Prisoners Of Shangri La

Intro -- Contents -- Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: The Name -- Chapter Two: The Book -- Chapter Three: The Eye -- Chapter Four: The Spell -- Chapter Five: The Art -- Chapter Six: The Field -- Chapter Seven: The Prison -- Notes -- Index

“Lively and engaging . . . raises important questions about how Eastern religions are often co-opted, assimilated and misunderstood by Western culture.” —Publishers Weekly Donald Lopez provides the first cultural history of the strange encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Charting the flights of Western fantasies of Tibet and its Buddhist legacy, Lopez presents fanciful visions of Tibetan life and religion, ranging from the utopian to the demonic. He examines, among much else, the politics of the term “Lamaism”, a pejorative name for Tibet's religion; the various theosophical, psychedelic, and New Age purposes served by The Tibetan Book of the Dead; the strange case of the Englishman with three eyes; and the unexpected history of the most famous of all Buddhist mantras, om mani padme hum. Throughout, Lopez demonstrates how myths of Tibet pervade both the products of pop culture and learned scholarly works. In his new preface to this anniversary edition, Lopez returns to the metaphors of prison and paradise to illuminate the state of Tibetan Buddhism—both in exile and in Tibet—as monks and nuns still seek to find a way home. Prisoners of Shangri-La remains a timely and vital inquiry into Western fantasies of Tibet. “Proceeding with care and precision, Lopez reveals the extent to which scholars have behaved like intellectual colonialists. . . . Someone had to burst the bubble of pop Tibetology, and few could have done it as resoundingly as Lopez.” —Booklist “Lopez's book shows that . . . when the West has looked at Tibet, all that it has seen is a distorted reflection of itself.” —Ben Jackson, Times Higher Education Supplement “A fine scholarly work.” —Kirkus Reviews

Lopez finds that even as Tibet's romance is invoked by exiled lamas, it ultimately imprisons those who seek the goal of Tibetan independence from Chinese occupation.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Islamic Shangri-La transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as it traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the 17th century to the present. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, David Atwill's vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid influences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, this book presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet's standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Carl Jung wrote a commentary on it, Timothy Leary redesigned it as a guidebook for an acid trip, and the Beatles quoted Leary's version in their song "Tomorrow Never Knows." More recently, the book has been adopted by the hospice movement, enshrined by Penguin Classics, and made into an audiobook read by Richard Gere. Yet, as acclaimed writer and scholar of Buddhism Donald Lopez writes, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death." In this compelling introduction and short history, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered--and so misunderstood--in the West. The central character in this story is Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965), an eccentric scholar and spiritual seeker from Trenton, New Jersey, who, despite not knowing the Tibetan language and never visiting the country, crafted and named The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, Lopez argues, Evans-Wentz's book is much more American than Tibetan, owing a greater debt to Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky than to the lamas of the Land of Snows. Indeed, Lopez suggests that the book's perennial appeal stems not only from its origins in magical and mysterious Tibet, but also from the way Evans-Wentz translated the text into the language of a very American spirituality.

A critical history of the study of Buddhism in the West, incorporating insights of colonial and post-colonial cultural studies. Social, political and cultural conditions that have shaped the course of Buddhist studies are discussed.

"Echoes of Dharamsala takes us deep into exile as a performance space, a refugee home on the diasporic range. The metaphor of reverberation comes very much to life as Keila Diehl bears witness to the emergent politics and poetics of Tibetan rock and roll. Compassionate and modest, yet incisive and unromantic, her writing brings us close to amazingly complicated musical lives being forged in a distinct global conjuncture of modernity, desire, and longing."—Steven Feld, Prof. of Music and Anthropology, Columbia University "Echoes from Dharamsala is a charmingly written, ethnographically rich, theoretically ambitious book about a Tibetan community in exile. Keila Diehl joined a Tibetan rock band as its keyboard player, and from that perspective gives us a fresh and honest look at the Tibetan refugee experience through its soundscapes. She has presented us with a model of ethnography, which while not shying away from representing the conflicts and contradictions of the community she studied, nevertheless displays a deep political solidarity with the Tibetan cause."—Akhil Gupta, author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India "Giving new meaning to "participant-observation," Keila Diehl explores the politics and poetics of Tibetan cultural production in exile, in a study that is at once engaging and insightful."—Donald S. Lopez, author of Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West

"This book is an introduction to Buddhism told as the story of the Korean pilgrim Hyecho, who traveled through the Buddhist world during its eighth-century golden age. Lopez tells the story of Hyecho's journey, along the way introducing key elements of Buddhism--its basic doctrines, monastic institutions, relationship to Islam, and importance of pilgrimage.

In 1927, Oxford University Press published the first western-language translation of a collection of Tibetan funerary texts (the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo) under the title The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Since that time, the work has established a powerful hold on the western popular imagination, and is now considered a classic of spiritual literature. Over the years, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has inspired numerous commentaries, an illustrated edition, a play, a video series, and even an opera. Translators, scholars, and popular devotees of the book have claimed to explain its esoteric ideas and reveal its hidden meaning. Few, however, have uttered a word about its history. Bryan J. Cuevas seeks to fill this gap in our knowledge by offering the first comprehensive historical study of the Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Bardo, and by grounding it firmly in the context of Tibetan history and culture. He begins by discussing the many ways the texts have been understood (and misunderstood) by westerners, beginning with its first editor, the Oxford-educated anthropologist Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, and continuing through the present day. The remarkable fame of the book in the west, Cuevas argues, is strikingly disproportionate to how the original Tibetan texts were perceived in their own country. Cuevas tells the story of how The Tibetan Book of the Dead was compiled in Tibet, of the lives of those who preserved and transmitted it, and explores the history of the rituals through which the life of the dead is imagined in Tibetan society. This book provides not only a fascinating look at a popular and enduring spiritual work, but also a much-needed corrective to the proliferation of ahistorical scholarship surrounding The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Takes an alternative look at modern Buddhism from the perspective of prominent authors writing from 1873 to 1980, and includes biographical sketches for each entry.