PhilPaine.com

Of all places in the world, Tibet has attract­ed the most fan­tas­tic mys­ti­fi­ca­tion. Mar­tin Brauen’s book is a study of the bizarre images, dreams, and super­nat­ur­al fan­tasies that peo­ple have pro­ject­ed on this land. He explores the var­i­ous themes, start­ing with Renais­sance spec­u­la­tion about a hid­den Chris­t­ian king­dom in the Himalayas, and pro­ceed­ing through the fan­tasies of Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists; the fic­tion­al Shangri-la of James Hilton’s Lost Hori­zon (and the won­der­ful Frank Capra film made from it); the racist pseu­do-sci­ence of the Nazis, who were fas­ci­nat­ed with Tibet; the absur­di­ties in the immense­ly pop­u­lar books by “Lob­sang Ram­pa”; to mod­ern adver­tiz­ing that exploits the image of the Dalai Lama, and cur­rent movies that still insist on see­ing only the reli­gious and “spir­i­tu­al” side of Tibetan life.

The author is not actu­al­ly angry about all this non­sense, but he is painful­ly aware that few peo­ple are inter­est­ed in the real­i­ty of Tibet, or the peo­ple of Tibet. 

Tibetans, espe­cial­ly the Tibetan exile com­mu­ni­ty, must walk a vibrat­ing tight-rope because of all these fan­tas­tic images. They know that, with­out the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion they pro­vide, the out­side world will have no inter­est in them at all, and a cul­ture that is con­stant­ly threat­ened with exter­mi­na­tion by an immense­ly pow­er­ful and ruth­less empire needs all the friends it can get. If the Tibetans were per­ceived as ordi­nary human beings, in an ordi­nary human cul­ture with a his­to­ry, weak­ness­es and strengths, achieve­ments and fail­ures, good and bad… then they would be sim­ply aban­doned by the world to a very, very nasty fate. Nobody is much inter­est­ed in defend­ing the help­less and oppressed if they are just peo­ple. They will only pay atten­tion to you if you rep­re­sent some kind of spir­i­tu­al spooky-ooky non­sense. I’m famil­iar with this process in Canada’s north, where the only bar­gain­ing chip that most peo­ple on native reserves pos­sess is a very sim­i­lar kind of mystification.

The fash­ion for what places and peo­ples are endowed with this kind of mys­tique changes with time, but Tibet has always had it. Why some peo­ple get it and oth­ers don’t isn’t very clear. Peo­ple in Day­ton, Ohio, or Toron­to, Ontario, appar­ent­ly nev­er had it, and prob­a­bly nev­er will have it. Nobody imag­ines that Toron­to­ni­ans can lev­i­tate, pos­sess super­nat­ur­al wis­dom, are clair­voy­ant, or hold the secrets of the uni­verse in caves under­neath the CN tow­er. There will nev­er be a Lob­sang Ram­pa sell­ing books attribut­ing such mir­a­cles to Toronto. 

[Lob­sang Ram­pa, by the way, whose books of “Tibetan wis­dom” sold in the mil­lions, was real­ly Cyril Hoskins, the son of a plumber in Devon, Eng­land, who migrat­ed to Cana­da and is now buried in Cal­gary, Alber­ta. He nev­er got any­where near Tibet, and his books dis­play no knowl­edge of Tibet or of Buddhism.]