead is drawn from the actual memories of Eastern yogins who could remember their past lives. Such knowledge, however, would crush those not trained to receive it; therefore, the Bardo Thödol has remained secret, “sealed with the seven seals of silence.” Echoing Evans-Wentz’s call, Govinda declared, “But the time has come to break the seals of silence; for the human race has come to the juncture where it must decide whether to be content with the subjugation of the material world, or to strive after the conquest of the spiritual world, by subjugating selfish desires and transcending self-imposed limitations” (p. liv). The remainder of his foreword is taken up largely with a defense of the authenticity of the Tibetan terma, the texts hidden by Padmasambhava during the eighth century, and an argument for the purely Buddhist nature of the Bardo Thödol, untainted by Bönpo influence. On this point, as we shall see, he appears to part company with Evans-Wentz.

  Sir John Woodroffe’s foreword is noteworthy for its persistent attempts at finding in the Hindu literature, particularly the Hindu tantric literature to which Woodroffe was so devoted, parallels and even precedents for the doctrines set forth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He pauses, however, to include an obligatory swipe at Tibetans for the way in which they mispronounce Sanskrit mantras (p. lxxix).

  Evans-Wentz’s own lengthy introduction begins with a note explaining its function, which is worth quoting in full:

  This Introduction is—for the most part—based upon and suggested by explanatory notes which the late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator of the Bardo Thödol, dictated to the editor while the translation was taking shape, in Gangtok, Sikkim. The Lāma was of the opinion that his English rendering of the Bardo Thödol, dictated to the editor while the translation was taking shape, in Gangtok, Sikkim. The Lāma was of the opinion that his English rendering of the Bardo Thödol ought not to be published without his exegetical comments on the more abstruse and figurative parts of the text. This, he thought, would not only help to justify his translation, but, moreover, would accord with the wishes of his late guru (see p. 80) with respect to all translations into a European tongue of works expository of the esoteric lore of the great Perfectionist School into which that guru had initiated him. To this end, the translator’s exegesis, based upon that of the translator’s guru, was transmitted to the editor and recorded by the editor herein.

  The editor’s task is to correlate and systematize and sometimes to expand the notes thus dictated, by incorporating such congenial matter, from widely separated sources, as in his judgement tends to make the exegesis more intelligible to the Occidental, for whom this part of the book is chiefly intended.

  The translator felt, too, that without such safeguarding as this Introduction is intended to afford, the Bardo Thödol translation would be peculiarly liable to misinterpretation and consequent misuse, more especially by those who are inclined to be, for one reason or another, inimical to Buddhistic doctrines, or to the doctrines of his particular Sect of Northern Buddhism. He also realized how such an Introduction as is here presented might itself be subject to adverse criticism, perhaps on the ground that it appears to be the outcome of a phil
osophical eclecticism. However this may be, the editor can do no more than state here, as he has stated in other words in the Preface, that his aim, both herein and in the closely related annotations to the text itself, has been to present the psychology and teachings peculiar to and related to the Bardo Thödol as he has been taught them by qualified exponents of them, who alone have the unquestioned right to explain them.

  If it should be said by critics that the editor has expounded the Bardo Thödol doctrines from the standpoint of the Northern Buddhist who believes in them rather than from the standpoint of the Christian who perhaps would disbelieve at least some of them, the editor has no apology to offer; for he holds that there is no sound reason adducible why he should expound them in any other manner. Anthropology is concerned with things as they are; and the hope of all sincere researchers in comparative religion devoid of any religious bias ought always to be to accumulate such scientific data as will some day enable future generations of mankind to discover Truth itself—that Universal Truth in which all religions and all sects of all religions may ultimately recognize the Essence of Religion and the Catholicity of Faith. (Pp. 1–2 n. 1)

  This remarkable note accomplishes many tasks. First, it locates the authority for the contents of the introduction that is to follow not in Evans-Wentz but in the translator, the Tibetan lama. It is the lama’s oral teachings that provide the basis of Evans-Wentz’s words. Indeed, it raises the level of authority one step higher by invoking the power of lineage, stating that the exegesis derives from the lama’s own guru, and that it was transmitted first to Kazi Dawa-Samdup and then from him to Evans-Wentz, in the tradition of guru to disciple. Evans-Wentz, then, has for the most part, as he states in his own preface to the first edition, acted only as the mouthpiece for his lama, only occasionally “incorporating such congenial matter, from widely separated sources, as in his judgement tends to make the exegesis more intelligible to the Occidental.” He reports that the late lama called him his “living English dictionary” (p. 78). As we shall see, there will be much such congenial matter, especially concerning the theories of karma and rebirth, and concerning “symbolism,” matter that deviates significantly from the contents of the Bardo Thödol but that is represented by this note as having the sanction of the lama and the lama’s lama. For Evans-Wentz is claiming for himself the status of the initiate; he is setting forth the teachings “as he has been taught them by qualified initiated exponents of them, who alone have the unquestioned right to explain them.” He thus vouchsafes that right for himself as the student of these masters, although whether his reference here is to Tibetan lamas or Mahatmas is unclear.34 At the same time, in the final paragraph, he professes as well the authority of the scholar, the anthropologist who is concerned with “things as they are,” unconcerned with the articles of any particular faith. Thus he claims for himself both the authority of Eastern religion (through his Tibetan lama) and Western science (through his Oxford degree). His task is the accumulation of scientific data, data that will one day lead all sects of all religions to see the Essence of Religion. One assumes that by this he means Theosophy.