[Buddha-l] FW: H-ASIA REVIEW Falcone on Huber 'India Re-Mapped: The Tibetan Geographies of Buddhist India'

[JKirkpatrick]

Jessica Falcone, author of this review, posted last year on the
Lama Zopa Maitreya Project theme park proposed for Kushinagar,
U.P. 
jk


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Toni Huber.  The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage & the Tibetan
Reinvention of Buddhist India.  Chicago  University of Chicago
Press, 2008.  464 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-35648-8.

X-posted, of interest to some of us.
JK
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Reviewed by Jessica Falcone, Warren Wilson College Published on
H-Asia (January, 2010) Commissioned by Sumit Guha

India Re-Mapped: The Tibetan Geographies of Buddhist India

Toni Huber's most recent scholarly contribution to Buddhist
studies, especially the sub-genres of Tibetan pilgrimage and
religious geography, makes a methodical foray into the heretofore
underexplored contours of the Tibetan geographies of Buddhist
India. Emerging from Huber's recognition that many Tibetan sacred
spaces have explicit or implied links to India, his goal for the
book project is ambitious: 
to trace the changing perspectives, borders, and maps of the
Indian holy land from the Tibetan perspective from the age of
ancient Tibetan empires to the present day. According to Huber,
_The Holy Land Reborn_ begins the work of filling in some of the
major holes in Buddhist scholarship that gloss over the
centrality of India in both Tibetan thought and Tibetan
pilgrimage practice. Less interested in musings upon sacred
spaces that can be found in some scholarly Tibetan monastic
discourses, Huber focuses on the history of Tibet's relationship
with India as a real and imagined pilgrimage place. This
investigation leads Huber and his readers over some familiar
terrain--to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar--but also to some
rather surprising places, such as Punjab, Bengal, and Assam.
Huber's diligently crafted history of the "shifting terrain" (p.
16) of Tibetan geographies of India will be of great interest and
value to scholars of anthropology, religion, and South Asian and
Tibetan area studies, in general, as well as to academics of
Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage more specifically. 

_The Holy Land Reborn_ has been divided into three parts, which
are loosely chronological. Part 1, "Locating and Dislocating the
Land of the Buddha," introduces the reader to the histories of
Tibetan views of and contacts with the India from ancient times
through the Middle Ages, as well as situates his themes in terms
of the modern scholastic work on Buddhist pilgrimage in India.
Part 2, "Reinventing the Holy Land in India," primarily through
the utilization of a series of case studies that elaborate a case
for creative reinvention of India by Tibetans, Huber picks up the
thread of Indo-Tibetan contacts, travel, and re-imaginations from
roughly the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. In part 3,
"Modern Rebirths of the Holy Land," Huber discusses the shifting
relationship of Tibetans and India in twentieth century, both
before and after the Chinese aggression that led to the
establishment of a long-term exile community in India. In this
review, I will explicate some of Huber's contributions by
discussing parts 1-3 sequentially before concluding with some
observations about some of the minor shortcomings of this
remarkable book.    

In part I, Huber succeeds in both showing the shifting nature of
Tibetan projections onto India, and demonstrating that such
changing geographies of interpretation are not necessarily a
particularly atypical way of reading the pilgrimage maps of
Buddhist India. Huber begins his work by arguing that some
existing work on the Tibetan views of sacred India assume a
fixity that is far from accurate. In an early chapter, in a
welcome gesture of academic reflexivity, Huber compares the
fluidity of the sacred Indias of Tibet through the ages with the
fluid geographies of even religious and historical studies of the
phenomena. In chapter 1, Huber argues that the "reinvention of
Buddhist India" is not a singularly Tibetan occupation; aside
from similar machinations of Buddhists from elsewhere, others
such as Orientalists, art historians, and Buddhologists have
their own history of trying to fix Buddhist geography in India by
using texts, art, and travel commentaries. Huber reviews the
various schemes of Buddhist sacred space in Indian _sutra_s and
historical texts, moving from two sites of the Buddha to four
sites to ten to thirty-two and back down to eight; he writes that
it is impossible to know which, if any, or all, of these sets of
sacred places were established pilgrimage routes set in stone.
Despite this lack of clarity, Huber notes, not only did
nineteenth-century scholars fetishize "eight chief places" and
begin to imprecisely link these places explicitly with ancient
pilgrimage practices, but as a result twentieth-century Buddhists
began to engage in pilgrimage to these eight sites as if reviving
an ancient tradition. As proof that the scholastic focus on
"eight" pilgrimage places was overstated, Huber goes on to show
that once Tibetans did begin visiting India for pilgrimage, their
travel accounts placed no premium at all upon visiting the
so-called eight places of the Buddha. 

I found Huber's discussion of Tibetan romanticism regarding India
to be quite significant, especially as it provides a counterpoint
to the recent works that instead emphasize the Western
exoticization of Tibetans past and present. Thus, Huber's work
extends a complicating counterpoint to the literature that
emphasizes only the Western Orientalism of the "East" without
noting that exoticization also exists in trans-Asian perspectives
as well. [About time! JK] Huber notes that despite periods of
infrequent Indo-Tibetan travel, Tibetans evinced a strong,
romantic attachment to the notion of a superior, robust Buddhist
land in India. It is not just that Tibetans lacked up-to-date
information about India in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
but rather that the ways in which the bits and pieces of
information were used, interpreted, and sometimes suppressed,
were generally done with the intention of promoting idealized
versions of a Buddhist holy land. 
Huber argues compellingly that in Tibet, India was so
romanticized that eleventh- and twelfth-century travelers brought
back somewhat exaggerated reports of the state of Buddhism there,
and that even much later, long after Buddhism had been pushed to
the margins of what is now India, certain Tibetan reports of
Buddhism's decline were ignored, rebuffed, and resisted by the
Tibetan Buddhist monastic establishment altogether. Huber's work
serves to illustrate the political and religious agency of
Tibetans who defined and created an India according to their own
perspectives and values. 

_The Holy Land Reborn_ also explores how Tibetan Vajrayana
(Tantric) Buddhism extends and reinterprets _pitha_ sites in
order to form another significant layer of sacred Indian
topographies. Huber explains that the _pitha_s are mapped onto
the meditative body, and also onto the known geographies of
Jambudvipa (the south continent in Buddhist cosmology), of which
India is thought to encompass the major part. His most important
contribution here is the astute observation that the _pitha_
terrain is eminently fluid over time; Huber gives an excellent
history of one of these sites, Devikota, and shows that over the
course of some seven centuries the site has been identified in a
total of eight places (half in India and half in Tibet). 

In part 2, Huber presents a handful of case studies of Tibetans
in India in the premodern years that reinforce his theme of fluid
sacred cartographies. Since the actual sites of the Buddha's life
were lost for several centuries, even the major sites of the
Buddha's life were open to Tibetan reinvention and rediscovery,
as Huber illustrates through his explication of the replication
of Buddhist sites in Assam, far from the Gangetic plains. The
book details the history of about three hundred years, from the
late sixteenth or early seventeenth century to the twentieth
century, during which many Tibetan pilgrims journeyed to Assam
fully believing that they were visiting the actual historical
sites from the Buddha's life, such as Kushinagar, Bodh Gaya, et
cetera. 

Toni Huber's new book is especially fascinating when he describes
the unlikely ground claimed by Tibetan Buddhists for their own,
such as sites in Punjab that arguably had nothing to do with
Buddhism before; the eighteenth-century identification of sites
in Punjab as significant hagiographic places now associated with
Padhmasambhava. Equally significant, the appropriation of sites
went both ways, as Huber also mentioned a Tibetan Buddhist sacred
site in the Himalayas where Sikhs arrived to find Tibetans
worshipping "Guru Rinpoche," and then intuited that they had
found a lost site of Guru Nanak. 

In part 3, Huber begins his exposition on modern Tibetan
pilgrimage in India with a discussion of how the Panchen Lama and
the Dalai Lama of the early twentieth century made sense of the
modern Buddhist revivalist movement, as well as the discoveries
of British archaeology. His exposition of twentieth-century
Tibetan pilgrimage emphasizes the place of the Mahabodhi Society
in revitalizing international pilgrimage to India, and shows how
Tibetans interacted with each of the following: the burgeoning
Buddhist community in India; the modern rail system; and, the
growth of the pilgrimage guidebook industry. Huber re-engages
with the work of Amdo Gendun Chophel, whose _Guide to India_ he
had already translated and published (2000), and makes persuasive
arguments both about the effects of the Mahabodhi literature on
the writer, and the ways in which Chophel's Guide served to frame
the modern Tibetan pilgrimage scene in India. According to Huber,
the cause of Buddhist modernism, which Chophel communicated to
Tibetans through his work, has been since carried forward by none
other than the fourteenth Dalai Lama. _The Holy Land Reborn_
traces compelling reasons why the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan
exiles have continued to celebrate Buddhist pilgrimage places in
India in ways that support their political and cultural status as
welcome guests in India, despite certain tensions between Indians
and Tibetan exiles. 

There can be no doubt that the book is excellent--it is a
readable book for specialists and non-specialists alike, and will
be required reading for generations of Tibetologists,
Indologists, and Buddhologists. The text leaves just a few things
to be desired, however. For example, I wish that Huber had given
his readers more than one paragraph of concluding thoughts at the
end of this latest book; as with his previous book, _The Cult of
Pure Crystal Mountain_ (1999), the lack of a strong,
well-developed conclusion here is lamentable--an opportunity
lost. In addition, there are two other nagging concerns that I
must also discuss further in this review: 
Huber's intermittent historical hubris, as well as his somewhat
underdeveloped ethnographic writing. 

As a reader, I was concerned whether Huber's own assumptions
always receive the same degree of due diligence that he handily
extends to the work of others. Occasionally, I found his
assertions uncompelling and wished for more evidence to back up
his scenarios. For instance, in chapter 11, Huber glosses the
complexity of Tibetan in exile relationships with India and
Indians with surprisingly little regard for the "shifting
terrain" of Indo-Tibetan dynamics in contemporary India; he
writes, "The vast majority of the 'Indian' space beyond these
tiny, borrowed settlement islands is regarded as foreign,
un-interesting, or even potentially hostile by most Tibetan
refugees" (p. 347). He also observes that, "After a half a
century of living there, India is not a place that Tibetan exiles
affectionately embrace" (p. 352). Huber utilizes just a few
select quotes from Keila Diehl's _Echoes from Dharamsala: Music
in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community_ (2002) in support of
these rather strong claims, while ignoring the multivalent and
complicated relationships that many Tibetans, including Diehl's
own primary informants, the Yak Band, have with India, Indians,
Indian music, et cetera. Despite the fact that Huber's broad
strokes regarding contemporary Tibetan relations seem
particularly jarring, his work on _The Holy Land Reborn_ is a
largely careful, if wide lens, parsing of the available sources. 

The exhaustive historical coverage of the book almost makes it
tempting to overlook the rather thin ethnographic work that
frames some of the modern material on Tibetan pilgrimage in
India. Indeed, Huber does not even methodically tell his readers
when, where, and for how long he did on-the-ground fieldwork.
Instead, he simply mentions his visits to such-and-such a place
in passing as the sites arise in the narrative, and proceeds to
discuss these visits with unfortunate brevity. As a result, his
writing about these trips has the feel of anecdotal formality, as
opposed to the depth of a sustained participant-observation,
which perhaps suited Huber's needs in this ambitious volume,
although it leaves the reader hungry for more. When Huber makes
an appearance as a fieldworker in his text, he seems to flit from
one site to another, rarely giving the reader a deeper sense of
what is happening beneath the surface of any given place. For
example, the few pages delineating his recent visits to the
Assamese "Tibetan Kushinagar" of Hajo had the feel of a brief
travelogue, a pilgrimage of his own to get a look at what he had
been reading so much about in the stacks of the distant
libraries. 

With each section that addresses contemporary sites Huber
visited, he leaves open just as many questions as he has
answered; other anthropologists, one can only hope, will someday
come forward to address some of these open questions with
in-depth, long-term anthropological fieldwork. In my opinion,
Huber's previous work in _The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain_
(1999), deemed "ethnohistorical" (p. 8), managed the task of
balancing the methodologies of history and anthropology with more
success. To Huber's credit he does not argue that his book is
specifically an _ethnographic_ contribution to the anthropology
of contemporary Buddhism; instead, he touts it as a solid history
that should serve to set the record straight on a topic that has
previously gotten short shrift in scholarly sources. While Huber
undeniably accomplished that goal with this major work, this
reader cannot help but feel that, taken as a whole, the extant
ethnographic material highlights a road not taken, rather than
substantively contributing to the claims of the author. 

As Huber's new book claims to be an invaluable work of
substantial breadth on Tibetan Buddhist India, and insofar as it
delivers upon that promise, it is a highly laudable scholastic
achievement. The painstaking research that undergirds _The Holy
Land Reborn_, has, for the first time, really demonstrated the
fluidity and breadth of the Tibetan geographies of sacred India
over the past millennium and beyond. It is a careful and
extensive history of Tibetan perspectives on Buddhist India, and
will serve as an excellent resource for many scholars in the
future. 

Citation: Jessica Falcone. Review of Huber, Toni, _The Holy Land
Reborn: Pilgrimage & the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist
India_. 
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. January, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25320

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
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