It is to the spiritual seeker that Sogyal’s book, like Evans-Wentz’s before it, is directed. And, indeed, the parallels between the two books are striking. Both speak of a universal message known to mystics of all traditions but preserved most perfectly in Tibet; both speak of the urgency of transmitting this teaching to a modern world in crisis, rich in knowledge of the external but bereft of the ancient science of the internal; both are collaborations between a Tibetan and a Westerner, with the determinative role of the latter largely effaced. And like Evans-Wentz (and Leary and Trungpa), Sogyal provides his own reading of the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation. Although he concedes that the realms of rebirth “may, in fact, exist beyond the range of perception of our karmic vision” (p. 112), he is more interested in the way in which the six realms of rebirth “are projected and crystallized in the world around us”:
The main feature of the realm of the gods, for example, is that it is devoid of suffering, a realm of changeless beauty and sensual ecstasy. Imagine the gods, tall, blond surfers, lounging on beaches and in gardens flooded by brilliant sunshine, listening to any kind of music they choose, intoxicated by every kind of stimulant, high on meditation, yoga, bodywork, and ways of improving themselves, but never taxing their brains, never confronting any complex or painful situation, never conscious of their true nature, and so anesthetized that they are never aware of what their condition really is.
If some parts of California and Australia spring to mind as the realm of the gods, you can see the demigod realm being acted out every day perhaps in the intrigue and rivalry of Wall Street, or in the seething corridors of Washington and Whitehall. And the hungry ghost realms? They exist wherever people, though immensely rich, are never satisfied, craving to take over this company or that one, or endlessly playing out their greed in court cases. Switch on any television channel and you have entered immediately the world of demigods and hungry ghosts. (P. 113)
Perhaps Sogyal believes that his audience would recoil at a literal rendering of the doctrine of the six realms of rebirth—as physical realms where beings are reborn after death. That may be why he locates them instead in North America, with gods in California and demigods on the East Coast.
The most recent translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is, according to the title page, “Composed by Padma Sambhava, Discovered by Karma Lingpa, Translated by Robert A. F. Thurman.” It was published in 1994 as part of the Bantam Wisdom Edition series, which also includes translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the I Ching, The Book of Five Rings (a book on swordsmanship by the seventeenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto), a book of “mystical poetry” by Rumi, and a book on unlocking the Zen koan. The placement of the Book of the Dead among these world spiritual classics is in itself indicative of the radical decontextualization that the Tibetan text has achieved.
In the preface, Thurman describes his initial reluctance at doing yet an other translation of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. His own research had centered on another genre of Tibetan literature that deals with death, “an ancient tradition of spiritual techniques every bit as sophisticated as modern material technologies,” which he found in the works of Tsong kha pa, “founder” of the Geluk sect.54 In comparison, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which derives from the Nyingma sect, was not as clear and systematic; it seemed “less relevant.” He eventually decided, however, to undertake the project when he realized that “people who are dying need something more clear, usable, and accessible than those translations” of Evans-Wentz and Fremantle and Trungpa (p. xx). Like the Evans-Wentz version, about half of Thurman’s work is taken up with his own commentary and glossary. The former includes sections such as “Tibet: A Spiritual Civilization,” “Buddhism in Summary,” “The Body-Mind Complex,” and “The Reality of Liberation.” In the latter, karma is glossed as “evolution,” gotra (lineage) as “spiritual gene,” abhidharma as “Clear Science,” and ḍākinī as “angel.”
Thurman’s choice of translation terms supports his larger project of representing The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Buddhism in general, as scientific rather than religious (he renders vidyadhara—literally, “knowledge holder,” a class of advanced Indian tantric masters—as “Hero Scientist”: “they have been the quintessential scientists of that nonmaterialist civilization” [p. 110]). For Thurman Tibet’s civilization was unique. While the West has devoted itself to the investigation and conquest of the material world and outer space, the direction of Tibetan society has been inward and its product has been generations of spiritual adepts who have studied spiritual technologies (tantras) and have become “inner world adventurers of the highest daring” (he calls them “psychonauts”) who have “personally voyaged to the furthest frontiers of that universe which their society deemed vital to explore: the inner frontiers of consciousness itself, in all its transformations of life and beyond death” (p. 10). As a product of this society, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or, as he renders the Tibetan title, the Great Book of Natural Liberation through Understanding in the Between) is not a Buddhist approach to death and dying, but a scientific description of the death process, derived from the research of psychonauts. Tibetan views on death are no more or less religious than modern Western views on the structure of the solar system (p. 18). In fact, Buddhism is not a religion; the Buddha did not found a religion. Instead, he founded an educational movement in which reality is “freely open to unprejudiced experience” (p. 16). He founded educational and research institutions (these institutions are referred to by others as monasteries and convents) in which “the study of death, between, and rebirth processes in particular, was conducted by researchers within these Mind Science institutions, the results being contained in a huge, cumulative scientific literature on the subject” (p. 17).
Thurman then argues in favor of the existence of rebirth and against those “emotional annihilationists,” “closet cosmic escapists,” and “materialist scientists” who dogmatically dismiss evidence of the postmortem continuity of consciousness in order to preserve their belief in nothingness. He still finds Pascal’s wager compelling. Pascal argued that if God exists, then his existence is incomprehensible. Thus, it is impossible to know with certainty whether or not God exists. If God does exist, the consequences of belief and disbelief are profound, both for the present and for eternity. To believe that God exists, therefore, is the prudent and reasonable course, in which nothing is lost and everything may be gained (Pensées 343).55 Thurman simply substitutes belief (or faith) in “rebirth” for “God.” From here, it is a short step to accepting the Tibetan view:
A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death. In developing such a science, it behooves the investigator to consider all previous attempts to do so, especially those traditions with a long development and a copious literature. Of all these, the science of death preserved in the Indo-Tibetan tradition is perhaps the most copious of all. (P. 27)
Having argued for the scientific value of the Tibetan system of rebirth, Thurman must, like previous translators of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, deal with the specific question of the existence of the realms of gods, ghosts, and hell beings. Thurman is the only translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead who did not collaborate directly with a Tibetan lama in the rendering of the text into English. And he is the only translator who rejects the “metaphorical” view of the realms of rebirth, arguing that the Buddhist heavens and hells are just as real as the realm of humans. “Those who have remembered their own previous lives have reported this to be the case. And it makes logical sense that the life forms in the ocean of evolution would be much more numerous than just the number of species on this one tiny little material planet we can see around us nowadays” (p. 33).
How are we to account for Thurman’s unique position in the history of the text? According to Evans-Wentz, Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup supported the “esoteric” view of rebirth as an evolutionary system in which regression to the brutish re
alms was impossible. Leary and his collaborators, following the Evans-Wentz translation, extended the metaphor further, arguing that The Tibetan Book of the Dead was really about life. From this they concluded that it could profitably be read as an account of an eight-hour acid trip. Trungpa Rinpoche portrays the realms of rebirth as psychological states. Sogyal Rinpoche uses his discussion of the six realms as an opportunity to lampoon California surfers and New York bankers. Only Thurman appears to believe what real Tibetans believe.
Evans-Wentz, Leary, Trungpa, and Sogyal can all interpret the six realms of rebirth as a matter of popular belief rather than fact because they have no contract with the practices of ordinary Tibetans.56 Their investments have been made elsewhere: in Theosophy for Evans-Wentz, in LSD for Leary, in transpersonal psychology for Trungpa, in the New Age for Sogyal. Only Thurman seems invested in a more literal (perhaps “orthodox”) presentation of Tibetan doctrine. Precisely because he is not Tibetan, he was not born into the lineage that naturally bestows authenticity but must derive his authenticity from other sources. These include his scholarly credentials, his ordination in 1964 (since lapsed) as the first American to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, his description of himself as a “lay Buddhist,” his characterization by journalists as America’s leading Buddhist, his occasional role as unofficial spokesperson for the Dalai Lama (who does not speak of rebirth symbolically), and his position as the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Taken together his credentials accord him an official status, a certain orthodoxy, that would not constrain a Tibetan lama living in America, such as Sogyal, for example. His active role in the Tibetan independence movement is a further impetus for his identification with a central tenet of Tibet’s endangered civilization. Thus for Thurman rebirth is not a symbol; it is, or will be, a scientific fact.
But his identification with Tsong kha pa provides its own problems. Here and in other works Thurman represents the life and works of Tsong kha pa as the pinnacle of Tibetan civilization, ushering in a renaissance. He writes elsewhere, “After the renaissance led by Tsong Khapa, the spiritual synthesis of Tibetan Buddhism was complete.”57 Although many Tibetans associated with the Geluk sect of Tibetan Buddhism (of which Tsong kha pa is regarded retrospectively as the “founder”) would probably not object to this characterization, those of other sects would. The problem is that the Bar do thos grol is a Nyingma text. This does not deter Thurman, however, from interpreting the work as if it were a Geluk text. His discussion of the “Ordinary Preparations for Death” is drawn not from the extensive Nyingma literature on the topic (some of which is available in English)58 but from Tsong kha pa’s “three primary aspects of the path” (lam gtso rnam gsum). His discussion of the “Extraordinary Preliminaries” is drawn, again, not from Nyingma literature but from the standard presentation of the Geluk. Thurman is aware of the problem, explaining it away in a spirit of ecumenism:
There are numerous Tantras used in the different Tibetan Buddhist orders, all inherited from the creative pioneer work of the great adepts of India. . . . All these Tantras emerge from the same path of transcendent renunciation, the enlightenment spirit of universal love, and the wisdom of selfless voidness [i.e., Tsong kha pa’s categories]. . . . That they present the process of achieving this one goal of supreme integration of Buddhahood variously as Great Perfection, Great Seal, bliss-void indivisible, and so on is a difference of conceptual scheme and terminology, not a difference of path or its fruition. (Pp. 73–74)
Thus, it is all the same, except that Tsong kha pa’s version is the best, one that can be fruitfully applied in any situation. In outlining simple mindfulness meditation, Thurman explains that the meditation object should be chosen according to one’s beliefs. “If you are a Christian, an icon of Christ. If you are a Moslem, a sacred letter. If you are a secularist, a Mona Lisa, a flower, or a satellite picture of the planet” (p. 55). When it comes to more advanced stages of tantric practice, however, other traditions are somewhat bereft:
The genuine shaman knows of the dissolution process, knows of divine allies and demonic interferences, and usually finds a ground of benevolence and trust, some sort of Lord of Compassion. The monastics of all ages have experimented with journeys of the soul, and some have lived to recount their experience in useful works. Sufi and Taoist adepts have given instructions and maintain living traditions. The Tibetan tradition can be used by any seeker in any of these traditions for its systematic technologies and its penetrating insight. (Pp. 80–81)
The technology is thus available to all presumably because it is, simply, the truth. It is no longer necessary, as it was for the other translators, to read the Tibetan text as symbol in an effort to find an accommodation between Buddhism and science, part of the endless attempt that goes back to Blavatsky and beyond to neutralize Darwin. For Thurman, Buddhism is science.
In each of the previous incarnations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the text is always read away from itself; it is always pointing at something else, at a meaning that requires so much elaboration that the translation of the Tibetan text (except in the case of Fremantle and Trungpa) is dwarfed by introductions and commentaries; in Leary and Sogyal’s renditions the Tibetan text is so superfluous that it need not be included at all. Despite the claims of the translators, their readings are not symbolic (in either the Romantic or the Peircean senses of the term): missing is the requisite arbitrariness between the symbol and the symbolized. Instead the book is read as a code (a system of constraints) to be deciphered against another text that is somehow more authentic, or perhaps as an allegory for another, anterior text with which it can never coincide; The Tibetan Book of the Dead is construed as referring “to one specific meaning and thus exhausts its suggestive potentialities once it has been deciphered.”59 For Evans-Wentz, the urtext is Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, itself her decoding of the Stanzas of Dzyan from Senzar, the secret language. For Leary, Metzner, and Alpert the text was the script for the paradigmatic acid trip; for Trungpa it contained the tenets of transpersonal psychology; for Sogyal it embodied the language of self-help in the New Age; and for Thurman the Nyingma text was forced into a Geluk template. For each, The Tibetan Book of the Dead must be read against something else in order for its true meaning to be revealed.
But, ironically, perhaps each of these modern interpretators was in his own way traditional. For the Tibetan work called the Bar do thos grol is a treasure text (gter ma) said to have been written long ago, in the eighth century, during a time when the people of Tibet were unprepared to appreciate its profundity. So it was hidden away, only to be discovered six centuries later. Even then it was revealed to its discoverer in the secret ḍākinī language, a kind of code that only he was able to decipher and translate into a public language. It was necessary, then, for the discoverer, finding the text at the prophesied moment, to become a kind of embodied ghost writer, translating it in such a way as to make it meaningful for its time, creating a text that is original because it is already a copy.
CHAPTER THREE
The Eye
The word mystify, the dictionary tells us, is derived from the Greek mystos, meaning to close the eyes and lips during an initiation or religious rite. T. Lobsang Rampa, whose books about “Tibet” have sold more copies than any other author on the subject, claimed to be an initiate into the secret cults of Lamaism. Rampa’s eyes were closed, however, to the authorized knowledge of Tibetan history and culture because he was not an initiate of another cult, the cult of Tibetology. He might then be called a mystifier, in two senses of the modern meaning of the word. First, he mystified Tibet, embellishing its various realities with his own mystical fancies, and, second, he mystified his readers, playing on the credulity of the reading public. This latter sense of mystify has a strong connotation of intentional deceit, a charge vehemently denied by Rampa, who is regarded as the greatest hoaxer in the history of Tibetan Studies. Although Alexandra David-Neel dressed as a Tibetan to hide her true ident
ity and Lama Govinda dressed as a Tibetan to signal his new identity, the Englishman who wrote under the name of T. Lobsang Rampa claimed to have been possessed by a Tibetan lama, and over the course of seven years to have become a Tibetan, not just in his dress but in his molecules. He accomplished this through his ability to float free, first from the forces of gravity in a man-bearing kite, and later from the constraints of time and space, floating free in the astral plane.
This chapter considers notions of embodiment and possession in an effort to raise the question of what authorizes the author of a book about Tibet. The occasion for these reflections is provided by three books published under the name of T. Lobsang Rampa, who claimed not to have had his eyes closed but to have had a new eye opened, an eye that allowed him in his words “to see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”
Prisoners of Shangri-La Page 13