[Buddha-l] Lamas and such

[S. A. Feite]

On Dec 3, 2009, at 1:27 PM, Mitchell Ginsberg wrote:

> Departing from the trip that stories took from the Indian sub- 
> continent westwards ho, I was recently in Beijing and was taken to  
> what was called a lamasery. This I found a special neologism (in my  
> idiolect, in any case) based on monestary + lama. It was in fact a  
> functioning Tibetan Buddhist sangha. My son's friend who took us  
> there says that she goes there regularly to pray and to offer  
> incense burnings. (I'm not sure of what she would say in Chinese.)
> Well, that aside (somewhat), I was relatedly talking to someone  
> here recently and I mentioned talk of Lamaism (the book One Year in  
> Tibet). I was chastised for using an outmoded and derogatory term.  
> When I went to a book by Guiseppe Tucci (not the cookbook giving  
> information on the passage of noodle dishes from China to Italy,  
> but the Buddhologist), The Religions of Tibet, he referred to  
> Lamaism with no interest in insulting anyone.
> Is contemporary Tibetan Buddhist scholarship avoiding this term  
> completely? Is it seen as necessarily derogatory (even if we don't  
> read back into time to say that Tucci was therefore attacking  
> Tibetan Buddhism)?


Donald Lopez, Jr.'s 1998 work _Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan  
Buddhism and the West_ in it's first chapter, "The Name", details the  
history of the neologism Lamaism, Lamaist, etc. in considerable  
detail, showing how it is basically a derogatory term. I would  
suspect lamasery (which I seem to recall from reading the German  
Ernst Lothar Hoffman, aka, Anagarika Govinda's books) would be  
similarly considered bad form. It is also associated with Theosophy  
IIRC.

As early as 1835 German Buddhist scholar Issac Jacob Schmidt, who  
studied the Buddhism of the Kalmyks in Russia, wrote "On Lamaism and  
the Meaninglessness of the Term". So the dislike of the term is not new.

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"Altogether, therefore, "Lamaism" is an undesirable designation for  
the Buddhism of Tibet, and is rightly dropping out of use."  -L. A.  
Waddell, 1915.

"Lamaism was a combination of the esoteric Buddhism of India, China  
and Japan with native cults of the Himalayas.  National Gallery of  
Art brochure, 1991.

-Steve Feite