July 5, 1998
Searching for Tibet: The Shangri-La That Never Was
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
In 1888 a U.S. diplomat-turned-adventurer named William Woodville Rockhill set out to explore Tibet, a territory he described in his journal as "a very imperfectly known portion of the Chinese Empire." It still is.
When President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin engaged in a public exchange on the subject last week, they spoke for two diametrically opposed lobbies. One, drawing on a largely Western vision of Tibet, sees a Himalayan Shangri-la waiting to be freed from beneath the Chinese boot. The other imagines a territory rescued from a dark and brutal theocracy by a modernizing government in Beijing.
Neither perception, most scholars say, accurately reflects the unique culture that flourished, and still struggles to survive, on the high-altitude Tibetan plateau. ...
[Tibet] became a demilitarized, decentralized, isolated country in the shadow of Mongolian and Manchu rulers but dominated by its Buddhist monasteries and lama-kings trying to rule over a collection of quarreling sects. ...
Tibet had all but disappeared for a thousand years before 19th-century explorers cajoled their way to Lhasa, the capital. Their heirs are the seekers of the late 20th century, who have mined Tibet, or perhaps an imagined Tibet, for its nonviolence, spirituality, meditative arts and herbal medicines. ...
But by the time the Dalai Lama was arriving in India, another school of thought had seized the imagination of influential intellectuals. Promoted by Beijing and by Westerners who became enamored of Mao Tse-tung's 1949 revolution, the new vision served to justify the Chinese invasion of Tibet that followed by painting the Tibetan monastic leadership as feudal, oppressive and living on the backs of serfs. ...
Robert Thurman of Columbia University, a professor and former Buddhist monk who is considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, said the movement to relegate Tibet to the Dark Ages was a byproduct of hearts broken by Stalin. ...
Scholars of Tibet mostly agree that there has been no systematic serfdom in Tibet in centuries .... In 1879, an Indian scholar who had spent his life in the Himalayan area, Sarat Chandra Das, traveled to Lhasa and studied the social order. He found no trace of bonded servitude. ...
But if Tibet's detractors operate on politically inspired myths, the champions of Tibetan independence also have their fantasies. The country was underdeveloped, its people often rapacious and warlike. Tibetan Buddhism is a robust, earthy religion, far less philosophical and pacifist than many of its Western practitioners would like to believe.