Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  The “Wisdom and Compassion” exhibition was designed, according to the curators, like a mandala (which they rendered as a “sphere of spiritual nurture”). The first work the viewer encountered was a six-foot gilt brass statue of the wrathful bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi, serving as a protector, as he often does at the entrance of Tibetan temples. The viewer then entered the sacred space of the mandala itself, where the images were arranged in outer, middle, and inner halls. The outer hall, called “Tibet’s Sacred History,” was devoted to images of Śākyamuni Buddha, of arhats and bodhisattvas, and of various Indian paṇḍitas and mahāsiddhas, ending finally with three “Dharma Kings”: the historical Tri Songdetsen (Khri srong lde btsan), during whose reign the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet was founded, as well as two mythological figures, Rudracakrin, who will lead the kingdom of Shambhala in its apocalyptic war against the barbarians, and Vaiśravana, god of the north. This final grouping of rather disparate figures under the rubric “Dharma Kings” suggests a blurring of any demarcation between the historical and mythological, a characteristic of the exhibition as a whole.

  The middle hall was devoted to the four major sects of Tibetan Buddhism, described by Robert Thurman as “four great waves.” This characterization implies that each earlier wave recedes as the next wave moves ashore, and supports a rather thinly veiled teleology that sees Tsong kha pa and the Geluk, the final wave, as the culmination of Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice. The important controversies that have occurred among the sects over the centuries were described as “very occasional conflicts” that always involved “political factions aligned with one or another ‘regional’ institution.”47 Each of the four sects was represented by images of important historical figures and examples of their preferred tutelary deities, or yi dam, with the same deity often appearing in the groupings of more than one sect.

  The inner hall was devoted to pure lands, “Tibetan Perfected Worlds.” Here one found images of “Cosmic Bodhisattvas” such as Avalokiteśvara and Tārā (who also appeared in the outer hall); “Cosmic Buddhas,” including the “historical Buddha” Śākyamuni (also to be found in the outer hall); “Pure Lands” such as Padmasambhava’s Copper Mountain and Samye monastery (the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet); figures of Milarepa and Tsong kha pa, who were also found in the middle hall in their respective orders; and a painting of the city of Lhasa. This mixing of mythical and historical figures, of heavenly pure lands and Tibetan cities, a mixing that some might see as merely incoherent, was perhaps intended by the curators to suggest that these lines should not be so sharply drawn, that if only we had the eyes to see we would also perceive Lhasa as a pure land as we approach the middle of the mandala. As they explain, “The Pure Land dimension of Tibet can be seen as the key to Tibet’s mysterious fascination, as it revitalizes our dreams of the mandalic, sacred aspects of Earth itself and its ultimate potential as a paradise.”48 Or, more succinctly, “Through Tibet’s seventeen-hundred-year association with the Buddha reality, the entire land of Tibet has become the closest place on earth to an actual Pure Land.”49 At the end of the exhibition, the viewer found in the middle of the mandala another mandala, one that monks from the Dalai Lama’s monastery were in the process of constructing from colored grains of sand. Although the intent was to provide “the living context within which the ancient masterpieces come to life,” one might also note that it is only here, in the inner sanctum of the symmetrical and static perfection of the pure land, at the center of the mandala and outside history, that Tibetan people, “real Tibetans” rather than idealized bodhisattvas and saints, were displayed, as in a tableau vivant.50 (The monks were behind glass at the exhibition at the IBM Gallery in New York.)

  FROM THE VARIOUS presentations surveyed in this chapter, one is confronted with a picture of Tibetan art as either a representation of the horrors that haunt the premodern mind or as a signpost to a sublime, hidden reality. The Tibetan artist is either an initiate of advanced mystical practice, translating his visions into line and color, or an automaton slavishly copying the iconographic conventions of a static and oppressive theology. The Tibetan viewer is either a credulous devotee who cowers before the frightful form or the knowing gnostic who looks through the numbing plethora of iconographic detail to an absolute beyond the veil of illusion. As Pal explained, “The tanka was not created for purely aesthetic enjoyment. Although some were hung as wall decorations, the tanka was primarily an image, an evocation. As the religion is essentially mystical, the tanka is intended to aid the devotee to look within himself.”51

  Perhaps much of such free association can be ascribed to the relatively late development (over the past two decades) of a scholarly knowledge about Tibetan art that may have deterred such representations, especially the kind of knowledge that could be derived from reading Tibetan texts and speaking to Tibetan artists.52 Even when scholarly knowledge has been available, its belatedness and its limited circulation have kept it from displacing the popular, which gains authority through the power of repetition in exhibition catalogs and coffee-table books. Just as the insistence of Sanskritists that oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ does not mean “the jewel in the lotus” has gone largely unheeded, so Tibetological prefaces to Tibetan texts have done little thus far to dispel the notion of the Tibetan painter as an anonymous mystical monk. Nonetheless, research that involved actually speaking with contemporary Tibetan refugee artists about their work paints a rather different picture of the production and use of Tibetan art.

  Paintings were commissioned from artists for reasons more quotidian than mystical. Commissioning a painting of a deity was a way of making merit, merit that could in turn be used to avert obstacles (bar chad). Paintings were requested, often on the advice of a lama, to dispel illness, to avert danger during an astrologically impropitious year, to help a recently deceased family member find a happy rebirth. Images of Amitāyus, the buddha of infinite life, were commissioned to promote longevity. Images of deities were above all objects of worship and propitiation to whom offerings were made and prayers were recited, and before whom prostrations were performed, thereby generating merit for the practitioner. Paintings also had didactic purposes, and itinerant teachers would often unroll a painting in public and tell miraculous tales of bodhisattvas. For those monks and lamas who engaged in meditation, visualization was an important part of their practice, but paintings were to be used as a template only in the preliminary stages of meditation until a sharp mental image could be produced. There were precise guidelines for the depiction of deities, although the storied use of iconometrics (the geometric grids specifying the proportions of a given deity) in Tibetan painting was as much a matter of interpretation and even controversy as it was of slavish repetition.53

  Tibetan artists were generally ordinary artisans who learned their craft from their fathers. Although some accomplished masters of Buddhist doctrine and practice were also skilled artists, the majority of Tibetan artists were laymen with little specific Buddhist training. Buddhist texts require that before executing an image of a tantric deity, the artist must undergo the proper initiation and go on a meditational retreat, and then observe dietary restrictions while executing the work.54 It seems, in fact, that such things were rarely done, apart from receiving an initiation that would permit them to depict the deities of a given tantric class. Although artists were generally well paid for their work, their fee was technically considered an offering since trafficking in sacred images was proscribed.55 Thus the Tibetan artist may not have been as Thurman and Rhie describe him: “The artist has to be a person who is open enough to enlightenment to serve as a selfless vessel for its manifestations, who participates in the creation of a work of art out of dedication to the higher realm, and not primarily for fame and profit.”56

  To next consider the degree to which Tibetan art is “symbolic,” one might begin by telling a Tibetan tale. As a young merchant is about to set off for India, his aging mother asks him to bring her back a relic of the Buddha. The so
n sets off on his journey, but forgets her request until he is almost back home. Coming upon the skull of a dog, he extracts a tooth, wraps it in silk, and presents it to his grateful mother, who worships it fervently, doing prostrations and making offerings daily. Soon the tooth begins to produce small pearls (ring bsrel) and emanate a rainbow light, as authentic relics do.57 The story is thus told as an illustration of the power of faith. But a variation on the story (provided by Thurman and Rhie in Wisdom and Compassion) adds a fascinating twist. After presenting the dog’s tooth to his delighted mother, the son begins to feel guilty and decides to confess his deception to her. The Buddha—more precisely, the Jowo (Jo bo) statue in Lhasa, the most sacred image of the Buddha in Tibet—appears and dissuades him, explaining that the relic is authentic, that the Jowo himself had magically placed the dog’s skull in the son’s path, so that the tooth was actually a manifestation of the Buddha, that is, of the Buddha’s image in Lhasa, a relic created by an image. The son is convinced when he returns home and finds the tooth surrounded by a rainbow halo.58

  This variation on the tale provides an important insight into Tibetan notions of symbolism and embodiment. A Tibetan image, whether painted or sculpted, is not considered finished until it has been animated in a consecration (rab gnas) ceremony. In the case of a sculpture, the interior must be filled with rolls of mantras wrapped around a wooden dowel, called the “life stick” (srog shing), which runs from the crown of the head to the base of the image. Often incense or the soil from a sacred place is added as well, before the bottom of the image is sealed shut and marked with the sign of a crossed vajra. Paintings are marked with mantras, often the letters oṃ, āḥ, hūṃ on the reverse of the scroll, aligned with the head, throat, and heart of the figure on the front. A consecration ceremony, sometimes brief, sometimes quite elaborate, is then performed, the purpose of which is to cause the deity represented in the image (most commonly, a buddha) to enter into and thus animate the image.59 The ritual is said to cause the deity, which in the case of a buddha abides in what is called the “unlocated nirvāṇa” (rab tu mi gnas pa ’i myang ’das, apratiṣṭhitanirvāṇa), because he abides in neither samsara nor nirvana, to become located in the physical image. The image has to be transformed into a buddha in order to become a site of merit making. In the ceremony, the unconsecrated image is (in the visualization of the person performing the consecration) made to dissolve into emptiness (which is its true nature) and then reappear as the deity itself, often through the use of a mirror, which reflects the ultimate nature of the deity into the conventional form of the image.60

  A standard component of the ceremony is the recitation of the verse “As all the buddhas from [their] abodes in Tusita heaven, entered the womb of Queen Māyā, likewise may you enter this reflected image.”61 The consecrated image of the deity thus is not a symbol of the deity but, effectively, is the deity, and there are numerous stories in Tibet of images speaking to their devotees. In the variation of the story above the dog’s tooth did not glow because of the mother’s faith, but because it was in fact a relic of the Buddha, created by the Buddha. In the “three body” (trikāya) theory of Mahayana Buddhism, the emanation body of the Buddha (nirmāṇakāya) includes not only the form of the Buddha that appears on earth, once in each age, in the guise of a monk, adorned with the thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks of a superman (mahāpuruṣa); the Buddha can also appear in the guise of ordinary beings, as well as (apparently) inanimate objects (called “crafted emanation bodies,” bzo sprul sku), such as paintings and sculptures. Thus, the dog’s tooth is a relic, it is a tooth of the Buddha, because it is an emanation of the Buddha. The fact that it is a sculpture of the Buddha that appears to the son, speaks to him, and identifies the tooth as his own creation only emphasizes this identity. It is this identity, which in the case of the consecration of an image is effected through ritual, that may help to explain the general absence in Tibet of what might be termed “art-historical” literature.62

  All of this would suggest that the Tibetan attitude toward the artistic representation of Buddhist deities might best be described with the term used by the early Catholic missionaries to Tibet: idolatry, defined as “the worship or paying of divine honors to a false god as represented by some image or idol in which he is believed to be present.”63 If the qualification “false” is removed and it is understood that Buddhist gods may be male or female, then the definition appears apt. The 1676 work China and France, or Two Treatises reports that the Catholic missionaries Grueber and d’Orville were not able to meet the Dalai Lama “because none is admitted that makes profession of the Christian Religion,” but they saw his picture, “unto which, as much reverence is paid, when but represented in Pictures and Images, as if he were there in person, by these Idolaters.”64 One finds a similar view in the writings of the missionary and scholar Graham Sandberg, who wrote in 1906, “Whatever praises modern enthusiasts may lavish on Buddhism as a pure and philosophic form of belief, they cannot long observe its practice in any country where it actually prevails without discovering that it is largely idolatrous.”65 One might prefer to call the Buddhist images icons, religious images that are believed to partake of the substance of what they represent, but the point remains the same.66 The Tibetan attitude, from the point of view of an earlier anthropology of religion, would be seen as the product of a primitive mentality. E. B. Tylor explains that “the tendency to identify the symbol and the symbolized, a tendency so strong among children and the ignorant everywhere, led to the idol being treated as a living powerful being, and thence even to explicit doctrines as to the manner of its energy or animation.”67

  Thus, far from being the high symbolist art that is always pointing to something else, away from itself, always standing for something else, a Tibetan image is not, in an important sense, a representation of the deity at all, but is the deity itself. The inability of art historians to recognize this fact, observable not only in Tibet but throughout the Buddhist world, derives in large part from a lack of interest in the uses of works of art. And even when use is invoked, it is romantic: the mystic contemplation of the image, turning a blind eye to persons prostrating in its presence. Indeed, the reception of Tibetan Buddhist art in the West observes the law of the excluded middle (something “Eastern thinking” putatively lacks). When the art historian explains wrathful deities as the projection of the Tibetan unconscious onto the brutal landscape, what is missing is any mediation by a Tibetan consciousness, by a Tibetan agent between the unconscious and the landscape. The Tibetan is instead portrayed as the passive observer of his or her own projections; the only agency is ascribed to the sinister lama who manipulates the observer’s fear for his own gain. When the art historian portrays the yab yum image as a symbol of the union of polarities, he ignores the fact that according to certain systems of Tibetan tantric theory (including the “conservative” Geluk), the attainment of buddhahood is impossible without at some point engaging in actual sexual union with an actual (rather than visualized) partner, and that the biographies and autobiographies of Tibetan lamas are replete with descriptions of their practice of sexual yoga.68 When the art historian portrays the mandala as an abstract symbol of an archetypal universe, he ignores the fact that a mandala is a particular palace of a particular deity who occupies the central throne, a palace decorated in a particular way and inhabited by particular buddhas, bodhisattvas, gods, goddesses, and protectors, that there are many different mandalas, and that the initiate seeks to memorize the palace in all of its aspects in order to become that particular deity.

  Just as Tibetan art is encountered not in Tibet but is located elsewhere, so its meaning is not specific but universalized away from Tibet, to an imagined state of enlightenment in the future or to a primitive state of human evolution in the past, but never in the present, never in Tibet. Thus, as with other portrayals of things marked with the adjective “Tibetan,” Tibetan art is represented as a field of opposites, of Chinese influence or Indian infl
uence, of peaceful deities or wrathful deities, of sexual degradation or high symbolism, of works that compel abject devotion or that point only beyond, works executed by evil magicians or enlightened sages, who inhabit a land that can inspire only terror or mystic visions of emptiness. Invisible in all of these portrayals are Tibetans, actors (both ritually and otherwise) in the middle of a universe constituted and populated in ways quite different from the universe of those who seek to explain Tibetan art to us and to them.