Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West

·期刊原文
Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
by Donald S Lopez
Reviewed by Donna Seaman
Booklist
Vol.94 No.18 (May 15, 1998)
p.1568
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Library Association

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Lopez, Donald S. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the
West. May 1998.

Tibet has long stirred Western imaginations, and inspired some
amazing adventures. These groundbreaking books examine the collision
between fantasy and fact when outsiders go inside and face both
Tibet's splendor and its sorrow.
Heinrich Harrer's story is better known, but the still controversial
tale of Alexandra David-Neel, the first white woman to enter Lhasa,
is far more mystifying. Long fascinated by her exploits, the Fosters
zestfully chronicle David-Neel's astonishingly chimerical and
adventurous life, and attempt to fathom her unique and confounding
personality. David-Neel not only trekked across the deserts,
glaciers, rivers, and mountains armed with a pistol and disguised as
a poor pilgrim to elude the authorities and marauders but also
became a Buddhist mystic and scholar responsible for translating key
Tibetan Buddhist texts. She lived for an entire century,
transforming herself at will from a political radical in France to a
student of yoga in India, a chanteuse in Europe and Indo-China an
intimate of the prince of Sikkim, the disciple of a Himalayan holy
man, and, eventually, the author of 30 books. So extraordinary are
David-Neel's experiences they read like fiction, but the authors
hold to the truth as best they can given the fantastic nature of
their subject, and never waver in their deep respect for this
high-spirited traveler.
Lopez's inquiry into the West's mythologizing and romanticizing of
Tibetan culture offers a stimulating counterpoint to the Foster's
portrait of David-Neel. Lopez is intent on disclosing the evolution
of our "notions" about Tibetan Buddhism, impressions that have
helped raise awareness of Tibet's plight under Chinese rule but that
now threaten to serve as conceptual prison detrimental, in the long
run, to helping free Tibet. Proceeding with care and precision,
Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like
intellectual colonialists, mining the treasures of a foreign belief
system to bolster their own. He makes this point with great finesse
in his rigorous discussion of the various English incarnations of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a mortuary text little known in Tibet
yet renowned in the West as a classic guide to life. This sort of
"radical decontextualization" has been applied to all aspects of
Tibetan culture, fueling our foolish fantasies of Shangri-La.
Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could
have done it as resoundingly as Lopez.
YA/M: Foster--For teenagers interested in Eastern religions and for
women's studies collections.