Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  This ability was put to use in the writing of the dissertation. In Tibetan Buddhist scholastic literature there is a genre called grub mtha’, often translated as “doxography.” Its texts are compendia of the doctrines of the various schools of Indian philosophy. While works of this genre sometimes include summaries of the doctrines of non-Buddhist schools of classical Indian philosophy such as Jaina, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and Carvāka, the bulk of the exposition is concerned with the Buddhist schools, which are generally numbered as four: the two Hinayana schools of Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika, and the two Mahayana schools of Yogācāra (generally referred to as Cittamātra, “mind only”—sems tsam, in the doxographical literature) and Madhyamaka. The Tibetans brought their own approach to the study of Buddhist philosophy, cataloging the positions of the various Indian schools, ranking them, and comparing their assertions on a wide range of topics. Despite the fact that Vaibhāṣikas and Sautrāntikas never had adherents in Tibet and the Cittamātra view was only occasionally espoused, studies that move up through this hierarchy are considered, especially in the Geluk sect, to have a strong pedagogic and even soteriological value; the exposition begins with Vaibhāṣika and moves toward Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika. The tenets of the lower schools are seen as stepping stones to the higher, as a means of understanding increasingly subtle philosophical positions, providing an opportunity to discern a development and refinement of concepts and terminology that would be imperceptible if study were limited to what is judged by many to be the most profound, the Prāsaṅgika-Mādhyamika. The Tibetan doxographies are very much constructions of the Indian schools and to that extent artificial. They are largely ahistorical, juxtaposing and amalgamating positions that were often separated by centuries. They are also synthetic, erecting “schools” for which in India there is sometimes insufficient historical evidence.18

  Professor Hopkins would assign a portion of one of these works to a doctoral student as his or her dissertation topic. For example, I was assigned the Svātantrika section of Jamyangshayba’s (’Jam dbyang bzhad pa) Great Exposition of Tenets (Grub mtha’ chen mo) and Anne Klein was assigned the Sautrāntika chapter. The task that Hopkins set for his students was “getting it straight,” a multistage process that began first with coming up with a rough translation of the assigned text. We each would meet with Hopkins once a week to go over our translation with him and have it corrected (an extremely labor intensive task, requiring him to keep up with a number of different texts at once). We would discuss doctrinal points with him, sometimes in connection with an early-nineteenth-century work of annotations on Jamyangshayba’s text. We regarded the authors of the works we studied as great masters. Our goal was to understand their thought by partaking in a lineage of scholarship. In the case of my own dissertation, that lineage, moving from the present to the past, flowed to me from Professor Hopkins, from his own teachers, from the author of the nineteenth-century annotations, from Jamyangshayba in the eighteenth century, from Tsong kha pa in the fourteenth century, and then from Indian masters: from Kamalaśīla, from Candrakīrti, from Nāgārjuna, and from the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, traditionally regarded as the word of the Buddha himself. To seek to use the understanding gained from this lineage as a foundation for one’s own evaluation and critique was considered presumptuous and somehow unseemly. It would be impossible for us to ever surpass their understanding; our task was to represent it accurately in English. This approach was in part borrowed from the tradition itself, in which a high premium is placed on a profound and detailed understanding of doctrine, especially of the Madhyamaka. It is the Geluk position, supported with copious quotations from Indian texts, that there is no higher philosophical position than that put forward by Nāgārjuna, and that in order to be liberated from rebirth it is necessary to have a full understanding of that position, eventually in meditation but initially in a discursive way. Thus, in the accurate translation and exposition of Buddhist philosophy we could also partake in a form of salvation by scholarship.

  At the same time, we would be applying to the appropriate funding agencies (at that time, the American Association of Indian Studies and the U.S. Office of Education through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad program) for support for our doctoral research. Here, because of politics both international and scholarly, a degree of dissimulation was called for. The government of India did not permit research in Tibetan refugee communities because of political sensitivity over relations with China. At the same time, research on Tibetan Buddhism did not have the cachet of Sanskrit studies. For that reason, doctoral students from the Virginia program submitted proposals for projects that involved the translation of a Sanskrit text (that also existed in Tibetan translation), and asked to be based not in Dharamsala or in refugee monasteries in Karnataka State (which were barred to foreigners) but, for example, at Delhi University, which had the only Department of Buddhist Studies in India. With the grant successfully in hand, it was then possible to make extended visits to Tibetan communities to study at the feet of refugee Tibetan lamas. In our work with them we felt that in a sense we were doing what the Tibetans had done when, during the tenth century, they brought Buddhism to their land of snows. After their arduous trip across the mountains to India, they studied with the great Indian masters and then returned home to translate their works into Tibetan. In the same way we had crossed the ocean to India to study with Tibetan masters, now in exile there, and upon returning to America would translate texts based on their teachings. In that way we both preserved the wisdom of these masters and made the dharma available in English.19 The precedent for this had been set earlier in the century by Evans-Wentz.20

  Meanwhile, at the University of Wisconsin shortly before the untimely death of Richard Robinson, one of the Tibetan scholars originally brought to America by Geshe Wangyal was hired by Wisconsin as an instructor and then as an assistant professor in the Department of South Asian Studies. This was Geshe Lhundup Sopa, a monk of Sera monastery. Now a professor emeritus, he is at this writing the only Tibetan geshe (the highest degree in the Geluk curriculum) ever hired as a tenured faculty member at a college or university in North America. Together, Jeffrey Hopkins and Geshe Sopa published a volume that included translations of two works: a commentary on Tsong kha pa’s poem on the three aspects of the path to enlightenment (renunciation, the aspiration to buddhahood, and the understanding of emptiness) and a brief doxography of the schools of Indian Buddhist philosophy. It was published under the apparently hyperbolic title of Practice and Theory of Tibetan Buddhism (later revised as Cutting through Appearances).

  As a highly regarded product of the monastic curriculum described above, the many graduate students that Geshe Sopa trained tended in their dissertations to focus on works of Geluk scholastic philosophy. The other places in North America where one could study Tibetan Buddhism at the graduate level in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the University of Washington, the University of California at Berkeley, Indiana University, and the University of Saskatchewan, produced far fewer graduates than Wisconsin and Virginia, which remained the primary centers of Tibetan Buddhist Studies during this period.21 In these decades, then, it was perhaps not much of an overstatement to represent the Practice and Theory of Tibetan Buddhism with two works from just one Tibetan sect, the Geluk, because the bulk of the scholarship being produced at that time focused on the Geluk sect, an effect that can be traced back to Geshe Wangyal, a Geluk monk who was the fore-father of the program at Virginia and the teacher of Robert Thurman. Indeed, one might say that during this century the most important figure in Tibetan Studies in Great Britain was David Snellgrove, that in France it was Marcelle Lalou or Rolf Stein, and that in North America it was Geshe Wangyal. This has had a profound effect on the history of Tibetan Studies.

  Most of the graduates of the Virginia and Wisconsin programs eventually found academic positions; they often described their specialty with the neologism “Indo-Tibetan Buddhism,” perhaps in an attempt to counter the old vie
w of Tibet as a marginal civilization of Asia. In time, however, such precautions have seemed unnecessary, as Tibet has come more and more into the forefront of popular attention with the repeated visits of the Dalai Lama to the United States. The graduates of these programs have gone on to constitute a distinct class in the history of American Buddhism, an American version of what in Tibetan is called the “scholar-adept” (mkhas grub), that is, scholars who are also Buddhist practitioners. In Tibet, such persons were generally monks and almost always male. In America, they are almost always laypeople, and sometimes female. This peculiar feature of American Buddhism, at least when compared to the Buddhisms of Asia, derives largely from the fact that American Buddhism lacks a significant monastic component.

  The histories of Buddhist nations traditionally tend to revolve around the founding of monasteries. In Tibet, for example, when King Tri Songdetsen wanted to establish Buddhism in his realm, he invited an abbot from India to found a monastery. It was his attempt that enraged the gods and demons of Tibet, requiring that Padmasambhava be called in to subdue them. Only then could the momentous act of founding a monastery succeed. Buddhist history and Buddhist texts agree that without monks there can be no Buddhism, a view supported by Buddhist myths of the endtime. In the last stages of the degeneration of the dharma, it is said that all Buddhist texts will disappear (the last to go will be those on monastic discipline), the saffron robes of the monks will turn white (the color of the robes of the laymen), and, in the end, all of the relics of the cremated Buddha—the teeth, the bones, the fingernails, the hair—will break free from their reliquaries, the stupas and pagodas, and magically travel to Bodhgaya, where they will reassemble beneath the tree where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. There they will be worshipped one last time by the gods before they burst into flames and vanish.

  In Asia, the distinction between monk and layperson is generally sharply drawn, even in Japan, where, since the Meiji era, monks have married. The distinction is not so much about celibacy, although outside Japan the pretense of celibacy (and its attendant misogyny) remains important. The distinction is instead one of a division of labor. The role of the monk is to maintain a certain purity, largely through keeping an elaborate set of vows. Such purity renders the monk as a suitable “field of merit” to whom laypeople can make offerings, thereby accumulating the favorable karma that will result in a happy rebirth in the next life. By adopting a certain lifestyle, then, in which the transient pleasures of married life are renounced, monks provide the opportunity for the layperson to amass a certain karmic capital. In return, monks receive the fruits of the labor of the laity—labor that they themselves have eschewed—in the form of their physical support. More specifically, monks do what laypeople cannot do because they generally do not know how: recite texts, perform rituals, and sometimes meditate. Laypeople do those things that monks are forbidden to do: till the soil, engage in business, raise families. (In Tibet, where lay and state support for monks was less generous than in some Theravada countries, monks often engaged in commerce, either individually or on behalf of the monastery.)

  In America, white Buddhists have not observed this distinction. Instead, American Buddhists, whether Zen, Theravadin, or Tibetan, have always wanted to do what monks do, but without becoming monks. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they have wanted to do some of the things monks do. They have been less interested in performing rituals, but have had a keen interest in reading and studying texts and in meditating. It is partly due to these interests and partly because of their wealth that American Buddhists have often been able to lure Asian monks away from the refugee communities they were brought to the United States to serve, founding instead “dharma centers” where the clientele is largely not of Asian descent.

  But even now there are not always enough Asian masters to go around. Some Western men and women have become monks and nuns, but generally they have not attracted large groups of followers. American nuns in Tibetan traditions have led the movement to reestablish the order of fully ordained nuns, a movement motivated by a complicated feminism that seeks to restore the place of women in a patriarchal hierarchy in which a man who has been a monk for fifteen minutes is senior to a woman who has been a nun for fifteen years. But the impact in America of American monks and nuns has been relatively minor, in large part because there is no institution to support them. Life in America with shaved head and robes is a difficult one, with much time spent explaining to the uninformed that one is not a Hare Krishna; there is no established sangha in the United States (outside of a few communities) in which one can easily live as a monk or nun. Furthermore, many of those who have become monks and nuns in the Tibetan tradition have never learned to read Tibetan sufficiently to receive the requisite sanction from a Tibetan lama to teach or the requisite renown to attract American followers. Tibetan is difficult to learn outside of an academic setting. Those Western monks who spend long periods in Korea or India or Sri Lanka, who learn the language and the texts sufficiently to be qualified as teachers in Asia, rarely remain monks when they come back home, finding a more appropriate role in the academy, as scholars (witness, for example, Robert Thurman, Robert Buswell, José Cabezón, Georges Dreyfus). Many who remain monks and nuns in the United States derive their authority from their garb, but they would not have the credentials of a teacher in a traditional Buddhist society. And thus, in a strange way, the traditional role of the monk, as dispenser of Buddhist wisdom and interpreter of texts, has been arrogated to the academic, those students of Geshe Wangyal, Geshe Sopa, and other Tibetan lamas who have received the sanction to teach, not necessarily by virtue of the symbolic capital derived from traditional transmission (although this was often also there), but by virtue of symbolic capital derived from their possession of a doctorate in Buddhist Studies.

  In order to continue in their positions, however, the new scholar-adepts also had to meet the demands of the institutions that paid their salaries. It was easy enough to attract large numbers of students to courses like “Introduction to Buddhism,” where the dual role of scholar and adept only served to boost enrollments. (During my younger and more supple years, I would annually wow my students by demonstrating the lotus posture during a lecture on meditation.) But it was also necessary to publish. In the 1970s and 1980s, the established academic presses in Europe and America, and even the commercial presses, failed to recognize the growing market for Tibetan Buddhism. Oxford University Press had kept the old Evans-Wentz tetralogy in print, but little else had been added to its list over the decades. Four new presses were founded to meet the growing need, each connected with a particular refugee Tibetan lama.

  The first was Shambhala Publications, founded in Berkeley in 1969 and named after the mythical Himalayan kingdom where the practice of tantric Buddhism is preserved in preparation for an apocalyptic war. In 1970 it published what would become its most successful title, The Tassajara Bread Book by Zen baker Edward Brown, and in 1975 it published what would become a New Age classic, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Its most notable author in the early years, however, was Chögyam Trungpa, the Kagyu lama who settled first in Vermont and then in Boulder, Colorado. Works like Cutting through Spiritual Materialism (1973) brought Trungpa’s urbane interpretation of Tibetan Buddhism to a large and enthusiastic audience; his followers eventually established a network of centers called “dharmadhātus,” with a headquarters in Boulder. Trungpa’s followers were highly organized, with local and national officers, appointed by Trungpa, including a Minister of External Affairs who was responsible for relations with those outside Trungpa’s community.22 Shambhala Publications also brought out translations of the works of a group of Trungpa’s disciples, called the Nālandā Translation Committee. The press eventually added titles in Islamic mysticism and New Age psychology, with less emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism beyond the works of Trungpa. Few of Trungpa’s disciples received doctorates in Buddhist Studies, and his influence on the academic study of Tibetan Buddhism largely
has been limited to the small Buddhist Studies program at his Naropa Institute in Boulder.

  The next press to be founded (in 1971) was Dharma Publishing, based in Berkeley, California. Its original and continuing purpose has been to publish the works produced by the Nyingma Institute under the direction of Tarthang Tulku. Dharma’s publishing program has included works by Tarthang Tulku himself, such as Time, Space, Knowledge (1977), as well as the work of his largely anonymous group of disciples, who, under his direction, have brought out the multivolume traditional history of Buddhism called Crystal Mirror. In addition, the works of several European Buddhologists have been reprinted by Dharma (Christian Lindtner’s Nagarjuniana was published as Master of Wisdom), as well as English translations of Tibetan works originally translated into French (such as Foucaux’s 1847 translation of the Lalitavistara, published as The Voice of the Buddha). Several of Herbert Guenther’s works, including his 3-volume Kindly Bent to Ease Us, were also published by Dharma. By far the most ambitious venture undertaken by Dharma was the publication of the Derge edition of the Tibetan canon, beautifully bound in 120 volumes and selling for $15,000. Unfortunately, although great expense was taken in the binding of the volumes, insufficient care was given to the reproduction of the contents, hurriedly photocopied from the blockprint edition housed in the University of California library. As a result, many folios are illegible, rendering the Nyingma edition an excellent canon to prostrate before (as Tibetan Buddhists often do) but a poor canon to read (as Tibetan Buddhists rarely do).