Western Visions of Tibet

Guido Vogliotti

I know of no other country in the world that sparked the Western popular interest, sympathy, and
imagination in such a deep and enduring way as Tibet has done over the last couple of centuries,
making it into a mythical, mystical, utopian country. If the man in the street were asked today to
name the main characteristics of Tibet that spring to mind, he would probably come up with some
clichés like: the Dalai Lama, monks in dark mysterious monasteries, snow-capped mountains in a
remote and inaccessible country, levitation, reincarnation, ritual implements, secret initation
ceremonies and so on. The prevalent idea of Tibet is that it is remote, mysterious, impenetrable,
forbidden, esoteric, pure. This conception does not seem to wane even now that our knowledge of
the real life and history of Tibet has dramatically improved, also thanks to the many Tibetans living
abroad offering us an opportunity to take a hard look at the reality of Tibet.
But first of all we should clarify what is meant by Tibet. In the introduction to her In the Image
of Tibet, Clare Harris writes: “It could be argued that Tibet no longer exists—or that if it does, it is
only as a utopian vision in a virtual world.” This is certainly true today, with Tibet reduced to an
Autonomous Region (TAR) within the People’s Republic of China, but the concept is also
applicable, to some extent at least, to historic Tibet. The political area of Tibet has hardly ever been
the same as its cultural area, which has tended to be much larger than the country itself, and we
should not forget that Tibet was never involved in the Western concept of State.1 To the Western
imagination, things are even more blurred, and Sikkim, Ladakh, Bhutan, or certain areas of
Mongolia or south-west China can all be part of the Western idea of Tibet. In the present article I
will be dealing with a purely cultural concept of Tibet, free of any political or geographic
implications.
The subject of how Tibet came to be perceived in this way by the Westerners has developed into
a new and vital branch of Tibetan studies, mainly supported by Martin Brauen, Donald Lopez, Peter
Bishop, Charles Allen, Edwin Bernbaum, Jamyang Norbu, to name but a few. It is largely on the
foundation provided by these authors that I will outline a general summary of Western ideas of
Tibet, how they came to be formed, and why they still persist.
Apart from Marco Polo, who in the late 13th century provided some descriptions of Tibetan
customs without ever actually getting into Tibet proper, the first accounts of Western travellers in
Tibet are those of some Jesuit missionaries in the 17th/18th century. It is in these accounts that the
seeds that will fuel Western views and projections of Tibet are planted. The Jesuit father António de
Andrade is the first Western traveller to reach Tibet (1624). As anybody confronted with a foreign,
totally unknown culture, he tries to organise this culture in terms of differences and similarities with
respect to his own world. He thus notices that the Tibetan religion seems to have many points of
contact with Roman Catholicism (the trinity, heaven and hell, exorcisms, rosaries, the Dalai Lama
as a Pope etc.) while barbarous customs, or the backward state of society, idol-worship, sorcery etc.
are estranging factors. This duality of familiar / alien, comforting / shocking will last at least until
the birth of a scientific Tibetology in the 19th century, and will be an important element for the
formation of Western perceptions of Tibet. De Andrade is followed by the Italian Jesuit Ippolito
Desideri, who will stay in Lhasa from 1716 to 1721 and will take such a serious interest in the
Tibetan religion and language that he might well be considered the first Tibetologist. Desideri
provides the first, usually correct, understanding of some basic Buddhist concepts and ideas.

1
The fact that Tibet escaped Western colonialism in the 19th century implies that it never adopted the typical
institutions of the West, like the idea of state. A Tibetan will always say where he is from in terms of region, rather than
say he is Tibetan. Thus a native of Kham would hardly identify himself as a bod-pa (a native of central Tibet, the
provinces of dBus and gTsang), but as a khams-pa.
Unfortunately, his writings will remain virtually unknown until they are rediscovered in 1875, and
they will only be published as late as 1904. As Martin Brauen aptly points out, if his descriptions of
Tibet had become available earlier the West might have developed a more realistic view of Tibet. In
1762-1763 Agostino Antonio Giorgi had compiled his Alphabetum Tibetanum, another seminal
work for the development of Western projections of Tibet.
Other missionaries will follow who will add to this first overall picture of Tibet in the West,
particularly with the accounts of the Lazarist fathers Huc and Gabet in the 1840s, the only
Europeans who saw Lhasa in the whole of the 19th century (apart from Thomas Manning in 1811-
1812). Thereafter Tibet will close its doors to Western visitors until the next wave of interest in
Tibet which will be spurred by Victorian colonialism with its explorers. This is the time when the
pundits, Indian surveyor-spies disguised as pilgrims, are sent by the Survey of India to map the
geography of Tibet, in view of a possible commercial conquest of the country by the British which
was never to happen.
One last great Western scholar from these pioneering times of Tibetan discovery remains to be
mentioned—the Hungarian Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (Sándor Kőrösi Csoma). On his quest for
the ancient homeland of the Magyars which he supposed to be in Central Asia, he went as far as
Ladakh, where he realised he would not be able to continue his journey. A chance encounter with
the British explorer William Moorcroft gave him the opportunity to spend a few years living like a
hermit in the monasteries of Zangla and Phuktal in Zanskar, where in the 1820s he produced some
of the most important research on Tibet and its language that the 19th century has seen.

The Western myth of Tibet is deeply rooted in these early accounts of the country. Due to the
lack of previous knowledge and to the difficulties in communication, there was of necessity a
significant amount of Western guesswork and interpretation of what these early visitors saw, and
this gave rise to the Westernised and distorted view of Tibet that has come down to us. So the
Western mythologies of Tibet are no recent creation—they originate with the very beginning of the
Western discovery of Tibet. Even the first generation of serious Tibetologists (Jacques Bacot,
Charles Bell, Giuseppe Tucci, Hugh Richardson, David Snellgrove, Rolf Stein) was not totally
immune from these distortions. For instance Tucci called Tibet ‘mysterium magnum’, a fascinating
and romantic, but personal and quite ‘unscientific’ term,2 and Stein himself, who is an extremely
objective academic, does not refrain from using the term ‘Lamaism’. Tibet is thus a very good
example of the ‘observer bias’ (or ‘observer effect’), i.e. how the observer and the act of observing
can affect and change the phenomenon being observed, a concept that has gained currency in
physics and quantum mechanics, as well as in all social sciences.3 In this respect it would be
interesting to examine the Chinese perception of Tibet, which so far has not received the same level
of attention as the Western views.4 Despite being at least in part responsible for our skewed
Western perceptions, it can be said that the contact of Christian missionaries with Tibet in the 18th
century generated a serious and factual analysis, mainly of Tibetan religion if not so much of
customs and society, and that this represented a true intercultural exchange between East and West.

In the late 19th/early 20th century, British colonial interests in India expanded to Tibet as a new
strategic and commercial opportunity, starting a spate of new explorations with a view to
establishing a foothold in Tibet. One of the main representatives of this new race to Tibet was
Laurence A. Waddell, a medical officer who had already spent ten years in Sikkim and Darjeeling
when in 1904 he joined the Younghusband military expedition, and who had published, in 1894, his
The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism. This seminal work was for a long time one of the staple
references for later Tibetologists, and it remains to this day an excellent and most useful

2
Elsewhere, in his A Lhasa e oltre (To Lhasa and Beyond), Tucci writes: “And it seems meet to bow down to this
religious aura that can be felt everywhere and animates each and every place with mysterious presences.” (p. 23).
3
Incidentally, the Buddhist view that reality is largely an issue of perception goes in the same direction.
4
For some analysis of Chinese projections of Tibet, see Harris 1999.
encyclopaedia on Tibetan religion. However, it is now equally clear that it presents a distorted and
lopsided view of Tibetan Buddhism, or Lamaism, as the Tibetan religion was called to indicate the
corrupted form of Buddhism that had flourished in Tibet with the spread of the Vajrayana teachings
and which included, in Waddell’s view, a deep-rooted devil worship contaminated with magic,
priestcraft, and shamanism (an extremely vague term that has been used to account for pretty much
anything). Waddell is thus another important contributor for the development of European
projections of Tibet. For him and for the European scholarship in general, the Tibetan form of
religion was not true Buddhism. Anything that Waddell could not understand he called ‘demonic’,
‘devilish’ and so forth, thus applying the cultural mindset of a Christian Westerner to a different
world in which such concepts were simply not applicable. The term ‘Lamaism’ was created to
indicate this particular debased form of Buddhism.5 It may be useful to quote a passage from The
Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism to give the flavour of Waddell’s writing: “Thus we are told that,
amidst the solitudes of this ‘Land of the Supernatural’ repose the spirits of ‘The Masters’, the
Mahātmas, whose astral bodies slumber in unbroken peace, save when they condescend to work
some petty miracle in the world below.”6 The scene is set for the wildest fantasies yet to come. On
the one hand, Waddell was intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism and by the mystery of Tibet, on the
other he was repelled by some obscure aspects he could not work out, and which he dismissed as
devil-worship. This gave rise to a dim view of Tibet which attracts and repels at the same time, and
that remained part of the overall fascination Tibet exerted on the Western societies until the
beginning of the 20th century. Waddell was also the first to classify things Tibetan into nicely
organised tables and grids in accordance with the colonial mindset, in an attempt to put some
Western order into the confusing imagery and ritual of Tibetan Buddhism.

This picture will change again in the second half of the 19th century, when Madame Blavatsky
(Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) gives a strong contribution to the creation of the Tibetan myth with
her Theosophical Society (founded in 1875 in New York). While she never was in Tibet, and the
‘Mahātmas’ who gave her their teachings through esoteric communication in dreams, visions or
letters do not seem to have much to do with Tibet (but, as we have seen, the term was already used
by Waddell), 7 she affirms the idea, already present before her time, that Tibet is the repository of
secret knowledge that only the initiates can access.8
Madame Blavatsky claimed that her knowledge was based on the Book of Dzyan, a Tibetan book
written in the secret language of Senzar. She was influenced by the Rosacrucians, believed in
levitation, in reincarnation, in an astral body that can travel at high speed, in the long life of some
lamas. Theosophy became extremely popular, and its importance for the creation of the Western
image of Tibet can hardly be overestimated. The main Orientalists of this time were more or less
influenced by, if not actively involved with, Theosophical ideas (Edward Conze, Alexandra David-
Neel, Nicholas Roerich, Walter Evans-Wentz, Daisetsu Suzuki, Christmas Humphreys, Mircea
Eliade), so that the interest that India had previously aroused in Europe under British colonial rule
gradually shifted to Tibet, particularly thanks to the occult movements. It is from Theosophical
ideas that we inherited the myth of Tibet as a land free from poverty or crime, inhabited by the pure
of heart and preserving an ancient wisdom, a land in which physical and spiritual are on an equal
plane—in short, an imaginary, utopian vision that has virtually nothing to do with the real country.
With this new surge of interest, the negative aspects of Tibetan culture that had been highlighted
in the 18th/19th century were almost completely discarded in favour of the positive ones. This
5
The term ‘Lamaism’ was probably coined by Peter Simon Pallas, a German zoologist and botanist (1741-1811).
6
Waddell 1894, p. 3 (Introductory).
7
The Theosophists believed the ‘Mahātmas’ to be the keepers of the wisdom of lost Atlantis.
8
She may have been influenced by Ferdinand Ossendowski’s descriptions of Agharti (Ossendowski 1923), an
underground world which is unknown in Tibet, or by the myth of Shambhala, or even by Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming
Race (1871), a novel in which a subterranean world of caves and tunnels hosts a superior race and where the Vril (an
all-permeating fluid energy that can be both destructive and healing) is used. Incidentally, the concept of Vril as life-
energy became so popular in Europe that it was used in the trade name of the British meat extract Bovril.
almost exclusively positive image of Tibet was mainly formed between 1904 and 1949 by a group
of British officers stationed in Sikkim and Tibet, among whom Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson
are no doubt the most outstanding personalities. In 1927 W. Evans-Wentz published (with the
translator-assistant Kazi Dawa-Samdup)9 his Tibetan Book of the Dead, which would further
stimulate the Western curiosity about Tibet. With its various prefaces and forewords in subsequent
editions (Sir John Woodruffe, Anagarika Govinda) and the famous ‘Psychological Commentary’ by
Carl Gustav Jung the book became an oddity, where the Tibetan text (Bar-do thos-grol) was almost
accessory, while the introductions, forewords and prefaces took on a paramount importance that
turned it into a product of the Western culture explaining its views of what this Tibetan text was
supposed to be. There can be no doubt that Jung’s interest in eastern religions and philosophies
fostered Western interest in Buddhism, as well as its association with psychology. He was thus
central to the idea that Eastern meditation techniques can be a sort of psychotherapy that can bring
much-needed spiritual health to the West, an assumption on which the New Age fad would later
thrive.
Evans-Wentz espoused the Theosophist idea that Western science will one day confirm the truths
of Oriental ideas, notably on reincarnation. Some fifty years later the physicist Fritjof Capra revived
this approach with his The Tao of Physics (1975) which, as the subtitle explains, is “An Exploration
of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism”. The book was a huge success.
Several other translations of the Bar-do thos-grol (among them a reprint of G. Tucci’s 1949 Italian
translation) became available in the 1970s to enjoy a revival in the wake of the hippy movement,
when the fad for the East (at first primarily concerned with Indian music and philosophy) gradually
expanded to a wider range of themes, including Tibet.10 A whole generation of young people in the
West came across this seminal book, although one wonders how many of them actually read it.

On the fertile ground of the Theosophical theories, the myth of Tibet was forged and it fuelled
the fantasy of writers and film makers. With its isolation and inaccessibility, and consequent lack of
knowledge and aura of mystery, Tibet provided the perfect conditions for a Western utopia. This
can explain why James Hilton chose to set his Lost Horizon (1933) somewhere in the Tibetan
region. Here in Shangri-la (a Western construct of Tibet) an esoteric community led by Westerners
lives in peace, pursuing a quest for wisdom and preserving the culture of all regions of the planet.
This place is a paradise of sorts, where time passes slowly and people get incredibly old.11 This
community will save the world when it is brought down by ignorance, war and greed. In 1937
Frank Capra made a successful film from the novel, which no doubt further popularised the utopian
vision of Shangri-la.12 Another important contribution to the development of the Tibetan fantasy
was Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet, published in 1953 (1952 for the original German
edition). Although his book is in a completely different league to the ones mentioned above—being
a factual account of the seven years (1944-1951) Harrer spent in Lhasa after escaping from a British
prison camp in India—it further enhanced the fantasies about Tibet by providing an insight into the
real (but compellingly remote and fascinating) traditional life in Tibet on the eve of the Chinese
invasion in 1950. In a way it provided a realistic base to the European projections of Tibet. Harrer
was not interested in religion but, with his companion Peter Aufschnaiter, managed to put across an
extremely positive and sympathetic picture of the country and its good-natured people, one that
would open up Tibet to Western eyes while at the same time giving new life to the image of a
traditional land untouched by the ravages of time and modernity.

9
Dawa-Samdup also collaborated with A. David-Neel.
10
The Beatle George Harrison was instrumental in opening up Western pop music to Indian influences, and
subsequently kept an abiding interest in Indian philosophies and religions.
11
The legendary long life of certain Tibetan lamas had already been mentioned by Madame Blavatsky, but it was this
novel that spread this fancy idea to a wider public, with Father Perrault reaching the age of 250.
12
Strangely enough, the film setting is not identifiable with Tibet, possibly to make it even more utopian.
 Another product of this Tibetan fixation was the book The Third Eye (1956) by Lobsang Rampa.
In the book Rampa, who claims to have been possessed by a Tibetan lama, enters a lamasery at age
7, he can fly through space and time to astral worlds and has a third eye which enables him to see
the true reality of the world. In spite of the fact that the book was outed as a fake even before
publication (Hugh Richardson and various other experts immediately spotted that it was written by
someone who had never lived in Tibet, and that the book was pieced together by collecting
information from various standard works with the addition of a lot of fantasy), it went to press and
was a success. Cyril Henry Hoskin (Lobsang Rampa’s real name) was no Tibetan, he was in fact
born in Devon, he never went to Tibet and made surgical fittings for a living. Despite being
unmasked as an impostor right from the start, Rampa always managed to keep alive the doubt that
he might be honest in his statements. He enjoyed a huge success and wrote 19 books which sold
over 4 million copies around the world, and most of them are still in print more than 50 years on.
The Third Eye is the perfect example of how the West can be easily deceived into believing what it
wants to believe; it has all the ingredients that will attract a credulous class of readers—body
possession, magic and mystery, ancient Egypt, caverns under the Potala, man-lifting kites, the yeti,
a Shangri-la valley, astral travel, Theosophical spiritualism, giant extraterrestrial gods from Tibet’s
prehistory, telepathy, telekinesis and such balderdash. Rampa integrates and supports what Madame
Blavatsky had said before him, so that the two seem to lend credibility to each other. The book is
such a comprehensive compendium of distorted Western views on Tibet that it can be the object of
study. Despite it being a fake, it had at least one positive effect—it stimulated a number of readers
to become serious scholars of Tibet.

In the 1930s the Nazis too became involved with Tibet. Their interest lay mainly in racial
theories, and starting from the legends of Shambhala and Agharti13 they connected them with the
myth of Thule, where a race of divine origin was supposed to live. In 1935 the Ahnenerbe was
founded, an institution for scientific research into matters that were not recognised by official
science and into the anthropology and cultural history of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe was part of
the SS and was strongly supported by Heinrich Himmler, who wanted to find the roots of northern
Indo-Germanism. In the same years the idea that Tibet had preserved cultural traditions that were
lost and forgotten elsewhere (Tibet as a Rückzugsgebiet) was also the basis for the studies of
Matthias Hermanns, a representative of the Viennese school of ethnology who believed Amdo to be
the cradle of Tibetan civilisation, a theory later reprised and developed by Siegbert Hummel.14
Himmler took a personal interest in Eastern philosophies and occultism, and he ordered Ernst
Schäfer’s expedition to Tibet in 1938, with the task of collecting geological and botanical
specimens, but also ethnological and anthropological evidence of Germanism in Tibet.15 It should
be noted that Nazi interest in Tibet did not usually extend to its religion, which was seen rather as a
decadent element in the pure spirit of the northern race. Nevertheless, the Nazi beliefs were a
further accretion on the European imaginations on Tibet, and contributed new elements that survive
mainly in films and comics.

Whilst the mythical image of Tibet we are discussing is a Western creation, it cannot be denied
that Tibet itself provides ample material that encourages this mythical interpretation. Due to the
absence in Tibet of a sense of history as understood in the West, Tibetan chronicles and historical
accounts always made it difficult to tell apart history and legend, and there are a number of myths in
the Himalayan region that doubtless stimulated the rise of Western fantasies on Tibet. One of these

13
Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, a French occultist, published the first ‘reliable’ account of Agartha/Agharti in
Europe in Mission de l'Inde en Europe in 1886. He described it as a real place situated in the Himalayas in Tibet.
14
The idea of ancient contacts between Tibet and Europe goes back to Immanuel Kant (Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795).
15
Bruno Beger was the anthropologist in this expedition. Schäfer had already been to East Tibet in 1931/32 and
1934/36.
is the legend of Shambhala, a kindgdom believed to be to the north of India to which only superior
beings have access, harbouring the secrets of the Kālacakra doctrine.16
Shambhala is a hidden realm, a pure land somewhere to the north of Tibet, where people live in
peace and harmony, free of illnesses or poverty. A dynasty of wise kings preserves the most secret
Buddhist doctrines of the Kālacakra, in preparation for the dark ages when religion will be effaced
from the earth by war, ignorance and greed. Legend has it that a future king of Shambhala (the 25th
Kulika, Rudra Cakrin) will lead the final battle between good and evil, ushering in a new golden
age. Under his reign the world will at last be a haven of peace, spiritual content and compassion.
Shambhala can only be reached through a long and difficult journey, crossing deserts and wild
mountains. The Shambhala tradition is very ancient, being mentioned in the bKa’-’gyur and bsTan-
’gyur, the Tibetan Buddhist canon, but a number of other texts are specifically concerned with it,
notably the Shamba-la’i-lam-yig written by the third Panchen Lama. In the bon version of this
legend Shambhala is known as Ölmolungring (’Ol-mo-lung-ring). Shambhala falls within the
category of the Tibetan sbas-yul, (hidden places), which is closely linked with the idea of gter-ma
(treasure texts) discovered by the gter-ston (text discoverers). These sbas-yul are sometimes
believed to be purely mental creations, but for the Tibetans there is no doubt that they also have a
physical reality. As there is the idea of a subtle, astral body, so there can be a subtle geography that
accounts for the hidden places and valleys of the Himalayan world. It should be noted that the
significance of Shambhala for the West (a utopic land, an escape from the shackles of oppressive
reality) is in fact the opposite of how the Tibetans see it, i.e. the true reality behind the deception of
appearances.
The myth of Shambhala is not the only one existing in Tibet, other sbas-yul are Pemakö (Padma-
bkod) situated in the east of Tibet, where the river Tsangpo takes a southward bend and falls
through the deep Tsangpo Gorge to reach the Indian plains of Assam, and Khenpalung (mKhan-pa-
lung), a hidden valley in west Tibet, to the east of Mount Everest.17

With the dominant materialism and spiritual malaise in the West, a feeling that the advances in
science and technology increasingly widen the gap between ourselves and nature came about. This
strengthened the need for a dream world not fundamentally different from the one conjured up by
James Hilton for his Lost Horizon. The Western surge of interest in Tibetan Buddhism after 1959
could also be explained by the fact that Tibet, being a closed and inaccessible country, was likely to
have preserved a more authentic form of Buddhism than India. This completely overturned the idea
of the previous century, championed by Waddell, when Tibetan Buddhism was considered to be a
debased and corrupted form of the original Indian doctrine.
The picture that emerges from all the above is that of a ‘frozen’ country where time stopped in
1959 in order to preserve an old traditional world which the West has long abandoned in favour of
modernisation and technology. The main stereotyped beliefs of the West about Tibet can be
summarised as follows:

− Tibet is an inaccessible, mysterious country (a lost realm).

− Tibet is a repository of secret doctrines and a power place.
− Tibet is a peaceful, pure land where Buddhism reigns.
− The Tibetan lamas have supernatural powers: levitation, inner warmth (gtum-mo) fast
running (rlang-sgom).
− Tibet has secret places (sbas-yul, hidden valleys), sacred spaces that can only be accessed by
the initiated. Utopian societies thrive in these secret places where famine, violence and
poverty are unknown and where eternal youth can be enjoyed.

16
A succinct description of Shambhala was provided, as early as 1834, by A. Csoma de Kőrös in his Grammar of the
Tibetan Language (note 4 on p. 192).
17
Ian Baker and Hamid Sardar in particular set out in recent years to explore the geography and the myth of Pemakö.
 − Tibet is a safe haven (Jesus, Prester John, the Nazis, Sherlock Holmes etc.) against the evils
of the Western world, it has a continuous, unchanging tradition. It preserves the values the
West has lost, it is outside the turmoil of history, sheltered from modernity.
− Tibetan religion and spirituality are of a superior nature.

Today we have enough detailed knowledge of Tibet and its history to make us fully aware of the
fact that most of the preconceived ideas discussed above are not sustainable. If we take a hard look
at these ideas we will see that most of them rest on very shaky ground indeed.
− There is no longer any reason to consider Tibet inaccessible and mysterious, Tibet can now
easily be reached by air, by road, or by rail, but the West hangs on to this dream with
stubbornness.
− The Vajrayana Buddhism of Tibet does in fact heavily rely on initiation and therefore on
secret teachings, but this secrecy is purely functional to the fact that knowledge can only be
imparted once the necessary spiritual development has taken place, otherwise it would be
dangerous. The Westerners, on the other hand, tend to see this secrecy as connected with
magic and with mysterious, inexplicable phenomena.
− It is not true that the Tibetans were changed by the arrival of Buddhism from a savage,
warring and imperialist people (who in 763 even conquered the Chinese capital Ch’ang-an)
into a peaceful and religious folk bent on salvation. Nevertheless, this view is still shared by
a number of Tibetophiles and Tibetologists. In the exhibition catalogue Wisdom and
Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet Robert Thurman writes: “Through Tibet’s seventeen-
hundred year association with the Buddha reality, the entire land of Tibet has become the
closest place on earth to an actual Pure Land.”18 But the fact that the Tibetan empire
crumbled in the 8th century is mainly due to changed historical circumstances, to the
political chaos that marked the end of the monarchy, certainly not to a mass conversion of
the Tibetans to Buddhism. Whilst possibly there might be some argument to support the idea
of a generalised devoted religious attitude of the Tibetans at a popular level, a look at the
monastic history of Tibet will readily show that things are quite different. In the 17th
century the fifth Dalai Lama did not hesitate to resort to violence in order to suppress a
rebellion in Tsang, clearly instructing that the rebels be wiped out. The association of the
Dalai Lama with peace is therefore historically unwarranted and misleading, and the number
of Dalai Lamas who died of poisoning or other violent means is quite stunning. The
monastic sects of Tibet were no better; the monastery of Drigung (’Bri-gung) was burnt
down in 1290 by the Sakyapas, and a few years earlier the monastery of Reting (Rva-
sgreng) had been burnt (and monks killed) by Sakya Panchen. Furthermore, it should not be
forgotten that for the Tibetans violence can be justified if the end requires it. The best
example for this is the killing of king Langdarma (Glang Dar-ma) in 842; a monk killed this
king who was persecuting Buddhism, and no Tibetan would argue that the monk did not act
in accordance with the Buddhist precepts, since by this action he saved the Buddhist
doctrine, and this alone made it a good and virtuous deed.19
− Much has been said and written about supernatural powers in Tibet, and doubtless the
Tibetans themselves believed in these powers, based on popular accounts and religious texts.
The Tibetan view is that the appearance of ‘supernatural’ powers is the natural consequence
of reaching increasingly higher levels of spiritual development. Some of these powers (like

18
Marylin Rhie and Robert Thurman 1991, p. 312.
19
A negative view of Buddhism as a violent and evil force has been developed by some Westerners, but this would
seem to be based on misinterpretation or undue emphasis of some lesser and probably foreign elements of the Buddhist
beliefs. See Victor and Victoria Trimondi 1999.
 gtum-mo) may just be the result of skilful techniques. However, there is virtually no
scientific evidence of the kind that a Westerner would normally require to be convinced of
these facts.

− Of course no evidence exists of secret places in Tibet, but a similar concept of different
planes of reality also exists in the Western fantasy and science fiction. The myth of the
fountain of youth is equally present in many traditions.

− The concept of Tibet as a remote, never-changing place is linked to the fact that it was
politically closed to the West. Modernism and technology have now reached Tibet like any
other country in the world, so the idea has now lost any foundation.

− While it is true to say that Tibetan religion has achieved very high levels of sophistication,
very few Westerners actually embark on an in-depth study of the Tibetan texts or their
translations, so that the concept remains vague and romantic for the public at large.
While the West enjoys the comforts of welfare, good communications, health care, education,
leisure time, Tibet must continue to stay as it was (or rather as it was supposed to be)—a repository
of old traditional ways, a sort of living museum sheltered from modernity where the Westerners can
go from time to time to rest themselves and revel in the solace of a lost paradise before going back
to their ordinary, modern and efficient, but glum world. The Westerners have stopped believing in
their own mythological traditions and choose to believe in those of the Tibetans instead, but their
image of Tibet harks back to an idealised romantic image of Medieval Europe. They will not accept
that Tibet moves on from the time warp it has fallen into. The items of Tibetan civilisation that have
become popular and iconic in the West are all religious and traditional, all limited to the times
before the Chinese occupation. Tibetan ritual objects are seen in the West as sacred technological
implements of an ancient power that enable reaching material targets. Prayer-wheels, phur-pas, dor-
jes, bone trumpets etc. are removed from their religious and ritual context and become magical
instruments for trivial achievements, a culture objectified. No art collector in the West would think
of collecting modern Tibetan art, and in fact the Tibetans have promptly conformed to this
philosophy by manufacturing ancient-looking fakes to be sold to credulous Europeans and
Americans who would never even consider buying any Tibetan art made in 1990. Thus, the
Westerners who dream of the ancient Tibetan culture as something to be preserved at all costs
against the Chinese attack are in fact jeopardising this culture by choosing to ignore that it is a
living thing, stifling Tibetan creativity and forcing the artists to eternally return to old unchanging
stereotypes. Indeed the image of Tibet we have in the West is that of a museum, where anything
that happened after 1959 is not worth considering. If Tibet’s only asset is its past, then it has no
future. The Tibetan government in exile is not completely innocent of this state of things, for it has
fostered and merchandised the traditional, religious image of Tibetan civilisation threatened by a
foreign power in order to win the sympathy and support of the Western governments against the
Chinese.20 Strangely enough, this idea has also been seized on by the Chinese, who have turned the
surviving monuments of Tibet into exhibits for the benefit of the tourists, including the flourishing
Chinese tourism. Having completely revolutionised the country and upturned the old traditional
order of society, the Chinese have realised that they can make a nice profit on the traditional image
of Tibet that the Westerners continue to nurture.

Based on the evidence above, we should ask ourselves how the West can possibly still believe in
a Western concept of Tibetanness that hardly has any ties with reality. I believe the reason can only
be that the West will never accept the real Tibet, for that would mean destroying the idealised image
it has formed of it over 300 years. Because the mythical / mystical image of Tibet is a purely

20
I am not sure what the idea of Tibetanness is among the exile Tibetan communities nowadays, but I very much doubt
anybody but the clergy and the aristocracy might be willing to return to the old structure of society.
Western construct and appropriation, the Western man will not prove himself wrong by accepting
that Tibet is a real country like almost any other. The West needs a utopia, an ideal world in which
it can believe and hope for the future, as opposed to the harsh reality of the Western world. Many of
Europe’s fantasies about India and China, dispelled by colonisation, migrated into the Himalayan
plateau to an idealised Tibet which, having escaped the experience of European colonisation,
remained untouched and safe from the ravages of our civilisation, an ideal land. Thus the myth
persists, and its vitality can be seen in the number of books, films, comics, adverts, TV
commercials, dharma centres that continue to proliferate in order to satisfy the West’s unquenchable
thirst for Tibet.21
And yet, accepting the historic reality of Tibet does not mean that it must lose its attraction and
charm to our Western eyes. Tibet has given to the world an impressive number of scholars (think of
Rin-chen bZang-po, ’Brog-mi, ’Brom-ston, Ma-gcig Lab sGron-ma, sGam-po-pa, Tāranātha, Bu-
ston, gZhon-nu-dpal, dPa’-bo gTsug-lag-’phreng-ba or, closer to our times, dGe-’dun Chos-’phel
and bSam-gtan rGyal-mtshan mKhar-rme’u). It assimilated Indian Buddhism and developed it to an
extent unparalleled by any other country, carrying out a monumental work of translation and
exegesis of the original Buddhist scriptures, thus preserving them from the destruction that awaited
them in India. It produced a flourishing of painting and sculpture that attained exquisite levels of
perfection. That a humble folk in such a harsh environment as Tibet could reach such cultural
heights and build up such a significant literary and artistic tradition is indeed a wonder, and bears
witness to the great intellectual ability and resourcefulness of the Tibetans. It would be a shame if
such achievements were spoilt by a myopic attitude only looking nostalgically at Tibet’s past and
neglecting to build a future for its culture. The myth of Tibet must live on.

21
For a comprehensive study of the implications of Tibetan projections in the West, with ample space for the Western
iconography that developed as a result, I can only refer to M. Brauen’s masterly work Traumwelt Tibet. Westliche
Trugbilder, with its wealth of illustrations. In recent years Tibet has also become a fashionable interest for Hollywood
stars, with the result that a number of films (Little Buddha, Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, Samsara) have further
strengthened the Western trivial image of Tibet. Conversely, it must be said that there are a small number of films
where Tibet is portrayed in much more realistic terms (Eric Valli’s Himalaya in 2000, Neten Chokling’s Milarepa in
2007).
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