Buddhism Without Beliefs
A Contemporary Guide to Awakening
by Stephen Batchelor
Bloomsbury, 1997, £9.99
Buddhism Without Beliefs is written for a popular audience, and succeeds in communicating Batchelor’s personal approach to western Buddhism. Rather than describing beliefs or practices, he evokes a modern, western ‘Buddhist’ mentality through creating a dramatised authorial self – which passes through the experience of awareness, emptiness, freedom and so on. Batchelor thereby projects himself as an agnostic, post-modern Everyman – and this perspective is evoked with such power, lucidity and feeling that the reader feels compelled to identify with it. Of course, this is rhetoric not argument, and those who feel Batchelor reduces Buddhism to humanism by excluding the possibility of experience that transcends reason, or faith that anticipates experience, will find his approach coercive and disingenuous. But Batchelor writes better prose than any other modern Buddhist and, within its limitations, his thinking has a cogency that will ensure its influence.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Minority Report
Minority Report, Dir. Steven Spielberg, US, Universal Studios, 2002
Reviewed by Vishvapani
The precogs lie in a pool of nutrients, secluded from intruders in a disinfected laboratory space known as ‘the Temple’. Genetic freaks, they have the unsexed, bleached features of angels and rest in a subliminal trance between waking and sleep, moaning with the pain of the psychic vibrations they pick up from the world. Innocent and passive themselves, they inhabit a nightmare of murder and violence, with a twist that distinguishes their reverie from madness. These are ‘true’ precognitions of future events, murders that really will occur unless they are pre-empted. The precogs’ thoughts are captured electronically, and viewed by the officers of Precrime, the police force that arrests murderers before they act. Chief Paul Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the maestro of disentangling the images, and Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow) is the programme’s Director.
The 2054 Washington DC the film depicts is filled with elaborations of the technology that even now both empowers and neuters us: cars that run on tracks in a huge grid; ubiquitous retinal scans for identification. But beneath this society’s bourgeoise, technologically brightened surface is an underbelly of drugs and violence that must be contained. The propaganda of Precrime, the ultimate antidote to urban anxiety, assures the public, ‘That which keeps us safe, keeps us free.’
The film’s central conceit marries our instinctive lurch for technological solutions to life’s threats with the traditional figure of the prophetic visionary. The precogs are shamanic messengers from the collective unconscious, reminiscent of oracles and the precognitive dreamers of the Bible, Shakespeare, and traditional cultures. Precrime’s alchemy is the harnessing of the perennial visionary capability to scientific control and reliability. But this is not the triumph of science over religion so much as their marriage. The three precogs form a triune ‘hive mind’ and a Precrime officer informs us that they ’are being deified’, adding, ‘We’re more like clergy than cops.’ The ability to predict, when it is apparently perfected, implies a knowledge that is superior to the individual’s ability to choose, and therefore the superiority of scientific determinism to free will.
‘The system is perfect,’ says FBI Agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who is investigating Precrime. ‘But there’s a flaw. There always is. It’s human.’ In fact the film presents two flaws. One is that the precogs’ visions occasionally disagree and produce a ‘minority report’ that depicts an alternative future. These reports, we learn, have secretly been suppressed in order to preserve public confidence in the system’s infallibility. The second flaw is that the system can be circumvented by someone wanting to commit a murder. They need simply to stage a killing in a way that precisely mirrors one that has already been predicted, so that the precogs’ vision of this crime will be regarded as an echo of its predecessor. From this premise grows the plot that gradually takes the film over, and we discover at the denouement that Lamar Burgess killed Agatha’s mother, using this method to prevent her from withdrawing her daughter from the programme.
Following this line, ‘Minority Report’ gradually dwindles from an evocative philosophical film noir into a conventional thriller. Anderton is an unwitting participant in his superior’s power-games who is sacrificed to preserve the system’s secret, but turns the tables and ultimately exposes the corruption at its heart. Yet Anderton is infected, too, through his desire to eradicate the unruly forces that robbed him of his abducted son. Mourning the lost possibilities of the child’s life he has sought refuge in the foreclosed future of Precrime.
Despite its disappointing lapse into conventional narrative, ‘Minority Report’ is memorable and impressive in its engagement with the image-world inhabited by the precogs. This is also the domain of the irrational and unconscious that lies beneath the surface of Anderton’s life – in his grief and drug-addiction – just as it is beneath the surface of society. It is associated principally with violence, but the precogs – luminous messengers from the beyond – are also more than that
In this respect ‘Minority Report’ develops director Stephen Spielberg’s abiding subject – the domain of fantasy that has been lost to modern culture, and our attempts to reclaim, ward off, contain or subvert its resurgent power. His films attempt to articulate in popular genres the collective imaginings of modern culture through creating powerful and evocative images of its hidden fantasy life. It is no coincidence that Spielberg’s movie studio is called Dreamworks – 'dreamwork' being Freud's term for the process that transforms a thought, wish or memory into the dream image. Where, Spielberg’s films enquire, have we displaced our dreams?
In 'Jaws', Spielberg's first major movie, the shark, beast of the depths, dramatically materialises to terrorise those living on the surface. 'Close Encounters' turns on the image-fascination of ordinary people that is in fact a summons to a meeting with the gods (who descend in their space-ship). ‘ET’ inverts this relationship by bringing the uncanny into suburbia and the world of childhood. In the Indiana Jones films, mystery resides in the lost or hidden realms that are uncovered by the archaeologist-hero. And in the Jurassic Park movies the unconscious forces (embodied in dinosaurs) are tamed and domesticated, yet show themselves unconstrainable. ‘Schindler's List’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ confront 'primal scenes' of modern consciousness – the Holocaust and WW2 – that offer its abiding images of human suffering.
None of Spielberg’s films perhaps sustains a serious and psychologically coherent engagement with the images he is so amazingly able to create, and he characteristically fails to resist milking an image for emotion. ‘Minority Report’ can be seen as a meditation on the power of the image, but it, too, suffers a Spielbergian lapses in its treatment of Anderton’s grief. More seriously, the thriller plot derails the deeper concerns upon which the film touches. Burgess, not Anderton, is the story’s key figure for it is he who first committed the Promethean sin of harnessing the precogs visions, only to find that he must sin again to protect it. Rather than making him a standard establishment villain, a more interesting film might have explored the mixed motives that incited Burgess to suppress violently the threats to Precrime. In potential he is a tragic figure honourably caught between the desire to protect and the dangers of control, but dishonourably corrupted by the prestige brought by his programme’s success.
In the latter perspective Burgess is trapped in the doubleness of sight that is also blindness because it is shrouded by desire. But when is human knowledge ever free of desire? The thriller plot and the discovery of Burgess’ chicanery overwhelms a deeper flaw in Precrime that is hinted at in the notion of the minority report – the disagreement between the previsions that casts doubt on their predictive authority. But a greater instability, towards which the film gestures but which it never grasps, is the inherent ambiguity of the information the precogs provide.
Precrime rests on the premise that the meaning of the precognitions is clear, but the film never confronts the certainty that images from the dream-world must be interpreted before they can become meanings in waking life. This simplification prevents ‘Minority Report’, for all its virtues, from penetrating deeply into the image-realm of dream, myth and the unconscious, which it invokes. Failing this, the film can scarcely offer an image for the waking awareness that floats above the darkness and grapples with the uncertain knowledge it throws up. As Nietszche says: ‘all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown text, one which is unknowable but yet felt’.
‘Minority Report’ aspires not to prediction but to prophecy: to show how our rational, sanitised, technology-saturated society deals so poorly with its irrational, threatening shadow. The film’s closing images show the precogs awakened from their dream and living ordinary lives, and Anderton restored to his once-estranged, newly pregnant wife. But these intimations of natural life’s openness and unpredictability are not fully realised in the neat resolution of the film’s story-lines. ‘Minority Report’ shows Spielberg – the master image-maker of modern American cinema – growing closer to making intelligible his abiding obsessions rather than simply finding images for them. But his populist forms, and perhaps an ingrained imaginative caution, constrain him. As yet, the prophecy is muted.
© Vishvapani, 2006
Reviewed by Vishvapani
The precogs lie in a pool of nutrients, secluded from intruders in a disinfected laboratory space known as ‘the Temple’. Genetic freaks, they have the unsexed, bleached features of angels and rest in a subliminal trance between waking and sleep, moaning with the pain of the psychic vibrations they pick up from the world. Innocent and passive themselves, they inhabit a nightmare of murder and violence, with a twist that distinguishes their reverie from madness. These are ‘true’ precognitions of future events, murders that really will occur unless they are pre-empted. The precogs’ thoughts are captured electronically, and viewed by the officers of Precrime, the police force that arrests murderers before they act. Chief Paul Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the maestro of disentangling the images, and Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow) is the programme’s Director.
The 2054 Washington DC the film depicts is filled with elaborations of the technology that even now both empowers and neuters us: cars that run on tracks in a huge grid; ubiquitous retinal scans for identification. But beneath this society’s bourgeoise, technologically brightened surface is an underbelly of drugs and violence that must be contained. The propaganda of Precrime, the ultimate antidote to urban anxiety, assures the public, ‘That which keeps us safe, keeps us free.’
The film’s central conceit marries our instinctive lurch for technological solutions to life’s threats with the traditional figure of the prophetic visionary. The precogs are shamanic messengers from the collective unconscious, reminiscent of oracles and the precognitive dreamers of the Bible, Shakespeare, and traditional cultures. Precrime’s alchemy is the harnessing of the perennial visionary capability to scientific control and reliability. But this is not the triumph of science over religion so much as their marriage. The three precogs form a triune ‘hive mind’ and a Precrime officer informs us that they ’are being deified’, adding, ‘We’re more like clergy than cops.’ The ability to predict, when it is apparently perfected, implies a knowledge that is superior to the individual’s ability to choose, and therefore the superiority of scientific determinism to free will.
‘The system is perfect,’ says FBI Agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who is investigating Precrime. ‘But there’s a flaw. There always is. It’s human.’ In fact the film presents two flaws. One is that the precogs’ visions occasionally disagree and produce a ‘minority report’ that depicts an alternative future. These reports, we learn, have secretly been suppressed in order to preserve public confidence in the system’s infallibility. The second flaw is that the system can be circumvented by someone wanting to commit a murder. They need simply to stage a killing in a way that precisely mirrors one that has already been predicted, so that the precogs’ vision of this crime will be regarded as an echo of its predecessor. From this premise grows the plot that gradually takes the film over, and we discover at the denouement that Lamar Burgess killed Agatha’s mother, using this method to prevent her from withdrawing her daughter from the programme.
Following this line, ‘Minority Report’ gradually dwindles from an evocative philosophical film noir into a conventional thriller. Anderton is an unwitting participant in his superior’s power-games who is sacrificed to preserve the system’s secret, but turns the tables and ultimately exposes the corruption at its heart. Yet Anderton is infected, too, through his desire to eradicate the unruly forces that robbed him of his abducted son. Mourning the lost possibilities of the child’s life he has sought refuge in the foreclosed future of Precrime.
Despite its disappointing lapse into conventional narrative, ‘Minority Report’ is memorable and impressive in its engagement with the image-world inhabited by the precogs. This is also the domain of the irrational and unconscious that lies beneath the surface of Anderton’s life – in his grief and drug-addiction – just as it is beneath the surface of society. It is associated principally with violence, but the precogs – luminous messengers from the beyond – are also more than that
In this respect ‘Minority Report’ develops director Stephen Spielberg’s abiding subject – the domain of fantasy that has been lost to modern culture, and our attempts to reclaim, ward off, contain or subvert its resurgent power. His films attempt to articulate in popular genres the collective imaginings of modern culture through creating powerful and evocative images of its hidden fantasy life. It is no coincidence that Spielberg’s movie studio is called Dreamworks – 'dreamwork' being Freud's term for the process that transforms a thought, wish or memory into the dream image. Where, Spielberg’s films enquire, have we displaced our dreams?
In 'Jaws', Spielberg's first major movie, the shark, beast of the depths, dramatically materialises to terrorise those living on the surface. 'Close Encounters' turns on the image-fascination of ordinary people that is in fact a summons to a meeting with the gods (who descend in their space-ship). ‘ET’ inverts this relationship by bringing the uncanny into suburbia and the world of childhood. In the Indiana Jones films, mystery resides in the lost or hidden realms that are uncovered by the archaeologist-hero. And in the Jurassic Park movies the unconscious forces (embodied in dinosaurs) are tamed and domesticated, yet show themselves unconstrainable. ‘Schindler's List’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ confront 'primal scenes' of modern consciousness – the Holocaust and WW2 – that offer its abiding images of human suffering.
None of Spielberg’s films perhaps sustains a serious and psychologically coherent engagement with the images he is so amazingly able to create, and he characteristically fails to resist milking an image for emotion. ‘Minority Report’ can be seen as a meditation on the power of the image, but it, too, suffers a Spielbergian lapses in its treatment of Anderton’s grief. More seriously, the thriller plot derails the deeper concerns upon which the film touches. Burgess, not Anderton, is the story’s key figure for it is he who first committed the Promethean sin of harnessing the precogs visions, only to find that he must sin again to protect it. Rather than making him a standard establishment villain, a more interesting film might have explored the mixed motives that incited Burgess to suppress violently the threats to Precrime. In potential he is a tragic figure honourably caught between the desire to protect and the dangers of control, but dishonourably corrupted by the prestige brought by his programme’s success.
In the latter perspective Burgess is trapped in the doubleness of sight that is also blindness because it is shrouded by desire. But when is human knowledge ever free of desire? The thriller plot and the discovery of Burgess’ chicanery overwhelms a deeper flaw in Precrime that is hinted at in the notion of the minority report – the disagreement between the previsions that casts doubt on their predictive authority. But a greater instability, towards which the film gestures but which it never grasps, is the inherent ambiguity of the information the precogs provide.
Precrime rests on the premise that the meaning of the precognitions is clear, but the film never confronts the certainty that images from the dream-world must be interpreted before they can become meanings in waking life. This simplification prevents ‘Minority Report’, for all its virtues, from penetrating deeply into the image-realm of dream, myth and the unconscious, which it invokes. Failing this, the film can scarcely offer an image for the waking awareness that floats above the darkness and grapples with the uncertain knowledge it throws up. As Nietszche says: ‘all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown text, one which is unknowable but yet felt’.
‘Minority Report’ aspires not to prediction but to prophecy: to show how our rational, sanitised, technology-saturated society deals so poorly with its irrational, threatening shadow. The film’s closing images show the precogs awakened from their dream and living ordinary lives, and Anderton restored to his once-estranged, newly pregnant wife. But these intimations of natural life’s openness and unpredictability are not fully realised in the neat resolution of the film’s story-lines. ‘Minority Report’ shows Spielberg – the master image-maker of modern American cinema – growing closer to making intelligible his abiding obsessions rather than simply finding images for them. But his populist forms, and perhaps an ingrained imaginative caution, constrain him. As yet, the prophecy is muted.
© Vishvapani, 2006
The Faces of Buddhism in America
The Faces of Buddhism in America
Ed. Charles Prebish & Kenneth Tanaka
University of California Press 1998, £14.95 p/b
A decade ago accounts of Buddhism in the West dealt mainly with history, allowing just a few pages for the present state of affairs. But, as Buddhism in America has grown into a complex part of the religious landscape, a new field of study has emerged; and The Faces of Buddhism in America is an important contribution.
The first part examines the Asian traditions as they exist in America, among both Asian immigrant communities and Euro-Americans. The second engages with issues that have emerged in Buddhist America: the relation of Buddhism and psychotherapy, socially-engaged Buddhism, questions of adaptation and so on.
The articles are thorough and informative, and most contributors write with sympathy as well as understanding, but two stand out. The first is Sogen Hori’s account of how the meaning of Rinzai Zen practice changes in the American context – even while practitioners think they are staying true to the Japanese model. The second is the feminist Rita Gross’s eminently sensible engagement with the charged issues of sexual relations between teachers and students, and the notion of hierarchy. Both these essays deserve to be well known and widely studied.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 11, Autumn 1999
Ed. Charles Prebish & Kenneth Tanaka
University of California Press 1998, £14.95 p/b
A decade ago accounts of Buddhism in the West dealt mainly with history, allowing just a few pages for the present state of affairs. But, as Buddhism in America has grown into a complex part of the religious landscape, a new field of study has emerged; and The Faces of Buddhism in America is an important contribution.
The first part examines the Asian traditions as they exist in America, among both Asian immigrant communities and Euro-Americans. The second engages with issues that have emerged in Buddhist America: the relation of Buddhism and psychotherapy, socially-engaged Buddhism, questions of adaptation and so on.
The articles are thorough and informative, and most contributors write with sympathy as well as understanding, but two stand out. The first is Sogen Hori’s account of how the meaning of Rinzai Zen practice changes in the American context – even while practitioners think they are staying true to the Japanese model. The second is the feminist Rita Gross’s eminently sensible engagement with the charged issues of sexual relations between teachers and students, and the notion of hierarchy. Both these essays deserve to be well known and widely studied.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 11, Autumn 1999
Land of No Buddha
Land of No Buddha
Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist
Richard P Hayes
Log on to a Buddhist Internet discussion group – almost any one – and there is Richard Hayes: magisterial, knowledgeable, urbane, debating with all comers, ruminating on western Buddhism, reflecting on his life. The learned Professor of Buddhist Studies at McGill University must spend hours of his day so engaged, a virtual Bodhisattva for the cyber-Sangha. Land of No Buddha is vintage Hayes, comprising essays written in pre-Net days. He chews over his often painful experience of practising Buddhism in the us, and brings to his meditations his substantial knowledge of Buddhism and western culture.
Hayes’s core belief is a radical scepticism, on a bedrock of pared down, no-nonsense Buddhism. And he is an entertaining guide on a sometimes-agonising journey of discovery through the profundities and absurdities of American Zen, the New Age supermarket, encounters with lamas and all the rest. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriating, Hayes is always worth reading.
Reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 10, Spring 1999
Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist
Richard P Hayes
Log on to a Buddhist Internet discussion group – almost any one – and there is Richard Hayes: magisterial, knowledgeable, urbane, debating with all comers, ruminating on western Buddhism, reflecting on his life. The learned Professor of Buddhist Studies at McGill University must spend hours of his day so engaged, a virtual Bodhisattva for the cyber-Sangha. Land of No Buddha is vintage Hayes, comprising essays written in pre-Net days. He chews over his often painful experience of practising Buddhism in the us, and brings to his meditations his substantial knowledge of Buddhism and western culture.
Hayes’s core belief is a radical scepticism, on a bedrock of pared down, no-nonsense Buddhism. And he is an entertaining guide on a sometimes-agonising journey of discovery through the profundities and absurdities of American Zen, the New Age supermarket, encounters with lamas and all the rest. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriating, Hayes is always worth reading.
Reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 10, Spring 1999
What is the Dharma?
What is the Dharma?
Sangharakshita
Windhorse,1998, £9.99/$19.99 p/b
The editors of Windhorse Publications’ Spoken Word project are slowly turning Sangharakshita’s huge output of lectures and seminars into a seemingly endless stream of ‘new’ books. What Is The Dharma? is a beautifully edited addition to the series and an excellent introduction to basic Buddhist teachings. It contains many teachings of the sort that everyone wanting to understand Buddhism should learn by heart, but most probably don’t know properly. Sangharakshita’s distinctive achievement here is to communicate profound teachings in a highly accessible way – helped by his mastery of the evocative metaphor and the stimulating allusion. In particular the first part, ‘The Truth’, offers an account of Buddhist ‘metaphysics’, which manages to be exceptionally clear and yet remains true to the elusiveness of its subject. What Is The Dharma? offers riches far beyond many of the books expounding Buddhist teachings that are currently being published. It deserves to avoid being submerged in the deluge.
reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
Sangharakshita
Windhorse,1998, £9.99/$19.99 p/b
The editors of Windhorse Publications’ Spoken Word project are slowly turning Sangharakshita’s huge output of lectures and seminars into a seemingly endless stream of ‘new’ books. What Is The Dharma? is a beautifully edited addition to the series and an excellent introduction to basic Buddhist teachings. It contains many teachings of the sort that everyone wanting to understand Buddhism should learn by heart, but most probably don’t know properly. Sangharakshita’s distinctive achievement here is to communicate profound teachings in a highly accessible way – helped by his mastery of the evocative metaphor and the stimulating allusion. In particular the first part, ‘The Truth’, offers an account of Buddhist ‘metaphysics’, which manages to be exceptionally clear and yet remains true to the elusiveness of its subject. What Is The Dharma? offers riches far beyond many of the books expounding Buddhist teachings that are currently being published. It deserves to avoid being submerged in the deluge.
reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
Oriental Enlightenment
Oriental Enlightenment
The Encounter Between Asian And Western Thought.
JJ Clarke
Routledge, 1997, £13.99 p/b
The intellectual encounter of East and West has continued for two centuries and, as JJ Clarke’s excellent account demonstrates, it has been a major theme in western culture over this period. Clarke’s most accessible chapters are those describing this encounter in the fields of philosophy, religious dialogue, psychology, science and ecology. These marshal truly prodigious reading, and offer a valuable guide to anyone interested in these areas.
There is also a useful interpretive history of the successive western passions for China, India and Buddhism, which attempts to account for why the West has been drawn to aspects of Asian thought at particular times. This leads Clarke to consider the lenses through which Asia has been viewed and misunderstood by westerners, and thence into the tangled academic debates of ‘orientalism’.
Views of the East have often been constructed as projections of western fantasies and fears, or in response to imperial agendas. So, academics ask, can there be a western understanding of the East free of such cultural biases? Clarke suggests that, as cultures fragment in the ‘post-modern’ age, and merge with one another under the forces of globalisation, new understandings are indeed possible. The scope of his insight into these possibilities seems rather circumscribed by the limits of the academic debates that are his starting point, and also because his subject is ‘Asian and western thought’. Ultimately the encounter is between people, and the only necessary limits are those of the individuals themselves.
Reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
The Encounter Between Asian And Western Thought.
JJ Clarke
Routledge, 1997, £13.99 p/b
The intellectual encounter of East and West has continued for two centuries and, as JJ Clarke’s excellent account demonstrates, it has been a major theme in western culture over this period. Clarke’s most accessible chapters are those describing this encounter in the fields of philosophy, religious dialogue, psychology, science and ecology. These marshal truly prodigious reading, and offer a valuable guide to anyone interested in these areas.
There is also a useful interpretive history of the successive western passions for China, India and Buddhism, which attempts to account for why the West has been drawn to aspects of Asian thought at particular times. This leads Clarke to consider the lenses through which Asia has been viewed and misunderstood by westerners, and thence into the tangled academic debates of ‘orientalism’.
Views of the East have often been constructed as projections of western fantasies and fears, or in response to imperial agendas. So, academics ask, can there be a western understanding of the East free of such cultural biases? Clarke suggests that, as cultures fragment in the ‘post-modern’ age, and merge with one another under the forces of globalisation, new understandings are indeed possible. The scope of his insight into these possibilities seems rather circumscribed by the limits of the academic debates that are his starting point, and also because his subject is ‘Asian and western thought’. Ultimately the encounter is between people, and the only necessary limits are those of the individuals themselves.
Reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
The Resonance Of Emptiness
The Resonance Of Emptiness
A Buddhist Inspiration For A Contemporary Psychotherapy
Gay Watson; Curzon, 1998, £40 h/b
Many therapists are attracted to, and even influenced by, Buddhism but, as Watson’s thorough study shows, the one cannot simply be grafted on to the other. Both therapy and Buddhism involve a process of mental change, yet how this change occurs depends on the understanding of the mind. Watson aims to contexualise this encounter within Buddhist views of selfhood, consciousness and identity, as well as the changing understandings of these phenomena in contemporary western philosophy and psychology.
Such a weighty agenda makes this a book only for the philosophically minded, and it bears many hall-marks of its origin as a PhD thesis. Watson concludes that Buddhism accords with and extends post-modern understandings of the self, particularly in its notions of interconnectedness and insubstantiality, and outlines her ideas of a Buddhist-inspired psychotherapy. Yet, although Watson finds many sources and analogues for her ideas, The Resonance Of Emptiness is finally an assertion of a personal approach to Buddhism and therapy rather than an argument for it.
Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
A Buddhist Inspiration For A Contemporary Psychotherapy
Gay Watson; Curzon, 1998, £40 h/b
Many therapists are attracted to, and even influenced by, Buddhism but, as Watson’s thorough study shows, the one cannot simply be grafted on to the other. Both therapy and Buddhism involve a process of mental change, yet how this change occurs depends on the understanding of the mind. Watson aims to contexualise this encounter within Buddhist views of selfhood, consciousness and identity, as well as the changing understandings of these phenomena in contemporary western philosophy and psychology.
Such a weighty agenda makes this a book only for the philosophically minded, and it bears many hall-marks of its origin as a PhD thesis. Watson concludes that Buddhism accords with and extends post-modern understandings of the self, particularly in its notions of interconnectedness and insubstantiality, and outlines her ideas of a Buddhist-inspired psychotherapy. Yet, although Watson finds many sources and analogues for her ideas, The Resonance Of Emptiness is finally an assertion of a personal approach to Buddhism and therapy rather than an argument for it.
Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
Landscapes of Wonder
Landscapes of Wonder
Nyanasobhano
Wisdom Publications 1998
$14.95 p/b
The essays in Landscapes of Wonder are prose meditation, and what prose it is! Nyanasobhano describes a country walk and it becomes an investigation of impermanence. He reads the paper, and reflects on the mind and its search for distraction. The quality of the essays varies, and some feel like routine expositions of Buddhist teachings. But at its best his writing is filled with a contemplative spaciousness that expands when his metaphors take flight, or when he describes nature, into a sublime evocation of a meditator’s poetic sensibility.
The writer is a former playwright, now ordained as an American bhikkhu, who lives quietly in the US, but this book reveals a literary power rare among writers on Buddhism. Some might think his style old-fashioned, but others will love the cadences of Emerson and Thoreau, and behind them the English Romantics. This is an inspiring book, to read with pleasure and contemplate with care. Vishvapani
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 12, Spring 2000
Nyanasobhano
Wisdom Publications 1998
$14.95 p/b
The essays in Landscapes of Wonder are prose meditation, and what prose it is! Nyanasobhano describes a country walk and it becomes an investigation of impermanence. He reads the paper, and reflects on the mind and its search for distraction. The quality of the essays varies, and some feel like routine expositions of Buddhist teachings. But at its best his writing is filled with a contemplative spaciousness that expands when his metaphors take flight, or when he describes nature, into a sublime evocation of a meditator’s poetic sensibility.
The writer is a former playwright, now ordained as an American bhikkhu, who lives quietly in the US, but this book reveals a literary power rare among writers on Buddhism. Some might think his style old-fashioned, but others will love the cadences of Emerson and Thoreau, and behind them the English Romantics. This is an inspiring book, to read with pleasure and contemplate with care. Vishvapani
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 12, Spring 2000
The Search for the Panchen Lama
The Search for the Panchen Lama
Isabel Hilton
Viking 1999, £20 h/b
The story of the present Panchen Lama sounds like a thriller until one recalls it concerns a real 12-year-old boy who was recognised as the new incarnation of the second most important Tibetan Lama, and is now held incognito by the Chinese. Isabel Hilton is an excellent writer and an expert on China. For several years she followed the secret search by the Tibetan government-in-exile for the new Panchen Lama. She was privy to their plans, and acted as a conduit for information in the complex manoeuvring between them and the Chinese authorities. She also brings a sharp journalistic eye to the murky, politicised history of the tulku system, free of the sentiment that often descends with issues about Tibetans.
As a result her book is informative as well as entertaining. She evokes the complex character of the previous Panchen Lama, who is sometimes perceived as a collaborator, but who she sees as a reformer caught in the Communist nets. She also explores the ironies of Chinese materialists who have chosen their own candidate as the Lama’s rebirth to secure their influence. However, never far off is the tragedy of the boy caught in these Byzantine intrigues.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 12, Spring 2000
Isabel Hilton
Viking 1999, £20 h/b
The story of the present Panchen Lama sounds like a thriller until one recalls it concerns a real 12-year-old boy who was recognised as the new incarnation of the second most important Tibetan Lama, and is now held incognito by the Chinese. Isabel Hilton is an excellent writer and an expert on China. For several years she followed the secret search by the Tibetan government-in-exile for the new Panchen Lama. She was privy to their plans, and acted as a conduit for information in the complex manoeuvring between them and the Chinese authorities. She also brings a sharp journalistic eye to the murky, politicised history of the tulku system, free of the sentiment that often descends with issues about Tibetans.
As a result her book is informative as well as entertaining. She evokes the complex character of the previous Panchen Lama, who is sometimes perceived as a collaborator, but who she sees as a reformer caught in the Communist nets. She also explores the ironies of Chinese materialists who have chosen their own candidate as the Lama’s rebirth to secure their influence. However, never far off is the tragedy of the boy caught in these Byzantine intrigues.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 12, Spring 2000
Surangamasamadhi Sutra
Surangamasamadhi Sutra
Trans. Etienne Lamotte, Curzon Press 1998, £40 h/b
The Surangamasamadhi Sutra is in the grand Mahayana style. An assembly that has gathered to hear the Buddha’s teachings is interrupted by the demonic Mara. He and his daughters are caught, brought before the Buddha, and a dialogue takes place. It is a dramatic, hyperbolic encounter of Wisdom and delusion. Around this story are expositions of many of the most important Mahayana teachings, such as emptiness and the Perfections practised by a Bodhisattva. In particular is extolled the ‘Concentration of Heroic Progress’, which gives the Sutra its title and becomes virtually a synonym for the goal of the spiritual life.
With this publication The Surangamasamadhi Sutra becomes available in English for the first time. Lost in the original Sanskrit, Lamotte used Chinese versions for his French translation, and this has now been rendered into English by Sarah Boin Webb. The result is lucid and often poetic, and the introduction, which shows outstanding scholarship, offers much-needed aid in navigation. The text is complex, baroque and occasionally bizarre, but it is also colourful, engaging and has passages of great clarity.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 11, Autumn 1999
Trans. Etienne Lamotte, Curzon Press 1998, £40 h/b
The Surangamasamadhi Sutra is in the grand Mahayana style. An assembly that has gathered to hear the Buddha’s teachings is interrupted by the demonic Mara. He and his daughters are caught, brought before the Buddha, and a dialogue takes place. It is a dramatic, hyperbolic encounter of Wisdom and delusion. Around this story are expositions of many of the most important Mahayana teachings, such as emptiness and the Perfections practised by a Bodhisattva. In particular is extolled the ‘Concentration of Heroic Progress’, which gives the Sutra its title and becomes virtually a synonym for the goal of the spiritual life.
With this publication The Surangamasamadhi Sutra becomes available in English for the first time. Lost in the original Sanskrit, Lamotte used Chinese versions for his French translation, and this has now been rendered into English by Sarah Boin Webb. The result is lucid and often poetic, and the introduction, which shows outstanding scholarship, offers much-needed aid in navigation. The text is complex, baroque and occasionally bizarre, but it is also colourful, engaging and has passages of great clarity.
review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 11, Autumn 1999
The Compassionate Revolution
The Compassionate Revolution
Buddhism And Radical Politics
David Edwards, Green Books, 1998, £9.95 p/b
It is refreshing, in these consensual times, to read an unapologetic, radical critique of the injustices of the world’s economic and political structures.
Edwards’ polemic owes much to libertarian thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, but his distinctive contribution is to argue that radicals are themselves compromised by their responses to injustice. Radicals’ anger, he suggests, diminishes their ability to construct genuine alternatives; they must learn from the more profound alternative found in the Buddhist ideals of compassion and selflessness.
Edwards’ book will appeal to many seeking political alternatives in keeping with their spiritual ideals. However, his invocation of Buddhism remains largely theoretical. Firstly, his fierce analysis seems largely unaffected by the loving-kindness he advocates. Secondly, the many attempts around the world to effect social change using Buddhist practices are unmentioned and unanalysed. Many have faith that Buddhism can make a real difference. The question is: how?
reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 10, Winter 1998
Buddhism And Radical Politics
David Edwards, Green Books, 1998, £9.95 p/b
It is refreshing, in these consensual times, to read an unapologetic, radical critique of the injustices of the world’s economic and political structures.
Edwards’ polemic owes much to libertarian thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, but his distinctive contribution is to argue that radicals are themselves compromised by their responses to injustice. Radicals’ anger, he suggests, diminishes their ability to construct genuine alternatives; they must learn from the more profound alternative found in the Buddhist ideals of compassion and selflessness.
Edwards’ book will appeal to many seeking political alternatives in keeping with their spiritual ideals. However, his invocation of Buddhism remains largely theoretical. Firstly, his fierce analysis seems largely unaffected by the loving-kindness he advocates. Secondly, the many attempts around the world to effect social change using Buddhist practices are unmentioned and unanalysed. Many have faith that Buddhism can make a real difference. The question is: how?
reviewed by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 10, Winter 1998
Loyalty Demands Dissent
Loyalty Demands Dissent
Sulak Sivaraksa
Parallax, 1998, £16.95 h/b
Sulak Sivaraksa is the de facto intellectual leader of Thailand’s Buddhist opposition, and Loyalty Demands Dissent is a briskly told autobiography following his progress from a middle class upbringing and western education to his current status as a Buddhist-inspired dissident intellectual. The book is stronger on what Sulak has done – the hectic round of publishing, academic work, writing, magazines and political activism – than on why he has done it.
His life is ideal material for a biographer seeking to make sense of the forces of modernisation, political repression and Buddhist values that have converged on Sulak’s life, and he himself can hardly be expected to provide a critical perspective on his struggles to accommodate them. Sulak emerges more as an intellectual seeking to draw on Buddhism than a Buddhist seeking to understand the world. Yet his life is characterised by huge energy and a fundamental integrity in his search for alternatives to capitalism and consumerism.
Review by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
Sulak Sivaraksa
Parallax, 1998, £16.95 h/b
Sulak Sivaraksa is the de facto intellectual leader of Thailand’s Buddhist opposition, and Loyalty Demands Dissent is a briskly told autobiography following his progress from a middle class upbringing and western education to his current status as a Buddhist-inspired dissident intellectual. The book is stronger on what Sulak has done – the hectic round of publishing, academic work, writing, magazines and political activism – than on why he has done it.
His life is ideal material for a biographer seeking to make sense of the forces of modernisation, political repression and Buddhist values that have converged on Sulak’s life, and he himself can hardly be expected to provide a critical perspective on his struggles to accommodate them. Sulak emerges more as an intellectual seeking to draw on Buddhism than a Buddhist seeking to understand the world. Yet his life is characterised by huge energy and a fundamental integrity in his search for alternatives to capitalism and consumerism.
Review by Vishvapani, Dharma Life 9, Winter 1998
Reading Emptiness
Reading Emptiness
Buddhism and Literature
Jeff Humphries
SUNY Press, 1999, p/b
reviewed by Vishvapani
old chestnut of Buddhist discussion groups is the question, ‘do bodhisattvas exist?’ Bodhisattvas, the fabulous figures of the Mahayana pantheon, remind some of theism (or perhaps polytheism) and because we are told that they are not ultimately external to us we are tempted to interpret them reductively as projections of our minds. As Jeff Humphries acutely suggests, the best answer (although it doesn’t always quite do in a study group), is another question: do we exist?
Buddhism tells us that in reality we do not exist as we think: we lack abiding substance, and mistakenly identify our physical and mental processes as ‘selfhood’. Bodhisattvas emerge in the space created by the apprehension that nothing has inherent existence, and the universe we experience is a mental construct. This universe beguiles us, yet, as the Avatamsaka Sutra says,
‘"In all lands there only exists verbal expression, and the verbal expression has no basis in facts. Furthermore facts have no basis in words." Thus do enlightening beings understand that all things are void, that all worlds are silent.’
Such apprehensions of the lacunae between sign and signified resonate with modern literary theory’s concern to deconstruct conventional ideas about substance and meaning. Derrida and de Man argue that a text creates meaning through establishing patterns of reference and hierarchies of value, yet these doom it to self-referentiality. Historicists like Foucault, suggest that our ways of structuring the world derive from economic and political forces.
In seeking to unravel these structures or constructs critical theory has developed powerful analytical tools, but Humphries, a literary theorist who practices Zen, suggests that it leads to nihilism. The error, in his view, is that while meanings are deconstructed the reader remains unexamined, regarded as a unitary, Cartesian self. How can such a reader help feeling superior, or avoid baffled solipsism? So, in answer to deconstruction’s query, ‘does a text exist?’ Humphries proposes the Buddhist question, ‘Does the reader exist?’ While Buddhism shares analytical approaches with deconstruction, it escapes nihilism because liberation comes in the realisation that this self, like the objective world it observes, is dynamic, shifting and ungraspable.
Humphries finds an ally in literature itself with its intentions to tease us out of thought and to hold up a mirror. Indeed, *Reading Emptiness* is fired by the belief that ‘the closest thing we have to the Middle Way in the West is the practice of literature – both reading and writing.’ This is a challenge not only to western views of literature, but to Zen Buddhists who have imbibed Dogen’s strictures against language. Reading and writing, he suggests, can be spiritual practices when literature is regarded through a Buddhist perspective.
This perspective grows from regarding the element in literature that defies exposition. For Humphries this is so because a text is not an inanimate object, but the product of a mind, so that in reading one mind encounters another, and sees its own representation. Both consciousness and literature are mysterious, and there is nowhere ‘objective’ from which to analyse. The encounter of reader and a text is a paradigm of the meeting of self and world, which is also, though less overtly, an encounter with the mind’s representations.
Humphries prefers the Eastern aesthetic that sees art as an intensification of nature, to the western tendency to oppose the two. He is attracted to the Japanese ideal of wabi-sabi, or rustic naturalness, represented in bonzai. He favours a relaxed, intuitive, yet engaged approach to reading in place of the attempt to achieve interpretive mastery.
This is fertile ground, and Humphries is a stimulating guide in the first part of Reading Emptiness which is a series of excellent, closely argued essays. (The second is a less interesting discussion of Lafcadio Hearn, the American decadent and Japanophile.) Humphries is admirably well versed in literature and critical theory, though his Buddhism is perhaps overly influenced by Zen. But his is a fine mind that has manifestly been formed by Proust, Derrida and Dogen. Buddhism offers him a path out of the maze of theory, back to the romance of reading, now reconceived as Zen contemplation: ‘let go,’ he tells us, ‘and you are like a great tide riding a high wind.’
© Vishvapani, 2006
Buddhism and Literature
Jeff Humphries
SUNY Press, 1999, p/b
reviewed by Vishvapani
old chestnut of Buddhist discussion groups is the question, ‘do bodhisattvas exist?’ Bodhisattvas, the fabulous figures of the Mahayana pantheon, remind some of theism (or perhaps polytheism) and because we are told that they are not ultimately external to us we are tempted to interpret them reductively as projections of our minds. As Jeff Humphries acutely suggests, the best answer (although it doesn’t always quite do in a study group), is another question: do we exist?
Buddhism tells us that in reality we do not exist as we think: we lack abiding substance, and mistakenly identify our physical and mental processes as ‘selfhood’. Bodhisattvas emerge in the space created by the apprehension that nothing has inherent existence, and the universe we experience is a mental construct. This universe beguiles us, yet, as the Avatamsaka Sutra says,
‘"In all lands there only exists verbal expression, and the verbal expression has no basis in facts. Furthermore facts have no basis in words." Thus do enlightening beings understand that all things are void, that all worlds are silent.’
Such apprehensions of the lacunae between sign and signified resonate with modern literary theory’s concern to deconstruct conventional ideas about substance and meaning. Derrida and de Man argue that a text creates meaning through establishing patterns of reference and hierarchies of value, yet these doom it to self-referentiality. Historicists like Foucault, suggest that our ways of structuring the world derive from economic and political forces.
In seeking to unravel these structures or constructs critical theory has developed powerful analytical tools, but Humphries, a literary theorist who practices Zen, suggests that it leads to nihilism. The error, in his view, is that while meanings are deconstructed the reader remains unexamined, regarded as a unitary, Cartesian self. How can such a reader help feeling superior, or avoid baffled solipsism? So, in answer to deconstruction’s query, ‘does a text exist?’ Humphries proposes the Buddhist question, ‘Does the reader exist?’ While Buddhism shares analytical approaches with deconstruction, it escapes nihilism because liberation comes in the realisation that this self, like the objective world it observes, is dynamic, shifting and ungraspable.
Humphries finds an ally in literature itself with its intentions to tease us out of thought and to hold up a mirror. Indeed, *Reading Emptiness* is fired by the belief that ‘the closest thing we have to the Middle Way in the West is the practice of literature – both reading and writing.’ This is a challenge not only to western views of literature, but to Zen Buddhists who have imbibed Dogen’s strictures against language. Reading and writing, he suggests, can be spiritual practices when literature is regarded through a Buddhist perspective.
This perspective grows from regarding the element in literature that defies exposition. For Humphries this is so because a text is not an inanimate object, but the product of a mind, so that in reading one mind encounters another, and sees its own representation. Both consciousness and literature are mysterious, and there is nowhere ‘objective’ from which to analyse. The encounter of reader and a text is a paradigm of the meeting of self and world, which is also, though less overtly, an encounter with the mind’s representations.
Humphries prefers the Eastern aesthetic that sees art as an intensification of nature, to the western tendency to oppose the two. He is attracted to the Japanese ideal of wabi-sabi, or rustic naturalness, represented in bonzai. He favours a relaxed, intuitive, yet engaged approach to reading in place of the attempt to achieve interpretive mastery.
This is fertile ground, and Humphries is a stimulating guide in the first part of Reading Emptiness which is a series of excellent, closely argued essays. (The second is a less interesting discussion of Lafcadio Hearn, the American decadent and Japanophile.) Humphries is admirably well versed in literature and critical theory, though his Buddhism is perhaps overly influenced by Zen. But his is a fine mind that has manifestly been formed by Proust, Derrida and Dogen. Buddhism offers him a path out of the maze of theory, back to the romance of reading, now reconceived as Zen contemplation: ‘let go,’ he tells us, ‘and you are like a great tide riding a high wind.’
© Vishvapani, 2006
Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey
Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey
David Schneider
Shambhala Publications 1994, pp.239, p/b
Reviewed by Vishvapani
What extraordinary lives we lead, we ordinary Buddhists. I have heard a good number of life stories recounting paths to the Dharma. For those of a certain age the paths can include hash-laden hikes through Afghanistan or explorations of paperback esoterica in drug-strewn squats. But I have come across few contemporary Buddhists whose biographies have the louche grandeur or the extravagant unlikelihood of Issan Dorsey's progress from drag queen to roshi to death from AIDS: If the Buddhist press had tabloid supplements, Issan Dorsey would have made the front page.
He was born plain Tommy Dorsey in 1933 in Santa Barbara, California. His parents were God-fearing Irish Catholics and they were at a loss to know what to make of their 'sissy' son. It took Tommy himself a good sixteen years before he figured it out: 'Oh, I'm a homosexual, there are other homosexuals in the world, they actually meet and have conversations and have friends.'
This was 1950 and the Korean War was being fought, so Tommy signed up for the navy and found himself in a thriving gay world until the authorities cottoned on. The navy discharged him, tipping him out into gay San Francisco where, cut off from social and family ties, the party began in earnest ... From this point the story becomes every right-thinking parent's nightmare of a descent into drink, drugs, and lots and lots of sex. There is sex in bars, at parties and in prison; sex with men, with women, with men dressed as women, with men while dressed as a woman; sex with prostitutes, as a prostitute... Anything. Anyone. When I first read On The Road as a teenager I was amazed that people had been living such a wild life back in the MacCarthyite, Doris Day 1950s. Well they were, and by the sound of it they were probably doing them with Tommy Dorsey. Street Zen should come with a dharmic health warning: 'This book contains language and behaviour which may cause offence. Not for those who are trying to forget the kamaloka altogether.'
Tommy Dorsey transmuted into Tommy Dee, drag queen of San Francisco's North Beach, working the bars, dealing drugs, doing cabaret, picking up tricks. He moved to Chicago which was 'a bad queen city. They were BAD. Hustling, running with whores, working for the mafiosi.' He moved in with a prostitute called Bang Bang Latour and pretty soon Tommy was as bad as the worst.
Tommy got back to San Francisco and found things were different. This was the sixties and barbiturates and heroin were giving way to LSD and cannabis. The air was thick with unsorted spirituality and one day Tommy walked into Suzuki roshi's zendo. Something changed. The outrageous personality Tommy had constructed had been mellowing and now it cracked. Overnight Tommy quit hard drugs. Walking down Haight Street one day he stooped to pick up a sweet wrapper. 'I bent down and picked it up and right as I did I said to myself "Does this mean I am responsible for everything I see?" I told myself it didn't, but actually I knew that it did.'
Schneider says little to explain this transformation beyond mentioning Dorsey's sense at this time that he was shaking off life-long shame and guilt at being a homosexual. A psychoanalyst might have based a book around this hint, but Schneider leaves it alone. He writes in a lively vernacular, full of short sentences and verbatim anecdotes. He is less a writer than a reporter, and less a reporter than a friend. He does not so much describe or explain Dorsey as introduce him to us.
Tommy had got the Dharma. He started to rise at 4.00am to practice zazen and he plunged into the project that was to become San Francisco Zen Centre which, with its affiliates – Green Gulch farm, Tassajara monastery, Greens restaurant – have had a central place in the recent history of American Buddhism. What emerges is Dorsey's great humanity: his unassuming kindness, his generosity, his humour and - in this biographical perspective - the human depth of his involvement. Dharma became his life and the sangha his long-sought family.
A sense of these depths is necessary to understand the crisis that hit Zen Center when its Abbot, Suzuki's heir, Richard Baker-roshi was found to be having an extra-marital affair. This scandal focused grievances against Baker-roshi's style of leadership and provoked a profound sense of betrayal. 'Baker-roshi's real crime,' says Schneider, 'was that he seemed to have strayed from his deeper love affair with the body of students in the community.'
Dorsey stayed loyal to Baker throughout. Perhaps he had seen too much in his life to be caught up in such swirling emotions; his heart-felt devotion was simpler than the arguments which surrounded him. He just got on with his work and practice. In his final years Dorsey became something of a bodhisattva in the gay community blighted by AIDS. He established an AIDS hospice and then contracted HIV himself, suffering a long, painful illness before his death in 1990. Dorsey grows in stature throughout, but there is no cheap apotheosis in suffering - he ached and moaned his way towards death.
But Schneider is an honest writer and Dorsey's seems to have been an honest death. By this book's testimony he also seems to have lived an honest life and perhaps there is no greater tribute than that.
© Vishvapani, 2006
David Schneider
Shambhala Publications 1994, pp.239, p/b
Reviewed by Vishvapani
What extraordinary lives we lead, we ordinary Buddhists. I have heard a good number of life stories recounting paths to the Dharma. For those of a certain age the paths can include hash-laden hikes through Afghanistan or explorations of paperback esoterica in drug-strewn squats. But I have come across few contemporary Buddhists whose biographies have the louche grandeur or the extravagant unlikelihood of Issan Dorsey's progress from drag queen to roshi to death from AIDS: If the Buddhist press had tabloid supplements, Issan Dorsey would have made the front page.
He was born plain Tommy Dorsey in 1933 in Santa Barbara, California. His parents were God-fearing Irish Catholics and they were at a loss to know what to make of their 'sissy' son. It took Tommy himself a good sixteen years before he figured it out: 'Oh, I'm a homosexual, there are other homosexuals in the world, they actually meet and have conversations and have friends.'
This was 1950 and the Korean War was being fought, so Tommy signed up for the navy and found himself in a thriving gay world until the authorities cottoned on. The navy discharged him, tipping him out into gay San Francisco where, cut off from social and family ties, the party began in earnest ... From this point the story becomes every right-thinking parent's nightmare of a descent into drink, drugs, and lots and lots of sex. There is sex in bars, at parties and in prison; sex with men, with women, with men dressed as women, with men while dressed as a woman; sex with prostitutes, as a prostitute... Anything. Anyone. When I first read On The Road as a teenager I was amazed that people had been living such a wild life back in the MacCarthyite, Doris Day 1950s. Well they were, and by the sound of it they were probably doing them with Tommy Dorsey. Street Zen should come with a dharmic health warning: 'This book contains language and behaviour which may cause offence. Not for those who are trying to forget the kamaloka altogether.'
Tommy Dorsey transmuted into Tommy Dee, drag queen of San Francisco's North Beach, working the bars, dealing drugs, doing cabaret, picking up tricks. He moved to Chicago which was 'a bad queen city. They were BAD. Hustling, running with whores, working for the mafiosi.' He moved in with a prostitute called Bang Bang Latour and pretty soon Tommy was as bad as the worst.
Tommy got back to San Francisco and found things were different. This was the sixties and barbiturates and heroin were giving way to LSD and cannabis. The air was thick with unsorted spirituality and one day Tommy walked into Suzuki roshi's zendo. Something changed. The outrageous personality Tommy had constructed had been mellowing and now it cracked. Overnight Tommy quit hard drugs. Walking down Haight Street one day he stooped to pick up a sweet wrapper. 'I bent down and picked it up and right as I did I said to myself "Does this mean I am responsible for everything I see?" I told myself it didn't, but actually I knew that it did.'
Schneider says little to explain this transformation beyond mentioning Dorsey's sense at this time that he was shaking off life-long shame and guilt at being a homosexual. A psychoanalyst might have based a book around this hint, but Schneider leaves it alone. He writes in a lively vernacular, full of short sentences and verbatim anecdotes. He is less a writer than a reporter, and less a reporter than a friend. He does not so much describe or explain Dorsey as introduce him to us.
Tommy had got the Dharma. He started to rise at 4.00am to practice zazen and he plunged into the project that was to become San Francisco Zen Centre which, with its affiliates – Green Gulch farm, Tassajara monastery, Greens restaurant – have had a central place in the recent history of American Buddhism. What emerges is Dorsey's great humanity: his unassuming kindness, his generosity, his humour and - in this biographical perspective - the human depth of his involvement. Dharma became his life and the sangha his long-sought family.
A sense of these depths is necessary to understand the crisis that hit Zen Center when its Abbot, Suzuki's heir, Richard Baker-roshi was found to be having an extra-marital affair. This scandal focused grievances against Baker-roshi's style of leadership and provoked a profound sense of betrayal. 'Baker-roshi's real crime,' says Schneider, 'was that he seemed to have strayed from his deeper love affair with the body of students in the community.'
Dorsey stayed loyal to Baker throughout. Perhaps he had seen too much in his life to be caught up in such swirling emotions; his heart-felt devotion was simpler than the arguments which surrounded him. He just got on with his work and practice. In his final years Dorsey became something of a bodhisattva in the gay community blighted by AIDS. He established an AIDS hospice and then contracted HIV himself, suffering a long, painful illness before his death in 1990. Dorsey grows in stature throughout, but there is no cheap apotheosis in suffering - he ached and moaned his way towards death.
But Schneider is an honest writer and Dorsey's seems to have been an honest death. By this book's testimony he also seems to have lived an honest life and perhaps there is no greater tribute than that.
© Vishvapani, 2006
Gurus Saints and Latter-Day Baboons
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon
Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru
by Peter Washington
Secker & Warburg, 1993, pp. 470 h/b, £20.00
Riding the Tiger
by Lama Ole Nydahl
Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1992, pp. 496, £14.95 p/b
Zen In America (Second Edition)
by Helen Tworkov
Kodansha Globe, 1994, pp. 268, £13.99 p/b
Reviewed by Vishvapani
In 1848, two sisters, Katherine and Margaret Fox, started to hear rapping noises in their house in upstate New York. These noises, they claimed, were messages from the spirit world: they had broken through. The Fox sisters' celebrity was instant and it quickly grew into the vast Nineteenth Century vogue for spiritualism. More than this, as Peter Washington argues in his excellent study of Western gurus, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, these contacts with immaterial reality heralded an early attempt to fill the void at the heart of modern Western religious life.
This void haunted the Nineteenth Century imagination and was the product of the split between the contrary claims of science and of religion. While the Bible was being discredited by geology, biology and higher criticism, the séance appeared to offer tangible evidence of a spiritual dimension. Madame Blavatsky (whose system of Theosophy was a development of spiritualism) celebrated the counter-attack on materialism by installing in her house a large, stuffed baboon, bespectacled, standing upright dressed in wing-collar, morning coat and tie and carrying under his arm a copy of The Origin of Species. The animal was a lampoon on Darwin's pretensions to have defined man as a purely material creature. Blavatsky knew better, and what is more, she could prove it.
The aims of Blavatsky's Theosophical Society expressed a desire to be true to both science and religion by promoting 'the investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.' But was this to be an objective, rational investigation, deriving its authority from the prestige of scientific method? Or was it a more subjective, 'spiritual' investigation, whose authority would depend on the experiences and occurrences it evoked? Was this study or spiritual adventure?
In practice there was far more of the latter, but the question of authority turned out to be central. The spiritualists' inchoate encounters with 'the other side' were gloriously trumped when Blavatsky claimed to be in direct communication with a brotherhood of Spiritual Masters who, dwelling apart from mankind, had chosen her as their channel. They 'precipitated' letters into her possession, dealing, on the one hand, with such subjects as metaphysics and cosmology, while on the other they intervened in the continual feuds between their emissary and her colleagues and rivals. While Blavatsky was alive the Masters' testimony made her virtually unassailable within the Society (in spite of the fact that the messages and the psychic phenomena which surrounded her were repeatedly exposed as fraudulent). After her death, as Blavatsky's heirs squabbled for power, the masters mysteriously resumed their communication with the various parties, invariably delivering the good news that the recipient was indeed in the right and should be granted ascendancy.
Washington suggests that Theosophy and the other movements he discusses appealed to the desire for the mysteries of religion to be tangibly present in the world. The Bible and the Church, after all, had been relativised; God had been removed to an abstract transcendence; and the various world religions now appeared as historical accidents, dimly reflecting an older and deeper path to wisdom. What, then, could connect the spiritual seeker with the realm of authentic meanings? The evidence of the séance and the testimony of the Masters were fine, but perhaps they were still not enough to excite fully spiritual sensibilities. The stage was set for the emergence of the Western guru who would embody the lost realities in his very person, one whose utterances (however far-fetched) were authorised not by tradition, precedent or scripture, but by the attributes with which – at least in the eyes of his disciples – he was endowed.
The Theosophists themselves produced the first major Western guru in Krishnamurti whom they groomed from boyhood as the 'Next World Teacher'. After Krishnamurti's rejection of Theosophy (and, indeed, of all claims that there was a path by which the Truth might be approached) he occupied the paradoxical role of a Teacher without a teaching. This did not, however, make him teach any less or forego the wealth and celebrity which his position brought him. This combination made him the object of countless projections: romantic, maternal, filial and oedipal. He was formed in the mould of Western images of an Eastern sage, and adapted himself to the task even whilst he was forswearing it.
Like Krishnamurti, it was often remarked that no two pupils of Gurdjieff could ever agree on exactly their teacher had said. Gurdjieff himself urged that his teaching – with its injunction to 'know less and be more' – was not capable of systematic formulation. 'The Work' (as the process of following his teachings was known) was essentially a function of Gurdjieff's character. So, was everything he said a teaching? Washington describes an emblematic encounter between Gurdjieff and a new acolyte. The master placed an orange on the table between them, fixed the pupil with his gaze and declared: ‘This is the most important thing in the Universe.’ What choice does the poor spiritual aspirant have except to submit his rational faculties or else be cast as a sceptic and materialist? Those who seek certainty will find it in such encounters, but at what price?
Gurdjieff's behaviour towards his pupils was certainly imperious and capricious, but was he skillfully challenging their egotistic limitations, or was Gurdjieff, himself, the real monster of egotism? Was the Work a path to freedom, or was it simply creating further dependency? And in the end, for all his extraordinary personal magnetism, was Gurdjieff as dependent on the submission of his pupils as they were on the dominance of their teacher? Were Washington's gurus, in general, sincere or were they willfully manipulative? All of these questions are raised by Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon.
Washington's previous book was a highly entertaining polemic against the cults and dogmas of modern literary theory, but something of his earlier verve is lost here in his desire to keep a straight face. He has not quite enough sympathy with the power of his subjects to make their appeal fully comprehensible, and his irony is too heavily veiled fully to expose their failings. For all that, the story told in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon has much to say about the excitements and dangers of religious life loosed from the moorings of tradition or social context, about our aspirations and about our credulity.
In addition to the guru-syndrome, a number of other developments in modern religion can trace their origins back to Theosophy These include the 'New Age' movement as well as Western interest in Buddhism. Many Western Buddhists will doubtless be curious whether their view of Buddhist tradition has been coloured by such influences. But I rather doubt whether Lama Ole Nydahl has had time to engage in such reflections. Riding The Tiger tells, in hectic fashion, the story of the establishment of the Danish Lama's network of over 100 Kagyupa centres, mainly located 'between Vladivostock and the Rhine'. He gazes out from the book's innumerable illustrations with the physique and energy of a marine, but he has no doubt of the source of all the energy: his own teacher, the Karmapa. 'Feeling the potential constantly unfolding in his powerfield beat any drug' and the book is full of semi-miraculous happenings in the Karmapa's presence. This is all doubtless highly attractive, but there is little in the way of reflection on the projections that may cloud the students relation to the Karmapa or, indeed, Nydahl himself. There is scarcely a hint of self-doubt, or self-analysis in the book and the 'shadow' is reserved for dark hints about other teachers, including one or two stories about Trungpa Rimpoche which one can only hope were first checked with Nydahl's lawyers.
Quite a different picture of contemporary Buddhism emerges from Helen Tworkov's Zen in America, which was first published in 1989 and is now reprinted with a new ‘Afterword’. Since writing this book Ms. Tworkov has gone on to edit the excellent Tricycle: the Buddhist Review, but already this book had established her as one of the acutest observers of the Buddhist scene. Her subject is precisely the difficulty of reconciling the absolutist claims to authority which accompany the status of a Zen roshi with the complex and messy reality of modern America.
The book features portraits of five American Zen teachers and it was written at a time when scandals involving prominent Buddhist teachers (including one or two of the subjects of this book) had raised innumerable questions about the relationship between teachers and students. Tworkov's analysis of the problem starts with distinction between the 'role' of the teacher and their 'personality'. In traditional societies the former predominates and personal failings are secondary matters, while modern sensibility tends to conflate the two. The first generation of Zen teachers in the West who were Japanese, subordinated their personalities to their role and consequently were idealised by their students. But the trouble started in the next generation who were Westerners and the projections broke down. Baker-roshi's spectacularly successful development of San Francisco Zen Centre in the 1970's was clearly an expression of his personality as much as the fulfillment of his role. For him it was a 'giant social experiment'. The result was that others felt their lives had been subordinated to the pursuit of one man's ambitions, and when sexual scandal revealed that Baker's personality was not infallible, the whole edifice was called into question.
Tworkov is a demystifier and all of her subjects appear as fallible individuals, who are doing good work in difficult circumstances. She is also a cool judge who makes her interpretations from within the terms of her training as an anthropologist. But as a Buddhist herself, Tworkov cannot help being deeply involved in the issues she raises. The new ‘Afterword’ redresses the balance in important ways, being a strong argument against those who would respond to the dangers posed by the status of teachers by formulating codes of 'ethics' to police their behaviour, particularly in the area of sex. In the end this is an attempt to translate the Dharma into the secular and democratic values of American liberalism: an attempt to make the Dharma 'safe'.
Tworkov argues that this approach is a potential betrayal of the principle of Enlightenment which lies at the heart of the Buddhism. She is surely right: the Dharma, gurus, teachers and indeed the whole process of spiritual life are intrinsically dangerous, because they demand change and because they take one into unknown territory. And yet one should not excuse the excesses of teachers who use the opportunities afforded by their students’ naivety and the absence of a regulating social context to give full rein to the various currents of their personality. The only way to mediate these relationships – role and personality, teacher and student, guru and disciple – is surely a renewed emphasis on Buddhist ethics, for only this offers a framework for human relationship which expresses the perspective of Enlightenment and speaks to the whole of our lives.
Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru
by Peter Washington
Secker & Warburg, 1993, pp. 470 h/b, £20.00
Riding the Tiger
by Lama Ole Nydahl
Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1992, pp. 496, £14.95 p/b
Zen In America (Second Edition)
by Helen Tworkov
Kodansha Globe, 1994, pp. 268, £13.99 p/b
Reviewed by Vishvapani
In 1848, two sisters, Katherine and Margaret Fox, started to hear rapping noises in their house in upstate New York. These noises, they claimed, were messages from the spirit world: they had broken through. The Fox sisters' celebrity was instant and it quickly grew into the vast Nineteenth Century vogue for spiritualism. More than this, as Peter Washington argues in his excellent study of Western gurus, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, these contacts with immaterial reality heralded an early attempt to fill the void at the heart of modern Western religious life.
This void haunted the Nineteenth Century imagination and was the product of the split between the contrary claims of science and of religion. While the Bible was being discredited by geology, biology and higher criticism, the séance appeared to offer tangible evidence of a spiritual dimension. Madame Blavatsky (whose system of Theosophy was a development of spiritualism) celebrated the counter-attack on materialism by installing in her house a large, stuffed baboon, bespectacled, standing upright dressed in wing-collar, morning coat and tie and carrying under his arm a copy of The Origin of Species. The animal was a lampoon on Darwin's pretensions to have defined man as a purely material creature. Blavatsky knew better, and what is more, she could prove it.
The aims of Blavatsky's Theosophical Society expressed a desire to be true to both science and religion by promoting 'the investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.' But was this to be an objective, rational investigation, deriving its authority from the prestige of scientific method? Or was it a more subjective, 'spiritual' investigation, whose authority would depend on the experiences and occurrences it evoked? Was this study or spiritual adventure?
In practice there was far more of the latter, but the question of authority turned out to be central. The spiritualists' inchoate encounters with 'the other side' were gloriously trumped when Blavatsky claimed to be in direct communication with a brotherhood of Spiritual Masters who, dwelling apart from mankind, had chosen her as their channel. They 'precipitated' letters into her possession, dealing, on the one hand, with such subjects as metaphysics and cosmology, while on the other they intervened in the continual feuds between their emissary and her colleagues and rivals. While Blavatsky was alive the Masters' testimony made her virtually unassailable within the Society (in spite of the fact that the messages and the psychic phenomena which surrounded her were repeatedly exposed as fraudulent). After her death, as Blavatsky's heirs squabbled for power, the masters mysteriously resumed their communication with the various parties, invariably delivering the good news that the recipient was indeed in the right and should be granted ascendancy.
Washington suggests that Theosophy and the other movements he discusses appealed to the desire for the mysteries of religion to be tangibly present in the world. The Bible and the Church, after all, had been relativised; God had been removed to an abstract transcendence; and the various world religions now appeared as historical accidents, dimly reflecting an older and deeper path to wisdom. What, then, could connect the spiritual seeker with the realm of authentic meanings? The evidence of the séance and the testimony of the Masters were fine, but perhaps they were still not enough to excite fully spiritual sensibilities. The stage was set for the emergence of the Western guru who would embody the lost realities in his very person, one whose utterances (however far-fetched) were authorised not by tradition, precedent or scripture, but by the attributes with which – at least in the eyes of his disciples – he was endowed.
The Theosophists themselves produced the first major Western guru in Krishnamurti whom they groomed from boyhood as the 'Next World Teacher'. After Krishnamurti's rejection of Theosophy (and, indeed, of all claims that there was a path by which the Truth might be approached) he occupied the paradoxical role of a Teacher without a teaching. This did not, however, make him teach any less or forego the wealth and celebrity which his position brought him. This combination made him the object of countless projections: romantic, maternal, filial and oedipal. He was formed in the mould of Western images of an Eastern sage, and adapted himself to the task even whilst he was forswearing it.
Like Krishnamurti, it was often remarked that no two pupils of Gurdjieff could ever agree on exactly their teacher had said. Gurdjieff himself urged that his teaching – with its injunction to 'know less and be more' – was not capable of systematic formulation. 'The Work' (as the process of following his teachings was known) was essentially a function of Gurdjieff's character. So, was everything he said a teaching? Washington describes an emblematic encounter between Gurdjieff and a new acolyte. The master placed an orange on the table between them, fixed the pupil with his gaze and declared: ‘This is the most important thing in the Universe.’ What choice does the poor spiritual aspirant have except to submit his rational faculties or else be cast as a sceptic and materialist? Those who seek certainty will find it in such encounters, but at what price?
Gurdjieff's behaviour towards his pupils was certainly imperious and capricious, but was he skillfully challenging their egotistic limitations, or was Gurdjieff, himself, the real monster of egotism? Was the Work a path to freedom, or was it simply creating further dependency? And in the end, for all his extraordinary personal magnetism, was Gurdjieff as dependent on the submission of his pupils as they were on the dominance of their teacher? Were Washington's gurus, in general, sincere or were they willfully manipulative? All of these questions are raised by Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon.
Washington's previous book was a highly entertaining polemic against the cults and dogmas of modern literary theory, but something of his earlier verve is lost here in his desire to keep a straight face. He has not quite enough sympathy with the power of his subjects to make their appeal fully comprehensible, and his irony is too heavily veiled fully to expose their failings. For all that, the story told in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon has much to say about the excitements and dangers of religious life loosed from the moorings of tradition or social context, about our aspirations and about our credulity.
In addition to the guru-syndrome, a number of other developments in modern religion can trace their origins back to Theosophy These include the 'New Age' movement as well as Western interest in Buddhism. Many Western Buddhists will doubtless be curious whether their view of Buddhist tradition has been coloured by such influences. But I rather doubt whether Lama Ole Nydahl has had time to engage in such reflections. Riding The Tiger tells, in hectic fashion, the story of the establishment of the Danish Lama's network of over 100 Kagyupa centres, mainly located 'between Vladivostock and the Rhine'. He gazes out from the book's innumerable illustrations with the physique and energy of a marine, but he has no doubt of the source of all the energy: his own teacher, the Karmapa. 'Feeling the potential constantly unfolding in his powerfield beat any drug' and the book is full of semi-miraculous happenings in the Karmapa's presence. This is all doubtless highly attractive, but there is little in the way of reflection on the projections that may cloud the students relation to the Karmapa or, indeed, Nydahl himself. There is scarcely a hint of self-doubt, or self-analysis in the book and the 'shadow' is reserved for dark hints about other teachers, including one or two stories about Trungpa Rimpoche which one can only hope were first checked with Nydahl's lawyers.
Quite a different picture of contemporary Buddhism emerges from Helen Tworkov's Zen in America, which was first published in 1989 and is now reprinted with a new ‘Afterword’. Since writing this book Ms. Tworkov has gone on to edit the excellent Tricycle: the Buddhist Review, but already this book had established her as one of the acutest observers of the Buddhist scene. Her subject is precisely the difficulty of reconciling the absolutist claims to authority which accompany the status of a Zen roshi with the complex and messy reality of modern America.
The book features portraits of five American Zen teachers and it was written at a time when scandals involving prominent Buddhist teachers (including one or two of the subjects of this book) had raised innumerable questions about the relationship between teachers and students. Tworkov's analysis of the problem starts with distinction between the 'role' of the teacher and their 'personality'. In traditional societies the former predominates and personal failings are secondary matters, while modern sensibility tends to conflate the two. The first generation of Zen teachers in the West who were Japanese, subordinated their personalities to their role and consequently were idealised by their students. But the trouble started in the next generation who were Westerners and the projections broke down. Baker-roshi's spectacularly successful development of San Francisco Zen Centre in the 1970's was clearly an expression of his personality as much as the fulfillment of his role. For him it was a 'giant social experiment'. The result was that others felt their lives had been subordinated to the pursuit of one man's ambitions, and when sexual scandal revealed that Baker's personality was not infallible, the whole edifice was called into question.
Tworkov is a demystifier and all of her subjects appear as fallible individuals, who are doing good work in difficult circumstances. She is also a cool judge who makes her interpretations from within the terms of her training as an anthropologist. But as a Buddhist herself, Tworkov cannot help being deeply involved in the issues she raises. The new ‘Afterword’ redresses the balance in important ways, being a strong argument against those who would respond to the dangers posed by the status of teachers by formulating codes of 'ethics' to police their behaviour, particularly in the area of sex. In the end this is an attempt to translate the Dharma into the secular and democratic values of American liberalism: an attempt to make the Dharma 'safe'.
Tworkov argues that this approach is a potential betrayal of the principle of Enlightenment which lies at the heart of the Buddhism. She is surely right: the Dharma, gurus, teachers and indeed the whole process of spiritual life are intrinsically dangerous, because they demand change and because they take one into unknown territory. And yet one should not excuse the excesses of teachers who use the opportunities afforded by their students’ naivety and the absence of a regulating social context to give full rein to the various currents of their personality. The only way to mediate these relationships – role and personality, teacher and student, guru and disciple – is surely a renewed emphasis on Buddhist ethics, for only this offers a framework for human relationship which expresses the perspective of Enlightenment and speaks to the whole of our lives.
Tricycle: the Buddhist Review
Tricycle: the Buddhist Review
Review by Vishvapani, 1994 – first published in Golden Drum magazine
I have been a reader of Tricycle for over a year now. It comes through the door with a satisfying thunk: over 100 pages looking - and reading - for all the world like a proper magazine. It is informed, intelligent, well-written and Buddhist. In many ways it is an extraordinary achievement with much of the credit going to the editor, Helen Tworkov, a journalist and author of Zen In America. After just two years Tricycle has a circulation of 100,000 and it is on sale in newsstands and shopping malls across the USA.
The magazine's whimsical title announces its nonsectarian stance, the three wheels of the tricycle equating to the three yanas or vehicles of Buddhist tradition. In this spirit it carries articles on all aspects of Buddhism, though with an undeniable emphasis on the Zen and Tibetan traditions which dominate the American scene.
Most impressive of all is the magazine's self assurance. In the pages of Tricycle Buddhism is no longer a fringe religion for drop-outs and ex-drop-outs: it is part of the American cultural mainstream.
There are now up to half-a-million Buddhists of European descent in the USA many of whom discovered eastern religions in the 1960s and, now that they have reached positions of prominence and responsibility, they have |brought their Buddhism with them. Past issues have featured John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass representing the Manhattan Zen avant-garde; the Dharma bums generation of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder appear regularly; there have been pieces by the American Buddhist writers Peter Matthiesen and Pico Iyer; and there was recently an intriguing interview with Presidential candidate, ex-Governor and Zen afficionado Jerry Brown.
There is a self-awareness and sophistication at work here at which European Buddhists can only wonder, but this has been hard-won and creates its own blindnesses. Behind the confident stance lies a decade of scandals, crises and disillusionment within American Dharma groups. The cases of prominent teachers involved in scandals concerning sex, power and alcoholism have thrown their American pupils back on their own resources. In particular, doubts have emerged concerning the appropriateness of Asian models of organisation and relationships to American life and Tricycle seems to be a deliberate attempt to reframe the context in which Buddhism is understood in America. The magazine is run by lay people and it may be significant that the two principal editors are women. It is eclectic, giving space to whatever is Buddhist and reasonable and smart. It is non-deferential without being irreverent. On the one hand, the editorial eclecticism gives rise to an element of laissez faire and there is always plenty to disagree with. But on the other hand the magazine is prepared to tackle some controversial issues in the Buddhist world (a recent example being a forthright acount the conflicts surrounding the installation of the new Karmapa).
But in spite of its eclecticism, Tricycle has a very distinctive character. At the heart of this is its Americanness it attempts to articulate a distinctively American as opposed to a Western or even contemporary Buddhism. The current issue, for example, includes a piece on Shoyen Saku, an early Zen teacher in America; an article on Buddhism among the Japanese inhabitants of WW2 internment camps; part of a serialisation of Wake Up, a life of the Buddha by Jack Kerouac; and an interview with the magisterial patriarch of American Zen, Roshi Philip Kapleau. These figures are clearly seen as forming a lineage or, at least, a history for American Buddhists. Beyond this there is a peculiarly American attempt to define an indiginous tradition - including Thoreau and even the authors of the American constitution - from which American Buddhism can be said to have emerged.
The most impressive European Buddhists - men such as Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita - possess a stature, erudition and complexity which is the distinctive product of the interaction of Buddhism with European culture and which, I would suggest, is not to be found within American Buddhism, for all its dynamism and creativity.
To a European eye this Americanness can seem baffling and parochial. American Buddhism has been strong on practice but comparatively weak on ideas, in contrast to European Buddhism which has its roots in scholarly and intellectual interest. For all the dynamism and creativity of the Dharma in the USA no American Buddhists have approached the stature, erudition and complexity of men like Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita who have emerged from the interaction of Buddhism with European culture. And behind European Buddhism lies an intellectual hinterland of Buddhist influences and analogues which stretches back to Schopenhauer and beyond. European culture is also a part of the American inheritance and in any case, many of the social conditions obtaining in the US are now present throughout the developed world. So why not show an interest in a broader issue: the development of Western Buddhism to which Europeans have already contributed a great deal?
These limitations expose Tricycle to a number of pitfalls. It is sincerely trying to question the relevance of the forms of Buddhism we have inherited from the East, but in the absence of a critique emerging from Buddhist principles, many of the contributors base their questions upon the values of American liberalism. Feminism, eco-Buddhism and `engaged Buddhism' inform many of the contributions which seek to go beyond traditional expositions of the Dharma. But while it is fine that Eastern Buddhism is being subjected to sassy NYC/West Coast good-sense, what is really needed is that America itself is subjected to the scrutiny of Buddhism. Tricycle is happy to comment on acceptably problematised questions such as euthanasia and abortion, but will it try to develop a critique of such beloved American institutions as the family, Christianity and the various trappings of middle-class American life? Will it seriously challenge the spiritual materialism of the `New Age' or subject to a thoroughly Buddhist critique the views and lifestyles which many American Buddhists have brought with them, unquestioned, into their new religion.
The current issue shows the strengths and weaknesses of Tricycle's approach. Helen Tworkov, on the set of Bertolucci's forthcoming film ‘Little Buddha’ (which seems to have the whole Buddhist world crossing its fingers) is perceptive, ironic and sceptical. But Stephen Batchelor's ‘Letter from South Africa’ appears to have been written because South Africa is a topical and important, even though he has nothing really Buddhist say about it. Kerouac's Wake Up is remarkable only for its famous author - a fairly traditional retelling of the Buddha's life which has the characters speaking bizarre sub-Shakespearean dialogue. It is clearly going to be hard to maintain the standard of the early issues.
It is extraordinarily encouraging to read Tricycle's confident and intelligent writing and to see Buddhism entering a mainstream (even if Europeans will feel that it is not their own). But the mainstream is not the Middle Way and unless the editors take care it may turn out to be nothing more than the middle of the road.
© Vishvapani, 2006
Review by Vishvapani, 1994 – first published in Golden Drum magazine
I have been a reader of Tricycle for over a year now. It comes through the door with a satisfying thunk: over 100 pages looking - and reading - for all the world like a proper magazine. It is informed, intelligent, well-written and Buddhist. In many ways it is an extraordinary achievement with much of the credit going to the editor, Helen Tworkov, a journalist and author of Zen In America. After just two years Tricycle has a circulation of 100,000 and it is on sale in newsstands and shopping malls across the USA.
The magazine's whimsical title announces its nonsectarian stance, the three wheels of the tricycle equating to the three yanas or vehicles of Buddhist tradition. In this spirit it carries articles on all aspects of Buddhism, though with an undeniable emphasis on the Zen and Tibetan traditions which dominate the American scene.
Most impressive of all is the magazine's self assurance. In the pages of Tricycle Buddhism is no longer a fringe religion for drop-outs and ex-drop-outs: it is part of the American cultural mainstream.
There are now up to half-a-million Buddhists of European descent in the USA many of whom discovered eastern religions in the 1960s and, now that they have reached positions of prominence and responsibility, they have |brought their Buddhism with them. Past issues have featured John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass representing the Manhattan Zen avant-garde; the Dharma bums generation of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder appear regularly; there have been pieces by the American Buddhist writers Peter Matthiesen and Pico Iyer; and there was recently an intriguing interview with Presidential candidate, ex-Governor and Zen afficionado Jerry Brown.
There is a self-awareness and sophistication at work here at which European Buddhists can only wonder, but this has been hard-won and creates its own blindnesses. Behind the confident stance lies a decade of scandals, crises and disillusionment within American Dharma groups. The cases of prominent teachers involved in scandals concerning sex, power and alcoholism have thrown their American pupils back on their own resources. In particular, doubts have emerged concerning the appropriateness of Asian models of organisation and relationships to American life and Tricycle seems to be a deliberate attempt to reframe the context in which Buddhism is understood in America. The magazine is run by lay people and it may be significant that the two principal editors are women. It is eclectic, giving space to whatever is Buddhist and reasonable and smart. It is non-deferential without being irreverent. On the one hand, the editorial eclecticism gives rise to an element of laissez faire and there is always plenty to disagree with. But on the other hand the magazine is prepared to tackle some controversial issues in the Buddhist world (a recent example being a forthright acount the conflicts surrounding the installation of the new Karmapa).
But in spite of its eclecticism, Tricycle has a very distinctive character. At the heart of this is its Americanness it attempts to articulate a distinctively American as opposed to a Western or even contemporary Buddhism. The current issue, for example, includes a piece on Shoyen Saku, an early Zen teacher in America; an article on Buddhism among the Japanese inhabitants of WW2 internment camps; part of a serialisation of Wake Up, a life of the Buddha by Jack Kerouac; and an interview with the magisterial patriarch of American Zen, Roshi Philip Kapleau. These figures are clearly seen as forming a lineage or, at least, a history for American Buddhists. Beyond this there is a peculiarly American attempt to define an indiginous tradition - including Thoreau and even the authors of the American constitution - from which American Buddhism can be said to have emerged.
The most impressive European Buddhists - men such as Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita - possess a stature, erudition and complexity which is the distinctive product of the interaction of Buddhism with European culture and which, I would suggest, is not to be found within American Buddhism, for all its dynamism and creativity.
To a European eye this Americanness can seem baffling and parochial. American Buddhism has been strong on practice but comparatively weak on ideas, in contrast to European Buddhism which has its roots in scholarly and intellectual interest. For all the dynamism and creativity of the Dharma in the USA no American Buddhists have approached the stature, erudition and complexity of men like Lama Govinda and Sangharakshita who have emerged from the interaction of Buddhism with European culture. And behind European Buddhism lies an intellectual hinterland of Buddhist influences and analogues which stretches back to Schopenhauer and beyond. European culture is also a part of the American inheritance and in any case, many of the social conditions obtaining in the US are now present throughout the developed world. So why not show an interest in a broader issue: the development of Western Buddhism to which Europeans have already contributed a great deal?
These limitations expose Tricycle to a number of pitfalls. It is sincerely trying to question the relevance of the forms of Buddhism we have inherited from the East, but in the absence of a critique emerging from Buddhist principles, many of the contributors base their questions upon the values of American liberalism. Feminism, eco-Buddhism and `engaged Buddhism' inform many of the contributions which seek to go beyond traditional expositions of the Dharma. But while it is fine that Eastern Buddhism is being subjected to sassy NYC/West Coast good-sense, what is really needed is that America itself is subjected to the scrutiny of Buddhism. Tricycle is happy to comment on acceptably problematised questions such as euthanasia and abortion, but will it try to develop a critique of such beloved American institutions as the family, Christianity and the various trappings of middle-class American life? Will it seriously challenge the spiritual materialism of the `New Age' or subject to a thoroughly Buddhist critique the views and lifestyles which many American Buddhists have brought with them, unquestioned, into their new religion.
The current issue shows the strengths and weaknesses of Tricycle's approach. Helen Tworkov, on the set of Bertolucci's forthcoming film ‘Little Buddha’ (which seems to have the whole Buddhist world crossing its fingers) is perceptive, ironic and sceptical. But Stephen Batchelor's ‘Letter from South Africa’ appears to have been written because South Africa is a topical and important, even though he has nothing really Buddhist say about it. Kerouac's Wake Up is remarkable only for its famous author - a fairly traditional retelling of the Buddha's life which has the characters speaking bizarre sub-Shakespearean dialogue. It is clearly going to be hard to maintain the standard of the early issues.
It is extraordinarily encouraging to read Tricycle's confident and intelligent writing and to see Buddhism entering a mainstream (even if Europeans will feel that it is not their own). But the mainstream is not the Middle Way and unless the editors take care it may turn out to be nothing more than the middle of the road.
© Vishvapani, 2006
The Book of Enlightened Masters
The Book of Enlightened Masters
Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions
Andrew Rawlinson
Open Court, 1997, £31.50
Review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 7, Spring 1998
Not long ago, when the East was axiomatically ‘mystical’, teachers of eastern religions were assumed to be possibly mad, probably bad, and certainly dangerous to know. Then, as eastern gurus came to be taken more seriously, western seekers flocked to their ashrams and zendos. The consequence is that two generations of westerners have now practised and sometimes mastered their teachings.
These westerners (and their predecessors) are the subject of Andrew Rawlinson’s superb, path-breaking book. Westerners now hold responsibility at all levels in the Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi traditions that have come West; and some have started traditions of their own. Rawlinson argues convincingly that they represent something genuinely new in western culture, a phenomenon that has been studied little, and understood less, but that now needs to be taken seriously in its own right.
Most of the 650 large pages of The Book of Enlightened Masters are a Who’s Who? of these men and women – the saints, the sages and the scoundrels. Some, like Gurdjieff or Da Free John are well known; others are virtually recluses. Some claim to be Enlightened, or God-conscious, or the reincarnations of eastern masters. Others make the more modest assertion that they are practitioners and perhaps interpretors.
Their approaches to spiritual life range from the sober and conservative Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho to Joya Santanya, who urges her followers to ‘bathe in the warm juices of the Mother’. Rawlinson is a connoisseur of gurus and makes an ideal guide to them. He is informal but precise; sympathetic but not credulous; amusing but never flippant.
So diverse are these teachers and their traditions that it is hard to think of them as a single phenomenon. But this is precisely Rawlinson’s contention. Buddhism, Sufism, and Hinduism themselves differ greatly and include many strands. Moreover, their differing versions of spiritual life, their claims to authority, and assertions of legitimacy have often placed them in competition and sometimes in conflict.
But in the West these traditions that developed independently have been thrown together, and are facing the same issues of cultural adaptation. Their juxtaposition is causing westerners to ask questions that never arose in the East: how do these traditions relate to each other, and what can be learnt from their confluence?
Rawlinson suggests that they are being made into something new by forces that affect them all. He argues that they all share basic principles, most importantly the belief that ‘human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications’. The centrality of the mind in this formulation leads Rawlinson to call the new phenomenon ‘spiritual psychology’. Moreover it follows from the first principle that there are people (i.e. teachers) who have transformed their consciousness, and that these people transmit spiritual practices that enable others to do so.
Rawlinson analyses western teachers in a way that accommodates the teachers’ diversity within terms that also contrive to see them as a whole. He says that the style and religious philosophy of a teacher can be hot (if the focus is on God or other transcendent forces) or cool (if meaning and practice derive from the self); and their approach can be structured or unstructured – depending on how systematic the teaching and practice are. They can also be a combination of these qualities.
For example, my teacher Sangharakshita is ‘cool structured, with a hot structured top level’. This means that his approach to teaching and practice is reasonable and methodical, but that his values and the basis of his authority come from some transcendent ‘other’. I found this an astute and illuminating description and, once I learnt my way around Rawlinson’s map, I found it a useful way of understanding the relationships between the different kinds of teaching available in the West.
This approach enables one to see the differences between teachers as matters of style and even temperament. There is something liberating in this, but it is very different from the way teachers see themselves. Rawlinson does not ask why their approaches to spiritual life differ. Most teachers presumably would protest that they emphasise, say, ecstatic union with a Godhead, rather than mindful dwelling in the present moment (or vice versa) because this is the Truth – or at least a better, truer and more effective approach to practice. Rawlinson clearly feels it is not for him to evaluate the claims teachers make. This offers a seductive relativism in which one need not choose between them, but this is a luxury the practitioner cannot afford.
Academics may object that Rawlinson’s concern with spiritual tem-perament leads him to ignore sociology and history. Why are particular people drawn to different practices? How has the pattern changed over time and across cultures? A further limitation is that Rawlinson ignores some eastern teachers who have had a profound impact, even when, as with Osho Rajneesh or the Maharishi, they were very westernised.
But The Book of Enlightened Masters is long enough and pricey enough already. I know £31.50 is expensive but I think this book should be required reading for any westerner practising an eastern religion who wants to understand the historical and cultural context of their endeavours. Indeed no one interested in how society is developing can afford to overlook western teachers – and this book is an excellent guide.
Vishvapani
Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions
Andrew Rawlinson
Open Court, 1997, £31.50
Review by Vishvapani, first published in Dharma Life 7, Spring 1998
Not long ago, when the East was axiomatically ‘mystical’, teachers of eastern religions were assumed to be possibly mad, probably bad, and certainly dangerous to know. Then, as eastern gurus came to be taken more seriously, western seekers flocked to their ashrams and zendos. The consequence is that two generations of westerners have now practised and sometimes mastered their teachings.
These westerners (and their predecessors) are the subject of Andrew Rawlinson’s superb, path-breaking book. Westerners now hold responsibility at all levels in the Buddhist, Hindu and Sufi traditions that have come West; and some have started traditions of their own. Rawlinson argues convincingly that they represent something genuinely new in western culture, a phenomenon that has been studied little, and understood less, but that now needs to be taken seriously in its own right.
Most of the 650 large pages of The Book of Enlightened Masters are a Who’s Who? of these men and women – the saints, the sages and the scoundrels. Some, like Gurdjieff or Da Free John are well known; others are virtually recluses. Some claim to be Enlightened, or God-conscious, or the reincarnations of eastern masters. Others make the more modest assertion that they are practitioners and perhaps interpretors.
Their approaches to spiritual life range from the sober and conservative Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho to Joya Santanya, who urges her followers to ‘bathe in the warm juices of the Mother’. Rawlinson is a connoisseur of gurus and makes an ideal guide to them. He is informal but precise; sympathetic but not credulous; amusing but never flippant.
So diverse are these teachers and their traditions that it is hard to think of them as a single phenomenon. But this is precisely Rawlinson’s contention. Buddhism, Sufism, and Hinduism themselves differ greatly and include many strands. Moreover, their differing versions of spiritual life, their claims to authority, and assertions of legitimacy have often placed them in competition and sometimes in conflict.
But in the West these traditions that developed independently have been thrown together, and are facing the same issues of cultural adaptation. Their juxtaposition is causing westerners to ask questions that never arose in the East: how do these traditions relate to each other, and what can be learnt from their confluence?
Rawlinson suggests that they are being made into something new by forces that affect them all. He argues that they all share basic principles, most importantly the belief that ‘human beings are best understood in terms of consciousness and its modifications’. The centrality of the mind in this formulation leads Rawlinson to call the new phenomenon ‘spiritual psychology’. Moreover it follows from the first principle that there are people (i.e. teachers) who have transformed their consciousness, and that these people transmit spiritual practices that enable others to do so.
Rawlinson analyses western teachers in a way that accommodates the teachers’ diversity within terms that also contrive to see them as a whole. He says that the style and religious philosophy of a teacher can be hot (if the focus is on God or other transcendent forces) or cool (if meaning and practice derive from the self); and their approach can be structured or unstructured – depending on how systematic the teaching and practice are. They can also be a combination of these qualities.
For example, my teacher Sangharakshita is ‘cool structured, with a hot structured top level’. This means that his approach to teaching and practice is reasonable and methodical, but that his values and the basis of his authority come from some transcendent ‘other’. I found this an astute and illuminating description and, once I learnt my way around Rawlinson’s map, I found it a useful way of understanding the relationships between the different kinds of teaching available in the West.
This approach enables one to see the differences between teachers as matters of style and even temperament. There is something liberating in this, but it is very different from the way teachers see themselves. Rawlinson does not ask why their approaches to spiritual life differ. Most teachers presumably would protest that they emphasise, say, ecstatic union with a Godhead, rather than mindful dwelling in the present moment (or vice versa) because this is the Truth – or at least a better, truer and more effective approach to practice. Rawlinson clearly feels it is not for him to evaluate the claims teachers make. This offers a seductive relativism in which one need not choose between them, but this is a luxury the practitioner cannot afford.
Academics may object that Rawlinson’s concern with spiritual tem-perament leads him to ignore sociology and history. Why are particular people drawn to different practices? How has the pattern changed over time and across cultures? A further limitation is that Rawlinson ignores some eastern teachers who have had a profound impact, even when, as with Osho Rajneesh or the Maharishi, they were very westernised.
But The Book of Enlightened Masters is long enough and pricey enough already. I know £31.50 is expensive but I think this book should be required reading for any westerner practising an eastern religion who wants to understand the historical and cultural context of their endeavours. Indeed no one interested in how society is developing can afford to overlook western teachers – and this book is an excellent guide.
Vishvapani
Books on the Karmapa Controversy
The Dance of 17 Lives
By Mick Brown
Karmapa
By Lea Terhune
Wrestling the Dragon
By Gaby Naher
Re-Enchantment
By Jeffrey Paine
Reviewed by Vishvapani
In 1959, listening to reports of the suppression of the Tibetan uprising, Chairman Mao interjected, “But what about the Dalai Lama?” Hearing he had escaped, Mao groaned, “In that case we have lost.” Mao was wrong in that Chinese rule of Tibet has never since been seriously threatened, but perhaps in another sense – in the battle of ideas – he was right. The Tibetans who survived the Cultural Revolution still love their lamas and cherish their Buddhist faith, and in exile Tibetan teachers eventually discovered a huge and growing new constituency among unchurched yet spiritually dissatisfied westerners. Buddhist teachings, especially as articulated by the Dalai Lama, are increasingly regarded by many in the West as sound advice on how to live happily and wisely. Who, following the horrors of its implementation, says the same of Maoism?
Variously designated “Living Buddha”, religious exemplar, feudal hierarch, and global icon of non-violence and inclusive spirituality, the Dalai Lama is the key to Tibetan loyalties and the tradition’s wider appeal. Above all, he is the exemplary tulku – an individual identified as the reborn manifestation of a spiritually advanced practitioner who directed his or her rebirth ‘for the benefit of living beings’ and therefore inherits the predecessor’s position. Westerners have been fascinated by tulkus since Mme Blavatsky first contacted her Himalayan Masters, attracted perhaps by the paradoxical combination suggested by Geophrey Samuel’s term “civilised shamans”. Tulkus offer accessible meditation practices and compelling teachings but augment these with the pre-modern glamour of prophecy, divination and miracles.
Jung noted the power for westerners of Tibet’s symbolic appeal, but thought that Asian archetypes were alien to the European psyche. Such volkisch-ness is outmoded, but later commentators such as Peter Bishop and Donald Lopez have explored how Tibetan Buddhism’s meaning changes in a new culture. In feudal Tibet tulkus formed a religious counterpart to the hereditary aristocracy, and Tibetans learned to navigate the system’s contradictions, regarding tulkus as emanations of Buddhas whilst knowing that they frequently engaged in political feuding so byzantine that westerners are often warned to stay out as they will never fathom the issues.
Most western responses to Tibetan Buddhism are innocent of such paradoxes, however, and popular accounts of encounters with the tradition and its tulkus, such as the books under review, tend to idealization or bemusement. Three of them concern the controversy surrounding the recognition of one of the most important tulkus, the Karmapa, the leading figure in the Kagyu school, which broke onto the front pages in 2002 when the fourteen-year-old Urgyen Thinley, recognised by the Dalai Lama and the Chinese alike as the Seventeenth Karmapa, slipped his guards at the monastery in Tibet to which he was confined, and escaped across the Himalayas. He emerged into a media storm, a diplomatic spat between India and China, and the escalation of a dispute between the regents charged by the Sixteenth Karmapa to identify his tulku. A bitter disagreement had developed, with Urgyen Thinley’s supporters and two of the regents on one side, and on the other the third regent – the Sharmapa – who had identified his own candidate. So acrimonious was the dispute that when a fourth regent died in a car crash accusations of foul play abounded.
The books by Mick Brown and Lea Terhune are enjoyable and informative, though Gaby Naher’s is weaker, but none of them matches the standard set by Isabel Hilton’s account of a parallel controversy, The Search for the Panchen Lama, which mixed investigative journalism, political commentary and history with sharp intelligence. Where she was both intellectually vigorous and sympathetic to the individuals involved, none of these books is wholly equal to this complex and beguiling territory.
Gaby Naher hoped to write an account of a personal connection with Urgyen Thinley (about whose status as Karmapa she has no doubts). But the young man seems to have been more concerned with his Buddhist studies, and granted her only fleeting interviews. She is reduced to describing her admiration for the hawk-eyed “Tibetan Keanu Reeves” and her misadventures en route. Naher is an activist for Tibetan independence who wants to promote the cause by promoting ‘the Karmapa’. But this is idealization at its most instrumental and naïve, and it renders her oblivious to the power-struggle that surrounds the Karmapa succession.
Lea Terhune’s book is more sober and more searching, indeed it is the most factually informative on the three in its account of Tibetan history, the Karmapa lineage, and the current dispute. It offers a helpful presentation of the issues, but it is avowedly partisan, being written by a journalist who is also a long-time Kagyu practitioner and a disciple of Urgyen Thinley’s teachers. In particular it fails adequately to address the Sharmapa’s case or his accusations against his opponents. It does, however invoke some of the complexities of ‘the politics of reincarnation such as the power-vacuum that threatens when the Dalai Lama’s retires or dies. After him, who will offer leadership for Tibetans in Tibet and in exile? Who will maintain the Tibetans’ global profile? And who will fill the gap in the western psychic economy?
Urgyen Thinley’s potential to do this becomes increasingly apparent in The Dance of 17 Lives as Mick Brown describes his growing admiration. Brown is one of the few capable British writers addressing religious or spiritual themes in a n intelligent, popular vein. As in his previous book, The Spiritual Tourist, Brown foregrounds himself as a sympathetic but sceptical investigator, who eloquently describes his encounters with the protagonists – to whom he gets commendably close – and his own wary responses. This is a thoughtful, readable work and Brown’s unaffiliated stance frees him to explore the disputes complexities, although one senses that he is just touching its surface. He is best at evoking the drama of the Tibetans’ religious politics and its impact on westerners. When the Sharmapa first told a largely western audience his belief that Urgyen Thinley’s sponsors were engaged in a giant political game, Brown writes, “there was an audible intake of breath. It was the sound of illusions shattering. Could the Sharmapa possibly be accusing another high lama of lies, forgery, a massive act of deception?”
Each of these books leaves one with the sense that the Sharmapa is a troublesome politician while Urgyen Thinley is the ‘real’ Karmapa. But to draw such a conclusion requires accepting the Tibetan wordview within which a Karmapa can be considered ‘real – complete with directed rebirth, and a quasi-feudal spiritual hierarchical. Only Brown seems aware of the difficulty this prompts – or should prompt – for outsiders to this worldview. Going further still, while the Sharmapa’s western listeners leapt into the dispute on behalf of their candidate (and they have already posted lengthy rebuttals of Brown’s and Trehune’s books on the internet) this story prompts one to ask: if tulkus can behave this way then why are they worth revering as “living Buddhas”? And, while Buddhism has much to offer westerners, how on earth have they found themselves involved in all this?
It is clear from the characters described in Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West that similar questions have already been exported to the West. There is Jetsunma, the Brooklyn housewife turned New Age teacher who was identified as a tulku and has attracted both controversy and devotion. And there is Stephen Seagal, the Hollywood action movie star whose identification as the rebirth past teacher prompted derision and allegations of corruption. But while Jeffrey Paine’s portrait of Tibetan Buddhism in the West is part-phantasmagoria, it is also part-celebration. He describes remarkable characters such as Tenzin Palmo, the English nun who spent a decade meditating with fierce intensity in a Himalayan cave, and Jarvis Masters who writes powerful accounts of his life as a Buddhist on Death Row. Re-Enchantment is an excellent introduction to the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism’s arrival in the West, suitable for students of contemporary religion and for general readers. Most of the stories are familiar, but Paine tells them with elegance and erudition, adding considerable extra research.
It is too easy to dismiss western practice of Tibetan Buddhism along the lines of Jung’s comment that "yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake". Tibetan Buddhism is not snake-oil, and, as Re-Enchantment shows, its effect on North America has been substantial and far-reaching. But its insights and practices are expressed through symbols and embedded in shamanistic beliefs and practices. These are a considerable part of Tibetan Buddhism’s appeal, but they are not what it most has to offer outsiders and, as the Karmapa dispute shows, taking the whole Tibetan package involves one in ancient and essentially irrelevant contentions. When telephones and telepathy collide we need guidance; Mick Brown and Jeffrey Paine are engaging fellow-travelers, but neither has a map, and on this evidence we are only just starting to disentangle what the Tibetans brought with them out of their long seclusion.
The Dance of 17 Lives
The Incredible True Story of Tibet’s 17th Karmapa
By Mick Brown
Bloomsbury, 288pp, £16.99 h/b
ISBN 0 7475 7161 9
Published 2004
Karmapa
The Politics of Reincarnation
By Lea Terhune
Wisdom, 308pp. £11.95 p/b
ISBN: 0 86171 180 7
Published 2004
Wrestling the Dragon
In Search of the Boy Lama Who Defied China
By Gaby Naher
Rider, 294pp., £9.99 p/b
ISBN: 184413231 1
Published 1 October 2004
Re-Enchantment
Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West
By Jeffrey Paine
Norton, £15.99, 261pp. h/b
ISBN 0 393 01968
Published 2004© Vishvapani, 2006
By Mick Brown
Karmapa
By Lea Terhune
Wrestling the Dragon
By Gaby Naher
Re-Enchantment
By Jeffrey Paine
Reviewed by Vishvapani
In 1959, listening to reports of the suppression of the Tibetan uprising, Chairman Mao interjected, “But what about the Dalai Lama?” Hearing he had escaped, Mao groaned, “In that case we have lost.” Mao was wrong in that Chinese rule of Tibet has never since been seriously threatened, but perhaps in another sense – in the battle of ideas – he was right. The Tibetans who survived the Cultural Revolution still love their lamas and cherish their Buddhist faith, and in exile Tibetan teachers eventually discovered a huge and growing new constituency among unchurched yet spiritually dissatisfied westerners. Buddhist teachings, especially as articulated by the Dalai Lama, are increasingly regarded by many in the West as sound advice on how to live happily and wisely. Who, following the horrors of its implementation, says the same of Maoism?
Variously designated “Living Buddha”, religious exemplar, feudal hierarch, and global icon of non-violence and inclusive spirituality, the Dalai Lama is the key to Tibetan loyalties and the tradition’s wider appeal. Above all, he is the exemplary tulku – an individual identified as the reborn manifestation of a spiritually advanced practitioner who directed his or her rebirth ‘for the benefit of living beings’ and therefore inherits the predecessor’s position. Westerners have been fascinated by tulkus since Mme Blavatsky first contacted her Himalayan Masters, attracted perhaps by the paradoxical combination suggested by Geophrey Samuel’s term “civilised shamans”. Tulkus offer accessible meditation practices and compelling teachings but augment these with the pre-modern glamour of prophecy, divination and miracles.
Jung noted the power for westerners of Tibet’s symbolic appeal, but thought that Asian archetypes were alien to the European psyche. Such volkisch-ness is outmoded, but later commentators such as Peter Bishop and Donald Lopez have explored how Tibetan Buddhism’s meaning changes in a new culture. In feudal Tibet tulkus formed a religious counterpart to the hereditary aristocracy, and Tibetans learned to navigate the system’s contradictions, regarding tulkus as emanations of Buddhas whilst knowing that they frequently engaged in political feuding so byzantine that westerners are often warned to stay out as they will never fathom the issues.
Most western responses to Tibetan Buddhism are innocent of such paradoxes, however, and popular accounts of encounters with the tradition and its tulkus, such as the books under review, tend to idealization or bemusement. Three of them concern the controversy surrounding the recognition of one of the most important tulkus, the Karmapa, the leading figure in the Kagyu school, which broke onto the front pages in 2002 when the fourteen-year-old Urgyen Thinley, recognised by the Dalai Lama and the Chinese alike as the Seventeenth Karmapa, slipped his guards at the monastery in Tibet to which he was confined, and escaped across the Himalayas. He emerged into a media storm, a diplomatic spat between India and China, and the escalation of a dispute between the regents charged by the Sixteenth Karmapa to identify his tulku. A bitter disagreement had developed, with Urgyen Thinley’s supporters and two of the regents on one side, and on the other the third regent – the Sharmapa – who had identified his own candidate. So acrimonious was the dispute that when a fourth regent died in a car crash accusations of foul play abounded.
The books by Mick Brown and Lea Terhune are enjoyable and informative, though Gaby Naher’s is weaker, but none of them matches the standard set by Isabel Hilton’s account of a parallel controversy, The Search for the Panchen Lama, which mixed investigative journalism, political commentary and history with sharp intelligence. Where she was both intellectually vigorous and sympathetic to the individuals involved, none of these books is wholly equal to this complex and beguiling territory.
Gaby Naher hoped to write an account of a personal connection with Urgyen Thinley (about whose status as Karmapa she has no doubts). But the young man seems to have been more concerned with his Buddhist studies, and granted her only fleeting interviews. She is reduced to describing her admiration for the hawk-eyed “Tibetan Keanu Reeves” and her misadventures en route. Naher is an activist for Tibetan independence who wants to promote the cause by promoting ‘the Karmapa’. But this is idealization at its most instrumental and naïve, and it renders her oblivious to the power-struggle that surrounds the Karmapa succession.
Lea Terhune’s book is more sober and more searching, indeed it is the most factually informative on the three in its account of Tibetan history, the Karmapa lineage, and the current dispute. It offers a helpful presentation of the issues, but it is avowedly partisan, being written by a journalist who is also a long-time Kagyu practitioner and a disciple of Urgyen Thinley’s teachers. In particular it fails adequately to address the Sharmapa’s case or his accusations against his opponents. It does, however invoke some of the complexities of ‘the politics of reincarnation such as the power-vacuum that threatens when the Dalai Lama’s retires or dies. After him, who will offer leadership for Tibetans in Tibet and in exile? Who will maintain the Tibetans’ global profile? And who will fill the gap in the western psychic economy?
Urgyen Thinley’s potential to do this becomes increasingly apparent in The Dance of 17 Lives as Mick Brown describes his growing admiration. Brown is one of the few capable British writers addressing religious or spiritual themes in a n intelligent, popular vein. As in his previous book, The Spiritual Tourist, Brown foregrounds himself as a sympathetic but sceptical investigator, who eloquently describes his encounters with the protagonists – to whom he gets commendably close – and his own wary responses. This is a thoughtful, readable work and Brown’s unaffiliated stance frees him to explore the disputes complexities, although one senses that he is just touching its surface. He is best at evoking the drama of the Tibetans’ religious politics and its impact on westerners. When the Sharmapa first told a largely western audience his belief that Urgyen Thinley’s sponsors were engaged in a giant political game, Brown writes, “there was an audible intake of breath. It was the sound of illusions shattering. Could the Sharmapa possibly be accusing another high lama of lies, forgery, a massive act of deception?”
Each of these books leaves one with the sense that the Sharmapa is a troublesome politician while Urgyen Thinley is the ‘real’ Karmapa. But to draw such a conclusion requires accepting the Tibetan wordview within which a Karmapa can be considered ‘real – complete with directed rebirth, and a quasi-feudal spiritual hierarchical. Only Brown seems aware of the difficulty this prompts – or should prompt – for outsiders to this worldview. Going further still, while the Sharmapa’s western listeners leapt into the dispute on behalf of their candidate (and they have already posted lengthy rebuttals of Brown’s and Trehune’s books on the internet) this story prompts one to ask: if tulkus can behave this way then why are they worth revering as “living Buddhas”? And, while Buddhism has much to offer westerners, how on earth have they found themselves involved in all this?
It is clear from the characters described in Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West that similar questions have already been exported to the West. There is Jetsunma, the Brooklyn housewife turned New Age teacher who was identified as a tulku and has attracted both controversy and devotion. And there is Stephen Seagal, the Hollywood action movie star whose identification as the rebirth past teacher prompted derision and allegations of corruption. But while Jeffrey Paine’s portrait of Tibetan Buddhism in the West is part-phantasmagoria, it is also part-celebration. He describes remarkable characters such as Tenzin Palmo, the English nun who spent a decade meditating with fierce intensity in a Himalayan cave, and Jarvis Masters who writes powerful accounts of his life as a Buddhist on Death Row. Re-Enchantment is an excellent introduction to the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism’s arrival in the West, suitable for students of contemporary religion and for general readers. Most of the stories are familiar, but Paine tells them with elegance and erudition, adding considerable extra research.
It is too easy to dismiss western practice of Tibetan Buddhism along the lines of Jung’s comment that "yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake". Tibetan Buddhism is not snake-oil, and, as Re-Enchantment shows, its effect on North America has been substantial and far-reaching. But its insights and practices are expressed through symbols and embedded in shamanistic beliefs and practices. These are a considerable part of Tibetan Buddhism’s appeal, but they are not what it most has to offer outsiders and, as the Karmapa dispute shows, taking the whole Tibetan package involves one in ancient and essentially irrelevant contentions. When telephones and telepathy collide we need guidance; Mick Brown and Jeffrey Paine are engaging fellow-travelers, but neither has a map, and on this evidence we are only just starting to disentangle what the Tibetans brought with them out of their long seclusion.
The Dance of 17 Lives
The Incredible True Story of Tibet’s 17th Karmapa
By Mick Brown
Bloomsbury, 288pp, £16.99 h/b
ISBN 0 7475 7161 9
Published 2004
Karmapa
The Politics of Reincarnation
By Lea Terhune
Wisdom, 308pp. £11.95 p/b
ISBN: 0 86171 180 7
Published 2004
Wrestling the Dragon
In Search of the Boy Lama Who Defied China
By Gaby Naher
Rider, 294pp., £9.99 p/b
ISBN: 184413231 1
Published 1 October 2004
Re-Enchantment
Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West
By Jeffrey Paine
Norton, £15.99, 261pp. h/b
ISBN 0 393 01968
Published 2004© Vishvapani, 2006
Contemporary Buddhism: an Interdisciplinary Journal
Contemporary Buddhism: an Interdisciplinary Journal
Ed. Michael McGhee and John Peacock
Volume 1, 1 & 2; Volume 2, 1 & 2
Curzon Press, 247pp. and 236pp.
Yearly subscription (2 issues) Individuals: £25, Institutions: £80
ISSN 1 463-9947
Published Spring and Autumn 2000 and 2001
Reviewed by Vishvapani
This review first appeared in the Times Higher Educational Supplement
Elias Canetti’s novel, Auto da Fe concerns Peter Kein, a sinologist who lives only for his books. Kein’s life is overturned when his housekeeper marries him and turns him out of his house. His books are burnt and he is set adrift in a nightmare world befriended only by a dwarf of evil propensities (what is it with expressionists and dwarves?) and left to contemplate the vulnerability of the dissociated intellect. Kein is a scholar in oriental languages, and for Canetti such endeavours are a byword for arcana, the obscurity that offers escape, and Kein resembles the Prospero in Milan, “rapt in secret studies.”
Kein offers an image of a time when western engagement with Buddhism was once largely philological. Latterly, however, it has entered a wider sphere. The intellectual encounter between Buddhism and the West now includes extensive interaction between Buddhist thought and philosophy, science and psychology, among many other disciplines. Buddhist concerns apparently speak especially loudly at present to post-modernists, theoretical physicists and psychotherapists. And not only is Buddhism of interest to scholars whose works have effects beyond the academy, there are many people who actually practice it. The number of Buddhists of European descent in Europe and North America is now well over a million, many of whom are both serious practitioners and intellectually curious.
Contemporary Buddhism: an Interdisciplinary Journal attempts to bridge the gaps between the diverse disciplines that study Buddhist-related issues, and to make scholarly findings and conjectures more accessible. As Michael McGhee writes in the opening editorial, Contemporary Buddhism “has a natural audience within this new Western Buddhist population, that of an educated, critical Buddhist public concerned to relate Buddhist issues to practical ones in the context of the Dharma.” In this endeavour Contemporary Buddhism undoubtedly addresses a need. The most prominent Buddhist magazines seem only occasionally to risk over-estimating their readers’ attention spans; and the only comparable academic journal is the online Journal of Buddhist Ethics, which does an excellent job in a narrower field.
By contrast the aims of Contemporary Buddhism are so broad and its audience is so diverse that there is frequently a sense that the Journal lacks focus. Indeed it is hard to imagine a reader who would feel adequately addressed, say, by both Frank J. Hoffman’s discussion of “Buddhism and Human Rights” (vol.2, no.2), which draws on technical jurisprudence, and Todd Lorendz’ entertaining but speculative thoughts on Buddhism and quantum physics (vol.1, no.2).
But between these poles are some excellent articles that find an appropriate level. One strand that seems successful to me is pieces by specialists explaining to a lay audience their own research or current thinking in their field. Andrew Skilton’s account of the editorial reconstruction that is often necessary before even important Buddhist texts can be translated is a valuable caution to ordinary readers to whom such editing is invisible (vol.1, no.1). Gay Watson’s “Buddhism, Consciousness Studies and Psychotherapy” is an excellent introduction to recent thinking in this area, as well as a summary of her own ideas (vol. 1,2). Watson’s article is, moreover, focused by a desire to distil conclusions that can inform the practice of the many psychotherapists who look to Buddhism for guidance.
A second successful strand is articles that explore specialist concerns but whose conclusions speak to broader interests. Patricia Sieber’s article on poet and Zen practitioner Jane Hirschfield demonstrates how a seemingly unconnected discipline, in this case literary criticism, can illuminate the transmission of Buddhism to the West. Also successful are some of the articles in which scholars reflect on matters of general interest. The outstanding contributor of such pieces is David Loy, a leading theoretician of Engaged Buddhism. Of his several contributions I particularly appreciated “Saving Time: Buddhist Perspectives on the End” (vol.1, no.1), which discusses the philosophy of time and the constructed nature of our experience of time as a prelude to exploring the possibility of reconstructing this experience in the light of Buddhist teachings.
Writers capable of translating from their specialism to a wider public without losing clarity are always scarce and Contemporary Buddhism perhaps requires them in greater numbers than its editors have found. Several articles would be more at home in a specialist journal than an interdisciplinary one, and there are occasional signs of editorial desperation. The most excessive of these is Kate Crosby’s 55-page literature survey that seeks to bring important research on “Tantric Theravada” (vol.1, no.2) out of the utmost obscurity in which it currently languishes into the relative obscurity of scholarly discussion. These are laudable aims, but not those of this journal and the article doesn’t belong here.<<
Though it would be uncharitable to dwell on other unsuccessful articles, I cannot avoid mentioning that these volumes are marred by numerous proofing errors. The editors should, however be congratulated on finding at least some authors who can transcend their specialism. The Journal is less successful in the harder task of relating academic findings to the practice of Buddhist spiritual life – which would require something other than typical academic method. A starting point for this might be found if contributors who are practising Buddhists were prepared to declare themselves. In particular, of the several contributors, including one of the editors, who are members of the Western Buddhist Order (to which I myself belong) none mention this currently unfashionable fact.
I shall continue to read Contemporary Buddhism with interest, and perhaps it already makes, in a small way, the contribution towards “a(n ecumenical) Buddhist culture in which the intellectual life and the spiritual life mutually inform one another” to which the editors aspire. Most valuable is its capacity to open academic insights to those (not just Buddhists) with a non-specialist interest in Buddhism. I have a final request to the editors: more and longer book reviews, please. It would be good to read sociologists on the work of psychotherapists; literary critics considering translations; Buddhist teachers examining Buddhology, and vice versa in many combinations. That would make for a truly rewarding inter- (and extra-) disciplinary encounter.
Ed. Michael McGhee and John Peacock
Volume 1, 1 & 2; Volume 2, 1 & 2
Curzon Press, 247pp. and 236pp.
Yearly subscription (2 issues) Individuals: £25, Institutions: £80
ISSN 1 463-9947
Published Spring and Autumn 2000 and 2001
Reviewed by Vishvapani
This review first appeared in the Times Higher Educational Supplement
Elias Canetti’s novel, Auto da Fe concerns Peter Kein, a sinologist who lives only for his books. Kein’s life is overturned when his housekeeper marries him and turns him out of his house. His books are burnt and he is set adrift in a nightmare world befriended only by a dwarf of evil propensities (what is it with expressionists and dwarves?) and left to contemplate the vulnerability of the dissociated intellect. Kein is a scholar in oriental languages, and for Canetti such endeavours are a byword for arcana, the obscurity that offers escape, and Kein resembles the Prospero in Milan, “rapt in secret studies.”
Kein offers an image of a time when western engagement with Buddhism was once largely philological. Latterly, however, it has entered a wider sphere. The intellectual encounter between Buddhism and the West now includes extensive interaction between Buddhist thought and philosophy, science and psychology, among many other disciplines. Buddhist concerns apparently speak especially loudly at present to post-modernists, theoretical physicists and psychotherapists. And not only is Buddhism of interest to scholars whose works have effects beyond the academy, there are many people who actually practice it. The number of Buddhists of European descent in Europe and North America is now well over a million, many of whom are both serious practitioners and intellectually curious.
Contemporary Buddhism: an Interdisciplinary Journal attempts to bridge the gaps between the diverse disciplines that study Buddhist-related issues, and to make scholarly findings and conjectures more accessible. As Michael McGhee writes in the opening editorial, Contemporary Buddhism “has a natural audience within this new Western Buddhist population, that of an educated, critical Buddhist public concerned to relate Buddhist issues to practical ones in the context of the Dharma.” In this endeavour Contemporary Buddhism undoubtedly addresses a need. The most prominent Buddhist magazines seem only occasionally to risk over-estimating their readers’ attention spans; and the only comparable academic journal is the online Journal of Buddhist Ethics, which does an excellent job in a narrower field.
By contrast the aims of Contemporary Buddhism are so broad and its audience is so diverse that there is frequently a sense that the Journal lacks focus. Indeed it is hard to imagine a reader who would feel adequately addressed, say, by both Frank J. Hoffman’s discussion of “Buddhism and Human Rights” (vol.2, no.2), which draws on technical jurisprudence, and Todd Lorendz’ entertaining but speculative thoughts on Buddhism and quantum physics (vol.1, no.2).
But between these poles are some excellent articles that find an appropriate level. One strand that seems successful to me is pieces by specialists explaining to a lay audience their own research or current thinking in their field. Andrew Skilton’s account of the editorial reconstruction that is often necessary before even important Buddhist texts can be translated is a valuable caution to ordinary readers to whom such editing is invisible (vol.1, no.1). Gay Watson’s “Buddhism, Consciousness Studies and Psychotherapy” is an excellent introduction to recent thinking in this area, as well as a summary of her own ideas (vol. 1,2). Watson’s article is, moreover, focused by a desire to distil conclusions that can inform the practice of the many psychotherapists who look to Buddhism for guidance.
A second successful strand is articles that explore specialist concerns but whose conclusions speak to broader interests. Patricia Sieber’s article on poet and Zen practitioner Jane Hirschfield demonstrates how a seemingly unconnected discipline, in this case literary criticism, can illuminate the transmission of Buddhism to the West. Also successful are some of the articles in which scholars reflect on matters of general interest. The outstanding contributor of such pieces is David Loy, a leading theoretician of Engaged Buddhism. Of his several contributions I particularly appreciated “Saving Time: Buddhist Perspectives on the End” (vol.1, no.1), which discusses the philosophy of time and the constructed nature of our experience of time as a prelude to exploring the possibility of reconstructing this experience in the light of Buddhist teachings.
Writers capable of translating from their specialism to a wider public without losing clarity are always scarce and Contemporary Buddhism perhaps requires them in greater numbers than its editors have found. Several articles would be more at home in a specialist journal than an interdisciplinary one, and there are occasional signs of editorial desperation. The most excessive of these is Kate Crosby’s 55-page literature survey that seeks to bring important research on “Tantric Theravada” (vol.1, no.2) out of the utmost obscurity in which it currently languishes into the relative obscurity of scholarly discussion. These are laudable aims, but not those of this journal and the article doesn’t belong here.<<
Though it would be uncharitable to dwell on other unsuccessful articles, I cannot avoid mentioning that these volumes are marred by numerous proofing errors. The editors should, however be congratulated on finding at least some authors who can transcend their specialism. The Journal is less successful in the harder task of relating academic findings to the practice of Buddhist spiritual life – which would require something other than typical academic method. A starting point for this might be found if contributors who are practising Buddhists were prepared to declare themselves. In particular, of the several contributors, including one of the editors, who are members of the Western Buddhist Order (to which I myself belong) none mention this currently unfashionable fact.
I shall continue to read Contemporary Buddhism with interest, and perhaps it already makes, in a small way, the contribution towards “a(n ecumenical) Buddhist culture in which the intellectual life and the spiritual life mutually inform one another” to which the editors aspire. Most valuable is its capacity to open academic insights to those (not just Buddhists) with a non-specialist interest in Buddhism. I have a final request to the editors: more and longer book reviews, please. It would be good to read sociologists on the work of psychotherapists; literary critics considering translations; Buddhist teachers examining Buddhology, and vice versa in many combinations. That would make for a truly rewarding inter- (and extra-) disciplinary encounter.
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