-Caveat Lector-
> Virtual Tibet
> Is the popular image of this troubled land true to reality?
>
> By Jeremiah Creedon, Utne Reader
>
> Tibetan Buddhism's high profile in the West today is said to be
> largely the work of the current Dalai Lama. Driven from Tibet by
> its Chinese occupiers in 1959, he has spent much of his life
> pleading the case for a free Tibet throughout the world. As
> others have noted, he first sought support in the halls of power,
> where few would listen. Only in the past decade or so has he
> begun to rely on a posse of famous friends and his own
> bespectacled presence to take the Tibetan cause directly to the
> masses.
>
> This popular appeal has been more successful, or so it seems. A
> detailed picture of Tibet now exists in the Western mind, updated
> most recently by two major films about the Dalai Lama's boyhood:
> the Brad Pitt vehicle, Seven Years in Tibet, and Martin
> Scorsese's Kundun. Both have been praised for capturing the look
> and feel of Tibet, though Seven Years was shot in Argentina and
> Kundun in Morocco. Others have tried to convey a sense of Tibet's
> unique form of Buddhism, though here again some say the
> authenticity may be celluloid thin.
>
> These efforts form what amounts to a virtual Tibet, a borderless
> country manipulated not by China but by the TV viewer's remote
> control. There's a general belief that the virtual Tibet somehow
> helps the actual Tibet, but does reality bear this out? That
> question is never far from the surface in two new books, each
> written by a leading American scholar of Buddhism. Both authors
> believe that Tibetan independence is a noble and not hopeless
> cause, but they differ over how well it's being served by current
> appeals to Western sympathy. The books also raise intriguing
> questions about the modern recovery of ancient wisdom and whether
> such a thing is even possible, given the warping lens of the
> present through which the past is inevitably viewed.
>
> In Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
> (University of Chicago Press, $25), Donald S. Lopez Jr. argues
> that the Western vision of Tibet has always been highly
> unrealistic. In a series of essays, he examines the various roles
> that Tibet and its Buddhist traditions have played in the Western
> imagination for centuries. Early missionaries and travelers
> vilified the Tibetans as barbaric heathens, "Lamaists" whose
> colorful but empty faith amounted to a cargo-cult version of
> Roman Catholicism. Today, several incarnations later, the
> Tibetans are viewed as "happy, peaceful people devoted to the
> practice of Buddhism, whose remote and ecologically enlightened
> land, ruled by a god-king, was invaded by the forces of evil."
>
> Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the
> University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, argues that all such visions
> stem from a colonial mind-set that denies the Tibetan people the
> right to their own lives. "During the past three decades
> fantasies of Tibet garnered much support" for the country, he
> writes. "But I have become convinced that the continued
> idealization of Tibet -- its history and its religion -- may
> ultimately harm the cause of Tibetan independence."
>
> Lopez is especially blunt about what he calls "Buddhist
> modernism," an atheistic "religion of reason" compatible with
> science and devoted to social reform -- in other words, a
> Buddhism abridged for the Western mind. "This version of Buddhism
> was unknown in Tibet," Lopez writes. "However, since the diaspora
> in 1959, the leading proponent of Buddhist modernism has been a
> Tibetan, the Dalai Lama." Another proponent, according to Lopez,
> is Robert A.F. Thurman, the popular Je Tsong Khapa Professor of
> Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, father of
> the actress Uma, and former Buddhist monk and student of the
> Dalai Lama, who remains a close friend. Thurman's Inner
> Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness
> (Riverhead, $24.95), would probably qualify as an example of the
> Buddhist revisionism that Lopez criticizes. In his history of
> Buddhism, Thurman reiterates a view of Tibet he has already done
> much to shape in earlier works, portraying Tibetans as a formerly
> warlike people who embraced enlightenment when Buddhism arrived
> from India many centuries ago. He sees Buddhism today as a tool
> for social change -- and the inspiration for a "cool heroism"
> that will revolutionize the West.
>
> The book is also a spiritual memoir that weaves the author's
> personal quest for enlightenment into his wider historical
> narrative. Taken on its own terms, it ultimately proves hard not
> to enjoy. To compare the two books is to acknowledge the
> existence of different, often competing kinds of history, if not
> reality. As Lopez so brilliantly argues, the virtual Tibet is a
> distortion, or even an illusion, like the light of an exploding
> star that glimmers most brightly after its source has dwindled to
> a cinder. And yet a student of Buddhism might find some room for
> tolerance in this regard. The image of Tibet in the mass media is
> a simple vehicle, perhaps, but not without some claim on a far
> more complicated truth.
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> -- Jeremiah Creedon
> From Utne Reader
>From www.utne.com
A<>E<>R
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