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
Thursday, February 8, 2007
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.
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