Monier-Williams went to some length to argue that there were not more Buddhists than Christians in the world. See his “Postscript on the Common Error in regard to the Comparative Prevalence of Buddhism in the World,” in his Buddhism, pp. xiv–xviii.
47. On this period see Edward R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (New York: George Allen and Unwin, 1968); Walter Ralls, “The Papal Aggression of 1850: A Study in Victorian Anti-Catholicism,” Church History 43, no. 2 (June 1974): 242–56; and, especially, Walter L. Arnstein, Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982). The mid-nineteenth century was also a time of strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, led by groups such as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. See Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
48. Thomas W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism: Being a Sketch of the Life and Teachings of Gautama, the Buddha, rev. ed. (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1903), p. 199.
49. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Buddhism, In Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Hindūism, and In Its Contrast with Christianity (Varanasi: Cowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1964), p. 261.
50. T. W. Rhys Davids, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Some Points in the History of Indian Buddhism, Hibbert Lectures, 1881 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882), pp. 192–93.
51. Note, however, that Waddell in 1895 retains the possibility of influence, but unlike earlier Catholic authors (and as an affront to Catholics) suggests that the influence may have occurred in the other direction:
But in Lāmaism the ritualistic cults are seen in their most developed form, and many of these certainly bear a close resemblance outwardly to those found within the church of Rome, in the pompous services with celibate and tonsured monks and nuns, candles, bells, censers, rosaries, mitres, copes, pastoral crooks, worship of relics, confession, intercession of “the Mother of God,” litanies and chants, holy water, triad divinity, organized hierarchy, etc.
It is still uncertain, however, how much of the Lamaist symbolism may have been borrowed from Roman Catholicism, or vice versâ.
See his Tibetan Buddhism, pp. 421–22.
In 1861, the Reverend Joseph Wolff, a Jewish convert to Christianity and missionary to “the Jews and Muhammadans in Persia, Bokhara, Cashmeer, etc.,” argued that the monotheism of Abraham had penetrated as far as Lhasa, where, he claimed, there is a statue dedicated to him. See Joseph Wolff, Travels and Adventures of Rev. Joseph Wolff, D.D., LL.D. (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1861), p. 189.
52. Rhys Davids, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 194.
53. Thomas W. Rhys Davids, Buddhism: Its History and Literature, American Lectures on the History of Religions, First Series (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), p. 6.
54. Cited from the 1972 Dover reprint issued under the new title, Tibetan Buddhism: With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology (1895; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1972), p. 4. In later life Waddell would turn his research more explicitly to his Aryan ancestors, claiming an Aryan origin for the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations in works such as his 1929 The Makers of Civilization in Race and History.
55. I. J. Schmidt, “Ueber Lamaismus und die Bedeutungslosigkeit dieses Nahmens,” Bulletin Scientifique publié par L’Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Pétersbourg 1, no. 1 (1836): 13–14. My thanks to Professor Constantin Fasolt for translating the passage.
Herder, writing some decades earlier, looked to a similar telos but offered a more sympathetic assessment. He writes, “Everything in nature, and consequently the philosophy of Budda, is good or bad, according to the use that is made of it. On the one hand it exhibits as fine and lofty sentiments, as on the other it is capable of exciting and fostering, as it abundantly has, indolence and deceit. In no two countries has it remained precisely the same: but wherever it exists, it has raised itself at least one step above gross heathenism, the first twilight of a purer morality, the first infantile dream of that truth, which comprehends the universe.” 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. 305.
56. Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, p. 10.
57. Ibid., p. 14. The charge of mixing has a long history in the case of Tibet. Centuries before Waddell, Tibetan authors had used the charge of mixing to condemn rival Buddhist sects; a work attributed (probably falsely) to Bu ston, the Refutation of False Tantras (Sngags log sun ’byin), contemptuously dismissed Rnying ma texts as an “admixture of gold and dog shit.” The passage appears in Kunsang Top-gyel and Mani Dorji, eds., Chag Lo-tsa-bas Mdzad-pa’i Sngags-log Sun-’byin dang ’Gos Khug-pa Lhas-btsas-kyi Sngags-log Sun-’byin (Thimpu, 1979), pp. 25.5–36.3. It appears in English in the source for this reference: Daniel Preston Martin, “The Emergence of Bon and the Tibetan Polemical Tradition” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1991), p. 159.
58. Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, p. 19.
59. Ibid., p. 30. Köppen characterized Lamaism as a mixture of Buddhism and Śaivism in his 1860 Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche (Berlin: Verlag von H. Barsdorf, 1906), p. 82.
60. Ibid., p. xi. It is noteworthy that Desideri, writing 150 years earlier, offers a very different assessment: “Though the Thibettans are pagans and idolaters, the doctrine they believe is very different from that of other pagans of Asia [meaning India]. Their Religion, it is true, came originally from the ancient country of Hindustan, now usually called Mogol, but there, in the lapse of time, the old religion fell into disuse and was ousted by new fables. On the other hand, the Thibettans, intelligent, and endowed with a gift of speculation, abolished much that was unintelligible in the tenets, and only retained what appeared to comprise truth and goodness.” See de Filippi, pp. 225–26.
61. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), p. 8. Kipling’s views of Tibetan Buddhism were typical of those of most travelers to Tibet during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. See Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 136–90.
62. Sir Francis Younghusband, India and Tibet (1910; reprint, New Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1994), p. 310. This is a reprint of the 1910 edition published by John Murray of London.
63. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Los Angeles: Theosophy Company, 1947), p. xxi. This is a facsimile of the original 1888 edition.
64. H. P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings 1877: Isis Unveiled (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), 2:582.
65. Rhys Davids, Buddhism: Its History and Literature, p. 208.
66. See Clements R. Markham, ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (London: Trübner and Company, 1879), p. 338. On the difficulties surrounding the term “tantra,” see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Elaborations on Emptiness, Uses of the Heart Sūtra (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 78–104.
67. Monier-Williams, p. 147.
68. Ibid., p. 151. Others saw Lamaism more simply as the natural development of Indian Buddhism. In his address to the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, James Legge declared:
Buddhism has been in China but a disturbing influence, ministering to the element of superstition which plays so large a part in the world. I am far from saying the doctrine of the literati is perfect, nevertheless, it has kept the people of China together in a national union, passing through many revolutions, but still enduring, after at least four or five millenniums of its existence, and still not without measure of heart and hope. Europe and America can give it something better than India did, in sending it Buddhism in our first century, and I hope they will do so. You must not look to the civilization of China and Japan for the fruits of Buddhism. Go to Tibet an
d Mongolia, and in the bigotry and apathy of the population, in their prayer wheels and cylinders you will find the achievement of the doctrine of the Buddha.
Cited in Reed, Primitive Buddhism, p. 30.
69. See Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, pp. 227, 229.
70. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Later Antiquity, Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religions, XIV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
71. Sax Rohmer (Arthur Ward), The Hand of Fu Manchu (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1917), p. 7.
72. J. Strunk, Zu Juda und Rom-Tibet: 1hr Ringen um die Weltherrschaft (Munich: Lundendorffs Verlag, 1937).
73. Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, p. 573.
74. Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries (New York: Dover Publications, 1905), pp. 447–48.
75. Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Opening the Eye of New Awareness, trans. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (London: Wisdom Publications, 1985), pp. 117–18. The use of the term “Lamaism” is also condemned in an article published in Tibetan in 1982 at the behest of the Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Committee. It was published in an inadequate English translation in 1986. See Tseten Zhabdrung, “Research on the Nomenclature of the Buddhist Schools in Tibet,” Tibet Journal n, no. 3 (autumn, 1986): 43–44. Tsultrim Kelsang Khangkar, a Tibetan scholar living in Japan, has, however, approved of the term. It is significant that his endorsement of the term is based on the opinion of Japanese, rather than Tibetan, scholars. He says in an interview, “I asked some Japanese scholars regarding the term ‘Lamaism.’ They have explained to me that Tibetans have great respect for teacher (Lama) which is why Tibetan Buddhism is called ‘Lamaism.’” See “‘Lamaism’ Is an Appropriate Term” in Tibetan Review 13, no. 6 (June 1978): 18–19, 27.
76. Wangyal had come to the United States to serve a community of Kalmyk Mongolians, refugees from Stalin who had left their homeland in Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Although Wangyal, like other Kalmyk Buddhist monks, had been trained in Tibet, he was not a Tibetan nor was his community; they were ethnically Mongols and nationally Russians. He therefore had no interest in calling his monastery “Tibetan Buddhist.” However, he wanted to evoke in the name of his institution the tradition of Buddhism to which he and his community adhered, a tradition that historically had spread as far west as the Black Sea, as far north as Siberia, as far east as Sichuan, and as far south as Nepal. The only alternative adjective, apparently, was “Lamaist.”
77. On British representations of Tibet as an archive state in a variety of literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Thomas Richards, “Archive and Utopia,” Representations 37 (1992): 104–33.
78. For an analysis of Tibetan Buddhist studies during this period, see my essay, “Foreigner at the Lama’s Feet,” in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 251–95.
79. Antonin Artaud, “Address to the Dalai Lama,” Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972), p. 65.
80. Pal and Tseng, p. 9.
81. Lee in Levenson, Circa 1492, “Virūpāksha” (plate 319), p. 472. Beyond this definition, Lee rather proudly excludes knowledge of the complicated theology of Lamaism from his narrative. In describing the final Lamaist piece in the National Gallery volume, “Portable Shrine in Triptych Form” (plate 320), he begins, “Identification of the twenty-one deities represented within the confines of this small folding shrine is beyond the competence of this writer.” After identifying one of the figures as the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava, who visited Tibet in the late eighth century, Lee devotes the greater part of his entry to a description not of this portable shrine, but of another one (not included in the exhibition), a “perfectly preserved” Japanese Shingon shrine reportedly brought from China by Kūkai in 806. Lee notes that the iconographies of the two shrines are quite different: “The Kongōbu-ji shrine is a classic presentation of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni,” whereas “the present Lamaist shrine is centered on a quasi-historical founder of a complex faith who, by the time this shrine was made, had acquired wholly legendary status and attributes.” Ibid., p. 472. Again, Lamaism must suffer in comparison. The Japanese piece depicts a historical figure in a classical style; the Lamaist piece depicts a figure only “quasi-historical.” Were this not enough, this figure was the founder, again, of a “complex” faith, complex presumably because it was somehow composite, in contrast to the imagined simple ethical teachings of the historical Buddha, who, Lee would seem to imply, did not acquire “wholly legendary status.” This complexity of the Lamaist shrine marks its great distance, its differentiation from the plenum present at the origin.
82. Jay A. Levenson, Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), p. 13. In defense of the National Gallery, it must be said that as part of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum funded by the federal government, the National Gallery must conform to State Department policy, which holds Tibet to be a part of China. This policy has been in place since the suspension of CIA support for Tibetan guerrillas in 1968 and the subsequent establishment of diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. The museum would therefore be instructed not to label any work as originating in Tibet.
83. Stuart and Roma Gelder’s The Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet (London: Hutchinson of London, 1964), p. 129. The characterizations of Tibetan Buddhism by British officers such as Landon and Waddell are quoted as authoritative by the Gelders as well as by another Chinese apologist who wrote for Western consumption, Han Suyin. See her Lhasa: The Open City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977).
One can also note the section on Tibet in Hajime Nakamura’s Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, in which, drawing largely on Chinese sources, reports of colonial officers, and spurious linguistic analysis (“The linguistic fact that Tibetans used a single short word to denote ‘committing suicide’ suggests the hypothesis that it was a fairly frequent social phenomenon,” p. 305), he characterizes Tibetans as a promiscuous, dirty, meat-eating, violent, ancestor-ignoring, corpse-abandoning, cruel race of nomads whose ways of thinking show both shamanistic and logical tendencies (although not as logical as the Japanese). Of Tibetan religion he writes:
Tibetans did not accept the Buddhism of rigorous moralism wholeheartedly. Chinese Buddhists once tried to propagate their own brand of Buddhism in Tibet, but they were soon expelled by the natives. The strict morality of Chinese Buddhism could not take root in Tibet. What was accepted by Tibetans was the Buddhism of worldly enjoyment which sometimes leads people to engage in sexual enjoyment, the corrupted form of Indian Esotericism.
See Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1964), p. 316.
84. J. Huston Edgar, The Land of Mystery, Tibet (Melbourne: China Inland Mission, 1947), p. 11.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” in A Personal Anthology (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 93–96.
2. These works include Lati Rinpochay and Jeffrey Hopkins, Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1985); Lama Lodö, Bardo Teachings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1987); and Glenn H. Mullin, Death and Dying: The Tibetan Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1986). There is also a video dramatization of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, including film footage from Ladakh and an animated depiction of the bardos, narrated by Leonard Cohen. Entitled The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation after Death, it was coproduced in 1994 by NHK (Japan), Mistral Films (France), and the National Film Board of Canada.
3. The first of the three was Sardar Bahādur S. W. Laden La (1876–1936), a Sikkimese police officer from Darjeeling who served the British in the Younghusband expedition. He was later hired by the government of the t
hirteenth Dalai Lama to establish a police force in Lhasa. He attended the Simla conference in 1914, and in 1921 was the personal assistant to Sir Charles Bell on his mission to Lhasa. On Laden La, see Melvyn C. Goldstein’s A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 121–25, 159; and (for a rather more glowing portrayal), W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 86–89. The other two translators were Geluk monks, Karma Sumdhon Paul and Lobzang Mingyur Dorje of Ghoom monastery in Sikkim. They were both disciples of the Mongolian monk Sherab Gyatso, the abbot of Ghoom. It was Sherab Gyatso who was the true author of Sarat Chandra Das’s Tibetan-English Dictionary, a fact acknowledged only on the Tibetan title page of the work (my thanks to Dan Martin for pointing this out). On the lives of the two monks, see Evans-Wentz, pp. 89–92.
4. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead or the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. xix. All subsequent references are provided in the text by page numbers in parentheses following the citation.
5. See Jay M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
6. On the uses of this and related mortuary texts in the Nyingma sect, see David Germano, “Dying, Death, and Other Opportunities,” in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Religions of Tibet in Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 458–93. See also Henk Blezer, Kar glin Źi khro: A Tantric Buddhist Concept (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1997).
7. For a history of spiritualism in England during this period, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850—1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
8. This notion persisted into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries. See Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 58–59. Such speculation often centered on theories concerning where Jesus spent the “lost years.”
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