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    Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
    Unavailable
    Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
    Unavailable
    Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
    Ebook468 pages7 hours

    Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West

    By Donald S. Lopez Jr.

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    To the Western imagination, Tibet evokes exoticism, mysticism, and wonder: a fabled land removed from the grinding onslaught of modernity, spiritually endowed with all that the West has lost. Originally published in 1998, Prisoners of Shangri-La provided the first cultural history of the strange encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Donald Lopez reveals here fanciful misconceptions of Tibetan life and religion. He examines, among much else, the politics of the term “Lamaism,” a pejorative synonym for Tibetan Buddhism; the various theosophical, psychedelic, and New Age purposes served by the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead; and the unexpected history of the most famous of all Tibetan mantras, om mani padme hum. More than pop-culture anomalies, these versions of Tibet are often embedded in scholarly sources, constituting an odd union of the popular and the academic, of fancy and fact.

    Upon its original publication, Prisoners of Shangri-La sent shockwaves through the field of Tibetan studies—hailed as a timely, provocative, and courageous critique. Twenty years hence, the situation in Tibet has only grown more troubled and complex—with the unrest of 2008, the demolition of the dwellings of thousands of monks and nuns at Larung Gar in 2016, and the scores of self-immolations committed by Tibetans to protest the Dalai Lama’s exile.

    In his new preface to this anniversary edition, Lopez returns to the metaphors of prison and paradise to illuminate the state of Tibetan Buddhism—both in exile and in Tibet—as monks and nuns still seek to find a way home. Prisoners of Shangri-La remains a timely and vital inquiry into Western fantasies of Tibet.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9780226485515
    Unavailable
    Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West
    Author

    Donald S. Lopez Jr.

    Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.

    Read more from Donald S. Lopez Jr.

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    • 5/5
      This is an excellent guide to fallacies regarding Tibet made by Western writers and travelers. Occasionally, Lopez lapses into the laxness of Foucaultian irony; however, these languors are made up for in bursts of startling original thinking. I relished his meditation on how authority to speak for foreign cultures is granted to some writers and not to others. This topic has been discussed elsewhere, but here Lopez provides a context in which an obviously fictional "true story," The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa (actually Cyril Hoskin from Devon), became an inspiration for a generation of Tibetologists. In another interesting chapter, the author describes the distortions applied to Tibetan Buddhism as it became disseminated in the West, changing monastic practice to suit a laity of individual worshipers steeped in Christian tradition. He also shows how the political and social needs of the Tibetan diaspora have driven further misconceptions.