Prisoners of Shangri-La by Donald S Lopez Jr

Author:Donald S Lopez, Jr [Donald S Lopez, Jr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Field

In a 1977 survey of the available Western-language scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism, the noted Sinologist Michel Strickmann identified what he perceived as a dangerous trend: “a far more serious threat to the interests of the non-specialist, in my opinion, emanates from a mass of new writings that ostensibly deal with Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist Tāntra. Though sometimes adorned with hitherto respectable names, many of these books appear in reality to be no more than tracts telling harassed Americans how to relax.”1 Strickmann refers to the commingling of the scholarly and the popular, a trend that, as we have seen, has a long history in the Western encounter with Tibet. It is a trend, also, that has only grown and diversified since Professor Strickmann bemoaned its existence two decades ago. This chapter will survey the development of Tibetan Buddhist Studies as an academic field in North America. Focusing especially on the changes that occurred in the wake of the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959, it will attempt to demonstrate some of the ways in which the production of knowledge is always partial, always undertaken within the determining confines of time, place, and cultural climate.2

In the academic study of Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps differing only in degree from other academic fields, the popular is never wholly absent. But there is, indeed, a difference in degree, for a number of reasons. First is the fact that for most of its history, Tibet has been regarded as somehow peripheral by its neighbors. For India, it has been the place beyond the forbidding Himalayan range, a place of mythical kingdoms and divine abodes. For the various Chinese, Mongol, and Manchu dynasties, it has been a distant, somewhat unrefined yet magically potent neighbor, sometimes imagined as part of their empires, sometimes not. For the British and the Russians of the late nineteenth century, it was the land just beyond the borders of their empires, a place to be mapped by spies. Even the Tibetans have participated in this perception, portraying their land in both Buddhist and Bönpo histories as a wild and uncivilized place to which culture was introduced only from the outside, whether from Buddhist India or Bönpo Zhang Zhung.

The perception of Tibet as peripheral has persisted in large part because until the second half of this century Tibet was never colonized, not by the Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, British, or Russian empires. One of the many products of colonialism is knowledge, produced first by explorers and merchants, then by colonial officers and missionaries, later by specialists in archives and institutes in the metropole and colleges and universities in the colony. No such institutions emerged in Tibet until after the Chinese invasion and occupation that began in 1950. Hence, there was no factory for the production of official knowledge, leaving only unofficial knowledge, produced by travelers and enthusiasts, “gifted amateurs.” Among trained Orientalists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, classical Tibetan was almost always a secondary language, learned by the Indologist to read translations

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