Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  The next press was Wisdom Publications, founded in 1975 and now headquartered in Boston. It began as a publishing organ for the teachings of the Geluk tulku Thupten Yeshe (1935–1984, known as Lama Yeshe), who, along with Thupten Sopa, founded Kopan and Tushita, popular dharma centers outside of Kathmandu and Dharamsala, respectively, and later centers around the world. Thupten Yeshe attracted a large number of students with his engaging teaching delivered in an idiomatic English, commenting on a wide variety of Buddhist and non-Buddhist works, including the Christmas carol “Silent Night” in a work called Silent Mind, Holy Mind. The followers of Lama Yeshe and Lama Sopa were organized into a network of dharma centers around the world under the umbrella of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). Wisdom Publications published works by the Dalai Lama, as well as Jeffrey Hopkins’s massive dissertation, Meditation on Emptiness. The press has also published a wide variety of titles on Buddhist practice, including translations from the Pali.

  The last press to be established was Snow Lion Publications (originally Gabriel/Snow Lion) in 1980 in Ithaca, New York. The press was founded by Gabriel Aiello, Pat Aiello, and Sidney Piburn shortly after the Dalai Lama gave teachings there in 1979. The group took an early interest in the work of Jeffrey Hopkins and his students and conceived the idea of a press that would be devoted to the preservation of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture. Despite initial financial hardship, Snow Lion has gone on to become the largest press devoted to Tibetan Buddhism, having published almost 150 titles on Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism (printing over one million copies) and distributing over 500 titles published by other presses. In addition, Snow Lion distributes hundreds of video- and audiotapes of teachings by Tibetan lamas; thangkas; statues of buddhas; ritual items such as vajras, bells, and rosaries; software for Tibetan fonts; and T-shirts, posters, and postcards connected to Tibetan culture. The press has been particularly committed to publishing works by the Dalai Lama (edited transcripts of public teachings), such as Kindness, Clarity, and Insight (1984), which has sold over fifty thousand copies. Despite the relatively small market, Snow Lion has also been committed to publishing the dissertations of Jeffrey Hopkins’s students, with such arcane titles as A Study of Svātantrika. Over the years, Snow Lion has sought to balance its initial Geluk emphasis by publishing translations from the other sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Most of the translators of these works are Westerners (often under the tutelage of a Tibetan lama) associated with dharma centers in Europe, America, or Nepal who do not hold academic positions. Its periodical newsletter, in which these products are marketed, is a major forum for advertisements for meditation retreats and appeals for aid by various Tibetan refugee religious groups. Recognizing the success of these presses, other more established houses, both academic (such as SUNY and the University of California Press) and commercial (such as HarperCollins, which in 1994 started a Library of Tibet) increased their titles in Tibetan Buddhism.

  In another case of the confluence of the scholarly and the popular, it is these presses, founded to serve the growing popular interest in Buddhism in Europe and America, that have published much of the North American scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism produced during the last three decades. Furthermore, the preponderance of this scholarship has centered on works of the Geluk sect, for a number of reasons. First, Jeffrey Hopkins, who headed the Virginia program, studied with many prominent Geluk scholars, such that most of his own prolific scholarship and that of the first generation of his students focused on Geluk texts. Because Geshe Sopa was a Geluk monk, the same was true of his students at Wisconsin. However, this research also needed to be published. Here the graduates benefited from the fact that two of the new “dharma presses,” Wisdom and Snow Lion, had strong ties to the Geluk, especially in their early years.

  But this politics of knowledge becomes clearer when we compare the circumstances of the production of scholarship on Tibet at the end of the nineteenth century with the circumstances today. It was at the end of the nineteenth century that the two most widely used Tibetan-English dictionaries were produced. One was compiled by a Moravian missionary, H. A. Jäschke, in Ladakh, the other by a Bengali scholar, Sarat Chandra Das, who made several spying expeditions into Tibet on behalf of the British. This was a time when Tibet was coveted as a potential mission field and as a potential colony, both of which require knowledge of the Tibetan language. As we saw in chapter one, Tibet was often portrayed during this period as a corrupt and static society and its religion was largely denigrated in scholarly literature as a debased form of the original Buddhism of India, contaminated with magic, shamanism, and priestcraft to the extent that it should not properly be called Buddhism. Similar characterizations of Asian, African, and New World cultures often provided an ideological justification for colonialism.

  This perspective began to change after the diaspora of 1959, with a more historically based variation on the Theosophical theme of Tibet as a domain in which ancient wisdom was held in safekeeping for the modern age. The view of Tibet as a closed society that had so fascinated and vexed European travelers in the colonial period now became a reason why Tibetan Buddhism was more authentic than any other. Tibet had never been colonized as had India and Southeast Asia, had never been “opened” to the West as had China and Japan, had never suffered a revolution as had occurred in China in 1911 and 1949, and had never attempted to adopt Western ways, as had Japan since the Meiji. Rather, Tibet was seen to have resisted all foreign influence, its monasteries having forced the thirteenth Dalai Lama to close down the English-language school in Lhasa, to abandon his plans to train a modern army, and to discourage the introduction of European sports by proclaiming that he who kicks a soccer ball kicks the head of the Buddha.

  All of this meant that the Buddhism of Tibet was pure and this purity derived in large part from a connection with the origin, which Tibetans themselves often invoked. Like other Buddhist traditions, the Tibetan based claims to authority largely on lineage, and in its case claimed that the Buddhism taught in Tibet in 1959 could be traced in an unbroken line to the eleventh century, when the founders of the major Tibetan sects made the perilous journey to India to receive the dharma from the great masters of Bengal, Bihar, and Kashmir, who were themselves direct recipients of teachings that could be traced to the Buddha himself. Moreover, this lineage was represented as essentially oral, with instructions being passed down from master to disciple as unwritten commentary on sacred text. Now that lineage was in danger of extinction. For the oral tradition not to be lost, locked within the minds of aged and dying refugee lamas, it had to be passed on, and the scholar-adepts of North America dedicated themselves to the task.

  It is the old legacy of religion and magic, India and Tibet, Buddhism and Lamaism that perhaps has caused the current generation of scholars of Tibetan Buddhism (especially in North America) generally to shy away from certain genres of Tibetan literature (propitiation of malevolent deities, exorcism texts, and works dealing in general with wrathful deities or mundane ends) and to gravitate to others (works on meditation, the bodhisattva path, and scholastic philosophy), texts that demonstrate unequivocally that the chief religion of Tibet is a direct and legitimate descendent of Indian Buddhism. The study of such works exalts the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in precisely those domains from which Tibetan Buddhism was so long excluded, the domains of the world religions, gaining for their scholarly experts academic positions that once would have gone to specialists in Indian or East Asian Buddhism. Simultaneously, Tibetan Buddhism, with its ethical systems, regimens of meditation, and profound philosophies, is demonstrated to have something to contribute to the discourse of Religious Studies, a discipline with deep roots in confessional Christianity and its emphasis on doctrine and belief. The Western scholar can thus promote a sympathetic portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism, write books that are bought by American Buddhists, and win tenure in the process; publication of one’s dissertation by one of the once-scorned “dharma presses” has since p
roved sufficient for tenure in a number of cases.23

  Something that was unthinkable in the late nineteenth century has become possible in the late twentieth: the curriculum of a Tibetan monastery has become the model for a doctoral program in the United States. The greatest Tibetologist of the twentieth century, Giuseppe Tucci, described the Tibetan monastery as a place where “Hardening of the arteries set in with the double threat of formulas replacing the mind’s independent striving after truth, and a withered theology taking the place of the yearning for spiritual rebirth.”24 The products of those monasteries were now teaching in the classrooms of American universities and graduate students were memorizing the formulas of their theology. And now that Tibet was no longer the object of European or American imperial desire, another side of Tibetan religion has become subject to the scrutiny of scholars (often working in concert with exiled lamas), the side of logic, philosophy, hermeneutics, ethics, and meditation, all of which demonstrated the depth and value of Tibetan civilization precisely at the moment when it seemed most in jeopardy.

  During the last decade these scholars have benefited greatly from a three-volume Tibetan—Tibetan-Chinese dictionary, published under Chinese colonial auspices in 1985. When an American scholar does not know the meaning of the words in the Tibetan definition, he or she can always open the Tibetan-English dictionaries compiled a century ago by the missionary and the spy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Prison

  The first reference in English to Shambhala was made by Alexander Csoma de Kőrös in 1833:

  The peculiar religious system entitled the Kála-Chakra is stated, generally, to have been derived from Shambhala, as it is called in Sanscrit (in Tibetan “bdé-hbyung,” vulgó “dè-jung,” signifying “origin or source of happiness”) a fabulous country in the north, the capital of which was Cálapa, a very splendid city, the residence of many illustrious kings of Shambhala, situated between 45° and 50° north latitude, beyond the Sita or Jaxartes, where the increase of the days from the vernal equinox till the summer solstice amounted to 12 Indian hours, or 4 hours, 48 minutes, European reckoning.1

  We can only appreciate the author’s concern with providing its precise location on earth. In the century that followed, the site of Shambhala (the probable inspiration of Hilton’s Shangri-La, the utopia from which one escapes at one’s peril) and, indeed, the site of Tibet, which was often made to stand for Shangri-La, would become increasingly nebulous. This chapter will consider the confluence of various myths of Tibet, some Western and some Tibetan, myths that have come together to form a certain lingua franca of the fantastic, shaping a land of language surrounded by mountains difficult to scale.

  In the texts associated with the Kālacakra Tantra, the kingdom of Shambhala is said to be located north of the Himalayan range. It is a land devoted to the practice of the Kālacakra Tantra, which the Buddha himself had entrusted to Shambhala’s king. Shambhala is shaped like a giant lotus and is filled with sandalwood forests and lotus lakes, all encircled by a great range of snowy peaks. In the center of the kingdom is the capital of Kalāpa, where the luster of the palaces, made from gold, silver, and jewels, outshines the moon; the walls of the palaces are plated with mirrors that reflect a light so bright that night is like day. In the very center of the city is the mandala of the Buddha Kālacakra. The inhabitants of the 960 million villages of Shambhala are ruled by a beneficent ruler, called the Kalkin. The laypeople are all beautiful and wealthy, free of sickness and poverty; the monks maintain their vows without the slightest infraction. They are naturally intelligent and virtuous, devoted to the practice of the Vajrayāna, although all authentic forms of Indian Buddhism are preserved. The majority of those reborn there attain buddhahood during their lifetime in Shambhala.

  But conflict looms in the future. In the year 2425, the barbarians (generally identified as Muslims) and demons who have destroyed Buddhism in India will set out to invade Shambhala. The twenty-fifth Kalkin, Raudracakrin, will lead his armies out of his kingdom and into India, where they will meet the forces of evil in an apocalyptic battle, from which the forces of Buddhism will emerge victorious. The victory will usher in a golden age in which the human lifespan will increase, crops will grow without being cultivated, and the population of the earth will devote itself to the practice of Buddhism.2

  But even prior to the war, all has not been peaceful in Shambhala. At the time of the eighth king, Yaśas, there were 35 million brahmans living in Shambhala, devoted to the religion of the Vedas. The king foresaw that, because both the Vedas and the religion of the barbarians permit animal sacrifice, after eight hundred years the descendants of the brahmans would join the race of barbarians and, as a result of the ensuing miscegenation, the entire population of Shambhala would eventually become barbarians. The king thus asked the brahmans either to receive initiation into the Kālacakra mandala (and thus become Buddhists) or to leave Shambhala and emigrate to India. The brahmans chose the latter course. During their journey south, the king realized that if the brahman sages were to leave, the people of the 960 million villages would lose faith in the practice of the Vajrayāna. In order to prevent this, the king assumed the form of a wrathful deity, appeared before the departing brahmans, and frightened them so much that they swooned into unconsciousness. When they awoke, they had been transported back to the capital, where they asked the king to allow them to convert to Buddhism and to receive initiation into the Kālacakra mandala.3 They were constrained to become prisoners of this utopia.

  IN HIS 1889 ESSAY “The Decay of Lying: An Observation,” Oscar Wilde promotes the art of lying, of making fearless, irresponsible statements that show disdain for proof of any kind. Lying, he argues, is particularly important in Art, because, contrary to popular opinion, it is Life that imitates Art. He observes, for example, that the climate of London had changed a decade before with the advent of French Impressionism; prior to that, London had not been foggy. The sunsets admired by “absurdly pretty Philistines” are merely second-rate Turners, the pessimism analyzed by Schopenhauer was invented by Hamlet: “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.”4 Wilde writes, “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment.”5 It is in this sense that we might regard Tibet as a work of art, fashioned through exaggeration and selection into an ideal with little foundation in history. We have observed in this study a variety of attempts by nature to imitate this art, as when Cyril Hoskin became Lobsang Rampa. As Wilde notes, “Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.”6 He is not speaking only of cityscapes and sunsets, but also of lands and peoples. The Japanese, he explains, are the creation of certain artists; the people who live in Japan are quite as commonplace and ordinary as the English. “In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. . . . And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio.”7

  If we extend Wilde’s theory, it would seem that Western enthusiasts of Tibetan Buddhism are more authentic in their Buddhism than Tibetans precisely because they are more intimate with the simulacrum of Tibet that is the invention, that is the artifice. But what happens when the people of such an invented land leave it and come to the place of its invention? This chapter will consider certain of the consequences of the Tibetan diaspora. As with other refugees, the nation has followed the exile into diaspora. But in the case of Tibet, Tibetans fled Tibet to find a safe haven in India, Europe, and North America only to find themselves and their country already there. In previous chapters, we have seen how the “lie” about Tibet took shape. Here
we will consider how Tibetans have both contributed to it and accommodated it, taking up more explicitly the question of the historical agency of Tibetans, an agency that must be acknowledged even when its products seem complicitous with those that we would judge as somehow less authentic. It will become clear, if it is not already, that agency, whether Tibetan or Western, is not a fixed point or an innate ability but rather a process of circulation and exchange, in which, for example, power is bestowed by enthusiasts upon Tibetan lamas, to whom they in turn offer their obeisance. But, as in any exchange, to receive this power the Tibetans must give up something in return. The emphasis here will be on the post-1959 period, in which Tibetan agency takes on a rather different form than it had prior to the diaspora. In 1959 the knowledge moves outside and the inside is, apparently, left with nothing.

  The focus of these reflections will be the current Dalai Lama, so strongly identified with Tibet both by Tibetans and non-Tibetans. If national identity is commonly defined in terms of the head of state in cases of hereditary kingship, such identity is at once concentrated and magnified when the head of state has been, essentially, the same person since the assumption of temporal rule by the fifth Dalai Lama in 1642, or even since the mythological beginning, for the bodhisattva of compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is the human incarnation, is also the progenitor of the Tibetan people. (Indeed, the institution of the incarnate lama in Tibet can be viewed as a form of ancestor worship in which the ancestor is always alive.) As the thirteenth Dalai Lama fled from the British in 1904 and from the Chinese in 1910 only to return, so the present Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959 and has remained there since, facing situations unimagined by his predecessors. Still, for many Tibetans and non-Tibetans, where the Dalai Lama is, there is Tibet: the soul of Tibet need not stand on the soil of Tibet.