Prisoners of Shangri-La:
Tibetan Buddhism and the West
    By Donald S. Lopez Jr.
 University of Chicago Press,
        283 pp., $25

Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and
  the Pursuit of Real Happiness
      By Robert Thurman
  Riverhead, 322 pp., $24.95

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 were it not for the
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 that 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, 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 19th
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 book 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. 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 flip side 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 kicks. 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 postcolonialist
Lopez seems extremely skeptical about the possibilities of cross-cultural
communication, not to mention the phenomenon of Western Buddhism itself.
This would be a curious 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 have cropped 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.

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Monk business: Sera Je Monastery in the Bylakuppe Tibetan ... ]

  Monk business: Sera Je Monastery in the Bylakuppe Tibetan Settlement in
                                   India