Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  26. Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (London: John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd, 1926), p. 177.

  27. H. A. Jäschke, A Tibetan-English Dictionary with Special Reference to the Prevailing Dialects (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), pp. 607–8. In the Tibetan orthography, oṃ is mistakenly written as soṃ. On the Moravian mission in Ladakh, see John Bray, “The Moravian Church in Ladakh: The First 40 Years 1885–1925” in Recent Research on Ladakh, ed. Detlef Kantowsky and Reinhard Sander (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1983).

  28. Mary Agnes Tincker, The Jewel in the Lotos: A Novel (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1883), p. 330.

  29. Philangi Dasa, Swedenborg the Buddhist: The Higher Swedenborgianism, Its Secrets and Thibetan Origin (Los Angeles: Buddhistic Swedenborgian Brotherhood, 1887), p. 33.

  30. Sir M. Monier-Williams, Buddhism, Its Connexion with Brāhmanism and Its Contrast with Christianity (Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1964), pp. 372, 373 n. 3.

  31. William Simpson, The Buddhist Praying-Wheel (London, 1896), p. 39.

  32. L. Austine Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Dover, 1972), p. 148. Albert Grünwedel offered the same gloss in his Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolia (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1900), p. 234.

  33. L. Austine Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries (New York: Dover, 1905), pp. 23, 29.

  34. J. Huston Edgar, The Land of Mystery, Tibet (Melbourne: China Inland Mission, 1930), p. 55. For a long description of the use of the mantra by another missionary (without speculation as to its meaning), see Marion H. Duncan, Customs and Superstitions of Tibetans (London: Mitre Press, 1964), pp. 181–86.

  35. William Carey, Adventures in Tibet (Boston and Chicago: United Society for Christian Endeavor, 1901), pp. 124–25.

  36. S. E. Brady, The Jewel in the Lotus and Other Stories (Shanghai: Oriental Press, 1905), p. 42.

  37. F. W. Thomas, “Om Maṇi Padme Hūṃ,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1906): 464.

  38. A. H. Francke, “The Meaning of the Om-mani-padme-hum Formula,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1915): 402–3. In The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, Har Dayal writes of the mantra, “This seems to be an invocation of a female deity, ‘the deity of the jewel-lotus.’ F. W. Thomas and A. H. Francke have shown that the popular interpretation is incorrect (Om, ‘the Jewel in the Lotus’).” See Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932), p. 49. See also Dan Martin, “On the Origin and Significance of the Prayer Wheel according to Two Nineteenth-Century Tibetan Literary Sources,” Journal of the Tibet Society 7 (1987): 13–29.

  39. G. A. Combe, A Tibetan on Tibet (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926), p. 48.

  40. David Macdonald, The Land of the Lama (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1929), p. 78.

  41. Basil J. Gould, The Jewel in the Lotus (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 1. In 1948 John Blofeld published an outline of contemporary Buddhism in China under the title The Jewel in the Lotus.

  42. André Guibaut, Tibetan Venture, trans. Lord Sudley (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 43.

  43. Marco Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 162.

  44. Geoffrey T. Bull, When Iron Gates Yield (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955), p. 79.

  45. Christmas Humphreys, Buddhism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 203.

  46. Allen Edwardes, The Jewel in the Lotus: A Historical Survey of the Sexual Culture of the East (New York: Julian Press, 1959), pp. 48–49.

  47. Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1969), p. 261.

  48. W. E. Garrett, “Mountaintop War in Remote Ladakh,” National Geographic 123 (May 1963): 686.

  49. Robert B. Ekvall, Religious Observances in Tibet: Patterns and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 116.

  50. See William Boyd Sinclair, Jump to the Land of God: The Adventures of a United States Air Force Crew in Tibet (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1965), p. 224 n. 2.

  51. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds: A Buddhist Pilgrim in Tibet (London: Hutchinson, 1966), p. 35.

  52. John Blofeld, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), pp. 194–95. In 1979 Walt Anderson explained in Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism:

  Perhaps the most famous mantra associated with Tibetan Buddhism is om mani padme hum, which is usually translated as “Hail to the jewel in the lotus.” This isn’t quite accurate, since om signifies the infinite cosmos and the principle of enlightenment, but the central words mani (jewel) and padme (lotus) do convey the essence of the mantra. They can be interpreted several ways; for example, the jewel can represent enlightenment and the lotus the human mind.

  See Walt Anderson, Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 77.

  53. Grace Cooke, The Jewel in the Lotus (Liss, England: White Eagle Publishing Trust, 1973), p. 13.

  54. Douglas Baker, The Jewel in the Lotus (Essendon, England: Little Elephant, 1974). The work has no page numbers. The quotation occurs six pages from the end of the book.

  55. Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Jewel in the Lotus (London: Concord Grove Press, 1983), p. 7.

  56. Donald Walters, The Jewel in the Lotus (Nevada City, Calif.: Crystal Clarity Publishers, 1993), p. 27.

  57. Robert A. Paul, “A Mantra and Its Meaning,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 9 (1981): 90.

  58. See Marilyn M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman, Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet (New York: Harry Abrams, 1991), p. 34. In 1994 Thurman rendered the mantra as “OM-the jewel in the lotus-HUM” in the glossary to his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. See Robert A. F. Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), pp. 267–68. John Powers in his Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism provides the same translation. See John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995), p. 230. Earlier in his book, Powers provides a long and fanciful explanation of the meaning of the mantra, describing a jewel inside a lotus blossom (without the sexual connotations), claiming (on page 15) that “All of these symbols are operating in the minds of the Tibetans who are making the circuit around the residence of the Dalai Lama.”

  59. Robert A. F. Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 38.

  60. Wolfgang von Effra, Uncompromising Tibet: Culture-Religion-Politics (New Delhi: Paljor Publications, 1996), p. 28.

  61. Here is the text from the site:

  This is where prayer wheels enter the cyber-age. Prayer wheels are used by Tibetan Buddhists to purify themselves and the entire world of its accumulated negative karma. Inside each prayer wheel is a paper or some other medium (such as microfilm) on which a mantra has been inscribed many times over. Typically the mantra is OM MANI PADME HUM, which Tibetans pronounce: Om Mani Pémé Hung.

  In English this means “the jewel in the lotus of the heart”; it is a reference to the hidden spark of divinity within each of us. The six syllables of the mantra are said to purify the six negative emotions: pride, jealousy, desire, ignorance, greed, and anger, while simultaneously engendering the six qualities of the enlightened heart: generosity, harmonious conduct, endurance, enthusiasm, concentration, and insight.

  If the mantra is inscribed once and placed into a prayer wheel, each rotation of the prayer wheel accumulates the same merit as saying the mantra once. Similarly, a prayer wheel containing 100 million instances of the mantra yields the same purification power per rotation as saying the mantra 100 million times.

  To set your very own prayer wheel in motion, all you have to do is download this mantra to your computer’s hard disk. Once downloaded, your hard disk drive will spin the mantra for you. Nowadays hard disk drives spin their disks somewhere between 3600 and 7200 revolutions per minute, with a typical rate of 5400 rpm. Given those
rotation speeds, you’ll soon be purifying loads of negative karma.

  If you occasionally post articles to netnews, you can exponentially increase the good karma that is generated by including the mantra in your .sig file. Shortly after posting an article, every news server in the world will be spinning your mantra round and round. If we assume that the news servers are Unix machines that operate continuously, a single news posting with this .sig will probably spin over 5 trillion times before the article expires. Sentient beings everywhere will be thanking you. However avoid spamming the net, as the negative karma produced by the spam tends to cancel out the good karma that might otherwise have been generated.

  So if you’re ready, click here for good karma. Remember you have to save the file locally to set the mantra in motion. If you prefer something a little fancier, click on the image below to save the mantra as it would be written by the Tibetans:

  [The mantra appears in Tibetan script followed in brackets by] OM MANI PADME HUM

  P.S. It wouldn’t hurt to think of the mantra from time to time while it’s spinning around on your disk drive.

  This computerization of the sacred recalls Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God.” The monks of a Himalayan monastery believe that the world will end when the nine billion names of God are known, but calculate that even if they could recite one name a second, it would take almost 290 years to recite all the names. They have computers flown in to speed their work. At the airfield, the pilots who brought the computers prepare to leave and are discussing the monks’ crazy beliefs when the stars start going out one by one.

  62. André Padoux, “Mantras—What Are They?” in Understanding Mantras, ed. Harvey Alper (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 302.

  63. This correspondence was noted by European scholars of Mongolia such as P. S. Pallas in his Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften (Saint Petersburg, 1801), 2:90; and Isaac Jacob Schmidt in Forschungen im Gebiete der älteren religiösen, politischen und literärischen Bildungsgeschichte der Völker Mittel-Asiens, vorzüglich der Mongolen und Tibeter (Saint Petersburg and Leipzig, 1824), pp. 199–201. For some of the many Tibetan glosses of the mantra, see, for example, William W. Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, pp. 326–34; David Snellgrove, Buddhist Himalaya, p. 237; Khetsun Sangpo Rinbochay, Tantric Practice in Nyingma (London: Rider, 1982), pp. 25–26; and Matthew Kapstein, “The Royal Way of Supreme Compassion” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 73–76.

  64. Pallis, p. 163.

  65. Mani ’khor lo’i phan yon, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Literature Series (Gangtok, Sikkim: Dzongsar Khyntse [sic] Labrang Palace Monastary [sic], 1985), 136: 8b2–9a2.

  66. Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama XIV, Kindness, Clarity, and Insight, trans. Jeffrey Hopkins (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1984), p. 117. The Dalai Lama’s comments have recently been backtranslated into Tibetan in a Tibetan language version of Kindness, Clarity, and Insight. See Nang pa’i lta spyod kun btus (Dharamsala, India: Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, 1996), pp. 168–70.

  67. See Dan Martin, “On the Origin of the Prayer Wheel according to Two Nineteenth-Century Literary Sources,” Journal of the Tibet Society 7 (1987), p. 15. The passage appears at 574.4 in Sde srid Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho’s Blang dor gsal bar ston pa’i drang thig dwangs shel me long. A similar gloss is provided by the fifteenth Karmapa in his commentary on Thang stong rgyal po’s ’Gro don mkha ’khyab ma. For an English translation, see the Fifteenth Karmapa Kakhyab Dorje, A Continuous Rain to Benefit Beings, trans. Ken McLeod (Vancouver, B.C.: Kagyu Kunkhyab Chuling, n.d.), p. 24.

  68. The Tibetan text appears in P. C. Verhagen, “The Mantra ‘Oṃ maṇi-padme hūṃ ’ in an Early Tibetan Grammatical Treatise,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 13, no. 2 (1990): 134. My translation differs somewhat from Dr. Verhagen’s more literal rendering. The Tibetan text is entitled Sgra ’i rnam par dbye ba bstan pa (P 5838) and the passage occurs in Mdo ’grel section of the Peking bstan ’gyur, vol. ngo, 63b8—64a2. See also Pieter Verhagen, “Mantras and Grammar,” in Aspects of Buddhist Sanskrit, ed. Kameshwar Nath Mishra (Sarnath, India: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1993), pp. 320–46. On versions of the mantra that appear in the Dunhuang manuscripts, see Yoshiro Imaeda, “Note préliminaire sur la formule Oṃ maṇi-padme hūṃ dans les manuscrits tibétains de Touen-houang,” in Contributions aux études sur Touen-houang, ed. Michel Soymié, Hautes etudes orientales 10 (Geneva and Paris: Librairie Droz, 1979), pp. 71–76.

  69. David Snellgrove, Buddhist Himalaya: Travels and Studies in Quest of the Origins and Nature of Tibetan Religion, 2d ed. (Kathmandu: Himalayan Book Sellers, 1995), p. 309 n. 26.

  70. Verhagen, “Mantra ‘Oṃ maṇi-padme hūṃ,”’ p. 138 n. 19. For speculations as to why the mantra of a male deity is in the feminine, see Agehananda Bharati, The Tantric Tradition (London: Rider and Company, 1965), p. 133; David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), 1:195 n. 134 (although he reads the mantra as “O thou with the jewelled lotus”); and Martin, p. 21 n. 4.

  71. Sten Konow, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 12 (1925), p. 5. See also Edward J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought, 2d ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 187–88. Thomas claims that there is no mention of a female deity Maṇipadmā in the sutra.

  72. Konow, p. 11.

  73. The text states (with orthographical errors corrected), me zhes ’byung ba’i ’dreng bu ni kye zhes ’bod brda. See Antonio Agostino Giorgi, Alphabetum Tibetanum Missionum Apostolicarum Commodo Editum (1762; facsimile, Cologne: Editiones Una Voce, 1987), p. 516. The passage is translated into Latin on page 521.

  74. Ibid., pp. 516–17. The passage is translated into Latin, with editorial comment, on pp. 521–22.

  75. Trijang Rinpoche, Gzungs sngags yi ge drug ma’i ’grel bshad, in The Collected Works of the Venerable Khri-byaṅ rdo-rje-’chan blo-bzaṅ-ye-śes-bstan-’dzin-rgya-mtsho, Junior Tutor of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, vol. 3 (ga) (New Delhi: Mongolian Lama Gurudeva, 1978), p. 67a1–5. This is my translation. A translation of the text has been published as Kyabje Yonzin Trijang Dorje Chang Losang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso Pal Zangpo, “The Significance of the Six Syllable Mantra Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum,” Tibet Journal 7, no. 4 (winter, 1982): 3–10.

  76. See June Campbell, Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism (New York: George Braziller, 1996), p. 64.

  77. Trijang Ripoche, Gzungs sngags yi ge drug ma’i ’grel bshad, p. 68b5—6. The Tibetan reads, dang po mtshon byed rtags kyi dbang du byes na | maṇis yab kyi rdo rje nor bu dang | padmes phyag rgya ’i padma dang | hum yig gis de gnyis mnyam par sbyar ba la brten nas gzhi dus su bu bskyed pa dang | lam dus su lha spro pa rnams bstan. It does not appear that this interpretation of Trijang Rinpoche (who did not know any European languages) derives from “Western influence.”

  78. Katz, ed., Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, p. 172.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. Sherman E. Lee, A History of Far Eastern Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), p. 108. Lee was not the only art historian to commit this sin of omission. Dietrich Seckel’s The Art of Buddhism (New York: Crown Publishers, 1964) contains no discussion of Tibetan art and no Tibetan works among its almost two hundred plates and figures.

  2. This chapter focuses entirely on the twentieth century, especially on the years since the Tibetan diaspora. For an excellent historical survey of the European encounter with Tibetan art, see Anne Chayet’s “Découverte de l’art Tibétain” in her Art et archéologie du Tibet (Paris: Picard, 1994), pp. 11–20.

  3. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 4.

  4. Antoinette K. Gordon, The Iconography of Tibetan Lamaism, rev. ed. (Rutland,
Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959), p. 45.

  5. Giuseppe Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1949), 1:ix. This masterpiece is so lavishly produced that it is usually seen only by initiates, that is, by those who have access to the rare-book rooms of select university libraries. In 1957 Tucci contributed a lengthy article on Tibetan art to the Enciclopedia Universale Dell’Arte. The work appeared in English as Encyclopedia of World Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). Tucci’s article, “Tibetan Art,” appears in vol. 14, on pp. 67–82. He observes on p. 76 that “Though Tibetan painting is derived from or influenced by Indian and Chinese painting, it cannot be favorably compared with either. It suffers from overproduction.” Notable for its tempered appreciation of Tibetan art is the 1911 booklet by Jacques Bacot, L’art Tibétain (Chalon-sur-Saone: Émile Bertrand, 1911), which concludes, “Le seul but que je m’étais proposé en venant ici, et je crois l’avoir atteint par les seules projections, était de réhabiliter un peu les Tibétains, réclamer pour eux, non pas de l’admiration, mais de l’indulgence et montrer qu’en somme ils ne sont pas tout à fait des barbares” (p. 30). He does say earlier in the work, however, speaking of Tibetan religious and secular art, “Nous ne trouverons dans aucun des deux ce que nous demandons au grand art et ce que donnent les peintures japonaises et surtout chinoises, d’exprimer de la nature et de la vie, de synthétiser une idée, un mouvement par ce qu’ils ont d’essentiel et de plus propre à provoquer une émotion” (p. 4).

  6. The history of the acquisition of Tibetan art in Europe and America remains to be written. For a brief account of the formation of one of the early collections in the United States, the Jacques Marchais Museum on Staten Island, see Barbara Lipton and Nima Dorjee Ragnubs, Treasures of Tibetan Art: Collections of the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 3–18. Barbara Lipton also recounts the strange odyssey of “The Golden Pavilion of Jehol” on pp. 261–67.

  7. Pratapaditya Pal, The Art of Tibet (New York: Asia Society, 1969), pp. 7–8.