Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  The missionary Odoric, who traveled among the Mongols from 1318 to 1330, wrote in reference to the capital of Tibet, “their Abassi, that is to say, their Pope, is resident, being the head and prince of all idolaters, upon whom he bestows and distributes gifts after his manner, even as our Pope of Rome accounts himself to be the head of all Christians.” Cited in Christopher Dawson, Mission to Asia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 244. The description of the Dalai Lama as “pope” or “pontiff” continues to the present. Pratapaditya Pal refers to him as “the chief pontiff of the Lamaist Church,” noting that the third Dalai Lama “founded the first Patriarchal See of Mongolia.” See Pal and Tseng, p. 12.

  27. See Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya, Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (London: Macmillan, 1913), 3:308.

  28. See Thomas Astley, New Collection of Voyages and Travels (1747; reprint, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1968), 4:459.

  29. Evariste-Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China 1844–1846, trans. William Hazlitt (2 vols. in 1, New York: Dover, 1987), 2:50.

  30. Huc and Gabet, 2:52. Max Müller notes that “The late Abbé Huc pointed out the similarities between the Buddhist and Roman Catholic ceremonials with such naïveté, that, to his surprise, he found his delightful Travels in Thibet placed on the ‘Index.’” See Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop: Volume I: Essays on the Science of Religion (1869; reprint, Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1985), p. 187. Skepticism about Christian influence, however, was expressed shortly after Huc published his theory. In his 1863 Buddhism in Tibet Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India, Emil Schlagintweit temperately wrote, “We are not yet able to decide the question as to how far Buddhism may have borrowed from Christianity; but the rites of the Buddhists enumerated by the French missionary can for the most part be traced back to institutions peculiar to Buddhism, or they have sprung up in periods posterior to Tsonkhapa.” See page 70 of the reprint of this work published in 1968 by Susil Gupta, London. In addition to a wealth of largely accurate information about Tibetan Buddhism, this work contains a remarkable analysis of the idealization of the human form in Tibetan iconography based on a comparison of the facial features of “Buddhas, Bodhisattvas,” and “Dragsheds, Genii, Lamas” with those of actual “Brahmans” and “Bhots” (Tibetans). See pp. 216–26.

  31. It is perhaps noteworthy that he of the prominent proboscis appears in none of the standard Tibetan biographies of Tsong kha pa, and also that Desideri, the first Catholic missionary to live for an extended time in Tibet, duly noted the resemblances in the ceremonies, institutions, ecclesiastical hierarchy, maxims, moral principles, and hagiographies but made no attempt to account for them, adding that in his reading of Tibetan history he found no “hint that our Holy Faith has at any time been known, or that any Apostle or evangelical preacher has ever lived here.” See de Filippi, p. 302. See also C. J. Wessel’s informative note on this passage.

  In Huc and Gabet’s explanation of the presence in Tibet of practices deserving their approbation, there is also another element at play here: the persistent European assumption that those whose whereabouts cannot be accounted for, whether Jesus himself during the “lost years,” Prester John, or Sherlock Holmes, must have been in Tibet, and that otherwise inexplicable “parallels” may be explained by their presence. For a document purportedly discovered in Ladakh purporting to describe Jesus’ travels in Tibet, see L. Huxley, The Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (London: John Murray, 1918), 2:334-35. See also Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), for the “translation” of a manuscript discovered by the author in Ladakh, “The Life of Saint Issa,” which describes Jesus’ activities in India and Nepal.

  32. This opinion of Tooke is cited by Peter Pallas. See John Trusler, The Habitable World Described (London: Literary Press, 1788), 2:261.

  33. See the appendix to Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China, trans. John Ogilby (1669; reprint, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 42–43. A similar passage appears in China and France, or Two Treatises (London, 1676), pp. 109–10, a work that also describes the Dalai Lama: “Their Arch-Priest or Mufty is called Lamacongin, whom they reverence as God; and believe to be related to their first King, but they name him the Brother of all the Kings of the World. They are persuaded that he riseth from the dead as often as he dies, and that this man hath already risen seven times.” See pp. 4–5.

  Kircher goes on to describe the process of discovering the Grand Lama after the death of his predecessor. He also explains that the Tanguts pay great bribes to the priests to receive meats that have been mixed with the urine of the Grand Lama (“Oh abominable nastiness!”). See also Hedin, Trans-Himalaya, p. 318, and Astley, pp. 462—63.

  For numerous cases of the comparison of elements of Tibetan Buddhism to Roman Catholicism, see Hedin, Trans-Himalaya, pp. 310–29. A useful survey of the early missions to Tibet may be found in John MacGregor, Tibet: A Chronicle of Exploration (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 1–111. On the Jesuit missions, see Sir Edward MacLagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), pp. 335–68. For a study of the evidence of possible Tibetan contacts with Nestorians and Manicheans, see Geza Uray, “Tibet’s Connections with Nestorianism and Manicheism in the 8th—10th Centuries,” in Contributions on Tibetan Language, History, and Culture, ed. Ernst Steinkellner and Helmut Tauscher (Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien, 1983), 1:399-430.

  34. See, for example, Justin Martyr, Apologies, LIV.7—8; LXII.1–2; LXVI.1–4. I am grateful to Elizabeth Clark for providing these references. It is significant to note that not all the Catholic priests who encountered Buddhist monks believed that they looked exactly like themselves. The Flemish friar William of Rubruck thought they looked like the French: “When I went into the idol temple I was speaking of, I found the priests seated in the outer gate, and when I saw them with their shaved faces they seemed to me to be Franks, but they had barbarian mitres on their heads.” See William W. Rockhill, The Journey of Friar William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253—55, as Narrated by Himself (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900), p. 146.

  Also of interest is the following note in Friedrich von Schlegel’s The Philosophy of History (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1984) by the translator James Burton Robertson:

  So great was the [Chinese people’s] expectation of the Messiah—“the Great Saint who, as Confucius says, was to appear in the West”—so fully sensible were they not only of the place of his birth, but of the time of his coming, that about sixty years after the birth of our Saviour they sent their envoys to hail the expected Redeemer. These envoys encountered on their way the Missionaries of Buddhism coming from India—the latter, announcing an incarnate God, were taken to be the disciples of the true Christ, and were presented as such to their countrymen by the deluded ambassadors. Thus was this religion introduced into China, and thus did the phantasmagoria of Hell intercept the light of the gospel. So, not in the internal spirit only, but in the outward history of Buddhism, a demonical intent is very visible.

  See page 136. I am grateful to Richard Cohen for this reference.

  35. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 3.

  36. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 85. The language of the demonic has persisted in more recent descriptions of Tibetan religion. In the following passage, Helmut Hoffmann, a researcher at the Sven Hedin Institute in Nazi Germany and later professor of Tibetan Studies at Indiana University, describes the Bön appropriation of Buddhist practices: “Just as the medieval Satanist desecrated the Host, so the Bön-po turned their sacred objects not in a dextral but in a sinister fashion. For example, the points of their holy sign the
swastika did not turn dextrally as that of Lamaism, but sinistrally, to left instead of right. The Bön religion had become ossified as a heresy, and its essence lay largely in contradiction and negation.” See his The Religions of Tibet, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 98.

  37. Cited in John Kesson, The Cross and the Dragon or, The Fortunes of Christianity in China: With Notices of the Christian Missions and Missionaries, and Some Account of the Chinese Secret Societies (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1854), p. 185.

  38. Some mention should also be made of more recent Catholic pronouncements on Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. In his 1994 Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf), Pope John Paul II discusses the appeal of Buddhism and of the Dalai Lama in a chapter entitled “Buddha?” (his question mark). The chapter is followed by “Muhammad?” then by “Judaism?” moving apparently from an atheistic pagan religion to the monotheisms. At the beginning of “Buddha?” the interviewer asks the pontiff specifically to address Buddhism, which “seems increasingly to fascinate many Westerners as an ‘alternative’ to Christianity or as a sort of ‘complement’ to it” (p. 84).

  The pope immediately mentions the world’s most famous Buddhist, the Buddhist who has the most Western followers, the Dalai Lama. Acknowledging that he has met the Dalai Lama a few times, he describes him not as the leader of the cause of Tibetan independence or as an internationally honored proponent of human rights, but as a proselytizer: “He brings Buddhism to people of the Christian West, stirring up interest both in Buddhist spirituality and in its methods of praying” (p. 85). But Buddhism is “an almost exclusively negative soteriology” (his italics):

  The “enlightenment” experienced by Buddha comes down to the conviction that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and of suffering for man. To liberate oneself from this evil, one must free oneself from this world, necessitating a break with the ties that join us to external reality—ties existing in our human nature, in our psyche, in our bodies. The more we are liberated from these ties, the more we become indifferent to what is in the world, and the more we are freed from suffering, from the evil that has its source in the world. (Pp. 85–86)

  Detachment from the world, however, does not bring one into the presence of God, because Buddhism is an atheistic system. “To save oneself means, above all, to free oneself from evil by becoming indifferent to the world, which is the source of evil” (his italics).

  There are many things that could be said about this characterization. One obvious response that students of Zen or of Tibetan Buddhism might make is that the pope seems wholly ignorant of the Mahayana, where the bodhisattva remains in samsara; hardly indifferent to the world, he finds reality immanent in it (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”), working ceaselessly and in myriad compassionate ways to benefit others. The pope may be describing the arhat, but he is not describing the bodhisattva. But it is perhaps wise to resist such a response, because the degradation of the arhat, the Hinayana disciple of the Buddha, and the exaltation of the bodhisattva is itself part of a polemic, a polemic present from the earliest Mahayana sutras, designed to wrest authority from the older tradition. To answer the pope by invoking the Hinayana-Mahayana distinction is merely to answer one polemic with another.

  Much of the pope’s characterization of Buddhism derives directly from nineteenth-century missionary literature. With the rise of the science of philology, the notion was put forward that languages represented the “mentality” of a given culture. This idea of mentality was then incorporated, with devastating effect, into race theory. There was thus something called the “Oriental mind” that was passive, irrational, static, world-negating, and given to mysticism (a forerunner to Jung’s view of Asians as “introspective”), all of which was reflected in the degenerate and corrupt societies of Asia in the nineteenth century. The European mind, on the other hand, was rational and dynamic, possessed both of superior technology and the superior religion that made that technology possible, Christianity. Such a view was used to justify both the colonial and missionary policies of Western nations. If Christianity is the true faith, then God’s providence ordains the delivery of that faith to the non-Christian world.

  [The Church] builds up civilization, particularly “Western civilization,” which is marked by a positive approach to the world, and which developed thanks to the achievement of science and technology, two branches of knowledge rooted both in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition and in Judeo-Christian Revelation.

  This passage, which could have been drawn from any number of nineteenth-century polemical treatises, Protestant or Catholic, is drawn instead from page 88 of Crossing the Threshold of Hope.

  39. Astley, p. 220. Later, referring to the Dalai Lama, he writes, “In this Respect, the Church of Tibet has infinitely the Advantage of the Romish, inasmuch as the visible Head of it is considered to be God himself, not his Vicar, or Deputy; and the incarnate Deity, who is the Object of divine Worship, appears alive in human Shape, to receive the Peoples Adorations: Not in the Form of a senseless Bit of Bread, or playing at Bo-peep in a diminutive Wafer, which would be too gross a Cheat to impose on the Understandings of the Tibetians, however, ignorant and superstitious the Missioners, to their own Shame, represent them.” See p. 461.

  In his 1769 report, the German naturalist Peter Pallas describes “the principal points of the tedious religion of the Lamas, that, like other superstitions, they are the fabrick of priests, and illusions by which they contrive to awe the ignorant multitude.” He goes on to compare it to Roman Catholicism: “Their head, or Delai Lama, may be considered as the Pope, except that his soul is continually wandering from one human body to another, and is deified.” He reports the opinion of Tooke that the first Dalai Lama was Prester John. See John Trusler, The Habitable World Described (London: Literary Press, 1788), 2:259-61.

  40. Astley, p. 212, n. f. Herder held a similar opinion, expressed more circumspectly, writing in 1784, “In short, the tibetian religion is a species of the papal, such as prevailed in Europe itself in the dark ages, and indeed without that morality and decorum, for which the mungals and tibetians are commended.” See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill, (1800; reprint, New York: Bergman Publishers, 1966), p. 304.

  For other British comparisons of Buddhism and Catholicism, see Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 123–28. There were also charges that Catholicism derived from Hinduism. See P. J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the 18th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 24.

  Certain Jesuits also were not optimistic about converting Tibetans. In a 1703 report on the state of the Jesuit missions in China, Father Francis Noel wrote, “The conversion of these roving Tartars would be difficult, because of the high Regard they pay their Lamas, who, being their Teachers, are implicitly obeyed in all things.” See John Lockman, Travels of the Jesuits into Various Parts of the World (London, 1743), 1:451.

  41. Susie C. Rijnhart, With the Tibetans in Tent and Temple (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), p. 106.

  42. On this portrayal of India, see Ronald Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” in Imagining India (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), especially pp. 85–130.

  43. Elizabeth A. Reed, Primitive Buddhism: Its Origin and Teachings (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1896), p. 16.

  44. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Buddhism, In Its Connexion with Brāhmanism and Hindūism, and In Its Contrast with Christianity (1890; reprint, Varanasi: Cowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1964), p. 253.

  45. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1: Essays on the Science of Religion (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), p. 220.

  46. James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1871), pp. 142–44. For other instances of the comparison of Buddhism with Protestantism, and of the
Buddha with Luther, as well as the cautions against such comparisons by scholars such as Rhys Davids and Oldenberg, notably when the Buddha began to be appropriated by socialists, see Almond, pp. 71–77.

  The noble elements of Buddhism were regarded by many Western scholars and missionaries as things that contemporary Buddhists in Asia were largely unaware of, things that the West could reintroduce them to, with salubrious effect. As Sydney Cave writes in Christianity and Some Living Religions of the East, “The Living Religions of the East have changed much since the time of the beginnings of the modern missionary enterprise. In their transformation many influences have been at work. The translation by Western scholars of The Sacred Books of the East revealed to the East the rich heritage of the past, and brought to light treasures which had been forgotten. In consequence, many Orientals gained a new pride in their religion and learned to pass from its baser to its nobler elements.” See Sydney Cave, Christianity and Some Living Religions of the East (London: Duckworth, 1929), p. 20.

  The popularity of Buddhism among the French during roughly the same period is satirized by Flaubert in Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which Pécuchet declares the superiority of Buddhism to Christianity:

  “Very well, listen to this! Buddhism recognized the vanity of earthly things better and earlier than Christianity. Its practices are austere, its faithful are more numerous than all Christians put together, and as for the Incarnation, Vishnu did not have one but nine! So, judge from that!”

  “Travellers’ lies,” said Madame de Noaris.

  “Supported by Freemasons,” added the curé.

  See Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 251.