Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  56. Rhie and Thurman, p. 37.

  57. The story appears, among other places, in Patrul Rimpoche, Words of My Perfect Teacher, trans. Padmakara Translation Group (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), pp. 173–74.

  58. Rhie and Thurman, p. 38. Unfortunately, the authors do not provide a Tibetan source for this variation.

  59. For a translation of one of the shorter rituals, see Yael Bentor, “The Horseback Consecration Ritual,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 234–54. On the process of filling statues, see Yael Bentor, “Inside Tibetan Images,” Arts of Asia 24, no. 3 (1994): 102–9, and “On the Indian Origins of the Tibetan Practice of Depositing Relics and Dhāraṇīs in Stūpas and Images” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 2 (1995) 248–61.

  60. On this process, see Yael Bentor, “On the Symbolism of the Mirror in Indo-Tibetan Consecration Rituals,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 23 (1995): 57–71; Yael Bentor, Consecration of Images and Stūpas in Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); and Giuseppe Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1949), 1:308-16.

  61. Cited in Yael Bentor, “Literature on Consecration (.Rab-gnas),” in Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. Roger Jackson and José I. Cabezón (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1996), p. 294.

  62. There are, however, a considerable number of Tibetan literary sources on art. For a discussion of one such work, see E. Gene Smith, introduction to Kongtrul’s Encyclopedia of Indo-Tibetan Culture, ed. Lokesh Chandra, pts. 1–3 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1970), pp. 42–51. Recent studies that make extensive use of Tibetan sources include Anne Chayet, Art et archéologie du Tibet (Paris: Picard, 1994); Roberto Vitali, Early Temples of Central Tibet (London: Serindia Publications, 1990); Franco Ricca and Erberto Lo Bue, The Great Stupa of Gyantse: A Complete Tibetan Pantheon of the Fifteenth Century (London: Serindia, 1983); and David Jackson, A History of Tibetan Painting: The Great Tibetan Painters and Their Traditions (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996).

  63. P. K. Meaghen, New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 7:348, s.v. “idolatry.”

  64. China and France, or Two Treatises (London, 1676), pp. 111–12.

  65. Graham Sandberg, Tibet and the Tibetans (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1906), p. 195.

  66. See Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 6–8. For a fascinating study of images, icons, and iconoclasm in Western art, see David Freedburg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  67. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 2:255; originally published as Primitive Culture.

  68. For a Geluk description of how Śākyamuni Buddha achieved enlightenment by this path, see Daniel Cozort, Highest Yoga Tantra (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1986), pp. 107–8.

  69. As Anne Chayet writes, “On en arrive parfois à cette absurdité que deux spécialistes, tibétain et non tibétain, parlant d’une même peinture, par exemple, semblent traiter de deux sujets, voire de deux domaines différents.” See Anne Chayet, Art et archéologie du Tibet (Paris: Picard, 1994), p. 20.

  70. Ibid.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Michel Strickmann, “A Survey of Tibetan Buddhist Studies,” Eastern Buddhist 10 (1977): 128.

  2. This chapter will not consider the fascinating history of Tibetan Studies in Europe during this century. Such a history would recount, for example, the circumstances (such as the presence of Dunhuang manuscripts in Paris) that have led Tibetologists in Europe (especially in France) to focus largely on pre-Buddhist Tibet and the fall of the Tibetan monarchy, producing excellent studies in which Buddhism is sometimes portrayed (as it is in some Bönpo histories) as an alien influence that brought an end to authentic Tibetan culture. In his study, The Yar-luṅ Dynasty, Erik Haarh writes:

  When, at last, Buddhism got a foothold in Tibet, its influence, however, became the very reason for the fall of the Dynasty and the disintegration of the Yar-luṅ Empire. This was not the result of a general mollification or pacification of the Tibetan mentality, but because Buddhism became a destructive agent to the spiritual life and tradition of the Tibetan people. To the Tibetan kings, adhering to Buddhism for the purpose of making their authority independent on the ancient national traditions, which at the same time meant its very basis and its restriction, Buddhism became disastrous, ruining the Dynasty in its own defeat against the last display of strength of the aboriginal traditions.

  See Erik Haarh, The Yar-luṅ Dynasty: A Study with Particular Regard to the Contribution by Myths and Legends to the History of Ancient Tibet and the Origin and Nature of Its Kings (Copenhagen: Gad, 1969), p. 12.

  The other emphasis in France has been on “popular” practice, such as ritual and pilgrimage, again generally eschewing Buddhist scholastic practice in Tibet, which, as will be considered below, has been the general focus in North America. A history of Tibetan Studies in Europe would also consider the circumstances that caused the study of Bon (today largely centered in Oslo under Per Kvaerne and in Paris under Samten Karmay) to be stronger in Europe than it has been in North America.

  3. For an eloquent and learned argument for the importance of Tibetan for the study of Indian Buddhism, see David Seyfort Ruegg, The Study of Indian and Tibetan Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967).

  4. For an account of this controversy, see Guy Richard Welbon, The Buddhist Nirvana and Its Western Interpreters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

  5. See J. W. de Jong, A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America, 2d ed., Biblioteca Indo-Buddhica, no. 33 (Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1987), p. 21.

  6. For a discussion of Csoma, with references to other studies of his life and work, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 256–59.

  7. See Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, History of Researches on Indian Buddhism (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981), pp. 129–32.

  8. For a useful survey of Western-language scholarship on Tibetan religions up to 1977, see the bibliographic essay by Michel Strickmann, “A Survey of Tibetan Buddhist Studies,” Eastern Buddhist 10 (1977): 128–49.

  9. For recent discussions and critiques of past and current paradigms in the field of Buddhist Studies, see Luis O. Gómez, “Unspoken Paradigms: Meanderings through the Metaphors of a Field, “Journal ofthe International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 2 (winter 1995): 183–230; and José Ignacio Cabezón, “Buddhist Studies as a Discipline and the Role of Theory,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 2 (winter 1995); 231–68.

  10. See Clyde A. Holbrook, “Why an Academy of Religion?” Journal of Bible and Religion 32 (1964): 97–105; reprinted in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 2 (summer 1991): 373–87. See also John F. Wilson, “Developing the Study of Religion in American Colleges and Universities,” Journal of General Education 20, no. 3 (October 1968): 190–208.

  11. Waddell, Tibetan Buddhism, p. xi.

  12. Tibetan Buddhism was placed in the tradition of perennial philosophy in 1968 by Huston Smith in his film Requiem for a Faith (Hartley Film Foundation). There amid a psychedelic kaleidoscope of sideways mantras and a Japanese painting of a buddha, Smith narrates: “Tibetans painted the truth.” He explains that “Separate selfhood is a fiction. . . . Our real identity is with Being as a whole, the scheme of things entire. . . . We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of others but from insight that sees and feels that one is the other.” In fact, the most famous argument for compassion in Tibet is that put forward by the eighth-century Indian scholar Śāntideva, who argues precisely that to practice compassion is
to deny the self for the sake of the other. Smith continues in this neo-Vedantin tone by stating that “the deepest insights of Tibetan Buddhism are not foreign to any of them [the alternative religions of man].” In fact, it is the position of the Geluk sect that enlightenment is impossible unless one gains direct realization of emptiness as it is set forth by Candrakīrti (as understood by Tsong kha pa).

  Smith’s film is famous as the first recording of the chanting of overtones by Tibetan monks. The subsequent history of the representation of this skill (Smith explains that “overtones awaken numinous feelings”) remains to be written.

  13. There were limited and unsuccessful attempts by the thirteenth Dalai Lama. In 1913 he sent four boys from aristocratic families to England to study. In the early 1920s a telegraph line was established between Lhasa and Gyantse, the machinery for a hydroelectric plant was purchased from England, and weapons were purchased from the British with which to modernize the Tibetan army. In 1924 an English-language school was established in Gyantse. However, it closed in 1926 (and efforts to modernize the military ceased) under pressure from the powerful Geluk monasteries. Another English-language school, designed to train wireless and hydroelectric technicians, opened in 1944 but it was closed under similar pressures after six months. See Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 120–38, 158–62, 421–26.

  14. Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries (New York: Dover Publications, 1905), pp. 447–48.

  15. This situation, however, has recently begun to change in the decades following the Tibetan diaspora, as Tibetan Buddhism belatedly confronts modernity. The Dalai Lama, for example, has become an active participant in the Buddhist-Christian dialogue and the Buddhist-Jewish dialogue. In the domain of comparative philosophy, we find works being published (by Wisdom Publications) such as Peter Fenner’s 1995 Reasoning into Reality: A System-Cybernetics Model and Therapeutic Interpretation of Buddhist Middle Path Analysis. But as in other confrontations between Tibetan Buddhism and modernity, the way has once again been led by Robert Thurman. In his 1984 Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet, he writes of Wittgenstein, “Yet, the critical insight he achieved and cultivated on his own was already highly developed and systematically cultivated in a great tradition with many thousands of members in India, Tibet, Mongolia, China, and Japan. One aspect of our first ‘western renaissance’ was our discovery of the hidden treasures of Greek thought. Our second renaissance may now well come from our discovery of the even greater resources of Asian thought.” See Robert A. F. Thurman, Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 111. See also his statement on page 79 that “Tsong Khapa precedes Wittgenstein by centuries in the exquisite and liberative understanding of the surface.”

  Here, in a standard strategy of the comparative philosopher, Thurman claims that Wittgenstein’s insights had been in the possession of Asian masters for centuries. And like Schlegel two centuries before and Seal one century before, he also predicts another renaissance. Thurman thus attempts to legitimate Tsong kha pa and Tibetan philosophy by showing that it is just as profound as anything thought by Wittgenstein, the most sublime of modern philosophers. Furthermore, the West is trumped by the fact that Tibetans knew what Wittgenstein knew centuries before his birth. What is being posited, then, is a universal truth that the East (specifically Buddhists) has always possessed and that the West may soon gain access to. Buddhists thus appropriate both the origin and the telos.

  Thurman next moves to subsume Western philosophical discourse within a Buddhist model: “Indeed, it may be that Berkeley and Hegel and Heidegger and so on will someday be claimed by Europe as representatives of the Maitreya lineage of magnificence, as Hume and Kant and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and so on may be claimed to represent the Manjushri lineage of the profound. . . . They should be included in the refuge-field icon we are constructing under which to read this Essence” (p. 21). Western philosophy is thus subjugated by subsumption.

  For a trenchant review of Thurman’s book, see Paul Williams, “Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49 (1986): 299–303. On “comparative philosophy,” see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 239–60.

  16. Edward Conze, Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1967), p. 213. For a powerful critique of the rhetoric of experience in Buddhist Studies, see Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 42 (1995): 228–83.

  17. For a brief biography of Geshe Wangyal, see the preface to the new edition of his The Door of Liberation, rev. ed. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), pp. xxi–xxvii.

  18. Perhaps the most striking instance of such a construction is the Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika, terms that do not appear as the names of branches of Mādhyamika in any Indian text, but rather were coined in Tibet, probably in the late eleventh century. Later Tibetan scholars disagreed over what constituted the difference between the two subschools, which Indian figures belonged to which, and which of the two should be ranked above the other.

  19. I have described my own experiences in this regard in an essay entitled “Foreigner at the Lama’s Feet,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 251–95.

  20. It was an enterprise of which Lama Govinda apparently would have approved. He wrote in his 1955 foreword to The Tibetan Book of the Dead:

  In times of old . . . “no one would have undertaken to translate a text who had not studied it for long years at the feet of a traditional and authoritative exponent of its teaching, and much less would anyone have thought himself qualified to translate a book in the teachings of which he did not believe.”

  Our modern attitude, unfortunately, is a complete reversal of this; a scholar is regarded as being all the more competent (“scholarly”) the less he believes in the teachings which he has undertaken to interpret. The sorry results are only too apparent, especially in the realm of Tibetology, which such scholars have approached with an air of their own superiority, thus defeating the very purpose of their endeavours.

  Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup and Dr. Evans-Wentz were the first to reestablish the ancient method of Lotsavas (as the translators of sacred texts are called in Tibet). They approached their work in the spirit of true devotion and humility, as a sacred trust that had come into their hands through generations of initiates, a trust which had to be handled with the utmost respect for even the smallest detail.

  See Lama Govinda, introductory foreword to Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. lxiii.

  21. It is noteworthy that the graduates of the programs at Washington and Indiana, where the Tibetologists were European-trained scholars (David Seyfort Ruegg and Helmut Hoffmann, respectively), produced work that was closer to the European model than did the graduates of Virginia and Wisconsin. The graduates of the program at Saskatchewan were influenced by the approach of their teacher, Herbert Guenther.

  22. Trungpa Rinpoche was often a controversial figure. For one view, see Peter Marin, “Spiritual Obedience,” Harper’s, February 1979, 43–58.

  23. Two recent cases of such sympathetic scholarship are Robert Thurman’s Essential Tibetan Buddhism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995); and John Powers’s Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995). Like so much of the work produced by American students of Tibetan Buddhism, both books have a bias that is both scholastic and Geluk (suggested by the photograph on the cover of Powers’s book of the five Geluk scholar-monks, complete with “yellow hats
”).

  Thurman’s book is part of HarperSanFrancisco’s Essential Series, which includes volumes such as Essential Zen, The Essential Tao, The Essential Koran, The Essential Kabbalah, The Essential Jesus, and The Essential Rumi. The contents of Thurman’s volume suggest that he believes that the essential Tibetan Buddhism is Geluk and scholastic. Of the thirty-two works in the volume, thirteen are Geluk (including six from Tsong kha pa), twelve are not Tibetan but Indian works (such as the Heart Sutra and selections from Śāntideva), and only seven are by non-Geluk Tibetan authors (of these, one consists of four lines from Gampopa, another, eight lines from Sachen Gunga Nyingpo). The Geluk bias is also evident in the length of the selections, with some 140 pages devoted to Geluk works (over half of these from Tsong kha pa), yet only roughly 30 pages are given to non-Geluk Tibetan authors. Indeed, there are twice as many pages from Indian texts (including a long extract from Nāgārjuna’s Pañcakrama, particularly important in Geluk tantra) than there are from non-Geluk Tibetan authors.

  In Powers’s book, the scholastic perspective is evident in the 25 percent of the book that is devoted to Indian Buddhist doctrine, as well as in the summaries of the four “schools” of Tibetan Buddhism, in which the philosophical and contemplative discourse of the most elite monks and lamas remains the focus. Even the chapter “Festivals and Holy Days” is devoted largely to the monastically dominated (and Geluk) events of the Monlam festival held to celebrate the New Year in Lhasa and the festival of the butter sculpture at Kumbum. The ordinary practices of the majority of Tibetans, monks, nuns, and laity, are consigned to a three-page section in the chapter on Bon entitled “Animism in Tibetan Folk Religion” (pp. 432–34). Elsewhere, whether it is in the discussion of tantra or the stages of death, the Geluk position is that which is presented, with occasional quotations from texts and teachers from other sects provided as embellishments. In both books the discussion of Tibetan history is derived largely (and uncritically) from traditional Buddhist sources, failing to note, for example, that the existence of the Nepalese bride of Srong btsan sgam po and the persecutions of Glang dar ma have been called into question.