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Tibetan Buddhism and the West

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Tibetan Buddhism and the West Introduction At the Opening Ceremonies of the I996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a work entitled "Call to Nature," by Mickey Hart, percussionist of the Grateful Dead, was performed. It began with the chant of a Tibetan monk from Gyuto monastery. In I993 chants of Tibetan monks from the same monastery were broadcast at deafening volume by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investiga­ tion in Waco, Texas, as part of their psychological assault on the Branch Davidians. The I995 filmAce Ventura: When Nature Calls findsthe protago­ nist living in a Tibetan monastery, doing penance for having fa iled to rescue a raccoon. He is dressed in the red robes and yellow hat of a Geluk monk, seeking to attain a state of "omnipresent supergalactic oneness." 1 On June I 6, I 996, fifty thousand people gathered at Golden Gate Park fo r a "Free Tibet" benefitconcert, which featured performances by Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, Yoko Ono, and John Lee Hooker (among others). Prior to performing, the bands were blessed by Ti­ betan monks. The I992 Christmas issue of Paris Voguehad as its guest editor the Dalai Lama. In the 1990 series Twin Peaks, Special Agent Dale Cooper tells the local police fo rce, "Following a dream I had three years ago, I have become deeply moved by the plight of the Tibetan people and filled with a desire to help them. I also awoke from the same dream realizing that I had -I- Introduction subconsciously gained knowledge of a deductive technique involving mind­ body coordination operating hand in hand with the deepest level of intui­ tion." 2 In the better grocery stores one can purchase Tibetan Root Beer: "gently invigorating cardamom and coriander in a Tibetan adaptation of Ayurvedic herbs." In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, Mayor "Diamond" Joe Quimby tells the assembled citizens awaiting the arrival of Michael Jackson, "This is the most exciting thing to happen to our fair town since the Dalai Lama visited in 1952. And so, I hereby declare that Route 401, currently known as the Dalai Lama Expressway, will henceforth be known as the Michael Jackson Expressway." Thus when we see advertised, under the heading "Booty, Spoils & Plunder," a "Tibetan Shaman's Jacket" (for women, $175) in a 1995 J. Peterman catalog we are not surprised to read the accompanying copy that says, "It's official. Crystals are out, Tibetan Bud­ dhism is in." But Tibetan Buddhism has been in for some time. In the 1983 film Th e Return of the Jedi, the teddy-bear like creatures called Ewoks spoke high-speed Tibetan. In 1966, when the Beatles recorded "Tomorrow Never Knows," which begins "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream," John Lennon asked the recording engineer to make his voice sound like "the Dalai Lama on a mountain top." In 1925 the French poet Artaud wrote "Ad­ dress to the Dalai Lama," which begins "We are your most fa ithful servants, 0 Grand Lama, give us, grace us with your illuminations in a language our contaminated European minds can understand, and if need be, transform our Mind, create fo r us a mind turned entirely toward those perfect summits where the Human Mind no longer suffers.... Te ach us, 0 Lama, the physical levitation of matter and how we may no longer be earthbound." 3 In 1948 the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace (vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, 1940-44) foundered when it was re­ vealed that he had written letters to a Russian Tibetophile that began "Dear Guru." And in "The Adventure of the Empty House," Sherlock Holmes accounts fo r his whereabouts during the years he was assumed dead-af­ ter plunging with Professor Moriarty over Reichenbach Fall-by telling Watson, "I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myselfby visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. Yo u may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend." -2- Introduction On September 6, 1995, the Raleigh, North Carolina, Ne ws & Observer carried on the front page a color photograph of the Dalai Lama being em­ braced by Senator Jesse Helms, under the headline "Buddhist Captivates Hero of Religious Right." The next day the photograph appeared on T -shirts in Chapel Hill. But by then, the words below the picture seemed redundant. They read "Anything Is Possible." This book is an attempt to understand how it is possible. Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism have long been objects of Western fantasy. Since the earliest encounters of Venetian travelers and Catholic missionaries with Tibetan monks at the Mongol court, tales of the mysteries of their mountain homeland and the magic of their strange-yet strangely familiar­ religion have had a peculiar hold on the Western imagination. During the last two centuries, the valuation of Tibetan society and, particularly, its religion, has fluctuatedwild ly. Tibetan Buddhism has been portrayed sometimes as the most corrupt deviation from the Buddha's true dharma, sometimes as its most direct descendant. These fluctuations have occurred over the course of this century, at its beginning as Tibet resisted the colonial ambitions of a Euro­ pean power and at its end as it succumbed to the colonial ambitions of an Asian power. Typical of those who have held the negative view is Susie Carson Rijnhart, a medical missionary who traveled in Tibet from 1895 to 1899· In her account of her journey, With the Tibetans in Te nt and Te mp le, she writes: But nothing could be further from the truth than the belief entertained by many occidentals that the lamas are superior beings endowed with transcen­ dent physical and intellectual gifts. On the contrary, they are mere children in knowledge, swayed by the emotions that play on the very surface of being. During all our four years' sojourn among the Tibetans of various tribes and districts, we did not meet a single lama who was conversant with even the simple facts of nature ... , fo r the great mass of them we found to be ignorant, superstitious and intellectually atrophied like all other priest­ hoods that have never come into contact with the enlightening and uplifting influence of Christian education. They are living in the dark ages, and are themselves so blind that they are not aware of the darkness. Ten centuries of Buddhism have brought them to their present state of moral and mental stagnation, and it is difficult to believe that any fo rce less than the Gospel of Christ can give them life and progress in the true sense.4 Introduction At the same time, many, notably Theosophists, held quite a different view: A prophecy of Tsong-ka-pa is current in Tibet to the effect that the true doctrine will be maintained in its purity only so long as Tibet is kept free from the incursions of western nations, whose crude ideas of fundamental truth would inevitably confuse and obscure the followers of the Good Law. But, when the western world is more ripe in the direction of philosophy, the incarnation of the Pban-chhen-rin-po-chhe-the Great Jewel of Wis­ dom-one of the Teshu Lamas, will take place, and the splendour of truth will then illuminate the whole world. We have here the true key to Tibetan exclusiveness. 5 We see here a play of opposites: the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad. This opposition has functioned throughout the history of Europe's relation to Asia: "West" and "East," "Occident" and "Orient"-each a historical rather than a geographic construct. As will be evident in the chapters that follow, the play of opposites has been both extreme and volatile in the case of Tibet, and it remains at work in contemporary attitudes toward Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. The opposition of the authentic and the derivative was also imagined to operate inside Tibet. In his popular 1951 survey Buddhism (which invokes, like so many others, the landscape of Tibet), Christmas Humphreys writes, "The great spaces ...and the silence where men are scarce and wildlife is rarer still, all lend themselves to introverted thought, to the development of abnormal ways of thought, to the practice of the best and worst of the mani­ fold powers of the mind." 6 For many decades, what interested scholars about Tibet was not Tibetan literature or practice, but the translations of Sanskrit texts lost in India but preserved in Tibet, held as if in deep freeze, safe from the dangers of Muslim fire and monsoon water. These texts, even in translation, were valued as the authentic documents of Mahayana Buddhism, which had been condemned by an earlier generation of scholars as a devia­ tion from the Buddha's original teachings. Ye t Tibetan commentaries on these works and their articulations in various ritual forms were generally dismissed as arid repetition devoid of the animation of authenticity. "Indige­ nous" Tibetan religion was portrayed as a debased practice. The French ex­ plorer Andre Guibaut wrote of Tibet, "Nowhere but here, in this atmosphere, could the lofty conception of Buddha unite with the dark, primitive rites of ancient Shamanism, to culminate in the monstrosity of Lamaism." 7 -4- Introduction Even those Europeans with a more fanciful interest in Tibet distinguished between the Tibetans' own religious practice and the secret knowledge of occult masters. The Theosophists believed Tibet to be the abode of the Mahatmas (Great Souls), keepers of the wisdom of Atlantis who congregated in a secret region of Tibet to escape the increasing levels of magnetism pro­ duced by civilization; they believed as well that the Tibetans were unaware of the Mahatmas' presence in their land.
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