Tibet and the West
From Hollywood’s Himalayan eye-candy to the Dalai Lama’s elfish Macintosh grin, from Beastie Boys Buddhism to the proliferation of “Free Tibet!” bumper stickers, it’s clear that Tibet has captured the pop mind. Of course, we would not be dreaming of the lost horizon again were it not for the powerful entrance of Tibet’s religious consciousness into the West, a process coupled, in ways not always clear, with the nonviolent struggle against China’s annexation of the land. But as Prisoners of Shangri-La and Inner Revolution both show in very different ways, Tibet remains a hybrid, half-imagined landscape, a curious commingling of reality and fantasy, scholarship and popular desire.
No contemporary Western Buddhist fuses scholarship and popular desire with the panache of Robert Thurman. Ex-monk, Columbia prof, Tricycle magazine honcho, Tibet House president, father of Uma, and American point man for the Dalai Lama, Thurman plays the Orientalist scholar as Buddhist impresario. He hobnobs with movie stars, writes books for academics and seekers, and lectures with a charismatic fire that have led some to dub him the Billy Graham of Buddhism.
Like a lot of dharma texts today, Thurman’s Inner Revolution is something of a “no-self help book,” a fusion of philosophy, transpersonal psychology, and spiritual techniques that hinges on the Buddhist insight that there is no permanent or essential “I.” As such, Inner Revolution should prove quite handy for many owners of human psyches. But Thurman’s central aim is political. Following a strain of Buddhist thought that emerged in the nineteenth century, Thurman redefines Buddhism as a process of “inner modernity” that encourages the evolutionary development of the individual. Thurman argues that such evolved individuals, freed from the habitual patterns of anxious selfhood and aware of their interdependence with all beings, inevitably incite a “cool revolution.” The compassionate values that fuel this gradual and nonviolent transformation are capable of turning even our nihilistic civilization around. As evidence, Thurman offers up a vision of historical Tibet as a demilitarized and socially harmonious “enlightenment factory.”
Comparatively speaking, Tibet was a remarkably peaceful and seemingly spiritual place before China moved in, and reports of its theocratic feudalism have been greatly exaggerated. But one can’t escape the sense that Thurman is consciously creating a romanticized image that serves the West’s own contradictory need to both escape and fulfill modernity. His Tibet is a coniunctio oppositorum, an unlikely crossroads between spiritual power and empirical science, at once timeless and extremely timely.
Thurman’s project proves that meditation does not ineluctably lead to quietistic navel-gazing, and the political platform he outlines at the end of his book is perfectly admirable in its liberal and democratic idealism. But Thurman is not as modern as he wants or pretends to be. On the one hand, he characterizes Buddhist practice as a path of critical self-exploration leading to the deconstruction of socially-conditioned values. Sounds good to me. Read a few pages further, however, and you’ll find adamant proclamations about the literal reality of rebirth — a doctrine that many serious Western Buddhists still find tough to swallow. Thurman even asserts that it is impossible to have an adequate basis for moral action if you believe that death really is the big snuff-out –an act of sutra-thumping that throws his vision of Tibet’s progressive utopia into doubt. In Prisoners of Shangri-La, a text that is sometimes explicitly critical of Thurman’s agenda, Donald Lopez Jr. fans the fires of such doubts. Though Lopez has taken refuge vows and writes for Tricycle, he is very much a skeptical scholar, and like many intellectuals in our post-Foucauldian academy (and quite unlike Thurman), he is almost claustrophobically self-conscious about the frameworks of knowledge and authority that shape his understanding of the world. Lopez would never attempt anything as brazenly naive as contrasting Western fantasies of Tibet with the “real thing,” so his book therefore mostly confines itself to mapping the “mirror-lined labyrinths” created by those who have attempted to speak for and represent Tibetan religion in the West.
As such, Lopez provides rich, unforgiving, and occasionally amusing genealogies of some of the most famous signifiers of Tibet: wrathful deities, the mantra om mani padme hum, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. He is particularly keen to show how our image of Tibet has long been ruled by the fantasized opposition between purity and degeneracy. The contemporary vision of the land as a timeless preserve of untainted Buddhist wisdom is only the flipside of the view held by most 19th-century Orientalists, who believed that Tibet represented a medieval sinkhole of papist Lamaism and devil-worship.
Lopez is not just puncturing myths for the kick of it. He fears that the popular interest in Tibetan religion, which considerably amplifies the Dalai Lama’s short-term political pull, may ultimately impede the struggle for Tibetan independence. Instead of affirming Tibet’s place in the real world, the West is embracing a lofty simulacrum that unconsciously denies the historical agency of living Tibetans. By reformulating Tibetan Buddhism into a modern and universalizing science of mind, teachers like the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman may be allowing Tibet to float free from history “in a process of spiritual globalization that knows no national boundaries.”
To complicate this image of dharma moderne, Lopez closes his book with a fascinating account of the so-called “Shugden affair.” Dorje Shugden is an important protector deity of the Geluks, the politically dominant Tibetan sect headed by the Dalai Lama. The fierce Shugden protects the purity of the Geluk way, especially against contamination by the sometimes rival Nyingma sect. Early this century, a charismatic “revival” movement grew up around Shugden, strongly influencing later generations of Geluk monks and increasing tension with the Nyingma. But in 1976, on the advice of the ferocious Nechung oracle, the Dalai Lama banned the worship of Shugden, sparking a controversy that has lately become quite bitter and occasionally violent. Though some media accounts paint Shugden supporters as fundamentalists clinging to Tibet’s shamanic past, Lopez argues that the struggle may actually represent a desire to reassert regional and specifically Tibetan culture. In contrast, the Dalai Lama needs to exile Shugden in order to constitute Tibet as a unified religious nation on the world stage, with himself as its ecumenical leader.
In any case, the Shugden affair suggests that the metamorphosis of Tibetan Buddhism into a global religion will continue to run up against serious cultural differences. Thurman obviously thinks it’s worth pressing forward, because Tibetan Buddhism transformed his American life. But post-colonialist Lopez seems extremely skeptical about the possibilities of cross-cultural communication, not to mention the phenomenon of Western Buddhism. This would be a curiously “essentializing” position, for the history of the dharma is the history of spirit as mutating virus: from India to China, Southeast Asia, Japan, Tibet, and now the West, spreading without guns or empire or much sectarian bloodshed. It’s inevitable that questionable revisions and creative misunderstandings crop up along the way. Such distortions might actually be grist for the mill, or what J.J. Clarke calls, in his study Oriental Enlightenment, “necessary and salutary turnings of the hermeneutic wheel.” Though popularizers like Thurman may be a little excessive on the spin, I suspect the wheel is turning in the right direction.
