Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  But is the perspective of the Tibetan, in the end, the determinative perspective? And, if so, which Tibetan, the artist in exile or the artist in Tibet? And which artist, the one producing thangkas for the Dalai Lama, the one producing thangkas for tourists, or the one producing modernist paintings? Perhaps it is ultimately a question of relevance (in the linguistic sense of having a contextual effect), as the popular and the scholarly once again converge. Travelers to Tibet have often remarked on the credulity of Tibetans who would trade an old buddha image for a new one, or who would repaint old thangkas that had lost their color. The age of the piece, unless it had once belonged to or was somehow associated with a past saint, was not as relevant as it would be to the Tibetologist or art collector. Yet it would be relevant to the Tibetan that the work be consecrated for use, that it be an animated icon. Some collectors, operating in a different system of relevance, have pried the bottom from a statue and emptied it of its contents, have, in effect, unknowingly deconsecrated it. Is it, then, blasphemous to display in a public gallery a mandala that would be revealed only to tantric initiates? Is it blasphemous to hang a thangka of the Buddha in one’s bedroom, if one does not know that Tibetans consider it a sin to make love in the presence of the Buddha? What is relevant for the Tibetan may not be relevant for the Tibetologist. What is relevant for the Tibetologist may not be relevant for the collector (made all the more complicated when the collector is a Tibetan or the Tibetologist is a Buddhist).69 Does the object, although remaining the same, also change as it moves from one incommensurable context to another, from the hands of one to another, like Belle’s necklace in Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête?

  What, then, is a Tibetan Buddhist painting? For a Tibetan it may be a valued heirloom, but it is also, when properly consecrated, an object of devotion and a medium for making merit. For the scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, it is an artifact: the deity needs to be identified, the piece dated, its provenance established, its author named, its style analyzed. For the connoisseur, the painting is not an artifact but a work of art, not a datum but a commodity. The information provided by the scholar is important, but largely in order to establish the commercial value of the piece. Linked to the value is the question of enjoyment, and here the ritual use and the techniques of the artist may be irrelevant to the connoisseurship that has been inextricable from art history. With connoisseurship has come a certain compulsion to interpret as a way of increasing value, a compulsion that has resulted in some of the theories of Tibetan art recounted here, all of which, in one way or another, attempt to control Tibetan art by making it into what Anne Chayet has called “une forme exotique de l’art occidental.”70 But perhaps what we call “Tibetan art” or “Tibetan Buddhism” is already uncontrollable and perhaps it is in the renunciation of the compulsion to control that a certain liberation may lie.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Field

  In a 1977 survey of the available Western-language scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism, the noted Sinologist Michel Strickmann identified what he perceived as a dangerous trend: “a far more serious threat to the interests of the non-specialist, in my opinion, emanates from a mass of new writings that ostensibly deal with Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist Tāntra. Though sometimes adorned with hitherto respectable names, many of these books appear in reality to be no more than tracts telling harassed Americans how to relax.”1 Strickmann refers to the commingling of the scholarly and the popular, a trend that, as we have seen, has a long history in the Western encounter with Tibet. It is a trend, also, that has only grown and diversified since Professor Strickmann bemoaned its existence two decades ago. This chapter will survey the development of Tibetan Buddhist Studies as an academic field in North America. Focusing especially on the changes that occurred in the wake of the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959, it will attempt to demonstrate some of the ways in which the production of knowledge is always partial, always undertaken within the determining confines of time, place, and cultural climate.2

  In the academic study of Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps differing only in degree from other academic fields, the popular is never wholly absent. But there is, indeed, a difference in degree, for a number of reasons. First is the fact that for most of its history, Tibet has been regarded as somehow peripheral by its neighbors. For India, it has been the place beyond the forbidding Himalayan range, a place of mythical kingdoms and divine abodes. For the various Chinese, Mongol, and Manchu dynasties, it has been a distant, somewhat unrefined yet magically potent neighbor, sometimes imagined as part of their empires, sometimes not. For the British and the Russians of the late nineteenth century, it was the land just beyond the borders of their empires, a place to be mapped by spies. Even the Tibetans have participated in this perception, portraying their land in both Buddhist and Bönpo histories as a wild and uncivilized place to which culture was introduced only from the outside, whether from Buddhist India or Bönpo Zhang Zhung.

  The perception of Tibet as peripheral has persisted in large part because until the second half of this century Tibet was never colonized, not by the Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, British, or Russian empires. One of the many products of colonialism is knowledge, produced first by explorers and merchants, then by colonial officers and missionaries, later by specialists in archives and institutes in the metropole and colleges and universities in the colony. No such institutions emerged in Tibet until after the Chinese invasion and occupation that began in 1950. Hence, there was no factory for the production of official knowledge, leaving only unofficial knowledge, produced by travelers and enthusiasts, “gifted amateurs.” Among trained Orientalists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, classical Tibetan was almost always a secondary language, learned by the Indologist to read translations of Sanskrit texts, learned by the Sinologist to read an edict on one of the four faces of a tetraglot stele or to read the non-Chinese manuscripts among the huge cache discovered in the caves and temples of Dunhuang in western China.3

  Indeed, it was only after the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959 that the study of Tibetan Buddhism “in its own right” began to be accepted as a legitimate academic field. This occurred as Tibetan lamas made their way, under various auspices, to North America and began to attract American and Canadian students. It was the more dedicated of such students who went on to form the greatest pool of graduate students for the newly founded programs in Buddhist Studies, who were to receive the first doctorates, and who were to compete for the increasing number of academic positions in Asian religion, having to suffer the effects of the perception of Tibet and its Buddhism as peripheral, somehow less central than the religions of India or China or Japan.

  Buddhist Studies, as a recognized academic discipline, came into existence only in the present century. It began in Europe as an offshoot of Oriental philology, in which scholars of Sanskrit also read Buddhist texts. Many of these works were first made available in Europe by Brian Houghton Hodgson, the British resident to the Court of Nepal, who in 1837 dispatched bundles of Sanskrit manuscripts from his post in Kathmandu to the great libraries of Europe. The first scholar to make extensive use of Hodgson’s gift was the French scholar Eugène Burnouf, who translated the Lotus Sutra into French; it was published posthumously in 1852. It was this translation and his 1844 Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien that introduced Mahayana Buddhism to European and American intellectuals, among them Wagner and Thoreau. From that point on, a growing number of scholars concerned themselves with Buddhist literature, debating such questions as whether the original teachings of the Buddha were preserved in Sanskrit or in Pali, and later considering such doctrinal questions as whether or not nirvana is a state of utter annihilation.4

  Beyond the work of Burnouf (and several others), the literature of Buddhism did not reach a significant Anglophone audience until the publication in the last decades of the nineteenth century of The Sacred Books of the East series, which was “translated by Various Oriental Scholars and edited by F. Max Müller.” Among
the fifty volumes in the series, seven were devoted to Buddhist works, for the most part works from Pali, but also a Chinese translation of Aśvaghoṣa’s life of the Buddha, another translation of the Lotus Sutra, and a volume entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts, which included the same life of the Buddha, this time translated from the Sanskrit, the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, and the shorter and longer Pure Land sutras. None of the works in The Sacred Books of the East were of Tibetan authorship, nor were they translated from the Tibetan.

  This is not to suggest that Tibetan works were entirely neglected during the nineteenth century. In 1837 Isaac Jacob Schmidt published a French translation of the Diamond Sutra from the Tibetan, followed in 1843 by a translation of the Sutra on the Wise Man and the Fool. In 1847 Philippe Édouard Foucaux (1811–1894) published his French translation of a Tibetan translation of a Sanskrit life of the Buddha, the Lalitavistara.5 The most significant work on Tibetan Buddhist literature to appear during this period, however, was that of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, the Hungarian scholar who published a Tibetan-English dictionary and a survey of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.6 Nonetheless, during the nineteenth century scholarly interest in Tibet was focused largely on those works that shed light on Indian Buddhism, that is, the various Tibetan canons of Sanskrit works translated into Tibetan, and Tibetan histories (chos ’byung) of Indian Buddhism.7

  In the United States the diplomat William Woodville Rockhill, who had traveled extensively in China and Tibet, published in 1892 Udanavarga: A Collection of Verses from the Buddhist Canon and in 1907 The Life of the Buddha and the Early History of His Order, Derived from Tibetan Works in the Bkah-hgyur and Bstan-hgyur. In 1942 Ferdinand Lessing of the University of California at Berkeley published Yung-ho-kung, An Iconography of the Lamaist Cathedral in Peking, with Notes on Lamaist Mythology and Cult; he later collaborated with Alex Wayman on the translation of an important Geluk survey of tantra, Mkhas grub rje’s Fundamentals of the Buddhist Tantras. Tibetan Buddhist Studies, however, did not become established in North America until the 1960s (after the diaspora). Its major figures were David Seyfort Ruegg, Herbert Guenther, and David Snellgrove.8

  The study of Tibetan Buddhism received its first substantial philanthropic support in the United States when the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds to bring the distinguished Sakya scholar Deshung Rinpoche to the University of Washington in 1960. In 1961 the first graduate program in Buddhist Studies was established at the University of Wisconsin, under the direction of Richard Robinson, a Canadian who had received his doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, where he wrote a dissertation later published as Early Mādhyamika in India and China. The students that Robinson produced filled many of the positions in Buddhist Studies that opened at American colleges and universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The students included Lewis Lancaster, Stephan Beyer, Francis Cook, Jeffrey Hopkins, Roger Corless, Steven Young, Dennis Lishka, Charles Prebish, Douglas Daye, Stefan Anacker, and Harvey Aronson. Some remained in the field, some went on to other professions. Those who remained in the field of Buddhist Studies generally found positions not in departments of Sanskrit or Classics or Oriental Languages, as would have been the case in Europe, but in departments of Religion or Religious Studies, a shift that would significantly affect both the direction and the form that Buddhist Studies and, in particular, Tibetan Buddhist Studies would take in North America.9

  The growth of Religious Studies as an academic discipline in the United States has been largely a postwar development, with especial growth during the 1960s. During the late nineteenth century, various anthropologists and students of “culture” (one thinks immediately of Frazer and Tylor) were examining certain practices of non-Western societies, practices that they identified as “religious.” The work of such scholars, often identified as “history of religions,” “comparative religion,” or “world religions,” paid much attention to the evolutionary development of religions from the animistic and fetishistic to the polytheistic and then to the monotheistic. Christianity was largely exempted from such studies, being regarded as the culmination of religious evolution when it was regarded as a “religion” at all. The study of Christianity was thus generally confined to theology faculties in Europe and to seminaries and divinity schools in the United States.

  The expansion and liberalization of the humanities curriculum in the United States after the Second World War led to the study of Christianity being established in public universities and moved out of the divinity schools of private universities. There was a perceived need to wean the curriculum in Religious Studies from the seminary model, to mitigate Protestant dominance by including Catholic and Jewish Studies, and to take into account non-Christian religions.10 However, in the formation of the curriculum of Religious Studies, much of the structure of the seminary faculty was retained. A typical seminary would offer training in Biblical Studies (Old Testament and New Testament, with their attendant languages), Church History, Theology, and Ethics, along with Pastoral Counseling and Homiletics. In the typical department of Religious Studies at a college, there would be positions in Old Testament, New Testament, Church History, Theology, and Ethics, although the names were sometimes changed. Old Testament could be subsumed under Jewish Studies, Church History sometimes became “Religion in America,” and Theology would become “Religious Thought” or “Philosophy of Religion,” the latter placing particular emphasis on Feuerbach and Kierkegaard. To this core was added “World Religions” or “Comparative Religion,” designed to cover the non-Judeo-Christian world—that is, among the “world religions,” Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and sometimes Shinto. Larger or more prosperous institutions might also add positions in Psychology of Religion (where William James, the Freud of The Future of an Illusion, and Jung received particular attention) and Sociology of Religion (where Weber and Durkheim were regarded as the founders). Religious Studies in the United States (and perforce Buddhist Studies) therefore was concerned largely with questions of meaning, interpreting texts to discover beliefs and worldviews. In Europe, however, where Buddhist Studies remained firmly within the long tradition of Oriental studies and philology, meaning in this sense was far less important than the ostensibly more simple commitment to the further accumulation of knowledge.

  With the rise of the colonial powers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the list of the great religions slowly lengthened. In order to qualify, each (if at all possible) should have a founder, an organized hierarchy of priests, a canon of sacred texts, and a set of defining “beliefs.” The first to be admitted was Islam, which like Judaism and Christianity regarded Abraham as its progenitor; then Confucianism, for its ethics, and Hinduism, or at least “classical Hinduism,” for its mystical philosophy; and “original” Buddhism, for its rationality and individualism. But the religion of Tibet, as discussed in the first chapter, remained largely unknown except from outside. Catholic missionaries accepted the Chinese view that the religion practiced at the Manchu court was not Confucianism, not Taoism, and not Buddhism, but rather lama jiao, the sect of the lamas, or “Lamaism.” For European scholars of the Victorian period, the religion of the Tibetans was not authentically Buddhist. As Waddell wrote, “the Lamaist cults comprise much deep rooted devil worship, which I describe in some fullness. For Lamaism is only thinly and imperfectly varnished over with Buddhist symbolism, beneath which the sinister growth of poly-demonist superstition darkly appears.”11

  Tibetan Buddhism was thus largely excluded from the realm of “comparative religion” and “comparative philosophy”; when one surveys anthologies of “world philosophy” or various renditions of the perennial philosophy or peruses journals such as Philosophy East and West one rarely finds a Tibetan name, either the name of an ancient Tibetan philosopher or of a modern Tibetan arguing his case.12 As mentioned above, this is largely because Tibet never became a European colony or fell under direct European influence. Thus, in T
ibet, there was no attempt to “modernize” by establishing universities, importing European technologies, or sending elites to Europe for education.13 The absence of Western colonial institutions in Tibet prevented Tibetan scholars from producing Western forms of knowledge. Since Tibet was not a European colony, institutes, libraries, archives, and museums were not created, either in Tibet or in a European metropole. In his account of the British invasion of Tibet in 1903 and 1904, L. Austine Waddell, chief medical officer during the invasion, made a prediction that never came true: “In the University, which must ere long be established under British direction at Lhasa, a chief place will surely be assigned to studies in the origin of the religion of the country.”14 This also impeded the teaching of European languages in Tibet and the teaching of the Tibetan language in Europe. At the same time, the Buddhism most valued in Europe was that which was controlled by Europe and long dead in Asia, Indian Buddhism. As described in the first chapter, it was this Buddhism, especially in its Pali form, that European scholars regarded as the “original” or “true” Buddhism, and in comparison to which Tibetan Buddhism was judged a late and corrupted form. All of these factors have contributed to the general exclusion of Tibetan Buddhism from the discourse of comparative religion and philosophy.15

  With the growing commitment to adding non-Christian religions to the Religious Studies curriculum, graduates of Robinson’s Buddhist Studies program at Wisconsin were well suited for the World Religions positions in the new and growing departments of Religious Studies. Because Buddhism was the one “pan-Asian” religion, scholars with training in Buddhist Studies had to know something of the traditions of the culture in which Buddhism had developed (India) and of those cultures to which it had migrated (China and Japan). (Other regions in which Buddhism held sway, such as Southeast Asia, Tibet, and Korea, received less attention prior to the 1980s.) Thus, when there was only one opening in World Religions in a given department, the Buddhologist was well positioned to fill it. Even when departments expanded to include an Islamicist or a specialist in Hinduism, there was often a position for someone in Buddhist Studies as well. Some of the larger departments subscribed to what was referred to as the “zoo theory,” staffing a department with scholars of each of the major world religions, in some cases seeking scholars who were themselves adherents of those traditions. Positions in Jewish Studies were almost always filled by Jews. Positions in Islamic Studies have increasingly come to be held by Muslims (of Middle Eastern or South Asian ancestry). Positions in Buddhist Studies are often held by Buddhists, but, as will be discussed below, these Buddhists have generally been of the white variety.