Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  Regardless of the number of “non-Western” positions, however, the majority of positions were still those inherited from the seminary model. As a result, the agenda of the scholarship was largely a reflection of its particular concerns, with research and teaching directed toward the exegesis of “sacred texts” and on “worldview” or “belief.” In producing his scholarship, however, the Buddhologist among the Christians was faced with a dilemma. The texts that he dealt with (the scholars of this generation were generally male) often presented daunting philological and historical problems, the solutions to which, when finally found, were generally of such a technical nature that they appeared hopelessly arcane to the Buddhologist’s undergraduate students as well as to his colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies. It was therefore common, both in teaching and in scholarship (especially in the United States), to turn away from the details of doctrine and institution and instead to look back toward their putative source, the experience of meditation. Few scholars of this period would question the declaration by Edward Conze, an influential Buddhologist of the 1960s, that “each and every [Buddhist philosophical] proposition must be considered in reference to its spiritual intention and as a formulation of meditational experiences acquired in the course of the process of winning salvation.”16

  Of particular interest for the development of the field of Tibetan Buddhist Studies is the career of Jeffrey Hopkins, who came to Robinson’s program in Wisconsin only after having received considerable training in Tibetan Buddhism elsewhere. Hopkins had gone to Wisconsin after studying with his teacher, Geshe Wangyal (1901–1983), whose influence on the current state of Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the United States is difficult to overstate. Geshe Wangyal was born in what is today Kalmykia, the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea populated by the Kalmyks, a Mongol people who in the seventeenth century emigrated there after the Mongols retreated from their European conquests. The Kalmyks are Tibetan Buddhists. Geshe Wangyal was born there in 1901 and ordained as a Buddhist monk at the age of six. He excelled at his studies and was chosen by the prominent Buryat Mongol lama Agvan Dorzhiev to travel to Tibet to enroll at Drepung monastery. He arrived in Lhasa in 1922 and remained for nine years, completing the monastic curriculum. He intended to return to Kalmykia to teach, but en route learned of the Bolshevik persecutions of Buddhist institutions. He remained in Beijing for some years, serving as translator for Sir Charles Bell (1870–1945, British political officer for Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet) during his travels in China and Manchuria. He later traveled to India and met the British mountaineer Marco Pallis, with whom he spent four months in England in 1937. During the Second World War, he divided his time between India and Tibet. With the first news of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, he left Tibet for good and moved to Kalimpong in West Bengal.17

  By that time a community of Kalmyk immigrants had been established in Freewood Acres, New Jersey. During the Second World War, the Kalmyks, who had been brutally persecuted under the Soviets, sided with the Germans. One group followed the Germans in their retreat from the Soviet Union, finding themselves in Austria when the war ended. This group was allowed to emigrate to New Jersey rather than being repatriated to the Soviet Union to suffer Stalin’s revenge. With their community established, they sought a monk to perform religious functions. In 1955 Geshe Wangyal arrived. Like so many Buddhist monks who first came to the United States to serve a refugee community, Geshe Wangyal soon attracted the attention of Americans interested in Buddhism. It became known to the Asian enthusiasts of Manhattan and Boston that there was a Tibetan lama living in New Jersey. Among the most enthusiastic were Robert Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins, both of whom left Harvard to live at Geshe Wangyal’s Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America in 1963. Geshe Wangyal accompanied Thurman to India, where in 1965 he was the first American to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. After Thurman returned to the United States, Geshe Wangyal encouraged him to return to Harvard, where he completed his B.A. and Ph.D. He is currently the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University.

  After eight years of study with Geshe Wangyal, Hopkins enrolled in the graduate program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he and Robinson established Tibet House, a place for students of Tibetan Buddhism to study with visiting refugee Tibetan lamas. After Robinson’s death in 1971, Hopkins went to India to conduct his dissertation research. Living in Dharamsala, he soon attracted the attention of the Dalai Lama, who was impressed both by Hopkins’s fluent Tibetan as well as his substantial knowledge of Madhyamaka philosophy. In 1972 Hopkins returned to the United States, where he completed his doctorate. In 1973 he was hired as a member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

  At that time the University of Virginia had one of the fastest growing departments of Religious Studies in North America, in the early years of the decade adding positions in Islam, Buddhist Studies, Hinduism, and Chinese Religions, along with Psychology of Religion and Philosophy of Religion. Hopkins had an immediate impact, teaching courses on Buddhist philosophy and meditation to huge classes, even attracting twenty students to his course in classical Tibetan, ten of whom survived the first semester. Hopkins’s specialty was Madhyamaka philosophy; his massive dissertation, Meditation on Emptiness, which was later published as a book, became the bible (in its University Microfilms International form) for a growing number of students. Some went so far as to have a rubber stamp made that read “Does Not Inherently Exist,” which they stamped everywhere from their foreheads to the urinals in the Department of Religious Studies’ men’s room. During his second semester, he brought to campus a Tibetan lama, Khetsun Sangpo, from Dharamsala. In courses with titles like “Buddhist Meditation” and “Buddhist Yogis,” the lama lectured to scores of students, speaking in Tibetan, pausing after each sentence for Hopkins to translate. This was to become the paradigm of the Virginia program. It was the learning of the lamas that was being passed on to the students, either in this mode of near-simultaneous translation or with Professor Hopkins reporting what he had heard or read in his prodigious studies with many of the leading Tibetan scholars of the refugee community. In this way the legendary oral tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, long locked in its Himalayan keep, appeared, as if magically, in a classroom in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tibetan lamas, long absent, were now present.

  But refugee lamas were not the only sources of Tibetan learning to materialize in Charlottesville (and elsewhere). Thousands of Tibetan texts also appeared. Under Public Law 480, the government of India agreed that its huge debt to the United States for shipments of American wheat provided for famine relief would be repaid in the form of books. Specifically, beginning in 1961, a designated number of copies of every book published in India were to be provided to the Library of Congress, which would then distribute them to select regional depository libraries, including Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. To the eternal good fortune of Tibetan Studies, the head of the Library of Congress in New Delhi from 1968 to 1985 was E. Gene Smith, an eminent Tibetologist trained at the University of Washington. Through his efforts, thousands of heretofore unknown Tibetan texts, texts that had been brought out of Tibet in the diaspora, were published in India and sent to depository libraries across the United States. In this way, the long mysterious Tibetan archive became, as if magically, manifest in the stacks of American university libraries.

  In the late 1970s the Department of Religious Studies added “History of Religions” to its graduate program. The students enrolled in this track were almost exclusively Hopkins’s students of Tibetan Buddhism. Early on, Hopkins discovered that these students had difficulty understanding and, especially, remembering the multiple relations between the myriad categories of Buddhist philosophy that were deemed essential in the Geluk monastic curriculum. In an effort to remedy this problem, he taught students to memorize the Tibetan definitions of some of the most basic terms used there. Thus a pot (the standard object abo
ut which qualities such as impermanence are posited) was “that which is bulbous, splayed-based and performs the function of holding water”—as difficult to say in Tibetan as it is in English. “Impermanent” was defined as “momentary.” “Phenomenon” was defined as “that which bears its own entity.”

  With these simple definitions memorized, it was then possible to construct simple syllogisms, such as “The subject, a pot, is impermanent because of being momentary.” Here pot was called the subject, impermanent was the predicate, and being momentary was the reason. In order for the syllogism to be true, the reason had to be a quality of the subject—that is, the pot had to be momentary—and there had to be “pervasion” between the category of the reason and the category of the predicate; that is, whatever was momentary had to be impermanent. Hopkins would test the students by saying in Tibetan, “It follows that whatever is momentary is necessarily impermanent,” and the students would answer, “There is pervasion.” Or he would say, “It follows that whatever is a phenomenon is necessarily impermanent,” to which the students would answer, “There is no pervasion.” He would say, “posit,” meaning “posit something that is a phenomenon and is not impermanent,” and the students would say, “the nonproduct space,” because they knew that the definition of the nonproduct space is “the absence of obstructive contact.” Because such an absence did not change moment by moment, it was not impermanent, but was rather permanent. In this way the students developed a rudimentary command of the categories of the elementary monastic curriculum, learning the kinds of things that novice monks learned in Tibet.

  It may be useful to describe briefly the nature of the Geluk monastic curriculum in Tibet, upon which Hopkins modeled the Virginia program. Monasteries were often large and complex institutions serving many functions in traditional society, only one of which was the training of scholars; moreover, only certain monasteries offered such training. The majority of the monks in any given monastery were not actively engaged in philosophical training; even in the large teaching monasteries of the major sects, it has been estimated that only 10 percent of the monks undertook the study of the philosophical curriculum.

  The monastic curriculum of the three major Geluk monasteries (Drepung, Sera, and Ganden) took from fifteen to twenty-five years to complete. After learning to read and write (usually beginning between the ages of seven and twelve), a monk would study elementary logic, set forth in a series of three textbooks called the small, intermediate, and large “path of reasoning” (rigs lam). The first of these introduced students to the mechanics of the syllogism (technically closer to an enthymeme) through the topic of colors, traditionally beginning with the statement “It follows that whatever is a color is necessarily red,” which would be followed by a statement designed to demonstrate the error of such a position: “It follows that the subject, the color of a white conch, is red because of being a color.” The Small Path of Reasoning proceeded through chapters on color, “objects of knowledge” (shes bya), identification of the reverse (ldog pa ngos ’dzin), opposites, cause and effect, and so on, providing increasingly difficult exercises in logic while simultaneously adding to the student’s store of definitions and categories of technical terms. After completing the study of the three paths of reasoning students would move on to study “types of awareness” (blo rigs), which introduced the basic categories of Buddhist epistemology, and “types of reasons” (rtags rigs), which provided further instruction in logic. The training in the “collected topics,” “types of awareness,” and “types of reasoning” took from one to five years.

  These works constituted the preparation for the core of the Geluk curriculum, the study of five Indian treatises known simply as the “five texts.” The first was the Ornament of Realization (Abhisamayālaṃkāra), attributed to Maitreya, which was studied for four to six years. The work purports to present the “hidden teaching” of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, that is, the structure of the path to enlightenment. It is for the most part a list of terms known as the “seventy topics,” each of which has multiple subcategories. There are, for example, twenty varieties of the aspiration to buddhahood (bodhicitta). The second text was the Introduction to the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra) of Candrakīrti, a work organized around the ten perfections of the bodhisattva path, but the bulk of which is devoted to the sixth, the perfection of wisdom. This chapter forms the locus classicus of Madhyamaka philosophy for the Gelukpas. It was studied for two to four years. The third work was the Commentary [to Dignāga’s “Compendium on] Valid Knowledge” (Pramāṇavarttika) of Dharmakīrti. Its logical categories are studied in a synthetic form in the “paths of reasoning” and “types of reasoning” textbooks. Monks of the three great monasteries would convene annually at Jang to debate about Dharmakīrti’s text. This text contains arguments for the existence of rebirth, for liberation from rebirth, and for the omniscience of a buddha; discussions of the two valid sources of knowledge (direct perception and inference); classifications of proof-statements; and an analysis of the operations of thought. Written in a cryptic poetic style, it is considered one of the most difficult Indian śāstras and thus was a particular favorite of the most elite scholar-monks. The fourth text was the Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakośa) of Vasubandhu, a compendium of Hinayana doctrine, providing the basis for Buddhist cosmology and karma theory, among other topics. It was studied for four years. The final work, also studied for four years, was the Discourse on Vinaya (Vinayasūtra) of Guṇaprabha, providing the rules of monastic discipline.

  The successful completion of the entire curriculum took some twenty years of study. During this time the educational techniques were two: memorization and debate. It was customary for a monk over the course of his study to memorize the five Indian texts, his college’s textbooks on the Indian texts, and Tsong kha pa’s major philosophical writings; it was not uncommon for an accomplished scholar to have several thousand pages of Tibetan text committed to memory. This repository of doctrine was mined in the second educational technique of the monastic university, debate. Debate took place in a highly structured format in which one monk defended a position (often a memorized definition of a term or an interpretation of a passage of scripture) that was systematically attacked by his opponent. Skill in debate was essential to progress to the highest rank of academic scholarship, and was greatly admired. Particular fame was attained by those monks who were able to hold the position of one of the lower schools in the doxographical hierarchy against the higher. These debates were often quite spirited, and certain debates between highly skilled opponents are remembered with an affection not unlike that which some attach to important sporting events in the West. It was commonly the case that a monk, adept at the skills of memorization and debate, would achieve prominence as a scholar without ever publishing a single word.

  At Virginia, Jeffrey Hopkins derived the graduate program in Buddhist Studies from this model. However, unlike in Tibet, where the entire day of study could be devoted to this curriculum, at Virginia there were other subjects that needed to be studied (Indian Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism, Sanskrit, History of Religions, a second religion, etc.), such that only the language classes in classical Tibetan could be consigned to the monastic curriculum. This severely truncated the amount of material that could be studied and absorbed. As the program eventually developed, students would begin with the Small Path of Reasoning; the first thing they would learn to say in Tibetan was “It follows that whatever is a color is necessarily red.” They would move in the first year through a selection of topics from the Small Path of Reasoning, memorizing the definitions and divisions, as well as the debates. Unlike in Tibet, however, the students never really learned to improvise in their debating, but merely repeated what they had memorized, like a conversation drill in a Spanish textbook. Whereas in Tibet the passive and active sides of the intellect were exercised in memorization and debate, respectively, at Virginia even the debating was passive. The second year of classical Tibetan was devoted
to the study of “types of awareness” and “types of reasoning,” the third year to a “stages and paths” textbook, and the fourth year was left open, often devoted to a tantric text.

  Whenever possible, a prominent Geluk scholar-monk, selected by the Dalai Lama, was invited to Charlottesville for a semester or a year to teach these and other classes, with Professor Hopkins, as always, providing sentence-by-sentence translation. On Friday afternoons and weekends, the Tibetan monk would teach meditation, first in a space provided by a local church and later at Hopkins’s home. The graduate students of the program were regular participants in these sessions. Thus the notion of belonging to a tradition of scholarship that had been the model in Europe, a tradition that extended back to the great Orientalists of the nineteenth century, was replaced by a far more ancient model, in which the master was not der Doktor-vater but the lama, whose tradition, it is said, can be traced back to the Buddha himself.

  The other topics of the monastic curriculum, that is to say, the formal study of the five texts, remained largely untouched; the four years of graduate study provided enough time to complete only the preliminary elements of the curriculum. Madhyamaka and Yogācāra philosophy, two of Professor Hopkins’s areas of expertise, were studied in English-language seminars, and here some of the content of Candrakīrti’s Introduction to the Middle Way was touched upon. But generally speaking, students would complete their graduate coursework with only a partial command of the material that would be required of a twelve-year-old monk enrolled in the scholastic curriculum of a Geluk monastery. Students completed the program with the ability to read one type of technical scholastic literature. One of the skills that was sacrificed in the process was a solid foundation in Sanskrit, long the lingua franca of Buddhist Studies, as it remains in Europe and Japan. It would be unthinkable there for a student to undertake the study of Tibetan without a strong knowledge of Sanskrit. In the United States, at least at Virginia, the requirements in Sanskrit were minimal, the focus being on the received tradition of Tibetan renditions of Buddhist doctrine.