[Buddha-l] "Western Self, Asian Other"

[Dan Lusthaus]

> Hello Alex.
>
> I just read that short article you referred to and did not feel it came
> across as 'patronizing contempt' at all.
>
> Thanks for the link
>
> Bankei

Lopez is trying to play myth-buster. Thurman's objections are based on the 
idea that Tibet's mystique is a useful tool for eliciting support for 
Tibetan liberation from China, and undermining that mystique therefore has 
dire consequences for actual flesh-and-blood Tibetans, who rely on that 
support for hope.

As a myth-buster, Lopez tries to sensationalize his supposed revelations 
(most are just common-place knowledge amongst scholars, if not all Western 
devotees). Into that, he mixes his own bag of questionable assertions. Let's 
take Alex's linked piece, on the 7 things you didn't know about Tibet.

1. Shangri-la is a made-up western name, possibly corruption of Shambhala. 
So?

2. The most wide-read book on Tibet is T. Lopsang Rampa's The Third Eye. I 
don't know if that quantitative claim is true (I confess to having read it 
back in my high school days -- always found it suspicious), but I know it 
still has its fans (including a Vietnamese monk friend who refuses to 
believe that it's a hoax). Are people still reading that tripe? It was 
understandable some decades ago when the available literature in English on 
Tibet was miniscule, but today, with Snow Lion, et al. pumping out 
Tibetophilic offerings at an alarming rate (and often questionable quality), 
why would anyone want to revert to Rampa's nonsense?

3. "Tibetans have never heard of the Tibetan Book of the Dead". Well, that's 
a bit of Madison Ave oversell. That's like saying New Yorkers have never 
heard of NY Pizza (since no one calls it that in NY).

4. Here's a Lopezism that most scholars I know have not found persuasive 
(Richard, you're our resident Skt grammarian -- I think you've already 
weighed in on this on buddha-l, here's a chance to revisit the issue). I 
quote Lopez:

"Here is something for the initiated: The most famous of all Buddhist 
mantras, om mani padme hum, does not mean "the jewel in the lotus." It means 
instead, "O Jewel-Lotus." Nineteenth-century European scholars of Sanskrit 
misread a vocative ending as a locative ending, thus thinking that the jewel 
(mani) was in the lotus (padme)..."

Richard, set us straight, but my grammar sources tell me that the vocative 
of padma is padma, and that padme is indeed a locative. This was supposed to 
be one of Lopez's big hermeneutic discoveries. I don't buy it.
http://sanskrit.inria.fr/cgi-bin/sktdeclin?t=VH&q=padma&g=Mas&font=roma

5. "The most common Western name for Tibetan Buddhism, "Lamaism," is 
considered a disparaging term by Tibetans." This is a subject that has been 
recently discussed on buddha-l, and one of the facts that came into evidence 
was that whoever it was that found the term objectionable, that did not 
include Tibetans who, as was demonstrated, continue to use it themselves.

6. "Because Tibet never became a European colony, it remained-and for many, 
continues to remain-a land of mystery for the West." Oh?! That's the reason? 
How post-colonial of Lopez to notice that!

7. "Tibet was not a non-violent society, even after the Dalai Lamas assumed 
secular control in 1642." And he goes on to offer some important examples. 
This is the sort of myth-busting that will throw Richard into apoplexy 
(perhaps he will give us a demonstration of a Western scholar declaring the 
last five hundred years of Tibetan Buddhism to not be Buddhist, or to be a 
decadent misundertanding of Buddhism?). Reminder that _Buddhist Warfare_, 
ed. by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer --  
http://tinyurl.com/yeyufef -- is now available. I've got my copy. Important 
reading for self-styled Western Buddhists.

Dan