Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  Repeated sufficiently, the role of landscape acquired an official explanatory power, finding its way over the decades into exhibition catalogs and reference works. Thus in 1975 we read, “Tibet is a country marked by extreme contrasts: an hallucinatory, geotectonic spectacle where light (because of the altitude) intensifies colour and the slightest detail; . . . An introspective awareness develops because of these unusual surroundings, one which eminently favoured the identification of the individual with the schemas imposed upon him by artistic canons which were entirely conditioned by mystical experience.”13 The 1970 Oxford Companion to Art explains that “Lamaism was not restricted to Tibet but became the ruling creed in those barren and desolate regions of Asia which alone could provide a solitude vast, calm, and inaccessible enough to nourish its intense spirituality and mysticism.”14

  Tibetans were thus portrayed as the observers of their environment, their minds, as if by reflex, turned inside by the overwhelming outside that surrounded them. With the impulse behind Tibetan Buddhism (and hence its art) detected, and the drudgery of identifying the bewildering pantheon largely completed, the art historian could turn next to consider the specific products of Tibetan art and their meaning. Three categories have proved to be of enduring fascination, the wrathful deity, the yab yum image, and the mandala, each regarded as a “symbol” of something else.

  A characteristic view of wrathful deities is provided by Pratapaditya Pal in his introduction to the 1969 catalog Lamaist Art: The Aesthetics of Harmony. He repeats the by now familiar refrain that Lamaism is not simply Indian Buddhism transported to Tibet, but is “really an amalgam of early, native shamanist beliefs, Bon ideology, and imported Buddhist concepts.”15 When he turns to a discussion of “Lamaist imagery,” we find wrathful deities (most of which were in fact derived from India) represented as manifestations of the Tibetan character. Pal discusses the “imagery of the terrifying deities” in Tibet’s repressive society:

  Nothing is more characteristic of the Tibetan psyche than their love for the grotesque and the bizarre in their art. Terrifying gods and wrathful demons, malevolent spirits and grinning skeletons prance and dance about on the surface of tankas . . . in an orgiastic exhibition of their strength and power. It is possible that these images are projected by the collective consciousness of the Tibetan and the Mongolian peoples as a release from their psychic and cultural tensions. To the average Tibetan or Mongolian, given to war and beset by the hardships imposed by an inhospitable terrain, concepts of “illusion” or “enlightenment” or “ultimate reality” must have meant very little. His own religion as well as the subjective quality of his mind was conditioned essentially by his environment, physical as well as social.

  Living in tents amidst inhospitable, formidable mountains and exposed helplessly to the hostile elements, his fears took concrete shapes as he visualized the inexplicable terrors and occult forces as fearsome and wrathful spirits who must be constantly appeased if one were to survive. It seems as though afraid of nature, where violent, mysterious forces always lurk behind the next corner, he has extracted the very essence of nature, which, in a symbolic form, serves as a weapon against nature’s evils.

  Equally oppressive was the society he lived in, for the tyranny of the monks and the monasteries was absolute.16

  Wrathful deities, although they are described in detail in Indian tantras, are thus somehow uniquely Tibetan, fulfilling what Giuseppe Tucci’s photographer, Fosco Maraini, called the “need for horror.” For Pal, they seem to be a kind of double projection. The credulous Tibetan peasant, unable to understand the profundities of Buddhist philosophy, oppressed by the power of the landscape and by the greed of the monks, reacts in horror to his environment, both physical and cultural. These external elements are processed in the Tibetan psyche and then projected back outside, to be embodied in the forms of wrathful deities who must be propitiated in order for the peasant to survive. As Pal writes elsewhere, “Hence, these fears and predispositions have resulted in the creation, out of his subconscious, of the terrifying and demoniacal divinities, who in turn enslaved the minds of their creators.”17 But as if this were not enough, there are other sinister forces at play, as devious monks concoct images to terrorize the laity. Describing the goddess Lha mo, Pal explains, “It seems clear that such forms and their explanations were invented by the theologians in order to impress upon the mind of the credulous man the fate that awaited him if he refused to join the church.”18

  In addition to the environmental and social theories of the wrathful, there were psychoanalytic explanations. In Tibet’s Terrifying Deities, F. Sierksma calls Tibetan paintings of wrathful deities “the art of the diabolic,” unsurpassed by any other culture in history. Other forms of Tibetan painting, those of buddhas and bodhisattvas, are mechanical and slavish; the serenity of the buddha is better expressed in art from beyond Tibet. It is only in the depiction of the wrathful deity, he argues, that the Tibetan artist finds the perfect freedom that results in true creativity, producing works that tell us more about ourselves than our own dreams. Sierksma finds historical reasons for the existence of the wrathful deities of Tibet. He concedes that Indian tantra had demonic gods and that Tibet had demonic gods prior to the introduction of Buddhism. But this cannot account for the “extremely aggressive character” of the protective deities of Tibet. For Sierksma, Indian Buddhism was a spiritual religion, quiescent and philosophical, while the religion of Tibet was a religion of the real world, a religion of the senses. For this reason, although Buddhism was able to triumph, its victory was never complete, and a gap remained between the old and the new. A kind of reaction-formation took place, fueled from two directions. Buddhism defeated the Tibetan gods and made them protectors of Buddhism, but the Tibetan gods were never fully subjugated, and thus were demonized. At the same time, the lusty, earth-bound religion of ancient Tibet, although defeated, remained unrepentant, its resistance and resentment resulting in the terrifying forms of its former gods, and even in the wrathful depiction of such beatific figures as Tsong kha pa. These demonic forms are described by Sierksma as “symptoms of acculturative demonisation,” standing for “a primary symptom of incomplete acculturation, of a warrior nation that for the sake of Buddhism has had to give up a part of itself, of a Buddhism that for that warrior nation has also had to abandon an integral part, while the two have not found ultimate reconciliation.”19

  At the same time that the wrathful deities of Tibet are explained as reflections of the darkest reaches of the Tibetan psyche, we find Tibetan art characterized as “an aesthetics of harmony.” “Unity, order, and harmony—the sine qua non of mystical experience—are also present in every Lamaist image”; each work of Tibetan art is “a translation of a vision experienced by a mystic.” For this reason, an analysis of the style and structure of a work, whether an icon or a temple, cannot contribute to an appreciation of the piece “without an acquaintance with the mystical vision that inspired it.”20 Tibetan painting therefore lacks “the subtle interplay of light and shade” because in Lamaism the true nature of the mind is the “Primal Clear Light.” Tibetan painting lacks pictorial realism and the use of perspective not because these were unknown to the Lamaist artist but because he could not be bothered with them, committed as he was to “portraying the transcendental reality.” It is not surprising, then, that Pal is struck by the fact that “the same artists who created with such consummate artistry the dreamlike, visionary landscape with its atmosphere of tranquility and harmony . . . could evoke the terrifying and fantastic forms with such convincing power of expression.”21

  Hence Tibetan art, devalued by some for its lack of creativity, is valued by others for an aesthetic that surpasses the merely creative: Tibetan art is portrayed as an evocation of (and hence a conduit to) a transcendent reality, inexpressible in words but not in art. And to avoid having to be overly concerned with a pantheon that is far too vast and with deities whose accoutrements are far too numerous, this transcendent reality i
s not depicted representationally but symbolically.

  The symbol solves many problems, for it is famous as the site of the coincidence of opposites. Thus if Tibetan deities are merely symbols, the wrathful need not contradict the peaceful. Without the symbol, the wrathful deities seem unique to Tibet, the product of the interplay between the topography of Tibet and the psychology of the Tibetan. At the same time, however, the peaceful deities seem to represent a more timeless and transcendent reality. But if all the deities, wrathful and peaceful, are really symbols, the problem dissolves; both symbolize a universal and ancient truth, as Pal explains:

  It must be emphasized that although these terrifying deities of Buddhism may appear demonic, they are not “demons” in the Western sense. Nor are they personifications of evil or demonic forces. Rather, their fierce forms symbolize the violence that is a fundamental reality of the cosmos and the cosmic process in the universe in general, and of the human mind in particular. . . . Science now states that the cosmos was born in violence; perhaps the ancient visionaries realized this universal truth when they envisioned the divine principle in terms of a mysterium tremendum.22

  This compulsion toward the symbolic, whether the symbols are peaceful or wrathful, reaches its apogee when Detlef Lauf declares, “These representations were not experienced as definite deities or real figures, but as symbols of a spiritual process which could be perfected and realized only in pure introspection.”23 Such symbols can only be depicted, furthermore, by an artist who is himself privy to their secret meaning, a meaning that the historian, not being an initiate, may be excused from understanding:

  He has learned the classical Indian Sâdhanas—those short meditative texts with Mantras (as invocations)—in which the deities were described with all their attributes, Mudrâs and colours for the purpose of pictorial meditation. Meditating on such Sâdhanas himself, the artist, time and again, becomes the creator of these embedded images—images developed out of himself. The Tibetan artist, being initiated into the profound teachings of the themes represented by him, thus creates works which in turn can be, and are designed to be, understood only by the initiated. This is an important factor in the contemplation of Tibetan art, an art frequently so obscurely encoded that access to it often seems barred to a thinking mind.24

  Even Tucci, who deemed it necessary to devote the first volume of his massive Tibetan Painted Scrolls to Tibetan history and religion in order to contextualize the works of art he was to describe, succumbed to the mystification of the artist who, he said “must be at one with the spiritual planes he wants to reproduce . . . drawing [infinite worlds] only out of himself, by virtue of the power of meditation and of ritual.”25

  Art historians have not only considered the Tibetan artist, but also the viewer, once again deriving their vocabulary from psychology, but offering two antithetical views. In one the viewer is passive, like the hypnotist’s subject waiting to be shown the Queen of Diamonds, the painting precipitating progress on the path: “The icon-mirror functions by establishing within itself (and therefore in the field of physical perception), the inclinations of the celebrant which would otherwise remain unconscious, permitting him to recognize them with a view to progress along the path of deconditioning.”26 In the other, art reveals reality, but only to those who have eyes to see. As Pal explains, “In general, images of deities, whether painted or sculpted, are meant only for the initiated and adept. They are intended to help him or her to achieve that state of concentration in which external symbols can be dispensed with altogether.”27 Thus “the many varied icons represented in Tibetan art are not meant to depict separate objective or imaginary humanshaped beings, or even particular spirit-beings, but states of being which the human viewer is meant inwardly to adopt.”28 Here one sees a variation on a distinction that goes back to the eighteenth century, where Hindus were seen to hold two attitudes toward their gods: the elite knew that the images were symbols pointing to an unseen reality, while the unlettered masses were superstitious idolaters. Depending on their estimation of Tibetan society, art historians have tended to place all Tibetans in one or the other category. In his 1969 film Requiem for a Faith (Hartley Film Foundation), Huston Smith explains, “These gods that seem so solid, so objectively real, actually represent our own psychic forces.”

  Also subject to the symbol are the famous representations of male and female deities in sexual union, called yab yum (father mother) in Tibetan. Such images elicited the opprobrium of Europeans in China during the nineteenth century. Garnet Wolseley, in his Narrative of the War with China in 1860 describes the Yonghe-gong (today known to tourists as the “Lama Temple”) in Beijing:

  Lust and sensuality is represented in its hideous nakedness and under its most disgusting aspect. . . . The priests when exhibiting these beastly groups did so with the greatest apparent satisfaction, and seemed to gloat over the abominations before them, which to any but those of the most bestial dispositions must have been loathsome in the extreme. Surely it cannot be wondered at, that a people who thus deify lust, should be base and depraved, and incapable of any noble feelings or lofty aspirations after either the good or the great.29

  But in the present century, the male and female pair are explained as symbols of the coincidence of any number of dualities. For Evans-Wentz the pair represents the unity of phenomena and noumena,30 for Sierksma, it is the union of the self and the ego.31 For Heinrich Zimmer, “Scarcely could the ultimate identity of Eternity and Time, Nirvāna and Samsāra, the two aspects of the revealed Absolute, be represented in a more majestically intimate way.”32 For Giuseppe Tucci’s photographer, Fosco Maraini, it is “the Absolute, the Ultimate, the First, the Eternal, the Everlasting, and the All-pervading, in the form of a bejewelled prince voluptuously embracing his shakti. What fantastic imagination, what metaphysical daring, to represent the most abstract possible concept, a concept only definable by negatives, like mathematical infinity, by the most concrete, the most carnal picture that it is possible to imagine.”33 Yet, Lama Govinda explains, it is not really sexual, rather the union of male and female “is indissolubly associated with the highest spiritual reality in the process of enlightenment, so that associations with the realm of physical sexuality are completely ignored.”34

  After the terrifying deities and the yab yum pairs, the third category of Tibetan art that has most fascinated art historians is the mandala. A mandala is a representation of a buddha’s palace, with a buddha (sometimes in union with a consort) in the center, surrounded by arrays of other buddhas, bodhisattvas, gods, and goddesses, with protectors standing guard in the doorways at the four cardinal directions. A mandala is sometimes depicted in three dimensions, but it is usually depicted schematically in two dimensions, in paint or in sand.35 In tantric initiations, the mandala, kept hidden during the early phases, is eventually revealed to the initiate, who is then allowed to “enter.” It is this perfected abode, inhabited by buddhas and their consorts, bodhisattvas, and protectors, that the initiate is then instructed to visualize, in minute detail, in the practice of “deity yoga” (lha’i rnal ’byor), in which one meditates upon oneself as the central buddha of the mandala.36 The mandala is not, then, a diagram that one stares at to induce altered states. Chögyam Trungpa explains that “It should be understood that mandala representations are not used as objects of contemplation in an attempt to bring about certain states of mind.”37

  However, the ritual use of the mandala seems to have been lost on many, including initiates like Lama Govinda, who described it as “a concentric diagram or plastic model, used for the purposes of meditation.”38 John Blofeld glossed the term as “an intricate pattern of decorated squares and circles used as a support for instruction and meditation.”39 Sometimes the term was simply rendered as “magic circle.” But like other elements of Tibetan art, the mandala became prey to psychologization. (The term was central to Jung.) Pal explained, “There can be no doubt that the mandala is one of the most complex symbols of Esoteric Buddhism. It h
as a precise esoteric character which, in its simplest terms, may be described as the visible projection of the scheme of the universe. It is the universe reduced, through abstract lines, from its phenomenal multiplicity to its quintessential unity, from chaos to order.”40

  Tibetologists were not immune from the psychologizing trend. Tucci explained that a mandala was “no longer a cosmogram but a psychocosmogram, the scheme of disintegration from the One to the many and of reintegration from the many to the One, to that Absolute Consciousness, entire and luminous, which Yoga causes to shine once more to the depths of our being.”41 Indeed, in his 1961 The Theory and Practice of the Mandala: With Special Reference to the Modern Psychology of the Subconscious, Tucci (who notes that he “is not unaware of the researches of Dr. Jung, whose work seems to me to be destined to leave lasting traces on human thought”) seeks to

  reconstitute, in their essential outlines, the theory and practice of those psycho-cosmogratta which may lead the neophyte, by revealing to him the secret play of the forces which operate in the universe and in us, on the way to the reintegration of consciousness. . . . You will find in this gnosis some striking analogies with comparable ideas expressed by currents of thought in other countries and in other ages; and often real anticipations of modern and more structural theories. Things could hardly be otherwise, since we are dealing with archetypes which are innate in the soul of Man and which, therefore, reappear in different lands and at different epochs but with a similar aspect, whenever Man seeks to reconstruct that unity which the predominance of one or other of the features of his character has broken or threatens to demolish.42

  Thus, like the wrathful deity and the yab yum pair, the mandala is ultimately neither Tibetan nor even Buddhist, but a symbol of something ancient, universal, and timeless.

  Many of the ways in which art historians have characterized Tibetan art and artists are echoed in the catalog that accompanied the most ambitious exhibition of Tibetan Buddhist art ever mounted, the “Wisdom and Compassion” show that opened in San Francisco in 1992, organized by Marilyn Rhie and Robert Thurman. The exhibition sought “to introduce Tibet’s compelling and mysterious art on its own terms,”43 an art that “seems to break the ‘veil of illusion’ and offer a complete, instantaneous vision of the radiant beauty and power of pure reality.”44 We find, for example, the observation, reminiscent of Tucci some four decades before, that “The erotic and terrific deities of Tibetan art and culture express the Tibetan mastery and further development of the sophisticated depth psychology inherited from Indian Buddhist civilization, anticipating discoveries in psychology made only recently in the West. And it is in this area, traditionally known as inner science (adhyatma-vidya), that Tibetan civilization has something else of its own, unique and of extreme value, to contribute to humanity.”45 Thurman and Rhie perhaps depart from their predecessors, however, in that they do not represent Tibetan art as an instantiation of psychological processes. Instead, in a more overtly theological tone, the images of Tibetan art are offered as a model for the world to emulate: “If we let ourselves observe and experience this [yab yum] image as Tibetans do, we can be inspired about the possibility of attaining enlightenment for ourselves.”46