Tibetan Buddhism today exists largely as a religion in diaspora. Since the fall of the central Tibetan government in 1959 to the Communist Chinese army , Tibetan refugees have resettled in India, Nepal, and in many developed nations around the world. In addition to the Tibetan diaspora proper, there are numerous ethnically Tibetan Buddhist peoples in Bhutan, in the Indian states of Kinnaur and Ladakh, and in the Himayalan regions of Nepal. There are also several millions of followers of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. The encounter of the Tibetan diaspora with Western countries has also spawned thousands of small groups and communities of Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. This nascent "Western Tibetan Buddhism" is also a diaspora, of sorts. While it comprises a diaspora of certain aspects of Tibetan culture itself, in many instances it is only tangentially related to the presence of Tibetans themselves. One need only point to the appropriation of Tibet and Tibetans in media -- let alone the many practice groups and communities -- to identify this peculiar diaspora, or "meta-diaspora".
My knowledge of Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhist communities in diaspora stems mostly from participating in Tibetan cultural events such as Losar (New Years), and from attending teachings and audiences with many Tibetan lamas of various traditions, in north America, India and Nepal. As a student of Tibetan Buddhism I have participated regularly or lived, up to several months at a time, among a number of communties in America, France, India, Nepal, South America and Canada. I use the term "community" loosely, as some of these social and religious organizations with which I am familiar have been little more than loosely organized Vajrayana "practice groups". Now, as print and electronic media have made the identity and activities of these groups and participants more accessible than might ever have been possible among far-flung monasteries and hermitages of Tibet, we can speak of a virtual diasporic community of both Tibetan and non-Tibetan Tibetan Buddhists that, in spite of geographical dispersion, is surprisingly well-informed of its local and international developments[1]. Typically, a year brings in several announcements for Tibetan cultural festivals; no less than fifty announcements of visits by Dharma teachers to New York and elsewhere, and several hundred messages from friends, colleagues and fellow practitioners from all over the world. The mailbox and computer screen may not be sacred spaces, but they are constant reminders that sacred space exists at least virtually.
Because of Tibet's recent tragic history, and due to the almost unfathomable richness of the symbolism and practices transmitted in the many lineages of Tibetan Buddhism (known as Vajrayana or "Vehicle of Indestructible Reality"), the diaspora has had to grapple with a unique set of concerns and, one hopes, will evolve an authentic set of responses to its role as recipient and preserver of Tibetan Buddhist values and practices. On the subject of "religion without sacred space", we are concerned with "religion without sacred land". An altar, or temple is a sacred space, but torn from the land of its origin, a religion lacks the broader context of sacred space that is the land itself. Tibetan Buddhism in diaspora is no exception but nonetheless it has developed some effective responses to this problem.
In the case of the Tibetan ethnic diaspora in South Asian countries, all the major communities have, to one degree or another, reestablished monastic institutions and their associated schools of higher Buddhist learning, the equivalent of our theological seminaries. This endeavor has been most successful in Karnataka state in south India, where there are several monasteries of more than two thousand monks, many of whom are recent refugees from the various Tibetan provinces. In the mountainous Himachal and Uttar Pradesh states in Northern Indian, there are several Tibetan communities and also many monasteries, mostly on a smaller scale than those in the south. In the former British hill station of Dharamsala the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, has made his home for almost forty years. Dharmasala is where the central Tibetan government in exile is located, and thus where many of the oldest and most influential families who fled the Chinese invaders have reestablished themselves. Nepal's Kathmandu Valley and several other regions surrounding it have long been important destinations for Tibetan traders, religious pilgrims and scholars. Many of India's Buddhist traditions were transmitted, orally and by manuscript, to Tibetan scholars visiting this region, and the Jarung Kashor and Svayambhunath stupas, two of the holiest Tantric Buddhist pilgrimage sites, have served as natural focal points for the communities and religious institutions of the Tibetan diaspora. Moreover, the large communities and monasteries of both India and Nepal have long served the Western Buddhist diaspora, who visit there in large numbers as pilgrim-tourists, students of yoga and meditation, or as research scholars. The Tibetan diaspora has also established itself in the holiest Buddhist sites of central India, most notably Bodhgaya, where the Buddha reached enlightenment, and Sarnath, where he first began to elaborate his teaching, the Dharma. These diasporic communities attract many Western Buddhist visitors and serve as centers of religious study and practice.
In these and many other ways, the requirement of sacred space has been quite well fulfilled in the South Asian Tibetan diaspora. In the case of Europe and North America, the situation is of course different; the Tibetan diaspora communities there are generally smaller, and they are not living in countries that have long harbored a Buddhist culture. The Swiss opened their doors to several thousand Tibetans in the sixties and at least one Tibetan monastery has been built there. In various locales of central and southern France Tibetan temples and retreat centers have been built by Tibetan lamas and their Western disciples. The region borded by Montignac and Les Eyzies in France's Dordogne region has been settled by a number of important Tibetan lamas and their extended families, as well as their patrons and a growing population of devout followers. There are several each of Tibetan temples, residential centers and long-term retreat cloisters in that region, and over the years many eminent Tibetan masters have lived and taught there, including the Dalai Lama. The Dordogne, home to the famous Lascaux caverns, is said to be the oldest continuously occupied human settlement on earth, dating back 40,000 years or more, well into the Ice Age. This, plus the abundant caves and grottoes of its hills and river gorges, surrounded by the tranquil, sparsely cultivated valley landsapes, lends this region an air of magic that most visitors will readily appreciate. As the epicenter of the most concentrated, dedicated and sustained activities of Tibetan Buddhist study, textual translation and contemplative practice anywhere in Europe or the Americas, this rather small region within the Dordogne has, for thousands of Tibetan and Western participants in those activities, become a veritable Buddhist holy land.
In North America there is no place quite comparable, but a few noteworthy establishments of the Western Tibetan Buddhist diaspora should be mentioned. Karma Choling in Vermont, and Karma Triyana Dharmachakra in Woodstock New York, have been important destinations for students of Tibetan Buddhism, American and otherwise, for more than twenty years. Rocky Mountain Dharma Center in Colorado which, like Karma Choling, was founded by the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is the site of one of the grandest stupas ever built. Recently completed after more than a decade of construction, it contains several shrines and the Trungpa Rinpoche's remains. New York's Catskill region is home to nearly a dozen Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers, residential centers and informal communities, and that number is soon to swell as senior Tibetan lamas continue to buy land and plan monasteries and residential sites for the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Washington Irving, the teller of Rip Van Winkle's legendary foray in the Catskill faerie realm, could hardly have forseen so strange a development as the importation of Tibetan and other forms of Buddhism here, but I think he would not be surprised. The enchantment of the Catskill region was not lost on Irving, nor on the American romantics of the Hudson Valley school of painting, and now it continues to provide a most congenial natural setting for a significant number of contemplatives and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism.
The Tibetan diaspora, and the diaspora of Western Buddhist adherents of Tibetan traditions, have several important factors that tend to bind them together. Most important is the Dalai Lama, universally revered as a spiritual teacher in all Tibetan Buddhist sects and even in Tibet's indigenous Bšn religion. Of similar importance, but much less visibly, are the Tibetan Lamas, monks and nuns who are residents or visitors in the diasporic communities. Professional religious practitioners, people of the cloth, are the cultural mainstay of Tibet. They are what Tibetans consider to be the most important symbols, and the most potent transmitters, of what is best in Tibetan culture. Wherever religious teachers (Lamas) and ordained persons stay tends to become, ipso facto, a Sangha-vihara or dwelling place of the the Spiritual Community, hence a place sanctified by religious practice, much as were the gardens and groves donated by the Buddha's patrons for the Sangha's annual monsoon retreat in central India, twenty-five hundred years ago. So in this respect Sacred Space is created spontaneously wherever the Three Jewels - the Buddha or teacher, the Dharma teaching or its texts, and the Sangha community of practitioners - are found. A place that elicits reverence should be sacred, and wherever the Jewels are found, the pieties of lay and ordained Buddhists are bound to be expressed.
Buddhism was originally, and is still to a degree a religion of wandering mendicants. Wherever they are well-received, Buddhism tends to establish itself. So generally speaking Buddhism creates its own sacred spaces rather easily, and is not especially dependent on the physical proximity or memory of its most important historical sites. (The celebrated central Indian Buddhist sites were all but lost to the Indians themselves and the Buddhists of other countries, until the British surveyors began to discover them in the eighteenth century).
The potential for sacred space to manifest spontaneously is nowhere higher than in Vajrayana Buddhist practice, which employs the use of mantra and visualization to create an experience of sacredness. Through liturgical performances, or amidst the activities of everyday life, a yogi is to experience, imaginately imaginatively or better yet spontaneously, the presence of divinity - Buddhahood embodied - in his or her own person, companions and environment. These constitute a mandala or sacred architecture which expresses the omnipresence of enlightenment, that is the ground of both "secular" and "sacred" experiences and activities that are never perceived apart from its all-encompassing confines. The invocation of divine presence of mandala is especially effective when undertaken by several people in a ritual context, and it is incumbent for practitioners to do so periodically with a feast-offering known as tsok or, in Sanskrit, ganapuja.
By invoking the presence of enlightenment as community, a virtual mandala or sacred hierarchy is formed wherever and whenever practitioners and their spiritual mentors or Lamas reenact an archetypal situation, that is, the transmission of enlightened wisdom which the Buddha bestowed on his historical disciples in India 2500 years ago. When this transmission takes place, one has "entered the mandala", the already-always-existing palace of enlightened mind, and formed a powerful spiritual bond with the teacher and the other participants. As long as the bond is maintained through the power of faith and practice, one remains a part of that mandala, even if (as is frequently the case) the teacher and students have convened for the occasion to a temporary shrine from across several states, provinces or even continents. The power of sacred bonding in a temporary or virtual sacred space is an intrinsic, if normally invisible, component of a Vajrayana community experience. The community is that experience, and ceases to exist without it. To dwell in that sacredness requires only that one perceive it, but to maintain that perception requires discipline, faith and a profound sense of love and respect for members of the mandala- that is, all living beings. To the extent that Western practitioners of Vajrayana have succeeded in these virtues, the Vajrayana community in diaspora has maintained a strong sense of cohesiveness, even in spite its relatively small numbers, its incredibly diverse lineages of teaching and practice, and its extremely far-flung distribution on six continents. Small communities might survive without this larger sense of connectedness, but with so many itinerant teachers and community members in our highly mobile society, the "microcosmic" mandala-community tends to maintain supportive links within the world-wide network.
All traditions of Buddhism emphasize the need for both selfless motives (i.e., freedom from desire and clinging) as well as selfless action (expressing love and concern for others). One would expect a community based sincerely on these attitudes to be a healthy and happy one. Nevertheless, the community both locally and at large has felt the intense strain of frequent ruptures - of organizations, often due to financial woes, but also of relationships. Perhaps some special troubles are to be expected in a culturally sophisticated, rather loosely connected network of communities of converts to esoteric forms of religion, where the existence of community is predicated almost entirely on the shared desire to realize the most sublime levels of spiritual realization. Unlike more conventional houses of worship, Vajrayana communities and temples are for the most part conceived with the needs of individual practitioners in mind, not necessarily those of families, or of cultural programs or service organizations within the community. It seems that, Buddhist altruism not withstanding, this type of community that intends to foster the practice of mostly lay, non-residential and often single or childless members, has a special attraction for introverted, intellectual, intensely self-searching individuals. A contemplative community of such persons might facilitate development of skill in practice, but if it fails to counterbalance or encourages an excess of introversion among its members, it might in the long run fail to serve their best interests. The Sangha first and formost supports "looking within" for peace and harmony, but in the final analysis it is a support for realizing the freedom from both inward and outwardly directed reflexes of the mind's activity. That is, the Sangha is a support for realizing selflessness in one's own view, practice and daily life.
The causes for social and psychological rupturing in the community are numerous, but most appear to stem, directly or indirectly, from reactions to the seemingly unnavigable gulf that separates the Tibetan Buddhist worldview from our own. But this awkward sense of cultural difference is more the creation of our deep-seated fears and prejudices, than of any objective circumstance. It stems partially from tension between wanting to know it all, and being content to know not enough, about the rich methodology of Vajrayana. It also arises from our hesitation to practice when it is all too apparent that, given the vast possibilities at our disposal, our job as spiritual practitioners, once started, might never get done. In Vajrayana, the path itself is the goal, and the goal is the path; but this does not resonate with our cultural orientation toward tangible results, credentials and other forms of self-gratification.
The vast methods of Vajrayana are supported by an equally vast view. Like much of Mahayana Buddhism, the Vajrayana view is barely conceivable in terms of the religious experience and cultural values of most Westerners. In the vajra mandala, not only are all beings and all things part of the sacred space of the universe itself, but within that sacredness, each of us must learn to stand at the center. When the unlimited potential of Buddha-nature begins to unfold we are impelled to abandon our limited ego-centered perceptions, and occupy the "boundariless center", radiating boundless reverence for the enlightened world and boundless compassion for all living beings. Pervasive sacredness, reverence and undivided compassion are not, according to Vajrayana, an extraordinary state to be cultivated; they are the natural expression of our being.
This view presents a special challenge to practice to the extent that our social environments are almost wholly secular and materialistic, quite unlike the materially undeveloped society in which Tibetan Buddhist traditions were rooted. In the absence of stable communities of faith and under constant pressure to conform to a secular society, many Western participants in Vajrayana have found it difficult to reap the spiritual benefits of their practices. The reason seems easy enough to diagnose, but difficult to treat. Culture is a pervasive influence that now, more than ever, has no fixed geographical locus. Just as the symbols and values of American material culture are increasingly omnipresent throughout the world, the Tibetan Vajrayana culture of enlightenment, as expressed in its symbols, practices and institutions, is influencing the lives of many people in the West. But it is up against stiff competition: the hardened ground of ingrained, unconscious cultural prejudices. These color our perceptions constantly and, for the most part, invisibly. Many a mind, if it is receptive, can be temporarily influenced to experience the world from a more open, less ego-centered perspective, by encountering another culture. But this does not guarantee an inner revolution, and up against a wall of defenses, an opening is almost always followed by an upwhelling of emotional resistance, a phenomenon well known among tourists and expatriates as "culture shock". In the case of the Western Vajrayana diaspora, this arises from the conflict that sooner or later obtains between the enlightened perspective, which is rich, spacious and intensely alive to the immediacy of the senses, with our underlying (and often entirely unconscious) value-systems, that tend to be rooted in the embattled mentality of egoic self-preservation.
The Westerners who seem to be most attracted to Buddhism often cherish an unquestioned belief in individualism. On the positive side, individualism implies initiative, the practice of critical observation, resourcefulness and innovation. All of these may be useful in the development of skillful means and wisdom, the two "wings" required for ascending the firmament of Buddhist enlightenment. The utilitarian mandate "to find the right tool for the job" might well lead an individualist to the teachers and communities of the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora, where a treasure trove of spiritual tools and techniques are available. Once there, however, the other side of individualism must account for itself. Individualism might also imply stubborn resistance to what is foreign or novel, a tendency to evade what is unfamiliar, an unwillingness to listen to one's heart or gut, and an arrogant attitude of "been there, done that". Such a person is less likely to resonate with the spacious mandala-view than someone for whom relatedness, not an enhanced sense individuality, is the primary motivation for seeking out new experiences. Since the swaggering attitude of males, particulary Americans, exemplifies these latter qualities of the individualist, it is not surprising that Vajrayana communities are so often led by women, who tend to be less anxious in the face of the ungraspable.
These individualistic "virtues" of the Western male - stubborness, hard-headedness and so on - are not much prized in traditional Buddhist societies. Those tendencies will likely cause one to withdraw in suspicion from any form of Buddhist practice that militates against the misconception that so-called "freedom" of the so-called "individual", held to be the most sublime value of our culture - , ought also to be the most sublime value of Western Buddhism. Freedom that is attainable for oneself, by oneself, without having to relate to anyone else's agenda, promises the ultimate in self-confirmation and self-preservation.
Indeed, self-reliance is the basic attitudinal paradigm for Buddhist practice, which must commence on our own initiative and thrive by our own discipline and critical observation of ourselves. This approach, which is well-documented in the drama of Zen biographies such as Hakuin's, is called "self-power", as opposed to the faith-oriented "other power" that is practiced in Pure Land Buddhism. But even in Zen it is said that in the final analysis, self and other-power are the same. The reason is that there is no self, so self-willing eventually must surrender to self-naughting. This is where many Western Buddhists lose their way. When they discover that self cannot be reinforced and liberated at the same time, they experience what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche colorfully once described as "a fundamental freak-out of ego". The conflict between expectations of the limited self and the unnerving openness of reality - that is, selflessness- may build up to a breaking point where a once heroically devoted practitioner turns into the meanest kind of critic of Buddhists and their supposedly cranky, conservative, and obsolete institutions. Unable to take the plunge into the unknown, we instinctively place the blame on our surroundings - our communities, friends, even our teachers. If those appear blameless, we can always blame it on "culture", that malleable patŽ of conceptions to which almost any personal impression or whim, like newsprint to Silly-Putty, easily adheres. If we aren't so bold as to blame "Asian" or "Buddhist" culture, we can still blame them implicitly, by invoking the concept of "cultural difference". We don't wish to malign Buddhism, so instead we tend to blame "cultural difference" for our failure to rise to the profound philosophical and existential challenges of Buddhist practice.
That there is "no self" in Buddhism tends to serve as an intellectual consolation, because it holds out the promise of liberation from the tyranny of our ingrained cult of the individual, with its insatiable demands for performance and achievement. That the illusory nature of the relative self can be demonstrated through logical arguments makes "Buddhism" all the more acceptable. The absence of a truly existing self implies that, in the ultimate sense, everything and everyone is equal, and that beliefs are just relative to the cultural contingencies of the superficial, unreal self. Based on selflessness, community and consensus are inevitable. Or so it would seem.
What we know, or suspect we know, to be so problematic about the cult of the self, is a mere fiction -- the "individual" or "self". That ought to come as a relief, and often it does, but only until the actual treatment of the problem is starting to show results through practice. That is when then the bogeyman of the "unbridgeable cultural gap" is likely to make his appearance, and tell us that we can never really reconcile ourselves to the seemingly suicidal demands of selfless practice, or worse yet, that we take an ego-death-defying leap of devotion or faith. Therefore many Westerners like to interpret Buddhism through the lens of rationalism, and selectively ignore those aspects of the teaching - such as the importance of faith, and the invisible workings of karma- that have no precedent or plausibility according to their intellectual conditioning. The ennobling powers of faith, and the ethical imperative of considering the results of one's actions in future existences, requires that we profoundly acknowledge the wisdom of others - the Buddha, the Dharma, the spiritual teachers of the Sangha. We have to bear witness to something more powerful than ourselves, an "other-power", if we really wish to see beyond the fictive "self". This is why Buddhism has survived as a both a popular religion and an esoteric practice in Asia. Faith compels taking refuge in the Three Jewels, and when many people take refuge faithfully, community and tradition thrive.
"Other-power" is hard for individualists to accept because it means accepting the inherent weakness and inevitable death of the self. Even if we realize that acceptance would mean the end of struggle, it seems just too much to take. We thought the Buddha only required our self-reliance, and then we find that even self-reliance must be given up. It seems a cruel surprise and puts one in the embarrassing position of having to admit one's weakness, but simple logic demands it. If self does not exist, the "self" that we imagine to exert effort is a fiction, its goals are illusory, and its strategies are powerless to deal with the problem of its own existence. The resolution to the problem is not in the self or the will, nor is it separate from those fictional enterprises, because those fictional enterprises are nothing. In the final analysis, the power of Other actually is one's Self or true nature; this is the resolution of the fictional problem of self. Accessing the power of this identity of self and other requires discipline, and wisdom, but especially, at the outset, faith. Faith is the limited self's only mode of direct access to Other-power. To the extent that our belief in individual selfhood still dominates us, discipline and wisdom, even in great abundance, are liable to leave us high and dry.
The simple affirmation of the identity of "Other-Power" and "Self" is liable to put off the inveterate believer in the lower-case individualistic self, because it suggests an idea reminiscent of a "spark of the divine", or a "God within". The individualist's and rationalist's attraction to Buddhism is often based on a revulsion for any kind of theism, as that is associated in our history of recent centuries with dogmatism, authoritarianism, patriarchy and so on - precisely the sorts of influences that individualists, democrats, and feminists most wish to banish. The idea of a blessed Buddha, within or without oneself, would seem not a blessing, but a serious risk, if faith were needed to invoke his or her presence. The Buddha might seem just another version of the jealous God or authoritarian pedagogue or parent, looking over our shoulder constantly. Many would rather stay enmired in the self-absorbed conviction that they are victims of the circumstances of life, than find solace in something infinitely greater and more powerful than that victimized self - even if that something is infinitely benevolent and emphatically not a Creator God. Our collective belief in the sanctity of the "self" - that created entity whose dignity our laws and customs exalt and protect, whose needs and vulnerability our psychology teaches us to cherish deeply - causes us to be both attracted and repelled by the religious aspects of Buddhism.
This has had major repercussions in how Western Buddhist communities have evolved in the West. Among other things, it has meant that many, and probably most non-ethnic North American Buddhists that would describe themselves as "Buddhist" have only loose affiliations with Buddhist churches or communities. Belonging to a religious community is an implicit act of faith, with all the commitments that implies, hence the many "journeyman" Buddhists with no particular community. As a result, perhaps, Buddhist groups in north America have, with a few noteworthy exceptions, remained marginal entities in society at large.
Thus in some respects Buddhism, to the extent that it really is a religion and not just the ultimate rationalism that some wish it to be, is not as easily rooted in our culture as one might have expected, given its enthusiastic acceptance, at least in principle, by so many of our cultural elite. Nevertheless Buddhism's values and worldviews are more easily portable than anyone would have thought a century ago, when East and West were thought to be worlds apart. This works to the advantage, as well as the disadvantage, of diasporic Buddhist communities. Many have found it possible to be, for example, a Catholic priest or investment banker by day and a Buddhist practitioner by night, just as some of Vajrayana Buddhism's historical adepts in India were Brahmin priests, businesswomen or barmaids by day, and Buddhist meditators or teachers in secret. This needn't entail a conflict of belief systems necessarily, provided one's faith and openness to the omnipresent sacredness of life are profound enough to encompass very different aspects of one's activity. I would suggest that a catholicity of faith, of the kind that inspires Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, is the most profound guarantor of discovering an authentic Western Buddhism. At the very least, such faith would not conduce to the kind of identity crisis that is likely to precipitate when secular values - individualism, egalitarianism, democracy - have assumed the degree of conviction that our ancestors reserved for spiritual values. In this case our values are bound to find themselves in conflict with the implications of Buddhist beliefs and practice.
To pursue the perennial sacred as though it were a part-time hobby, and to maintain an unquestioning ideological commitment to theological or philosophical dogmas, materialistic values or political agendas (to name but a few of the forces that would countervail against genuine spirituality), is bound to lead to inner and, eventually, outer conflicts. For example, one cannot be materialist or relativist at heart and a Buddhist by profession, without being false to one or another of the philosophical commitments in which one is thereby implicated. This fact has been recognized-although, it would seem, unconsciously - by those who have tried to paint Buddhism as a rationalistic alternative to religion. To avail oneself of the promise of Buddhist spirituality, without having to face the discomfort of challenging one's rational convictions, leaves only one alternative, and that is to make Buddhism into the exemplar of one's preexisting belief in Reason.
Earnest dillentantism has provoked many a dark night of the soul among Western Buddhists in diaspora. When Buddhist practices and beliefs are pursued with energy, they are bound to have an effect on one's experience of the world. But without a willingness to undergo a profound metanoia or inward transformation - which looms all the more threateningly on a spiritual path, the more addicted one is to ingrained beliefs about the world - intense experimentation in powerful practices such as those of Vajrayana Buddhism can precipitate a crisis of faith, or perhaps more accurately, of worldviews. The power of sacred perception is said to be such that, once one has had a genuine glimpse of it, to doubt it has the potential to precipitate terrible suffering. Since the authentic sacred is ultimately not a creation of our minds, whatever limiting views our minds create will obscure it; thus to doubt the sacred realm is to become utterly deprived of it. Doubt and subsequent deprivation of connection to the sacred realm are an all-too-frequent occurrence among Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. Since to some people it seems that "Doubt" can never be banished, many Western Buddhists hope to rehabilitate it. Rather than an obstacle, doubt is, they say, an operating principle. They point to some practices of Zen meditation to prove their point. The "Great Doubt", they say, is the passageway to the great enlightenment. That may be so. But in Zen doubt is never exalted as an object of faith. Much as our ancestors were stuck with a harsh and jealous God, now it seems we are stuck with Doubt. But making Doubt into an object does not seem to serve our purposes any better than doing the same with God. Either way we are stuck with our projections, and Buddhism is supposed to eliminate those projections.
Another bogeyman in Western Buddhism is the concept of "human equality". The contervailing empirical evidence (people do seem to be born with different traits and potentials), and the demonstrable unattainability of "human equality" even in those societies that claimed to prize it the most (e.g., Maoist China), suggest that "human equality" is not so much an ontological fact, as it is a wide-spread dogmatic conviction that has as much power to harm as it does to help. I don't wish to contest that human equality--if that means dignity and equal rights before the law -- should belong to everyone. But regardless of the dignity that the law might guarantee us in society, when the simple concept ame notion of "equality" is applied in the spiritual life, it does little more than indicate that we're all in the same boat. That seems obvious enough. But believing there is no difference among those stranded might be taken to mean, for survival's sake, that it's every man for himself. If everyone is equal in the eyes of an egalitarian system of law, we might be protected from violations of our legal rights, but we are not thereby protected from our competitiveness or self-centeredness. Likewise "everyone is equal" in a spiritual or religious context simply means "nobody necessarily knows any better than anyone else" and "everyone's got to figure it out for himself." Though these might be helpful thoughts for someone who needs to escape from the psychological confines of a narrow-minded religious dogmatism, if we take them as premises for an authentic path to wisdom, they are likely to foster an arrogant intellectualism devoid of faith, or a benumbed agnosticism incapable of breaking free of the confines of the created self.
Where "human equality" is a cornerstone of belief, democracy - government by communal consensus - is bound to follow. As a social organizing principle, the benefits of democracy are obvious enough. But let us suppose that our spiritual life is to be governed by the same principle. If all are equal, then everyone's opinion is equally valid. In that case, we should develop communities that construct their own beliefs and practices. If most or all of the members of such a community were saints, one might expect those legislated beliefs to be spiritually edifying; but what if there are no saints, no enlightened ones among us? Or what if the saints and enlightened one's opinions count for no more than the whining of emotional five-year-olds? What do we end up with then? By legislating beliefs and practices, it seems we will face only a mild challenge from our like-minded compatriots in an intentional religious community. Sometimes we will be aggravated by kindergartners who get to boss us around. We will tend to take the path of least resistance, voting in favor of beliefs that and practices that make life easier, and voting against those that make us uncomfortably aware of our faults.
When the blind lead the blind, it is not much different than stumbling forth alone, the difference being that there will often be a warm arm or torso to break one's fall. If the ideal of human equality and the democratic process are invoked to determine the form of our spiritual belief and practice, I think that in the best-case scenario we end up with a spiritual version of network television: content pitched to the lowest common cultural denominator. If the masses - or the intellectual elites, for that matter- create their own religion from scatch, it will only be as sublime a religion as the most spiritually mediocre among them. The truth of this is abundantly evident in the reams of New Age and self-help platitudes that crowd our bookstore shelves.
Intellectuals and dilletantes, on their own, have never created truly spiritual form in a culture; they have always relied upon, or parasitized, the forms created by the inspiration of saints and mystics. By affirming naively idealized equality, and thus denying the existence-not to say the importance-of spiritual authority, intellectual Buddhists might evade the discomfort of being challenged by someone who has a deeper experience of the divine: but at what price? Except for rare spiritual geniuses, all the great saints of the past have found their freedom within the context of a tradition, however flawed the institutional dimension of tradition may sometimes be. By refusing to learn from others more learned, we condemn ourselves and others to repeat our mistakes.
In the Buddhist view some things (and, especially, some persons) are more holy than others simply because of their profound link with the divine; to benefit from contact with such vessels of sacredness requires the humility of knowing one's faults and a receptivity to intangible spiritual quality. This should not be a remarkable statement for anyone familiar with the mystical and hagiographical literature of the world's religions, which all attest the fact that saints are different from ordinary people. This idea, which is essential to Buddhist traditions such as Vajrayana where wisdom is transmitted directly from teacher to student, turns out to be a source of profound confusion for many converts in the Buddhist Diaspora . For Americans, at least, it flies in the face of that secular humanist truism, which is repeated almost as a prayer in our public school texbooks and media, yet which, like many religious beliefs, seems to fly squarely in the face of both common sense and experience: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal." This is one belief that might had better be bracketed out, if we wish if we hope to realize our innate wisdom through their inspiration and guidance of a spiritual teacher. Based as it is on intangible and essentially personal experience, how seriously can we take the spiritual authority of another human being, while also believing that person to be "equal" to ourselves?
From the perspective of sacredness itself, which cannot be established or disestablished by ordinary logic, the collective clatter of human opinions is no consequence. The Buddha did not quarrel with the opinions of ordinary people. He never discussed metaphysical conundrums, except to dismiss them as fruitless preoccupations. However I would like to think that the Buddha would not have objected in principle to the social ideals of human equality and democracy, even though, like the metaphysical views he dismissed, they are based on unprovable (and probably mistaken) assumptions. For, like the concept of "skillful means" in the Lotus Sutra, these ideals seem to be salutory, even if (like everything in this world) they are illusory. However, one wonders how the Buddha would have reacted to the idea-which is practically an article of faith in some segments of the Western Buddhist community-that our Western social ideals must be wedded to our Buddhist practice and our Buddhist communities, if Buddhism is to become authentically "Western", and not remain an exotic artifact of Asian cultures. How would the Buddha have responded to the suggestion that Buddhist communities ought to have no persons of spiritual authority, and no seniority; to the idea that the ethics of a community might be leglislated according to current vogues (otherwise known as "cultural values"); or to the idea that, all things being equal, the qualities of the Buddha are not all that remarkable, and that an unqualified person ought to assume equal stature next to him? This latter was also the suggestion of Buddha's cousin, the monk Devadatta, who considered the Buddha's authority and charismatic presence to be inconsequential. When the Buddha refused to share his authority, Devadatta left with a splinter group of monks and later tried several times to assassinate his former teacher. Likewise the monk Sunakshatra (Pali Sunakkhata), after he had withdrawn from the Order, maintained that the Buddha's enlightenment was a kind of felicitous accident, based on a willy-nilly process of reasoning, the likes of which might have been cooked up by any clever person.
According to some self-appointed spokespersons for Western Buddhism, since "everyone has Buddha-nature" means "everyone is equal" means "everyone has Buddha-nature", nobody has any more authority in spiritual matters than anyone else, and hence, teachers are unimportant or unnecessary. Ironically, some of the preachers of this anti-authoritarian message have, on the seeming authority of their position, become well-established teachers in Western Buddhism. Like so many other "New Age" teachers their underlying message, which caters to the lowest common denominator, is the same as Burger King's: "have it your way". In other words, "just do it" -- cook up your own spiritual life from scratch. Evidently this is a message that many people will pay to listen to over and over again. The reason, it would seem, is that the message resonates with the belief system of the secret cult that, even unawares, many of us already belong to: the cult of the Individual which is necessarily opposed to any authority higher than oneself.
But those who would begrudge the idea of spiritual authority still submit to another kind of authority to find confidence their own position, in this case, the "authorities" on anti-traditional, anti-authoritarian Buddhism. They buy their books and attend their seminars and retreats in growing numbers. None of them, it seems, ever stops listening to the message long enough to inquire whence derives the authority of this anti-authoritarianism that exalts the power and authority of the individual. Likewise, those who accept anti-authoritarianism unquestioningly are necessarily blind to the ironies inherent in their position. Not only is it almost irremediably na•ve; it is quite problematic in light of the Buddhist notion of selflessness. Since one's "self" is only a contingency that depends on "not-self" for its moment-to-moment existence, that illusory "self" is dependent on nominally distinct sources of authority to form its beliefs and organize its knowledge of the world. Traditional Buddhists acknowledge this contingency and all of its implications by taking refuge in the Three Jewels. Anti-authoritarian Buddhists, to one degree or another, implicitly deny this contingency, and to that extent are not quite Buddhist, at least not philosophically. And without its philosophical (and epistemological) basis, what is Buddhism, other than a collection of unquestioned beliefs? This is the spurious image of "religious" Buddhism that some rationalists and anti-authoritarians reject; but the Buddhism they end up with, bereft of its philosophical integrity, is certainly no better.
My guess is that, faced with the insistent demands of so many people in the Buddhist Diaspora that many of the basic beliefs and practices of Buddhism ought to be revised or jettisoned, the Buddha would have said, as he occasionally did, "Have it your way. But you are not my disciple." The Buddha was not a missionary bent on conversion; he would only accept into the order those who approached him guilelessly, with a willingness to commit and learn anew. Likewise he was content to disassociate himself from any would-be disciple who was more interested in debate and controversy than the practical exigencies of the path. The Buddha used reason wherever possible to guide his students and interlocutors, but he was also not shy of declaring that the higher truths of the spiritual path would only become evident to those willing to prepare themselves rigorously in contemplation and meditation. In many scriptures the Buddha declares what makes a spiritual teaching authentic. It is any teaching based the Four Noble Truths. Since the Buddha invited any and all to practice his path and allowed that anyone could realize the same truth as he, he did not claim that his teaching alone was authentic; but he did leave many clues for future generations as to what would qualify a genuine spiritual teaching, or a genuine interpretation of his own. According to the Buddha's guidelines, all such teachings should at least acknowledge the three marks of existence: impermance, suffering, and selflessness. To understand these three means to understand the Noble Truths and all the practices associated with them; to contradict these three is to undermine the basis of the Noble Truths and thus, the possibility of enlightenment.
Everyone who has studied the Buddhist Sutras would have to agree that, as far as thinking can go, the Buddha was an original, creative, and flexible thinker. This is what appeals to many Buddhists today - the Buddha's thought seems to bend where it needs to go, but nonetheless, to retain what strength is needed to be a viable guide for us. The Buddhist world view challenges us, and at the same time, gives us the tools that one would need to meet the challenge of becoming a Buddhist. Part and parcel of that world view is its monastic institutions, based on lineages of vinaya or monastic discipline, handed down from the Buddha's time until now. These have changed little in their time, even though the Buddha allowed that minor rules could be changed as needed. Neither have the Buddha's basic teachings changed, in spite of lending themselves to many and distinctive philosophical elaborations.
Now the social institutions and philosophical cornerstones of Buddhism are under attack in some corners of the Western Buddhist community. One of our most popular Diasporic writers and teachers tells us that those Asian Buddhist monastic institutions are just the province of self-serving ecclesiasts. Their alleged spiritual authority is a sham being foisted on starry-eyed Western converts. And we hear that much of what passes as the Buddha's teaching is not really his after all. It is largely the pious and fabulous interpolations of the Buddha's followers, who were determined to twist his pristine rational doctrine, a rather unextraordinary philosophy, into a "religion" rife with revelations concerning matters that lie beyond the ken of the ordinary senses and intellect. These ecclesiasts, we are told, are just doing what churchmen always do: manipulating the largesse of the faithful by creating confusing doctrines that sometimes console, and at other times frighten.
Many a version of this rather dim view of the social history of Buddhism has become popular among Western Buddhists, especially intellectuals and academics who came of age in the radical social ferment of the nineteen-sixties. Traditional Buddhism is broken, they say, and we, the culturally enlightened generation of the Baby Boom, survivors of fascist wars and stalwarts against the cultural imperialism of our less enlightened ancestors, shall fix it. What two and a half millenia of meddling by priestly opportunists has done to overlay the original message of the Buddha with mystical mumbo-jumbo, shall be undone with a quick lobotomy, resulting in scientific agnosticism. The degenerate hierarchies of Buddhism's cultural institutions are to be razed and reconstituted on the level playing field of egalitarian democracy. The presumption of Buddhism's traditional followers to represent the authority of the tradition they have practiced all their lives, should be superrannuated by "Buddhist" communities where everyone thinks their own thoughts and comes up with their own ideas, without interference by the so-called "wisdom" of tradition. Meanwhile, the illusive elusive "certainty" of meditative contemplation - so much suspect in the world of post-modern discourse where all possibility of intuitive revelation in the Word has been replaced a Great Flood of trivial tautologies - is to be surpassed by the "profound perplexity" that arises when one discounts the possibility of external guidance, and thus existentially confronts one's own ignorance without any possibility of escape.
We are to take solace in this solution to the "Buddhism" problem that ancient history and stagnant cultures have bequeathed. No more shall we be tormented by the cognitive dissonance of "secular" and "sacred". If we can just be convinced that Buddhism never knew of anything sacred, that it never allowed for truths revealed by supernormal cognition, and that it never owed its existence to one human being incomparably wiser than the rest, we shall have every warrant to make Buddhism whatever we wish - into an experiment in communal living, a brand-new consensual faith, a daring exercise in spiritual orienteering without map, compass or guide. For many people, this is the spirit of "American Buddhism" - little different, it seems, from that of several extinct utopias of 19th century American religion. When Society is already our Religion, it is not surprising that some people would try to make Buddhism into an exotic (and barren) hybrid of the two.
Thus the Tibetan Buddhist community has found itself divided at times, between the adherents of faith who are able to keep their secular lives and values separate from their spiritual lives and values; and a small but vocal minority which seeks to reform Western Buddhist communities, practices and even, in some cases, beliefs according to their deep-seated cultural prejudices, be they secularist, rationalistic, scientific, collectivist or whatever. In this sense Western Tibetan Buddhism is like any other established religion in our midst, diasporic or otherwise. The encounter of tradition with modernity and post-modernity in the Western Buddhist diaspora tends to make for some strange bedfellows who share the same practice, at least superficially, but have rather incompatible sets of beliefs.
Many Western Buddhists argue about where to draw the line between "Buddhism" and "culture". Thinking that Buddhist practices and beliefs are simply cultural artifacts, some are rather hasty to pick and choose, reinterpret or abandon those practices and beliefs. Some people even claim that by drawing and quartering a Buddhist tradition, one exposes the "core" that is real Buddhism. Needless to say such an approach would be suspect according to the current canons of textual criticism, where hypothetical existence of such an "essence" is disallowed. In the Vajrayana world-view as well, the hypothetical dissection of Buddhism can not yield anything of value. According to Vajrayana, sacredness must be embodied-experienced and lived-in order to be shared, while the ability to receive what is shared requires a profound openness such as only intense faith and surrender of the ego can engender. Thus the "pick-and-choose" agenda, based as it is on impulsive likes and dislikes, is especially problematic. Sacred space, and the transmission of wisdom, require profound communication such that personal agendas are excluded. Words and ideas are perhaps the least important aspect of that communication, which is really a communication of enlightened wisdom. To receive what is priceless one cannot afford to be too choosy or have too many preconceptions, especially when one is unfamiliar with what a priceless relic of wisdom might look or feel like. Sometimes the greatest gifts come in the most unlikely packages, and that might well be true of a spiritual teacher, or a spiritual practice, that fails to fit our poorly informed expectations.
Sacredness, as cultivated in Tibetan Buddhist practice, aims at a radical modification of one's ordinary sense of time, space and relationship. The realm of enlightened mind is out of time, because it encompasses all time, and beyond spatial division, because it encompasses all things. Vajrayana practice mirrors this state, so relationships in Vajrayana communities - especially those between teachers and students - reflect different principles of relatedness than those which structure a bureaucratic, materialist, capitalist or democratic society. To the extent that a teacher embodies and transmits enlightenment to the student, the teacher stands in the Buddha's place and merits gratitude and respect that is much greater, and qualitatively different, than what one would feel for one's parents or friends, for example. And since what the teacher "teaches" is not really a teaching per se, but is an incomparable gift that defies ordinary measurement, the student's relationship to the teacher is not a temporary, but a permanent one - one that transcends the limitations of time and space, thus spanning the gap between this life and the next. The teacher is kinder and greater even than the Buddha, because he or she is our special connection to Buddha's wisdom; for the same reason, the teacher is the equal of all Buddhas. In the fully ripened state of wisdom, the pure equality of all things, we become inseparable, thus "equal" to the teacher. At this point, equality is an existential fact. If loudly proclaiming the mere principle of equality were all that mattered, teachers would be unnecessary; but Buddhism insists that we go beyond principles and theories to ultimate realization. For this, guides and teachers are essential.
This is, of course, a relationship utterly unlike anything one could imagine based on experience of high school teachers or college professors, or the relationship that normally obtains between a priest, rabbi or imam and the members of his or her the congregation. This The all-important role of the spiritual master is also found in some traditions of Hinduism and Sufism, for example, but not in all forms of Buddhism. So the most deeply involved practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism would, in spite of the obvious theological and practical differences, feel a greater kinship with the devotional mysticism of those traditions, than they would with some of the recently developed experimental forms of Western Buddhism, where the elements of faith, devotion and acceptance of spiritual authority are more or less absent.
The Tibetan Buddhist diaspora includes individuals who bear the fruits of the tradition of spiritual realization that descends from the historical Buddha Shakyamuni and the great Indian and Tibetan masters down to the present generation. What that tradition needs to survive with its authenticity intact is not necessarily a sacred or holy land under its very feet - for all land is sacred in this view - but a network of sacred relationships, especially those which might form between teachers and students, so the lived experience that is transmitted in the tradition can survive. For this purpose, local communities and sacred spaces large and small have and will continue to be formed. To bring those spaces alive, we need individuals capable of reordering their value systems without experiencing crippling identity crises - in other words, persons willing to make the sacrifices necessary in order to become truly selfless. That is not to say that Westerners practitioners of the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora must cease to be who they are in an everyday, conventional sense; but rather, they must realize that who they are in the context of their culture is not the same as who they are, when they decide to enter the world of enlightenment that is the virtual sacred space or Mandala. If there is no male or female in Christ or in Buddha-nature, certainly there must be no ideology-eternalist or nihilist, collectivist or totalitarian-nor any cult of the "individual" that worships the self-absorbed, independent individual, over and above someone who has no "self" or "identity".
© 2002, by John Whitney Pettit. All rights reserved.