Orville Schell (continued)What is not in question, however, is the yearning of disenchanted Westerners to believe in such places. Indeed, to acknowledge that such lands may no longer exist seems too bleak a thought for most of us in modern life to bear.
Fantasies of escape are naturally more powerful when rooted in real geography; the concreteness of a real place helps us believe in our romantic myths as something more than baseless, chimerical dreams. Few places on the globe have been afforded better geographical conditions for remaining isolated than Tibet, protected as it is from Inner Asia by the Kunlun Mountains and the deserts of Qinghai and Xinjiang to the North; from China by the rugged foothills of the Tibetan plateau; and from India by the Himalayas. Never mind that it is not the pocket-sized kingdom tucked in the mountains that many in the West may still believe it to be, but instead a vast and sparsely populated land as large as Western Europe.
No land has provided such an enticing target for a corpus of romantic transferences, nor more continuously fired the imagination of Western escape artists. Tibet is still imagined as "the cure for an ever-ailing Western civilization, a tonic to restore its spirit," as Tibet scholar Donald Lopez has written in his recent book Prisoners of Shangri-La. "To the growing number of Western adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, 'traditional Tibet' has come to mean something from which strength and identity are to be derived . . . a land free from strife, ruled by a benevolent Dalai Lama, his people devoted to the dharma."
I made my first trip to Tibet in 1981, when, after several decades of strict closure, the Beijing government finally gave foreign tourists, trekkers, and climbers limited access to "the roof of the world." Even though this was the first time I had been in an ethnically Tibetan region of China, it could have been said of me, as of so many other Westerners, that I had already long been journeying toward Tibet. In a manner of speaking, I had many times before reached "Tibet," that fabulous land of our Western imagination which I had inhabited first in a vicarious fashion through various books of exploration and adventure, novels, and articles in National Geographic that I read in my youth, even though I had never actually set foot on Tibetan soil.
If there was a first milestone in my travels-not to Tibet itself, but toward what I've come to call "virtual Tibet"-it would have been the moment in 1953 when at age thirteen I happened to pick up Heinrich Harrer's classic tale, Seven Years in Tibet, one in a long lineage of accounts of Tibet by Western missionaries, diplomats, explorers, adventurers, freebooters, soldiers, dreamers, spiritual seekers, geographers, ethnographers, and scam artists that extends back hundreds of years.
First had been the reports of Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then those of British East India Company officials in the eighteenth century and of the Indian "pundits" sent secretly by the British Raj to map Tibet's "blankness" in the nineteenth century. There followed a motley crew of European travelers who managed to penetrate Tibet's peripheries and return home with overheated tales of their adventures. Based on these reports, a whole series of "Tibets," each more fabulous than the last, arose in the minds of Westerners, especially those curious about Tibet's unique and colorful form of Buddhism.
Beginning with the accounts of those who had actually been there-as well as those who only claimed to have been there-in the course of time Tibetan fantasies rooted themselves in almost every form of popular entertainment: in magazines, newspapers, books, comics, children's stories, stage productions, and finally on the screen. When James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon was released as a film in 1937, it was the apotheosis of Tibet as a fantasy realm. With it, the notion of that land as the paradisiacal "Shangri-La" entered both the imagination and the vocabulary of Western popular culture, becoming one of the most powerful utopian metaphors of our time.
Tibet was the last place on earth still seeming abound in true "mysteries," including lamas who could "fly," magicians who could stop the rain, and Yetis, a race of half-human and half-ape-like creatures said to inhabit the snowy wastes of the Tibetan plateau and remarkably capable of eluding the best Western attempts at scientific verification.
It hardly needs to be said that Tibet's snow-capped mountains and alpine deserts do not offer the promise of easy tropical living held out by island paradises with their palm-fringed beaches and azure lagoons. Indeed, until recently, Tibet was entirely devoid of most amenities. Tibetans did not even adopt the principle of the wheel, except for purposes of spinning prayers, until the second part of this century when Chinese occupiers finally arrived.
Most of Tibet is thousands of feet above sea level and possesses one of the more inhospitable climates on earth. It has an indigenous cuisine that Westerners have found mostly inedible and, until recently, a largely nomadic population that engaged in only the most modest kinds of personal hygiene. What is more, Tibetans, despite a beguiling cheerfulness, have historically shown themselves to be capable of considerable savagery against one another, not to mention outside intruders. Yet this catalog of dubiously utopian attributes has seldom hindered rapturous Western dreams.
The formidable barrier of the Himalayas helped shield Tibet from the power of British- ruled India and from the outside Western world more generally until the late nineteenth century. In the modern West, where "wonders" had by then become by definition scientific; where the church had increasingly lost power; and where royalty was fast falling to democracies and dictatorships, the idea that somewhere there existed a feudal theocracy ruled by a compassionate God King and a colorful aristocracy, which labored not for industrial production or colonial expansion but for the spiritual enlightenment of humanity, and did so under golden monastery roofs, proved irresistibly attractive to a disillusioned West.
In addition, though many Europeans and Americans were captivated by other forms of "oriental" religion, Tibet's brand of Buddhism-steeped as it was in tales of magic and mystery, including accounts of unbelievable spiritual feats-held a special fascination. The idea of an entire people still enraptured by religion and engaged so ardently in a Buddhist affair of the spirit rather than materialism was irresistible to Westerners lost in a cult of material accumulation and spiritual anomie.
Buddhism, which ultimately mixed with nativist shamanism in Tibet, was founded by Prince Siddhartha Gautama. Born in the middle of the sixth century b.c. into a wealthy family on the border between present-day Nepal and India, he set out to wander as an ascetic to acquaint himself with the suffering of ordinary people. This is said to have caused him to renounce his life of privilege in order to search instead for the true nature of reality and existence. Through these efforts he came to be known as the ´Sakyamuni, a Sanskrit word meaning "the hermit of the Sakya family."
His teachings, or the dharma, grew out of a realization he had while meditating under a bodhi tree, that human existence is bounded by the Four Noble Truths: life is filled with suffering; attachment and desire are the root of most suffering; liberation from desire and the self is possible; and such liberation-nirvana or "enlightenment"-can be attained by leading a compassionate life of virtue, wisdom, and meditation.
According to the Buddha ´Sakyamuni-whose recitations were transcribed by one of his disciples, Ananda, in sutras, meaning in Sanskrit "threads" or "strings"-the way to enlightenment was through adherence to a Noble Eightfold path, which committed followers to strive to maintain right views, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, mindfulness, and right concentration. In the Buddhist view, life's endless sufferings can be escaped only by accepting the impermanence and illusion of reality. As the Buddha says in the Prajna paramita, one of his most famous sutras, "Regard this fleeting world like this: Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn, like bubbles on a fast-moving stream, like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass, like a candle flickering in a strong wind, echoes, mirages, phantoms, hallucinations, and like a dream."
Within a century and a half of Buddha ´Sakyamuni's death, Buddhism had divided into two main schools: Hinayana (still practiced in South and Southeast Asia today) emphasized the salvation of the individual, while Mahayana (variants of which are practiced in Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan) emphasized the need to strive for the collective salvation of all human beings. Neither tradition believed in a supernatural God-the-Creator. In this sense, Buddhism was as much a set of ethical teachings, a philosophy of life that could lead to a form of earthly "enlightenment," as it was the theology of a transcendental faith.
In 779 a.d., the Buddhist master Padmasambhava journeyed from India to Tibet to found the first Buddhist monastery, Samye, just south of Lhasa. By the thirteenth century, Buddhism had spawned a complex series of monastic orders whose rivalry mirrored the land's fragmented political structure. By then, the distinctive brand of Buddhist teaching that we know today as Tibetan Buddhism, or Vajrayana, had been codified and accepted as Tibet's prevailing faith. Vajrayana Buddhism added to the by-then standard Buddhist spiritual practices of meditation and chanting an assortment of other techniques including yoga, tantric sexual rituals, visualizations, and repetitive prayers to the Buddha himself that are carried out by means of recitation, prayer wheels, and prayer flags.
One of the most important features of Vajrayana Buddhism is the notion of the
bodhisattva, or "enlightened being," who out of universal compassion for the suffering of others abstains from entering nirvana in order to help save those still trapped in the inescapable cycles of samsara, the conditionality of our existence. Tibetan Buddhism's most fundamental precept is that motivation determines actions, and that if one wishes to act compassionately and gain enlightenment, one must vigilantly strive to cultivate a high state of consciousness about what one does and how it may affect others. Why? Because upon death, what the Dalai Lama has described as the "imprint" of a former being's consciousness, or karma, will remain as a kind of residue that is "reincarnated" in a new animal, human, or divine form.All of this was woven into an elaborate institutional fabric centering around thousands of monasteries. According to Tibetan Buddhist belief, when the reincarnation of a particularly enlightened being occurs in human form, that person is known as a tulku, which literally means "illusionary body." The most eminent Tibetan tulku is the Dalai Lama, who is traditionally viewed as both the spiritual and temporal leader of all Tibetans. Monastic life revolves around these tulkus. But monasteries have long been more than just ascetic religious retreats for Tibet's hierarchical priesthood. Since Tibet had virtually no cities, monasteries become the focal point of socialized life for the land's largely nomadic populace. Monasteries were where Tibetans were educated, where commerce was conducted, and where society interacted during religious festivals. By the time of the Chinese Communist occupation of Tibet in 1950, there were said to be more than 2,500 monasteries spread throughout Tibetan ethnic areas. Almost all of them would be destroyed or severely damaged in the decades of Maoist political upheaval that followed.
Much of this sorry interregnum went on unreported and thus unnoticed by the West, which was shut out by the Communist Party's policy of preventing access to journalists that stopped the free flow of information. Ignorance enabled most people in the West to go on imagining the Tibet of old, only dimly aware that something apocalyptic was transpiring. When I made my first trip to Tibet via Beijing I had already heard repeated stories of the savagery involved in the "peaceful liberation" of Tibet first by the People's Liberation Army and then the Chinese Communist Party, and this reality had already begun to encroach on my own fantasy of that fabled land. And so, by the time I returned in 1994, as a correspondent for a PBS Frontline documentary on Tibet's agonized relationship with China, I had come, more or less, fully down to earth. Far from being a land of tranquil isolation as I had imagined, Tibet was a cauldron of political turmoil and military domination.
If Buddhists see the world as illusory and de-emphasize the difference between dreams and waking consciousness, Westerners have tended to blur the distinction between what Tibet is and how they imagine it or want it to be, so that it has become the dreamiest of realities. But like any fantasies cobbled together from fragments of suggestive reality, our fantasies of places on or off this earth generally reflect far more about ourselves and our own yearnings than we perhaps care to know. Certainly, this has been true of Tibet.
Of course, China's President Jiang Zemin, like many of his countrymen, tends not to romanticize Tibet as Westerners do, and he remains incredulous-as he told President Clinton in 1998-that those who live in countries where (as he puts it) "education in science and technology has developed to a very high level" and where "people are now enjoying modern civilization" should still "have a belief in Lamaism" [Tibetan Buddhism]. Indeed, in the past few years many observers have come to believe that Beijing had simply decided to wait until the sixty-four-year-old Dalai Lama passed from the scene, counting on Tibet to become ever more Sinicized and so more amenable to Chinese rule as increasing numbers of Han Chinese immigrants arrived each year to build its new economy. To foreigners looking on from afar, the Chinese occupation and the dismantling of traditional culture and society seemed similar to other brutal forms of nineteenth-century European and American colonization, which were also based on no more than the flimsiest claims to sovereignty. Some came to feel that the Chinese were not only crushing a traditional society, but the dream of Shangri-La itself. For them Chinese rule represented crushing a dispossessed people and a traditional society.
Thus in the mid-1990s, the Beijing government found itself confronting a new problem nearly as intractable as the Tibetan independence seekers themselves. To their dismay, Party leaders began to realize that China now abutted a symbolic space controlled by a far more fantastic kingdom than any that had ever existed on the Tibetan plateau. Moreover, as the decade proceeded, the citizens of this new kingdom threatened to take possession of Tibet as a form of intellectual property-to internationalize it and challenge China's version of its "liberation" in ways that seemed beyond the ability of Party leaders to grasp, much less control. This new kingdom was especially effective as an agent of global public relations and it had a capital of sorts, no less fabled than Lhasa but situated in Southern California, beside the blue Pacific Ocean. The Kingdom of Hollywood's fin-de-siècle seizure of Tibet as a subject for its films raised a curious new question: who in this global era would be the final arbiter to determine which version of Tibet would triumph-the real Tibet, China's Tibet, or the "virtual Tibet" that was being elaborated in the West and in a host of new Hollywood films including Martin Scorsese's <i>Kundun</i> and Jean-Jacques Annaud's <i>Seven Years in Tibet. </i>
There were dangers to having Tibet's new Western persona consigned to Hollywood's custody. For while a certain amount of "consciousness" might be raised, Hollywood's manufacture of myths for profit threatened to have a different kind of distorting effect. Indeed, even the Dalai Lama risked a certain devaluation of his persona of aloofness and ineffability by being run through Hollywood's powerful dream machine.
In a swirl of globalized bottom-line anxiety, conflicting imagery, bad publicity, political threats, wanton boosterism, and furtive negotiations, the Tibetans themselves-those scattered around the world in their diaspora or still oppressed within Tibet itself-stood oddly in danger of being forgotten. It wasn't that "Tibet" was being forgotten. Certainly not. As the films Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun neared their release dates in 1997, the buzz in the media about Western interest in China's occupation of Tibet, Buddhism, Tibetan adventures, the Dalai Lama, and Hollywood stars smitten with any of the aforementioned subjects hit near-manic proportions, so that it was increasingly difficult for those who took their Tibetan politics or Buddhism seriously to know how to comport themselves.
But even among the realists, and especially among supporters of the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile, the advent of Hollywood arriving on the scene like a fire brigade-with its stars, its money, and now its film power-renewed a sense of hope. After all, however dangerous Hollywood can be to pure principles, one could not doubt its power. And if there was one thing those who had made a crusade out of Tibet felt crippled by, it was weakness. At last, these activists hoped, compelling big-screen scenes of the halcyon days of Tibet (as it was once imagined to have been), might force the issue of Tibet and what was lost onto the U.S. foreign-policy agenda. Political arguments had been insufficient means to accomplish this end, but perhaps wondrous onscreen images of the Dalai Lama's story would do the trick. Among many exiled Tibetans there grew an almost millenarian belief that the release of these films, and Tibet's identification with such pop icons as Brad Pitt, Martin Scorsese, Richard Gere, Steven Seagal, and the Beastie Boys, might finally precipitate the long-awaited moment when China would feel compelled by the power of world opinion to relent and address the question of Tibet in a more humane and conciliatory way.
In retrospect, however, such dreams were, if anything, less realistic than the exotic ones Westerners had so long held about Tibet itself and its redemptive, transformative powers. In a world of gigantism-imax movie screens, megastars, superpowers, massive corporations, hundreds of millions of dollars in grosses, global publicity blitzes-the hopes of actual Tibetans, even when played onscreen by bona fide Tibetan extras, even when weeping real tears over Tibetan "events" that never actually happened, were modest, yet utterly unrealizable. It was as if, in every sense, they were not functioning on the same scale as the worlds now intersecting and colliding around them over the "China market." There was no wisdom the Dalai Lama possessed, nothing he could either tell an American psychiatrist co-author, Hollywood's nouveau royalty, or his own frustrated people, no amount of "different thinking" that would truly affect this disparity. It was all well and good to imagine that with the help of Hollywood and other American power structures, Tibet might be redeemed. After all, it was very tempting to believe that this morality play would have a happy ending, that those Tibetans who had been scattered to the far corners of the globe might at last be delivered.
The truth is that there is probably no exogenous force-not U.S. pressure on China, not trade sanctions, not even the titanic power of Hollywood's ability to make global myths-that is sufficient to budge China's determination to defend its self-declared sovereign right to hold onto Tibet, one of the few remaining relics of the Chinese Communist Party's original revolutionary platform. By now, commitment to maintain the "reunification of the Motherland" has become unassailable, doctrinal canon. What makes this situation so tragic is that not only is this posture destructive for Tibet, it is just as destructive for China's global image at a time when Beijing leaders desperately seek international respectability and equal standing as a member of the respectable global community of nations. But with a yawning absence of strong leadership in Beijing, as the millennium ended it did not seem likely that the "Tibet question" would soon find resolution.
The only hope may be some tectonic change in China's own political structure-if not the end of the Chinese Communist Party as the unilateral leader of China, then some shock to the system-perhaps economic-that might cause party leaders to realize that tradeoffs need to be made for China to survive in the increasingly interrelated and competitive world. The "Tibet card," if played by Beijing, would go a long way to repairing those aspects of China's image in the world that still cause it to be viewed as a quasi-pariah.
Moreover, if and when China becomes ready to play this card, it could hope for no more reasonable partner than the Dalai Lama. If China chooses to wait until the Dalai Lama passes from the scene, no one can foretell how much deeper will be the descent into tragedy of this struggle-in which Western fantasies of Tibet as utopia meet China's fantasies of it as a bastion of feudal oppression to be liberated. Alas, both of these versions of Tibet ignore most of the realities of the actual (as opposed to virtual) Tibet and Tibetans.
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