Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  Tibetans in exile, led by the Dalai Lama, have thus been forced to turn to new patrons—in Europe, the Americas, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan—for whom they perform the role of the priest by giving religious instructions and initiations and from whom in return they receive financial contributions and political support for the cause of Tibetan independence. The measure of the success and of the sphere of patronage (and thus influence) of Tibetan lamas in this regard can be plotted historically by the increasingly larger geographical regions in which incarnate lamas are discovered. After the death of the third Dalai Lama, to whom the Mongol leader, the Altan Khan, had pledged his support, the Altan Khan’s grandnephew was recognized as the fourth Dalai Lama. Today, incarnate lamas are discovered in Europe and America. (In a recent Wildean case of life imitating art, an American boy in Seattle was identified as the incarnation of a prominent lama, as in Bertolucci’s The Little Buddha. More recently and too farcical for Wilde, action film star Steven Seagal was identified as the reincarnation of a Tibetan lama.) In this way Tibetans have quite literally incorporated foreigners into their patronage sphere through their own version of colonialism, what might be termed a spiritual colonialism. Rather than taking control of a nation, Tibetan Buddhists are building an empire of individuals who, inhabited from birth by the spirit of a Tibetan saint, become, in effect, Tibetans, regardless of their ethnicity. (Although, as seen in chapter three, Lobsang Rampa lacked the proper credentials, he was clearly something of a forerunner of this phenomenon.)

  The Dalai Lama may have a long-term strategy, then, one that serves Buddhist universalism, the freedom of Tibet, and the utopian aspirations of Tibetophiles around the world. Since coming into exile, the Dalai Lama has given the Kālacakra initiation over twenty times. This initiation is unusual among tantric initiations in that it is given in public, often to large gatherings; recent attendance has exceeded 250,000 people. When the initiation is given in Europe or America (as in Madison Square Garden), it has often been called “Kalachakra for World Peace.” As he writes in his autobiography, “I have given the Kalachakra initiation in more than one country outside India—my motive for doing so being not only to give some insight into the Tibetan way of life and thinking, but also to make an effort, on an inner level, in favour of world peace.”57 This peace may have a special meaning, however, for those who take the initiation are planting the seeds to be reborn in their next lifetime in Shambhala, the Buddhist pure land across the mountains dedicated to the preservation of Buddhism.58 In the year 2425, the army of the king will sweep out of Shambhala and defeat the barbarians in a Buddhist Armageddon, restoring Buddhism to India and to the world and ushering in a reign of peace.

  In Hilton’s novel, the inhabitants of Shangri-La sometimes found it necessary to resort to kidnapping in order to populate their utopia, commandeering an airplane and bringing its occupants to the Valley of the Blue Moon. The Dalai Lama may have found a more efficient technique for populating Shambhala and recruiting troops for the army of the twenty-fifth king, an army that will defeat the enemies of Buddhism and bring the utopia of Shambhala, hidden for so long beyond the Himalayas, to the world. It is the Dalai Lama’s prayer, he says, that he will someday give the Kālacakra initiation in Beijing.

  Notes

  PREFACE

  1. Sir Charles Bell, Portrait of the Dalai Lama (London: Collins, 1946), p. 16.

  2. Ibid.

  3. See Heather Stoddard, Le mendiant de l’Amdo (Paris: Société d’ethnographie, 1985), p. 102 and n. 162.

  4. The typescript is entitled “The Life Story of the 13th Dalai Lama” and is held in the India Office Library and Records of the British Library, IOR MSS Eur F80/5i.2.

  5. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 94.

  6. Ibid., p. 97.

  7. Ibid., p. 105.

  8. Ibid., p. 106.

  9. Ibid., p. 108.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Bell, Portrait, p. 430.

  12. On Desideri’s argument, see Michael J. Sweet, “The Devil’s Stratagem or Human Fraud: Ippolito Desideri on the Reincarnate Succession of the Dalai Lama,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 29 (2009): 131–40.

  13. For a detailed study, see “Storm in the Grasslands: Self-Immolations in Tibet and Chinese Policy,” International Campaign for Tibet, 2013, https://www.savetibet.org/storm-in-the-grasslands-self-immolations-in-tibet-and-chinese-policy/.

  14. Bataille, Accursed Share, p. 95.

  15. Clements R. Markham, ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, 2nd ed. (London: Trübner and Company, 1879). pp. 132–33.

  16. See Markham, Narratives, p. 168.

  17. See Nima Dorjee Ragnubs, trans., “The Third Panchen Lama’s Visit to Chengde” in James A. Millward et al., eds., New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 188–98.

  18. Captain Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet, (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1800), pp. 335–36.

  19. Ibid., p. 337.

  20. For translations from Desideri’s refutations, see Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa, Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

  INTRODUCTION

  1. I am grateful to Stephen and Sean Hallisey of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for providing me with this reference. In the 1980 film Caddyshack, the caddy played by Bill Murray delivers the following monologue:

  So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet. I set myself up as a looper over in the Himalayas, you know, a looper, a caddy, a jock. So I tell ’em I’m a pro jock and who do they give me? The Dalai Lama himself, twelfth son of the lama, the flowing robes, the grace, bald, striking. So I’m on the first tee and I give him the driver and he whacks one (big hitter the lama, long) right into a 10,000 foot crevasse at the base of a glacier. And so we finish eighteen, and he’s gonna stiff me! So I says, “Hey Lama. How about a little something, ya know, for the effort, ya know.” And he says, “Oh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

  2. Twin Peaks, episode 2, written and directed by David Lynch, first broadcast April 19, 1990. In episode 9 (aired October 6, 1990), the following exchange occurs:

  AGENT COOPER: Buddhist tradition first came to the Land of Snow in the fifth century A.D. The first Tibetan king to be touched by the Dharma was King Hop-thong-thor-bu-nam-bu-tsang. He and succeeding kings were collectively known as “the happy generations.” Now some historians place them in a Water Snake year, 213 A.D. Others in a year of a Water Ox, 173 A.D. Amazing, isn’t it? “The happy generations.”

  AGENT ROSENFELD: Agent Cooper, I am thrilled to pieces that the Dharma came to King Ho-ho-ho, I really am. But right now I am trying hard to focus on the more immediate problems of our century right here in Twin Peaks.

  AGENT COOPER: Albert, you’d be surprised at the connections between the two.

  3. Antonin Artaud, “Address to the Dalai Lama,” in Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972), pp. 64–65.

  4. Susie C. Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), p. 125.

  5. H. P. Blavatsky, “Tibetan Teachings,” in Collected Writings 1883–1884–1885 (Los Angeles: Blavatsky Writings Publication Fund, 1954), 6:105.

  6. Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 189.

  7. André Guibaut, Tibetan Venture, trans. Lord Sudley (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 43. Christmas Humphreys wrote, “Nowhere save in Tibet is there so much sorcery and ‘black’ magic, such degradation of the mind to selfish, evil ends.” See Humphreys, p. 189.

  8. In his classic 1957 work, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, Karl Wittfogel classed Tibet as a “marginal agrarian
despotism.” See Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 191.

  9. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds: A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. xi. The view of Tibet as mechanically backward but spiritually advanced, as lacking in “outer technology” but rich in “inner technology” is oft-repeated. See, for example, Walt Anderson, Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 5, 21. A particularly extreme version can be found in Robert A. F. Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), pp. 10–12.

  10. Huston Smith, Requiem for a Faith, Hartley Film Foundation, 1968.

  11. Marilyn M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 22. Such statements can be explained in part by the lack of detailed histories of pre-1900 Tibet, despite the wealth of available sources in Tibetan. The period of 1913–1951 is presented in detail in Melvyn Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Although it does not rely on Tibetan or Chinese documents, a useful account of Tibet since 1959 is found in Warren W. Smith, Jr., Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). The absence of reliable histories is another consequence of Tibet’s not having come under the colonial domination of a European power. It is noteworthy that there has been a marked increase in the writing of history (in Tibetan and Chinese) since Tibet came under the colonial domination of China.

  12. For an insightful critique of this view, see Toni Huber, “Traditional Environmental Protectionism in Tibet Reconsidered,” Tibet Journal 16, no. 2 (autumn 1991): 63–77.

  Tibetan women generally had greater freedom of movement, access to and control of financial resources, and sexual freedom than did women in India and China. There were no practices comparable to sati, female infanticide, or foot-binding in Tibet. It does not follow from this, however, that, as the historian Franz Michael claimed, “Tibetan Buddhism believed in the equality of all human beings in their temporary individuality and did not, in principle or practice, recognize any sexual discrimination.” See Franz Michael, Rule by Incarnation: Tibetan Buddhism and Its Role in Society and State (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982), p. 127. In fact, there were far fewer nuns than monks, for example. Being a nun carried little of the status held by a monk; there is a Tibetan proverb that if you want to be a servant, make your son a monk; if you want a servant, make your daughter a nun. Unmarried daughters often became nuns (sometimes remaining at home). Other women became nuns to escape a bad marriage, to avoid pregnancy, or after the death of a spouse. The educational opportunities and chances for social advancement open to monks were generally absent for nuns, whose chief activities involved the memorization and recitation of prayers and the performance of rituals. Among the some three thousand incarnate lamas in Tibet, only a few were women, and women did not hold government office in Tibet. A feminist critique of Tibetan religion and society, both in pre- and post-1959 Tibet (where anthropologists report domestic violence both in the exile community and in Tibet), is an urgent desideratum. For a feminist analysis of Tibetan Buddhism, see June Campbell, Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism (New York: George Braziller, 1996).

  13. Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas, 3d ed., rev. (London: Woburn Press, 1974), p. 358.

  14. In Bataille’s posthumously published work, The Accursed Share, he argues that every system and thus every society produces a surplus energy that must be expended. Some societies expend it on war, some on luxury. He argues that in Tibet this surplus was consumed by Lamaism. His only source for his study is Sir Charles Bell’s 1946 Portrait of the Dalai Lama. Although Bataille’s essay is thus limited and mistaken on many points, he nonetheless provides a fascinating materialist analysis of the myth that, with the introduction of Buddhism, Tibet decided to transform itself from a bellicose to a pacifist state. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 1:93-110.

  15. Ekai Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1909), p. 422.

  16. Robert Thurman, “The Nitty-Gritty of Nirvana,” interview by Joshua Glenn, Utne Reader, January–February 1996, 97.

  17. Philip Rawson, Sacred Tibet (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 5.

  18. Cited in Peter Hansen, “The Dancing Lamas of Everest: Cinema, Orientalism, and Anglo-Tibetan Relations in the 1920s,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (June 1996): 731.

  19. On the stereotype, see Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 49–50.

  20. The fixation on “old Tibet” has resulted in a remarkable dearth of scholarship on Tibet and Tibetans under Chinese rule. As Tsering Shakya has noted, “[T]here was also a residual sense that there was nothing worthy of study in post-1950 Tibet; as if the apparent demise of traditional society rendered further studies valueless and uninteresting.” An important reversal of this trend is the book in which this statement appears: Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner, eds., Resistance and Reform in Tibet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Tsering Shakya’s statement appears on page 9.

  21. This view is also held among the Tibetan intelligentsia in exile. See, for example, Tsering Shakya, “Tibet and the Occident: The Myth of Shangri-La,” Lungta 5 (special issue on Tibetan authors, 1991): 21–23.

  22. The largest selling book about Tibet (translated into thirty-two languages, including Tibetan) may be Hergé’s 1960 Tintin in Tibet, in which the boy reporter goes into Tibet in search of his friend Chang (whom he met in The Blue Lotus). Hergé also weaves a yeti (very much in the news during the 1950s and the object of numerous zoological expeditions) into the plot. Hubert Decleer (in an unpublished article entitled “The Tibetan World Translated into Western Comics”) has discovered part of the reason why Tintin went to Tibet. Hergé’s advisor on The Blue Lotus was a Chinese student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels named Chang Chong-jen (the inspiration for the character of Chang). They became close friends and corresponded after Chang returned to China in 1935, but lost touch after the Japanese invasion of China. Hergé was so concerned about his safety that he went to all the Chinese restaurants in Brussels asking whether anyone knew his friend. He eventually determined that he had interrogated people from every province in China. He never met anyone from Tibet, however, and concluded that Chang must be there. In the story Tintin receives a letter from Chang saying that he is enroute to London via Kathmandu. Captain Haddock reads in the newspaper of an air crash in the Himalayas, and a subsequent report confirms that Chang is among the missing. They set off for Delhi and then Kathmandu, whence they undertake a trek into the Himalayas. They become lost in an avalanche but are rescued and taken to a Tibetan monastery, complete with levitating monks. They set out again and discover Chang, who had been rescued and protected by a yeti.

  23. The popular fiction contains works such as Mark Winchester’s In the Hands of the Lamas, Talbot Munday’s Om, Douglas Duff’s On the World’s Roof, Mildred Cooke and Francesca French’s The Red Lama, Lionel Davidson’s The Rose of Tibet, Berkeley Gray’s The Lost World of Everest, and two “sequels” to Hilton, Leslie Haliwell’s Return to Shangri-La: Raiders of the Lost Horizon and Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri’s Shangri-La: Return to the World of Lost Horizon. (I am grateful to David Templeman for alerting me to the existence of many of these works.) The travel literature is even more substantial. Selected works are provided here to illustrate the range of titles. The works include Theos Bernard’s (who styled himself the “White Lama”) Penthouse of the Gods, William M. McGovern’s To Lhasa in Disguise, W. N. Fergusson’s Adventure, Sport and Travel on the Tibetan Steppes, Harrison Forman’s Through Forbidden Tibet, M. L. A. Gompertz’s The Road to Lamaland, Thomas Holdrich’s Tibet the M
ysterious, Edwin Schary’s In Search of the Mahatmas of Tibet, Theodore Illion’s In Secret Tibet, Frederick Bailey’s No Passport to Tibet, P. Millington’s To Lhassa at Last, and Lowell Thomas Jr.’s Out of This World: Across the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet. On travelers to Tibet (especially of the British variety), see Peter Hopkirk, Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet (New York: Kodansha International, 1995); Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing, and the Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berlekey: University of California Press, 1989); and Laurie Hovell’s 1993 Syracuse University dissertation, “Horizons Lost and Found: Travel, Writing, and Tibet in the Age of Imperialism.” See also Graham Sandberg, The Exploration of Tibet: Its History and Particulars from 1623 to 1904 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1904). The writings of Protestant missionaries to Tibet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also remain largely unexplored. These include Geoffrey T. Bull’s When Iron Gates Yield, J. H. Edgar’s Land of Mystery Tibet, Isabella L. Bird Bishop’s Among the Tibetans, Marion H. Duncan’s Customs and Superstitions of Tibetans, Susie Rijnhart’s With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple, Flora Shelton’s Sunshine and Shadow on the Tibetan Border, Annie W. Marston’s A Plea for Tibet, and the diary of Annie Taylor included in William Carey’s Adventures in Tibet. For a useful survey of Western travelers to Tibet, see Barbara Lipton, “The Western Experience in Tibet, 1327—1950,” The Museum (Newark), n.s. (spring/summer 1972): 1–9, 50–59.

  Also worthy of research is the New York Times hoax of 1936–37 that culminated in the front page story of February 14, 1937, headlined “M. M. Mizzle Quits His Lamasery, Pursued by Sable Amazon on Yak: Famous Caraway Seed Expert also Tires of Tibetan Diet, So He Sets Out for Calcutta—Old Friend, Winglefoot, the Tea Taster, Gets News in Letter Written in Lion’s Blood.”

  24. See Derek Waller, The Pundits: British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990); and Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 11–44. On the Japanese, see Hisao Kimura, Japanese Agent in Tibet (London: Serindia Publications, 1990); and Scott Berry, Monks, Spies and a Soldier of Fortune: The Japanese in Tibet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).