Little Buddhas

·期刊原文
Little Buddhas

by David Klinghoffer
National Review

Vol. 50 No.11 1998.06.22

Pp.44-45

Copyright by National Review

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Tibetan Buddhism' is all the rage -- although it has little to do with
Buddhism, or Tibet.

ON bus stops across New York City, a poster for Smirnoff vodka shows two
cartoon characters a la Jules Feiffer, one holding up a bottle of
non-Smirnoff spirits. The man boasts: ``This vodka comes in a bottle
designed by albino monks from Tibet.'' Unimpressed, the woman asks: ``How's
it taste?'' The question hadn't occurred to him: ``Taste?''

In vino veritas, or anyway in vodka. The poster neatly captures a cultural
vortex that has snagged upper-middle-class white people by the tens of
thousands. These folks have got their hands on a bottle with a particularly
enchanting label, ``Tibetan Buddhism,'' but what's inside has proved to be
of less interest than the container. As Professor Donald Lopez writes in an
intriguing new book, our homegrown ``Tibetan Buddhists'' have yet to notice
that the entity they have embraced has little to do with the religion
practiced for centuries by Buddhists in Tibet.

The phenomenon of white Buddhists has been amply chronicled in newspapers
and newsweeklies. The emphasis there is on show-business celebrities who
are into the stuff -- Oliver Stone, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, the
inevitable Richard Gere, and action star Steven Seagal, recently celebrated
as the reincarnation of a fifteenth-century Tibetan lama. But the
popularity of this transplanted Oriental faith exceeds the city limits of
Hollywood and Beverly Hills, as I can personally attest.

So for instance, not long ago I had high hopes for a sweet-hearted Jewish
girl I had started dating. Hope began to dim when she revealed that she was
a Tibetan Buddhist and showed me the big picture of a bulging red Buddha's
Eye in her bedroom, suitable for worship. Around the same time I met a
Jungian psychotherapist who recommended The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which, he explained, documents the researches of Tibetan psychonauts who
pierced the veil between life and death and saw the fantastic portmortem
future that awaits us all. Meanwhile, my friend Ira is always telling me
about the mandala he saw in a dream the night before.

Tibetan boutiques are popping up all over Manhattan. In my neighborhood on
the Upper West Side we've got a Tibetan restaurant plus two boutiques
within a block of each other, the latter offering Tibetan furry hats,
``healing incense,'' ``religious artifacts,'' and ``Tibetan singing
bowls.'' (I stopped by Tibet Himalayan Gifts & Accessories the other
morning to hear a Tibetan bowl warble or yodel or whatever Tibetan bowls
do, but the shop was closed.)

The number of Americans who are Buddhist fellow-travelers, such as Ira,
dwarfs the number of signed-up converts. Even so, the latter total more
than 100,000. Both groups buy the requisite accessories, gadgets, singing
bowls, magazines, and books -- amazon.com lists 1,200 titles on Buddhism.
They attend the nation's 1,062 Buddhist instruction centers --up from 429
since 1988. They see the movies: lately Hollywood has released three swank
tributes to the Tibetan religion: Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha,
Martin Scorsese's Kundun, and Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt.

For all this we can thank the Chinese. Had they not brutally cracked down
on Tibet in 1959, causing the Dalai Lama and many others to flee, there
would be no Tibetan lamas teaching in American cities and writing books for
Americans to read. The Dalai Lama would still be ensconced in the Potala
palace at Lhasa, instead of globe-trotting wherever spiritually
malnourished white people are to be found, declaiming at the United
Nations, and appearing, as he did last month, on the cover of New York
magazine to plug alternative medicine.

Yet as Professor Lopez explains in his wry and enlightening Prisoners of
Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago), the romance of Tibet
goes back farther than the Tibetan diaspora. When fleeing Tibetan monks
arrived in America they found they had been preceded by a religion, thought
up by Americans and Englishmen, going by the same name as their own. The
best-known Tibetan text circulating in the West continues to be one that
the vast majority of actual Buddhist scholars never encounter in their
monastic studies, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. In reality an
obscure mortuary text read over fresh corpses to inform the departed of the
demons and deities they might expect to encounter in the hereafter, the
Book of the Dead was picked up by an oddball from San Diego called Walter
Evans-Wentz. In 1927 he published an extensive commentary based on
Theosophy, the hoax religion founded in New York in 1875 by Madame
Blavatsky. Since then, other editions have appeared. Their introductions
and commentaries -- which typically far overshadow in length the slender
Tibetan document itself -- tend to be unanchored in real Tibetan teaching;
instead, they serve as a vehicle for whatever bee has got into the bonnet
of the individual commentator. So there is a Theosophist Book, a Jungian
version depicting the journey of the dead as psychological allegory, and
another by Timothy Leary presenting the Book as a road map for an
eight-hour acid trip.

Yet the various Books of the Dead seem almost conservative when compared to
the output of the all-time best-selling author of works on Tibet and its
religion: T. Lobsang Rampa, a/k/a Cyril Hoskin, an Englishman allegedly
possessed by the spirit of a lama. In the 1950s, ``Rampa'' channeled three
volumes of autobiography, which included tales of communication with space
aliens and were marked by an odd emphasis on the religious significance of
cats. He later produced a memoir of life with himself authored
telepathically by his own cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers.

In general, the tendency of pseudo-Buddhism has been to reinvent thorny,
particularistic Tibetan concepts as non-threatening, universalizing
allegory. In a fascinating chapter about Tibetan art, Mr. Lopez
demonstrates that authentic Tibetan Buddhism was always uninhibitedly
idolatrous. It posited a multiplicity of gods that literally inhabited
works of Tibetan religious art. When you prostrated yourself before a
statue, you were bowing not to a symbol but to the god itself. Propitiating
these deities was a key activity for Tibetans. This fact got decidedly lost
in the American version, which presents the gods, if at all, as mere
``projections'' pointing to a ``deeper reality,'' and emphasizes
meditation, compassion, and environmentalism.

As Lopez reports, even Tibetan lamas have tended to absorb Westernized
Buddhism at the expense of real Buddhism. In his view, the foremost
Buddhist ``modernist'' is the Dalai Lama himself -- which explains the
wrangle the high lama has got himself into with followers of his who
persist in worshipping a god by the name of Dorje Shugden. Shugden is just
one of many regional Tibetan spirits, notable for an ability to flap his
ears vigorously so as to create a super-powerful wind. But for reasons
having to do with the politics of the Tibetan diaspora, the Dalai Lama
decided to stamp out Shugden worship. Now when he travels in the U.S. and
Britain, he is shadowed by Shugden-loving protestors who accuse him of
suppressing their religious freedom.

Stubborn particularism like that is among the fading embers of the old,
non-modernist Buddhism. Presumably, that Buddhism wouldn't go over well in
America, where idolatry still carries a hint of taboo. But the reinvention
of the faith doesn't entirely account for its popularity in the West.

Other factors come into play. Buddhism looks great in feature-article
photos. Devotees are invariably found sitting on beautifully waxed hardwood
floors meditating with attractive potted plants and Buddha statues all
around. No doubt, too, there is genuine substance, for good or evil, in
that part of the religion which has survived the great American
anti-weirdness filter. Interestingly, the Bible mentions ``gifts'' the
patriarch Abraham gave to his concubines' children before sending them off
``eastward to the eastern country,'' on which a tradition comments that
these were spiritual gifts involving the ``name of unclean powers.'' Who
knows what real weirdness was preserved in cut-off places like Tibet?

Probably what American Buddhists love most is exactly this idea of old
wisdom long hidden away. The extreme remoteness of Tibet, locked behind the
Himalayas, is a note you often hear struck. Brad Pitt makes the point in
Seven Years in Tibet. While hiking into Tibet he remarks to the audience in
an awed voice: ``This is the highest country on earth, and the most
isolated.''

The Bible has something to say about this, too. We are told to ``love your
neighbor as yourself,'' with the emphasis on neighbor. Presumably God
doesn't bother to command in favor of an activity or attitude unless its
opposite comes to some of us more naturally. There seems to be an
indestructible human temptation to value whatever is farthest away from our
immediate environment.

The more alien -- in appearance, demeanor, values -- the more seductive.
Why do some liberals assume that any aspect of a Third World culture must
by automatic right be morally superior to its counterpart in the West? To
blame Western ``self-hatred,'' as conservatives like to do, begs the
question; anyway, most liberals don't really hate America and Europe.
They're just loopy in love with Africa and Asia.

Which, in the long run, is bad news for ``Tibetan Buddhism.'' The Dalai
Lama can appear on the cover of New York magazine, or People, or Paris
Vogue, only so many times before his boat starts to leak its exotic fuel.
The lure of the foreign is a quality which, once lost, cannot easily be won
back. Maybe those fans of Dorje Shugden have a point, after all.

ILLUSTRATION