Donald Lopez' "Prisoners of Shangri-La": Book Review

How we idealize Tibet as the white man's spiritual treasury, protected by monks within frozen lairs, links seven essays. Acerbic, dispassionate, and unromantic, Lopez demystifies what much coverage of the Dalai Lama and centuries of fables have obscured: Tibet's reality. This book talks little of politics, but much about the predicament that the West has placed Tibet within: we cannot allow it to escape our own fanciful prison, within which levitating lamas, carefree peasants, and many monks pursue beneath rarified skies the mysteries of a higher realm.

This emphasis, despite Lopez's knack for deadpan dismissal of tall tales, can be dispiriting. While I admire his efforts to dismantle the Orientalist construct that freezes Tibet, I wondered why he remained so dispassionate about its current plight. The final chapter, "The Prison," appears to castigate the Dalai Lama for his difficult balancing act between political leader and spiritual director, but it's hard to see why Lopez ignores the destruction of so much of the learning and culture that he, as a professional Tibet expert, would surely lament.

Perhaps the "surely" betrays my own prejudice, however. In professorial mode rather than as gulled tale-teller, he seeks to distance himself from Western stereotypes of Eastern wisdom. He studies how Western reception makes "things Tibetan become not particular to a time and a place, but universal, and in the process Tibet is everywhere and hence nowhere, functioning as an element of difference in which everything is possible." And in this non-historical, non-geographical, nonsensical depiction, Westerners form their own deluded knowledge of what they claim to know.

Chapter One examines at great length the term Lamaism as a definition for what Tibetans believe. Often Protestant or rationalist interpreters sought to taint Tibetan practice and belief as "papist," and while Lopez does not cite Ram Dass' later summation of Tibetan Buddhism as "Roman Catholicism on LSD," this later, and perhaps approving, tie of the Vatican to the lamasary may be a rare instance of a positive spin on the topic. Even early friars visiting Lhasa despaired at finding an eerie funhouse mirror of Catholic ritual seemingly repeated by the panoply they found. It later became justification for the fears of the West that the Church and Tibet both represented, to be conquered by either reforming Christians and/or rational imperialists. He concludes: "The very use of the term Lamaism is a gesture of control over the unincorporated and the unassimilated, used first by the Qing over Tibet, then as a code word for 'Papism' by the British over Catholic Ireland and Europe, and finally by European Buddhology over the uncolonized and unread." (44)

Chapter Two extends the reach of the West through Jung's commentary and the various editors and renderers of the mislabelled (to allude to the 1920s King Tut craze, a point Lopez does not mention) "Tibetan Book of the Dead." Lopez repeats a minor error in recounting the tale of its earliest popularizer, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz. Lopez notes that Evans-Wentz "enrolled at Stanford, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats." (52) While W.Y. Evans-Wentz pursued Yeats to his Irish home at Coole in the summer of 1908, and dedicated his 1911 "Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries" (originally his Rennes thesis, published by Oxford) to WBY, I can find no record in the standard biography by R.F. Foster that Yeats himself taught at Stanford, only that his lecture tour from 27 Jan.-3 Feb. 1904 covered the Bay Area, with a lecture on 29 Jan. at Stanford. ("W.B. Yeats: A Life" 1:305; Foster makes his own minor slip, indexing "William" rather than "Walter.")

Lopez, here and in his edition of the life of Milarepa, appears to borrow the last phrase of the blurb (repeated on Wikipedia) in "Fairy Faith" that's "about the author." This claims: "He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats." In "Fairy-Faith," Evans-Wentz dedicates it to AE (George Russell) and Yeats, "who brought to me at my own alma mater in California the first message from fairyland and who afterward in his own country led me through the haunts of fairy kings and queens." This seems more accurate. The earlier claim repeated by Lopez about the "where" is the point in question; Evans-Wentz came in 1908 to learn from Yeats; Yeats did not come to teach Evans-Wentz per se-- unless a few conversations with WYE-W by WBY during California speaking engagements count as such.

Returning to the main text, I disagree with Lopez' assumption that Sogyal Rinpoche's "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" too heedlessly sidesteps the idea of the "six realms of rebirth" by avoiding a "literal rendering." (80) As a Californian, I liked Sogyal's analogy of my state as, for "the demigod realm," reified by deluded, "high on meditation," surfers and lounging, affluent layabouts. He, as Lopez glances at only, simply gives us a comparison Westerners can relate to. He later shows in his book much more about traditional depiction of the bardos, but his purpose is not the straight translation (or as Francesca Fremantle later in "Luminous Emptiness" strove to do, the applicability of it to life and not only the afterlife) or commentary that Thurman may have favored--admittedly with his own very contemporary slant. After all, Fremantle & Chogyam Trungpa, Thurman, and Sogyal Rinpoche tried to shift the text from Evans-Wentz's esoteric eclecticism and Jung's archetypes so as to position it for post-hippie, post-lysergic readers today. This mission in the Penguin complete edition (by Gyurme Dorje, Graham Coleman, Thupten Jinpa, with the inevitable if certainly welcome prefaces and comments by the Dalai Lama) continues to strive to overcome Evans-Wentz's Theosophical & New Age bias. And, as Lopez deadpans, if E-W had found in the 1919 detritus of a returning British officer instead a Buddhist logic tract, we'd be telling a far different tale of the dharma in the West today.

Lopez raises an excellent question. Perhaps New Age devotees of Evans-Wentz's Theosophical and willfully eclectic "California Cosmology" (see Ronald Hutton's "The Triumph of the Moon" history of modern paganism and witchcraft) and eager Tibetophiles such as Tim Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), and Robert Thurman might agree: early Buddhism anticipates later Western physics, regarding deeper levels of consciousness accessible by psychedelics, meditation, tantra, or combinations thereof. Yet, Lopez interrupts, why do we believe Buddhists and their sympathizers? "When we read the claims of Hindu fundamentalists that locomotives and rocket travel are described in the Vedas or that the beam of light emitted from S[h]iva's brow is really a laser, we smile indulgently." Compare to Buddhist claims from the same time and culture for "a universe that moves through periods of cosmic evolution and devolution," for which many may "assume that this is simply something that physicists have not yet discovered." (76)

Such claims permeate those who, as with Lama Govinda, may not even know Tibetan, yet speak as purveyors of hidden wisdom from "treasure texts" long preserved in Shangri-La. By contrast, Lopez is almost gentle in Chapter Three with Lobsang Rampa, the "mystifier" in a double sense, born Cyril Hoskin in Devonshire. He handles the persistently popular New Age assertions that this British man had his "body actually taken over by the spirit of an Easterner"-- to quote him-- and so he "became" a lama, although unable to speak any Tibetan in his Anglicized manifestation, although he could communicate with cats. His many pulp paperbacks recount his adventures in Tibetan and spiritualist realms, and while shelved among "occult" titles today, Lopez notes with a touch of sympathy how many of his professional colleagues first learned about Tibet in the pages of such as 1956's début by Rampa, "The Third Eye."

Chapter Four takes on "om mani padme hum" at much length, equalling that of "lamaism." Again, he delves into how interpretations-- eventually by Tibetans themselves in their explanations-- turn into a rote recital of "the jewel in the heart of the lotus" to sum up this endlessly recited formula as speaking for Tibet.
I found its most evocative, if provocative, exposure near the end of a rather exhausting chapter. It may be that early missionaries quailed at its meaning, if they dared to penetrate its mystery. If the "feminine form of the Sanskrit vocative" for "mani padme" apparently as "O Jewel Lotus" appeals to Avalokiteshvara, who holds both items, why would this masculine figure receive a feminine form? Lopez quotes June Campbell's "Traveller in Space"-- it's unlikely that "mani" means phallus, as "vajra" [often "thunderbolt" in common translations] is "more common." Campbell posits "mani" as clitoris and so the mantra invokes "the deity of the clitoris-vagina," an indigenous deity before the coming of the dharma, who underwent a sex-change by those Campbell deems "the zealous missionaries of Tibetan Buddhism." (133)

The tendency to misinterpret art in Western exhibitions and catalogues takes up Chapter Five; Chapter Six presents a fascinating topic that I have never seen raised in a popular account of Tibetan Buddhism. Jeffrey Hopkins, along with Thurman the pioneer of Western transmission of Tibetan dharma into academia, is also a practitioner. Many of his American Ph.D.'s-- as with Lopez, I gather-- in the field turn "scholar-adepts." Unlike Continental scholars emerging out of Oriental Studies programs, for the U.S., the seminary model influenced the Religious Studies set-up for colleges here. Tibetan Studies Ph.D's often link their study to their practice.

Perhaps, one cannot easily sever study from inculcation, as one seeks "salvation by scholarship" in by collegial tenure rather than as a celibate monk. This intrigued me, for how many other departments may boast this psychic identification by professors? Can one teach communism or Freud or Islam without avowing its tenets? Certainly. Given the transmission that Buddhism relies upon of the teaching in a one-on-one chain over 2500 years, I wonder if this can be adapted to academia, or if the monastic pattern will be substituted in universities. What he does not explore is whether a non-believer in the dharma can truly comprehend Tibetan texts, that need-- if Lopez and Hopkins are correct-- to be taken in by those encountering them by methods defying mere translation or equivalents.

Lopez shows how Hopkins at the U. of Virginia took his students into in-depth re-thinking so they could learn the syllogisms and rationales upon which non-Western philosophy as taught by the lamas rested for their students. This re-orientation of the mindset necessary for understanding Tibetan teaching, due to its difficulty, means that a UVA dissertation may still aspire to the level that, among Tibetans, may be reached by a twelve-year-old schoolchild in a monastery. It's that arcane. Just comparing the Tibetan transliterations to their Western compression shows the challenge of crossing what I imagine may loom as a considerable barrier for those not fluent in Sanskrit and Chinese before tackling Tibetan and its cousin languages.

The final chapter raises how we construct prisons around fantasies. Pico Iyer in "The Open Road" (reviewed by me last year on "Blogtrotter" and on Amazon US) raises the same example as Lopez. How many who revere in stadiums or seminars the Dalai Lama know of the "Shugden affair"? Westerners tend to respond to a secularized, ethical, and non-theistic, non-ritualistic, ecumenical style of Buddhism as packaged for wide audiences. "The Tibetan Buddhism practiced by Western adherents was generally of the Buddhist modernist variety, with an emphasis on meditation on emptiness and on compassion, and did not include ritual offerings of fire from a lamp made of human fat with a wick made of human hair." While Tibetan teachers themselves propitiate this controversial "demon" deity, such veneration to say the least does not constitute the retailed version of what gurus offer to their students abroad.

And, on such contrasts, Lopez ends his uneven but worthwhile 1998 study. This book feels as if he wrote separate essays on aspects of how Westerners interpret Tibetan Buddhism, and then he later linked them, often loosely, and widened them for a broader readership. Unlike Jeffery Paine's popularized "Re-Enchantment," Lopez includes substantial scholarship with complete references; many of the endnotes are essential for complete appreciation of what can be advanced academic discourse. Despite the apparent outreach to a wide readership, this book tells almost nothing about the basics; I'd recommend it after Paine, who while he eschews the learning appended and permeating Lopez, would be more accessible for newcomers. Thomas Laird's "History of Tibet" compiled with interviews with the Dalai Lama would also be a good start for those craving more background. (I reviewed Fremantle, Thurman, the TBoD editions by Dorje et al., Laird and Paine on Amazon US and my regular blog "Blogtrotter"; I also recommend and reviewed Richard Gere's reading of the Fremantle-Trungpa TBoD ed., and Patrick French's disillusioning "Tibet, Tibet" about the aftermath of Western activist enthusiasm for what seems increasingly the lost cause of Tibetan freedom.)

Jeffery Paine's "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West"

"When the story is told in these pages began, had most Americans tried to locate Tibet on a map, they would have pockmarked half the globe with bad-guess pinpricks. By the time the story ends, some Hollywood stars know more about Tibetan Buddhism than the Dalai Lama does-- or at least they act that way." Paine's wry sideswipe at Steven Seagal shows the wit and tone of this thoughtful-- if erratically edited-- introduction to a subject that will likely leave you craving more insight.

Paine takes us through not so much the tenets of Tibetan Buddhism, described by Alan Watts as "Roman Catholicism on acid"; the appeal in the West of what's surpassed Zen since Watts & the Beats lies in its panoply of approaches towards wisdom, its exotic teachings, and its colorful characters. As Paine in his best chapter, on the Dalai Lama's appeal to live with utmost conviction yet astonishing flexibility, shows us, most Tibetans despite their escape from the horrors of decimation seem-- unlike so many presenters of religious doctrine-- to be enjoying themselves amidst their substitution of dogma or dictate with philosophical ambiguity, non-theistic contemplation, unpredictable practices, and creative props that both represent and deny the ultimate existence of gods. Not taking themselves seriously, the Tibetan lamas teach us, he displays in case studies of teachers and students, how to approach our life with the sense it's a game, played that comes and goes perpetually beyond the brief brackets of our birth and death in our present form.

"With its compact emphasis on individual meditation, Buddhism may fit the overpopulated" century as "it can accomodate itself and take up less space." (136-7) He wonders if more people sought diminishment of goods, more people might "possess an 'overabundance' of food and housing." Many in these pages dream of a transformed world through ethical principles based in Buddhism that others may incorporate, if free of the panoply that surrounds Tibetan versions of its teachings. Paine defines universality, individual responsibility, and heightened capabilities for personal growth turned social improvement as three civilizing features the dharma can share with other religions and moral systems.

Certainly, the appeal of a self-generated, yet outwardly directed, way of life that avoids fruitless fretting about salvation, eternity, and sin may be timed for our times better than Vedanta was for Christopher Isherwood's Hollywood, or even Zen, Paine hints, for its countercultural adoption. This issue deserved far more depth, but Paine does touch on essential points. He wonders if religions would improve by being more contradictory, communal vs. individual, mystical vs. practical, angelic or unadorned, "flinty" or "firm," as they adapt to a human nature more akin to Buddhist notions of impermanence, the unknowable, and the evanescent that underlies the illusion of relative, conventional "reality" as a transcendent, perpetual state.

These ideas burrow into the text, more in its latter chapters. He begins with Thomas Merton's in retrospect still-naive pilgrimage, when the Dalai Lama was little known by most in 1968. Harold Talbott, whose own journey from Fifth Avenue scion to Buddhist scholar gains attention later on as one of three case studies, served as Merton's go-between. Paine gives a solid overview of what in the anthology "Merton & Buddhism" more recently has gained needed scrutiny by scholars. Tibet's context within Western imperialism follows, with French explorer and writer Alexandra David-Neel's long life (1868-1969) spanning the cultural shift from fabled Shangri-La to hippie destination, if one no less exotic in the eyes of typical Westerners.

The romanticization, decried later by Patrick French in "Tibet, Tibet," and the adulation of the Dalai Lama, have long been present in the West. The difference is now, unlike when Diane Perry grew up in the 1950s in London, millions know now what few knew only in fragments, as Merton did, given the lack of communication with the West by lamas who had not yet gained Western followings until around 1970. Thubten Geshe and then notoriously Chögyam Trungpa spearheaded the British and American popularity of Tibetan lore. Paine's ability to get inside the minds of both teachers and students shows him at his best as a writer and interpreter throughout the book.

Trungpa, he suggests, soon figured out that Westerners could be jumpstarted into higher-level teaching than customary in Tibetan monasteries. Inspired by Shunryu Suzuki's similar shifts when he brought Zen to San Francisco earlier, Trungpa decided to shift into higher gear. Paine explains: "Meditation is so empty of content that it's hard to turn it into spiritual materialism or appropriate it for egotistical purposes." (93) For newcomers, who had lost "the principles of sacredness," Trungpa reduced the dharma to a secular-friendly core; for those who wanted to restore the Tibetan brocades, visualizations and enthronements commenced.

Therefore (as the uncredited Fields narrates in his history), Tibetan monastic practices began to be transferred outside their origins. By the 1990s as the process advanced, Alyce Neoli/ Catherine Burroughs emerged as a "tulku" of a reincarnated female "lama" chosen by the same Penor Rinpoche who later "recognized" Seagal-- after a few donations were made. The uncredited Kamenetz records that when the rabbis found out about how a "tulku" was found, they wondered: what if the lama makes a mistake? I wondered this too, when reading Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn" about Alyce who became Jetsunma; Paine takes a sympathetic tone towards her, noting Tenzin Palmo's conclusion after reading Sherrill: "her follies are such the way such a being would behave," as recounted by Sherrill, "if he or she lacked the proper training." (158) Tenzin should know, as a girl attracted to a teaching she could not even define as Buddhist, so little being known then about Tibetan dharma by all but a few scholars from a few glimpses such as David-Neel's.

Tenzin Palmo's transformation's amazing; born a Cockney fishmonger's daughter Diane Perry when nobody born humble in postwar Britain knew of such teachings, ordained in 1964 as one of the first Western nuns, she later spent twelve years as a hermit in a cave 13,200 feet high in Ladakh, and then returning from her harrowing yet inspiring story to found a nunnery. David-Neel saw Buddhism from the outside; Perry became Tenzin to enter it.

The widening attraction of hitherto inaccessible teachings from a remote land rippled out from the hippies to the celebrities and by films. Not only explicitly about Tibet as in the 1990s, but filtered through "The Matrix" and "Jacob's Ladder," the bardo dramatized for everyday folks. The fact I don't explain that term speaks for the rapid spread over a generation of a thousand-year-old, isolated, esoteric science of the mind into popular culture, as if a medieval monk found himself lauded in Manhattan.

This may be a fad, or it may be a genuine sign of shift: Robert Thurman argues the latter, while Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard ("The Monk & The Philosopher" 1996) James William Coleman in "The New Buddhists" (2001, neither work cited here) examines the appeal of Buddhism for many intellectual elites in the West; the teachings he finds have not trickled down yet. Pankraj Mishra from the Indian p-o-v also wonders about Buddha vs. Nietzsche at length in "An End to Suffering" (2004). Paine favors Shakespeare, Henry and William James as his references, well-employed if hard for an eager reader to track back-- more later about this shortcoming.

Paine, considering music and film, seems to feel the dharma's widening, but I wonder about the permanence of its impacts. De Tocqueville noted the American withdrawal from "delineation of the soul to fix exclusively on that of the body, and they substitute the representation of motion and sensation with that of sentiment and thought."

Daringly, Paine then links this prescient observation to Buddhism, which as with film uses projection to record sensory experiences and motion while leaving the soul's mysteries intangible. "Hollywood calls the illusions it makes from bodies, sensation, and motion 'cinema.' Buddhism calls the illusions made from them 'conventional reality.'" Paine provides a novel image when recounting how cinema and Tibetan Buddhism are both roughly a century old in their Western transmissions: "In both a movie and Buddhism, 'reality' is palpably, sensuously before us, making us laugh one moment and cry the next, but then vanishing insubstantially when the projectionist (or, in Buddhism, our projection) flicks off the switch." (179)

Paine again excites the reader by his ability to convey the wonder: he juxtaposes Talbott's Gatsby-esque tale of reinvention. Here, as with "tonglin" and "ngondro" and "chöd" Paine illustrates Tibetan terms deftly. "Our usual mental states are like the audience in a theater that gets caught up in the drama that unfolds." Contrast this with the emptiness and luminosity registered by Tibetans at this high stage. The state of play demanded as in quantum physics demands Talbott as a "dzogchen" practitioner abandon "reality" as it seems solid to our senses, for a mind so trained "resembles the playwright who exults in the creative play with which he maneuvers his imaginary puppets."(221)

His next case: a (psuedonymous to protect her reputation) Princeton deconstructionist feminist mid-life wonders about the appeal her tentative forays into Tibetan practice and reading reveal. A literary critic such as herself, Paine relates, follows a long path of scholarship most of her career, with "few genuine knock-you-off-your-chair discoveries left to be made." Tibetan Buddhism provides "Christine" with "her ticket into the unknown," after idly finding used at the Strand Bookstore Sogyal Rinpoche's influential "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." Yet, her colleagues, disdainful of any belief, may belittle her quest, so she pursues it in the morning at home, gingerly but with increasing fascination.

San Quentin's death row houses the final American turned Tibetan student, if at a distance behind bars. Jarvis Masters contemplates karma, impermanence, and mindfulness as translated into taking responsibility for one's actions, accepting how reality itself changes during one's sentence as faced with honesty, and how one must faced with one's term should cultivate an awareness to embrace not endure the present situation. As with Alyce Zeoli or Diane Perry in their ignorance of Buddhism constructed before their exposure to it a homespun notion of its dharma independently and even intuitively, so in prison, Paine considers, such stories "from both the sickbed and prison cell, indirectly support Buddhism's claim that it is not a religion but something that occurs 'in life'-- not a man-made, synthetic medicine but a plant with healing properties that grows of itself." (251)

The narrative concludes on such graceful notes. Still, the story needed more unfolding, given that Paine admits seven years' labor on its contents. Intended for the general reader, so lacking by his design footnotes or works cited, this superficially but persistently disappoints in its scattershot mention of many who've preceded Paine; Paine assures their books can be readily found, but his decision to eschew documentation makes this an uneven book, riddled with typos. W.Y. Evans-"Wenz" repeats, "Llasa" alternates with "Lhasa." "Arbie's" and "Guiness" appear; Stephen and Martine separately are surnamed "Bachelor" while "Into the Wild" is attributed to "John" Krakauer. The lack of credit given such as Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus," the 1994 account of the 1990 visit by rabbis to Dharamsala, proves odd; Rick Fields' pioneering 1992 "How the Swans Came to the Lake" may also be familiar to readers already, but why not mention these popular and enduring predecessors that showed many Americans (as they did me) perhaps their first glimpses into Tibetan Buddhism?

These persistent shortcomings noted, the strength in Paine's narrative lies in his metaphorical mind. As he struggles, for instance, to match the mansion yearned for in Christian mentalities of the afterlife with the adding on of another room in a modern mind making room for hitherto unknown Tibetan dharma, he falters. But, he more often succeeds.

(P.S. I've reviewed Coleman, French, "Merton and Buddhism," Kamenetz, Mishra, Revel & Ricard, and Sherrill on Amazon U.S. and my "Blogtrotter" daily-ish blog; Sherrill's review's also in May on NTLATBR blog where longer reviews are cross-posted.)

Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn": Book Review

From the title, I figured an Allen Ginsberg-goes-to-Katmandu spiel. Far from it. This deserves wide attention for its insights into how a cult of personality may evolve into a sincere religion. A half-Italian (quarter-Jewish) gal from Brooklyn, although she moved to Florida at 14 and spent her time since in the South, Midwest, and now Maryland, the soon-to-be four (or five) times-divorced mother of many defies expectations of whom a "tulku," or reincarnated holy one in the Tibetan tradition, would be.

Is she genuine? The question perhaps lies beyond Western ways of verification. Gurus have been notorious before. Sherrill constructs a story about this sometimes sleek, sometimes frumpy, Lee Press-On Nails and black leather-clad mother that spirals downward and inward as hints early on expand, halfway through this brisk, intelligent book. As if for dazzled children, the lady in question exerts considerable appeal for adults as she exhibits the wonder of the spirit. The aura she creates energizes the channeller-healer and her New Age followers into Buddhism after a lama visits their center. He recognizes Catharine Burroughs (already changed from Alyce Zeoli) as the return of a 17th c. Tibetan holy woman. She will take the name Jetsunma Akhon Lhamo and command an increasingly devoted, in the full sense, congregation. It includes her friends and family, who now venerate her as a guru in Tibetan fashion, prostrating before her.

Meanwhile, while the monks and mostly nuns at what becomes America's largest and most stable Tibetan Buddhist monastery work themselves ragged to build the temple and then the forty-foot stupa (sacred monument; if they said prayers for the bugs killed in the construction, why did they have to cut so many trees down for it, and why destroy a sixty-five acre grove across the road for their temple?), Jetsunma takes on a combination of consumerism and confrontation that unsettles a few of her charges. Two nuns were her lovers; so were two monks, both of whom marry her more or less sequentially. She loves and leaves them in quick time; she also tells members to divorce their spouses, and takes on one member's child as her own adopted one while coveting another couple's child. The community winds up giving half its income to her, tax-free $10k monthly, even as the monastics live spartan lives full of sacrifice and unending toil to serve her and her plan to build the stupa and expand the monastery. They also help fund her hair-care product scheme and its infomercials, which fail to capture the public.

Jetsunma claims the stupa's building trumps finding a cancer cure or running a soup kitchen. The romantic love that attaches so many to join her monastery and temple proves her charismatic power over often professionals and well-educated folks seeking her insights, from around the DC area. Sherrill, as a Washington insider used to profiling celebrities, struggles to understand her charm. The vowed members of the temple must obey her, as a guru's commands cannot be denied, under "samaya" that instills in Tibetan practice a total obligation to a lama as part of the demanding and punishing way a follower finds enlightenment by endless abnegation.

The followers fear losing karma and creating bad energy among other "sentient beings" if they disobey her. A visiting monk warns that such a system distorts the dharma teaching just as the Tibetan forms have warped the original dharma of the Buddha's message, but he doubts if reform can come in their lifetimes. The Asian models instill obedience, and by "any means necessary," Jetsunma will even use seduction if it lands her followers who will then be open to dharma, in her logic, and the way of the Buddha.

Such reasoning lures Sherrill to relate stories she tells from within the circle-- Jetsunma's third husband, her attendant, male and female consorts, and a nun who wavers in her commitment. The children appear less vividly. Sherrill seems to have been prevented in talking to the earlier two-exes and Alyce's mother so as to have access to Jetsunma. (I note that my hardcover book lacked the small picture of the guru on the paperback cover; surprisingly or not, no photos of the KPC temple or its members are shown.) Sherrill appears, late in her quest, to veer away from the increasingly complex imbroglio into tangents, talking with Deepak Chopra, Tammy Faye Bakker, Dr. Laura Schlessinger in her attempt to comprehend how charisma and money combine for certain purveyors of self-help coupled with spirituality. She's on to a great topic, but this distracts her from the Tibetan Buddhist adaptation to the West that needs elucidation.

This lack of follow-through examination of Tibetan practices in one instance left the narrative less than complete. I sensed that the lamas allied with the one who "recognized" Jetsunma were about to rescind that judgment when a lawsuit threatened; the sudden withdrawal of the case left me wondering if indeed a guru's "recognition" could ever be in error. The trouble, or the blessing, for those truly convinced of "guru devotion" is that "Correct View" allegiance allows one even to lie if a guru's involved, from what Sherrill tells us, and this whole predicament seemed less than clear in her treatment of the attempt to get Jetsunma's bonafides withdrawn by the lamas in charge. The dangers for a Westerner of explaining, or following, absolute conviction that a guru will guide one to enlightenment no matter how bizarre or extravagant their behavior, as in the case of Chogyam Trungpa's "crazy wisdom" alluded to in this book, complicates the matter considerably.

The temple increasingly takes on an aura familiar to those who know of religious domination by powerful leaders, and certainly Jetsunma embodies such magnetism, turned towards confusing and contradictory directions. She seems to retreat from Tibetan fidelity after the mid-90s, and in her mid-forties may have tired from such intense scrutiny, moving her core group again-- to the New Age bastion of Sedona, Arizona.

Yet, Sherrill does not end her story with a pat moral. I leave out the latter episodes, but the last seventy-five pages marvelously increase the suspense that this author creates out of this subject. One time, she fears that "there was no emptiness," that all around Jetsunma betrays only desperation, not aspiration. Then, she reconsiders, in the tradition of earlier cults turned respectable faiths.

I leave the relevance of the dog's tooth as the decoy Tibetan tale and her interpretation for you to find out. Sherrill takes on a great challenge personally and journalistically, and I admire her tale-telling skills in her intricately arranged construction of the facts, and her own exploration of spiritual appeal amidst material temptation. The lesson she learns may elude our rational expectation, but "the lotus has its roots in the mud" proves an relevant and appropriate phrase.

(See my related review of Jeffery Paine's 2004 "Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" posted 6-28-09, here, on "Blogtrotter," and on Amazon U.S. He has a chapter on Jetsunma. My regular blog, "Blogtrotter," has many reviews related to this wider topic as well.)