Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 1998, 2018 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

  Published in 1998

  Paperback edition 1999

  First edition, with enlarged text, published 2018 by the University of Chicago Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48548-5 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48551-5 (e-book)

  DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/[9780226485515].001.0001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lopez, Donald S., Jr., 1952– author.

  Title: Prisoners of Shangri-La : Tibetan Buddhism and the West / Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

  Description: Twentieth anniversary edition, with a new preface. | Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032242 | ISBN 9780226485485 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226485515 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Buddhism—China—Tibet Autonomous Region.

  Classification: LCC BQ7604 .L66 2018 | DDC 294.3/923—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032242

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, with a NEW PREFACE

  PRISONERS of SHANGRI-LA

  TIBETAN BUDDHISM and the WEST

  Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

  THE UNIVERSITY of CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO and LONDON

  for TOMOKO

  Contents

  Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE. The Name

  CHAPTER TWO. The Book

  CHAPTER THREE. The Eye

  CHAPTER FOUR. The Spell

  CHAPTER FIVE. The Art

  CHAPTER SIX. The Field

  CHAPTER SEVEN. The Prison

  Notes

  Index

  Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition

  The term “Shangri-La” was coined by James Hilton to name a mythical land in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Twenty years ago, when Prisoners of Shangri-La was first published, Shangri-La still remained a domain of the imagination. Yet the search for Shangri-La has not ceased, and some claim to have found it, even putting it on a map: in 2001, to encourage tourism, a Tibetan town in Yunnan Province in China was officially renamed “Shangri-La.”

  In April 1944, just a few years after Hilton’s novel was made into Frank Capra’s classic film Lost Horizon, the renowned Austrian mountain climber and SS Sergeant Heinrich Harrer escaped from a British detention camp in India. Making use of their alpine skills, he and his fellow mountaineer Peter Aufschnaiter crossed the Himalayas into Tibet, where they planned to stay until the end of the Second World War. Instead, they remained there much longer; Seven Years in Tibet would become the title of Harrer’s bestselling 1952 memoir, itself made into a film in 1997, starring Brad Pitt as Harrer.

  Writing in his diary on February 13, 1946, Harrer reports that at a party in Lhasa, he “met a Mongolian Lama, who spoke English and who is doing translations and who is also writing poetry. His name is Chömphel.” Harrer says that Chömphel told him that he had recently been paid by the British to translate a biography of the thirteenth Dalai Lama and that the translation had been sent to Sir Charles Bell (1870–1945), the long-serving British political officer in Sikkim who had retired to Canada. Harrer was wrong about the ethnicity of his interlocutor. He was from Amdo, and his name was Gendun Chopel (1903–1951). He had returned to Lhasa in the summer of 1945 after twelve years in India.

  The translation of the Tibetan biography, entitled Wondrous Garland of Jewels (Ngo mtshar rin po che’i phreng ba), and its dispatch to Charles Bell is confirmed by Bell himself in the preface to his famous biography of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, Portrait of a Dalai Lama. There, Bell explains,

  A biography of the late Dalai Lama was compiled under the orders of the Tibetan government. It was completed in February, 1940, between six and seven years after the Dalai Lama’s death in December, 1933 and is entitled The Wonderful Rosary of Jewels. The Regent was so good as to give me a copy of it, printed from the wooden blocks made in Tibetan style. Sir Basil Gould, the Representative of the Government of India in Tibet since 1935, kindly arranged for the translation of the relevant parts. This translation was supervised by my old friends Raja and Rani S. T. Dorji. This biography, which reached me after I had completed mine, deals with the Dalai Lama’s life on typically Oriental lines.1

  Bell then goes on to disparage that style, concluding that it portrays the Dalai Lama as a deity rather than a human being and so would not appeal to many Western readers. He concedes, however, that “it contains many authentic and interesting facts, some of which are suitable for a biography on Western lines. I have found room therefore for a selection of these.”2

  It seems that the translation was “supervised” by Sonam Tobgye Dorji, the representative of the king of Bhutan in Kalimpong, and his wife Chuni Wangmo (they carried respectively the titles “Raja” and “Rani” from the Viceroy of India). What is not acknowledged and was likely not known by Bell is that the translation was done by Gendun Chopel and perhaps Dorje Tharchin, the editor of the Tibetan newspaper Melong.3 The typescript of the translation resides today among Bell’s papers in the British Library.4

  Portrait of a Dalai Lama was published in London in 1946, the year of Harrer’s conversation with Gendun Chopel. That same year, in Paris, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) began work on a series of essays that would be published in 1949 as The Accursed Share (La part maudite), in which he argues that the economies of all societies generate an excess that cannot be put to productive use and must therefore be somehow wasted, most often in weapons of war but also in luxury goods, religious spectacles, games, and massive monuments. He offers a number of case studies, including Aztec sacrifice, the potlatch of the Pacific Northwest, Soviet industrialization, and the Marshall Plan. Part 3 of The Accursed Share is entitled “The Society of Military Enterprise and the Society of Religious Enterprise,” with the first represented by Islam and the second by Tibetan Buddhism, or, as he calls it, “Lamaism.” In a chapter of eighteen pages, Bataille offers an analysis of Tibetan society. He does this based on a single source: Sir Charles Bell’s Portrait of a Dalai Lama.

  Bataille’s audacity in providing a grand analysis based on so little must immediately be acknowledged. As the 1998 edition of Prisoners of Shangri-La notes, the chapter’s title “The Unarmed Society: Lamaism” is itself dubious; it places Tibet in a system of fantastic opposites—bellicose Islam versus pacific Lamaism. Bataille’s focus, however, is a specific moment in modern Tibetan history, when the thirteenth Dalai Lama, having fled a British invasion in 1904 and a Chinese invasion in 1910, returned from exile in British India in 1913 with a plan to develop a modern army to repel future invaders. The plan failed, largely because of opposition from the monasteries of his own Geluk sect. Calling Tibet a “peaceful civilization, incapable of attacking others or defending itself,” Bataille disp
enses with the argument that Tibetan pacifism somehow derives from Buddhist principles, noting correctly that “other religions condemn war, and the people who profess them obviously still manage to kill one another.”5

  Bataille offers a brief sketch of Tibetan history, explaining that Tibet chose monks over a king, creating a system in which all prestige was invested in lamas and military force was abandoned. The Dalai Lama, although head of state, was politically weak: “A sovereignty is precarious that does not command both the religious enthrallment of the people and the half-mercenary, half-emotional obedience of an army.”6 As Bataille notes, the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s attempt to raise an army and devote resources to that purpose was met with firm resistance from the monasteries, even when it was argued that an army was needed to defend the dharma.

  For Bataille, the effort was doomed from the start. Using what he acknowledges are very rough estimates from Bell, he states that one in three adult males were monks and that between 5 and 10 percent of the population of Tibet were “religious persons.” Citing Bell’s estimate of the annual expended revenues, he finds that, “in theory, the total budget of the Church would have been twice as large as that of the state, eight times that of the army” (italics in the original).7 Even if these figures are unofficial, for Bataille they prove that no society that expends such a huge segment of its economy on monasticism can have an army. Still, one needs to explain what caused “a whole country to become a monastery.”8

  This brings him to the accursed share, the surplus that all economies produce (or strive to produce); the use that a society deems to make of that surplus defines the character of that society. Although monasticism was hardly limited to Tibet, what Bataille finds unique is that it became the primary outlet for Tibet’s accursed share. Given its large geographical area and small population, Tibet had no need to expend its surplus in military expansion. It could therefore be consumed by devoting the entire surplus to religion. Tibet became a “closed container” unconcerned with defending itself, taking comfort in Buddhist prophecies that Tibet would occasionally be invaded but the invaders would not stay long. Tibetan Buddhist monasticism was thus “an internal construction so perfect, so free of controversion, so unconducive to accumulation, that one cannot envisage the least growth of the system.”9 This suppression of growth was further ensured by the large portion of the population that was celibate, living in monasteries that generated revenue that was expended by the monks themselves, “a mass of sterile consumers.”10

  There is much to question in Bataille’s argument. In the years both before and after the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death in 1933, Tibet was a far less closed society than Bataille presents it to be. Yet it is the case that much of the Tibetan economy was controlled, in one way or another, by Buddhist institutions—from the massive generation of wealth by monasteries, to the state appropriation of funds for the performance of rituals and the maintenance of temples and the icons they housed, to the fact that monasteries served as major landholders and lending institutions in much of Tibet.

  Bataille published The Accursed Share in 1949, one year before troops of the People’s Liberation Army crossed into Tibetan territory. Although he alludes, almost mockingly, to Buddhist prophecies of invasion, he does not cite the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s own prophecy, which was translated in Bell’s biography. There, warning of the threat of Communism, the Dalai Lama writes (in Bell’s translation),

  Unless we can guard our own country, it will now happen that the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the Father and the Son, the Holders of the Faith, the glorious Rebirths, will be broken down and left without a name. As regards the monasteries and the monks and nuns, their lands and other properties will be destroyed. The administrative customs of the Three Religious Kings will be weakened. The officers of the State, ecclesiastical and secular, will find their lands seized and their property confiscated, and they themselves will be made to serve their enemies, or wander about the country as beggars do. All beings will be sunk in great hardship and in overpowering fear; the days and nights will drag on slowly in suffering.11

  Like the prophecies mentioned by Bataille, this one came true; foreigners conquered Tibet. As was not prophesied, the foreigners have stayed long. In the period since the Chinese annexation of Tibet, does Bataille’s theory retain any purchase? If so, what has become of Tibet’s accursed share?

  In 1961, two years after the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile, there was an extraordinary meeting in Dharamsala of many of the high-ranking lamas who had escaped from Tibet. There is a famous black-and-white group photograph that records something that had never occurred before in Tibetan history: the Dalai Lama, the Karmapa, Sakya Trizin, and a high Nyingma lama (in this case, Dudjom Rinpoche) seated side by side. Behind them are many of the most renowned figures to have escaped from Tibet, including Kalu Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse. This was a highly significant event and one deserving of full study. One of the purposes of the meeting was to decide how best to preserve Tibetan Buddhism in exile.

  One proposal, apparently not adopted, was for each sect to establish in exile something that it had not had in Tibet, a ma dgon, a mother monastery or ecclesiastical headquarters. Another proposal, apparently adopted, was to stop recognizing incarnate lamas, to stop finding tulkus. Until any documents remaining from the meeting can be studied and until any of the surviving lamas who attended can be interviewed, a host of questions remain about how this decision was made. Was it that it would be too hard to find new incarnations in Tibet from a position of exile? Was it that the institution had grown too large and cumbersome in Tibet and the situation in exile was sufficiently desperate that resources (at a time when there was no surplus) needed to be directed to more important things? Was it that with the labrang (bla brang), the estate, now lost, the institution of the lama made little sense? These questions become all the more fascinating when we note that the majority of those present at the meeting, including three of the four luminaries seated side by side, were tulkus. When the greatest lamas and tulkus of twentieth-century Tibet had a chance to shut the system down, they did, or at least they tried to.

  The ban was agreed on and observed for some years, perhaps as long as a decade, until someone broke it, and then everyone eventually followed suit. Yet there was a period when tulkus were not found. What does this mean? If we think of the tulku system from the perspective of missionaries like Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733)—who ascribed the poise of young tulkus to demonic possession—perhaps Satan had done enough to Tibetans that he no longer needed to bedevil them.12 Having turned their country into hell, he could now turn his attentions to China. If we think of the tulku system from the perspective of the Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799), the devoted disciple and friend of the Jangkya tulku (1717–1786), the system could end because there were no longer any labrangs; the emperor himself had not closed the labrangs because doing so would impoverish so many monks. But in 1961, all the monks were impoverished. If we think of the tulku system from the doctrinal perspective, the decision raises many questions: How does one stop a tulku from being reborn? During that decade, was the Akaniṣṭha heaven mobbed with sambhogakāyas surveying the world for the appropriate time, place, and parents for their birth, and finding none in Tibet? Or were they reborn in Tibet and never identified? If a rainbow appears over the house where a child is born and no one sees it, is the child a tulku?

  Since the breaking of the ban, scores of tulkus have been identified in the exile community, as if a surplus, finally accrued, needed to be expended. In the twenty years since the publication of Prisoners of Shangri-La, many of these tulkus have come of age. Today, one finds the various glossy Buddhist magazines replete with advertisements for the teachings of this or that tulku, many of whose names are preceded by the letters H. E. (for “His Eminence”), a title that does not have an obvious correlate in Tibetan. The tulkus have been the drivers of a new economy with its own surplus, derived largely from the support of foreign disciples. One of its pr
oducts is the seminary (shes grwa) where many of these disciples have learned Classical Tibetan and Buddhist doctrine well, leading to a sociological phenomenon that might be called the “dharma translator,” someone with the ability to translate Tibetan texts and the oral teachings of Tibetan lamas without the imprimatur of the academy, their translations filling the lists of “dharma presses” like Wisdom and Shambhala (which purchased Snow Lion Publications in 2012).

  In Tibet, the situation for Tibetans and their religion has deteriorated over the past two decades. This does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism has ceased to generate excess wealth. The period since 1998 has seen a movement away from foreign tourism to Tibet and a significant increase in Han Chinese tourism, facilitated by a high-speed train dubbed the “Lhasa Express,” which made its inaugural pilgrimage in 2006. The wave of Han tourism, in many cases motivated by the myth of Shangri-La, was made possible by the surplus wealth of many Chinese. No longer closed, at least economically, Tibet has finally become a source of wealth that can be expended outside, not by Tibetans but by Chinese, as the mineral wealth of Tibet is exploited amid protests by Tibetans who fear the destruction of their environment and fear for the well-being of the deities who inhabit it.

  A wave of crackdowns on the advent of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing sparked nonviolent protests across the Tibetan cultural domain; they were strongest not in Lhasa and the Tibet Autonomous Regions but in Kham and Amdo, in what the Chinese call “Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures.” This led in turn to further repression. Indeed, in Tibet the most important and tragic events of the past two decades have been a far more corporeal form of expenditure: the sacrifice of the lives of over one hundred Tibetans (150 as of August 1, 2017) who have died by self-immolation.13 Self-immolation is not a traditional form of suicide in Tibet. Unlike in Chinese Buddhism, it is not considered a scripturally sanctioned act. There is not even a word for “self-immolation” in Tibetan; new words, like rang lus mer bsregs (literally, “burning one’s own body in fire”) had to be invented. Although not all of these Tibetans left a suicide note or spoke before setting themselves on fire, the most common expression among those who did has been a call not for Tibetan independence but for the long life and return of the Dalai Lama. One of the most detailed statements was that of the monk Sonam Wangyal, called “Lama Sobha,” who died on January 8, 2012. In a statement recorded prior to his death, he declared,