To begin, let’s travel first to Dharamsala, North India, 1992.

There, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack (1929-2004) had a conversation with the Dalai Lama about aliens. Mack was no rube when it came to extra-terrestrials. Having already spent decades conducting research with hundreds of extra-terrestrial ‘experiencers’ in North America, he had built a career on trying to make sense of the alien abduction experience. The Dalai Lama, apparently, knew a thing or two about aliens as well. He explained to Mack and a small group that aliens too were sentient beings in the universe. He also corroborated Mack’s theory that these entities were making contact because they were disturbed by humans’ destruction of the environment. A few years later in 1999, Dr Mack met with the Dalai Lama again in Dharamsala, India, as part of a symposium on world peace. During this visit, Mack recorded an interview where he shared some thoughts about the Dalai Lama and aliens. According to Mack, for high-level Tibetan lamas like the Dalai Lama who “live at the level of…mystical formlessness,” dramatic alien contact and abduction was unlikely. Realized beings like the Dalai Lama were already used to being contacted by “a vast array of entities and beings that are very real for them in the cosmos” and so they took for granted a contra-materialist, contra-Western worldview where “things can cross from the unseen world into the material world.” It thus simply didn’t make sense for them to have the kind of shattering, consciousness-expanding abduction experiences that were typical of Mack’s more run-of-the-mill North American research subjects. In other words, the Dalai Lama’s level of consciousness was so advanced, so other or ‘alien’ to mainstream thinking, that it made encountering an avant-garde alien consciousness pretty redundant. Simply put, the Dalai Lama was already on the aliens’ wave-length.

By contrast, Mack’s research with apparently sane, sincere, non-opportunistic and otherwise disconnected alien ‘experiencers’ had come to have “a shattering impact on [his] views of the nature of the cosmos”. In struggling to steer a middle path between equally dissatisfying ‘psychosocial/cultural’ and ‘literalist, there-really-must-be-flesh-and-blood-aliens-out-there’ explanations for his research subjects’ claims of contact with diminutive, big-headed ‘grey’ ETs, Mack had found his way to to cross-cultural psychiatry and the Dalai Lama. The alien abduction phenomena, he realized, called for a “widening of the ontological undertsanding of what is possible in the universe.” He thus followed in the footsteps of many other researchers of alien abduction, who had “turned to alternative notions of the nature of the cosmos, more familiar to Eastern religions and philosophy, that depict the universe and all its realities as a vast play of consciousness with physical manifestations”. Yet the fact that Mack started with what seemed like a fairly recent ‘Western’ psychiatric-cultural phenomenon only to end up with Tibetan Buddhism and non-dual Eastern philosophies concealed an irony. For according to one theory, the alien visitation narrative may have actually begun with Westerners’ co-optations and re-interpretations of Tibetan Buddhism, and the first grey alien may have actually been a Tibetan Buddhist lama.

To understand this, we need to back-track from 1999 to 1918. Sometime in that year, English occultist and sex magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) had an encounter with a spirit in New York. Crowley was no stranger to communication with disincarnate entities. As a dedicated ritual magician, he had by 1918 already spent the better part of his life experimenting with various esoteric methods for contacting non-human entities (as a case in point, in 1904, he had been contacted by Ancient Egyptian deities in Cairo who named him the prophet of a New Age, and transmitted to him the foundational scripture for his new religious movement, Thelema). Something of a gatecrasher, the being who contacted Crowley unbidden in 1918 in the midst of the magician’s other ritual activities sported a large, swollen head devoid of ears and slit-like eyes. The being called itself ‘LAM’, a name which Crowley correctly identified as the Tibetan word for ‘way’ or ‘path’. Claiming that Lam was the soul of a dead Tibetan Buddhist teacher or lama, Crowley included a drawing he had made of the entity in an exhibition of his artwork called ‘Dead Souls’, which he organized in Greenwich New York in 1919. He also included a copy of Lam’s portrait in his esoteric periodical the Equinox in the same year. There it appeared as the front-piece to his critical commentary on ‘The Voice of Silence,’ a book of supposedly ancient – and Buddhist – wisdom which had been channelled by the infamous Russian/Ukranian clairvoyant Madame Blavatsky twenty years prior. (Blavatsky (1831-1891), the so-called ‘grandmother of the New Age’ was co-founder of the esoteric organization known as the Theosophical Society (formally est. 1875 in New York), who as I mentioned in my last post claimed to be in contact with highly evolved spiritual Masters from the East who lived in Tibet and were the ultimate dispensors of the teachings of the ‘Universal Wisdom-religion’ which the Theosophical Society claimed to embody.)

Lam only resurfaced in Crowley’s records again in 1945, when Crowley invited his student and personal secretary at the time Kenneth Grant (1924-2011) to select any piece of artwork he liked from the old mage’s portfolio as a gift. Grant chose the portrait of Lam – or as he later recounted it, Lam chose him. Following Crowley’s death, as one of Crowley’s chief heirs and executors, Grant played a major role in preserving, disseminating, and reinterpreting the occultist’s teachings. As part of his reformulations of Thelema and Crowley’s take on sex magic, Grant became convinced that Lam and many of the beings Crowley had trafficked with were in fact extra-terrestrials. For Grant, Crowley’s encounter with Lam represented the first and perhaps most momentous example of the phenomenon of ‘grey alien’ contact, which by the start of the 1960s was increasingly becoming a part of popular culture. Although Crowley really didn’t seem to make much of Lam while alive and had little interest in aliens per se, Lam the (Tibetan) extra-terrestrial became a key figure in Grant’s new esoteric cosmology. Circulating his theories about Crowley’s legacy and Lam through various publications, Grant encouraged other ritual magicians to conduct their own experiments to contact the being. These activities, along with Grant’s statements about Lam and the ritual procedures he suggested for contacting it, became the barebones of a new religious phenomenon. ‘The Cult of Lam’ was born.

The association between Tibet, secret esoteric knowledge and extra-terrestrials has reoccurred in film, literature, and new religious movements for virtually one and a half centuries. Indeed, ‘Tibet’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ may represent two of the greatest signifiers of otherness in Western religious history. Before the advent of physical space travel, Tibet was the quintessential spiritual ‘outer space’ of the Western imagination, an ultimate orientalist frontier that transcended ordinary time and place. The story of the first grey (Tibetan) alien is thus a story of this conflation of two kinds of otherness, of a long legacy of exotic (mis)representations of Tibet by outsiders. Yet it is also a story about the blurring of the boundaries between Western and Indo-Tibetan esoteric traditions. Researchers have sometimes traced the origins of the iconic grey alien to testimony from Barney and Betty Hill, an American couple from rural New Hampshire whose account of being jointly abducted by aliens in 1961 received significant media attention. Grant and the Cult of Lam, however, suggest a different genealogy.

Grant’s creative re-interpretations of Crowley and Western esotericism are legendary in occult circles (fellow ritual magician and graphic novelist Alan Moore has described Grant as “a sasquatch at a vicarage tea-party…too big to dismiss, too weird to feel entirely comfortable about.”) While Crowley had little to no direct knowledge about Hindu and Buddhist tantra or the fictional mythologies of American weird fiction ‘cosmic horror’ writer H.P. Lovecraft, Grant strongly linked both of these to his teacher’s legacy. Through his work, Grant fleshed out three inter-connected claims : 1) the apparently fictional corpus of self-avowed atheist-materialist Lovecraft was the product of psychic contact with actual extraterrestrial forces 2) these forces were parallel if not identical to those with which Crowley had engaged as part of his own magical activities; and 3) these activities and Crowley’s ‘Cult’ Thelema represented the latest and most relevant expression of primordial teachings whose ultimate source was extra-terrestrial, and which had been preserved in Hindu and Buddhist tantra and a handful of other esoteric traditions around the world. Crowley’s ‘Latest Tantra’ was merely a new and refined iteration of “the pre-Christian Gnosis, the Cult of Shaitan”, the much maligned Double-Horned and Hidden God who long ago in Egypt had been known as Set. This Gnosis was embodied in what Grant called the ‘Draconian’ or ‘Typhonian’ Tradition. Named for the Greek god Typhon, this Tradition was associated with similar primal, non-anthropomorphic, and demonized deities from various mythologies. Grant’s ideas and somewhat macabre aesthetic came to have a major influence on the so-called ‘Left Hand Path’, a loosely connected grouping of contemporary magickal and occult traditions that emphasize active engagment with the ‘dark’, transgressive and demonic as a path to wholeness, self-transformation and empowerment.

It’s safe to say that most Tibetans and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism wouldn’t accept Grant’s claims about the extra-terrestrial origins of Indo-Tibetan esotericism, nor credit his intensely weird and ghoulish re-interpretations of tantric practice. And still, exotifications of various non-Western ‘Significant Others’ have been central to the construction of modern esoteric traditions and the mythic histories that legitimate them. By now, a lot has been written on the place of Tibet in the Western imagination. Much of this scholarship has been concerned with exposing the dangers of enduring romantic misrepresentations and mystifications of Tibet, what have been short-handed variously as the ‘myth of Shangri-La’ or ‘Virtual’, ‘Dreamworld’ Tibet.  In existing scholarship, Western occultists who have promulgated key fantasies about Tibet have often appeared as either supremely naive dupes or as supremely manipulative con-men. Yet on closer inspection, Crowley and Grant’s orientations to tradition and truth complicate this picture. While a lot of attention has gone to Grant’s recasting of Lam-as-extra-terrestrial in occult circles, less focus has gone to the document in which Lam first appeared in print. Crowley’s critical commentary on Blavatsky and her teachings is thus revealing in a number of ways. It represents one early example of a ‘modern’ magician directly responding to inconsistencies and historical fabrications in occult tradition.

Before receiving his new scripture the ‘Book of the Law’ in Cairo, Crowley spent time studying Hindu and Buddhist meditation in India, Ceylon and Burma. Before his revelation, he considered himself a Buddhist and his critique of Theosophy and Blavatsky was predicated in part on his knowledge of Western scholarship on Buddhism and his direct experience practicing Buddhist meditation under the guidance of Charles Henry Allan Bennet (1872-1923) his former ritual magic mentor, (a.k.a. Bhikku Ananda Metteyya, Bennett was the second Englishman to ever be ordained as a monk in the Theravada tradition). In Crowley’s commentary, his superior knowledge of academic scholarship, but also his direct experience and attainments in yoga and meditation make him especially qualified to present the Buddha’s teachings. At the same time, his status as ‘Logos of the Aeon’, as the newest World Teacher, allow him to place the Buddha’s teachings in a larger framework of historical ages and perennial gnosis in which Thelema stands as the most recent and most ultimate revelation. Crowley was well aware that Blavatsky had little concern or capacity for scholarly accuracy. Blavatsky’s claims to have visited and studied in Tibet were shaky at best. In his autobiography, Crowley called Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled an “unscholarly hotchpotch of fact and fable”. Still, in his commentary he approves of Blavatsky’s ‘forgery’ by defending her accomplishment as a naive but gifted esotericist. Crowley critiques Blavatsky for fudging Buddhist terminology and philosophy yet he also rails against merely academic commentators. He uses a set of opaque metaphors to suggest that while Blavatsky’s ‘esoteric Buddhism’ was a ruse, it was a nonetheless strategic one. He proposes that ‘Oriental lore’ was something that Blavatsky had put on, like African hunters putting on ‘dead ostrich skins’ to draw close and unawares to their prey, or was something she had constructed, like a Trojan horse, to gain access to some strongly guarded location.

We know that Crowley regarded Blavatsky not merely as a fraud but as someone with real spiritual realization, so such analogies are about more than just debunking a skilled con-woman. Crowley here implies that historical cultural traditions are a means to an end, a strategic springboard for capturing and articulating a higher more transcendent Gnosis or Truth. While Crowley considers it important to point out Blavatsky’s terrible scholarship and inaccuracies, it remains that careful scholarship alone is not enough. The best translator of esoteric wisdom, ‘Oriental’ or otherwise, must understand his subject, and to have understanding one must be a practicing and accomplished mystic oneself. We know Crowley was concerned about Theosophical rivals and interested in bringing Theosophists into the Thelemic fold. The simplest interpretation of Crowley’s advertising of his contact with Lam may thus be his more general competitiveness towards Theosophy. By making Lam the patron of his book, Crowley may well have been saying, “Look! I too have been contacted by Tibetan masters! I too know the Way”. But Lam’s significance goes beyond mere branding in a competitive spiritual marketplace. Appearing in The Equinox and as the guiding genius of Crowley’s commentary on Blavatsky’s pseudo-Buddhism, Lam comes coincidentally to stand for Crowley’s complex positions on the relationship between spiritual truth, esoteric tradition, expert knowledge, and personal experience. Under Lam’s hooded gaze, we see the articulation of a new, contemporary philosophy of magic, one supposedly grounded in scientific empiricism and agnosticism, which, while revolving around a set of specific procedures grounded in tradition, posits an end-goal – illumination – that transcends historical and cultural particulars. This orientation towards magic appears too, for example in the opening of one of Crowley’s books on basic magical training:

Transcendent gnosis and the widening of the mind’s horizons are thus ultimately more important than the particular methods, the trappings of tradition or ‘tricks’ one uses to ‘hunt’ and achieve these. This idea would come to fruition in Grant’s work, which in turn would come to have a great influence on later ‘pragmatic’ magical developments like ‘Chaos Magic’ with its war-cry of ‘nothing is true, everything is permissible’.

In my last post, I mentioned Rothstein’s work on the ‘ufological turn’ in post-Blavatsky Theosophical movements, where, as historical Tibet became progressively de-mystified and accessible, Tibetan Spiritual Masters were recast as benign Space Brothers. Rothstein sees this shift as being about narrowing the Masters ontologically, as making them (ironically) more down-to-earth, more rational and corporeal. Grant’s extra-terrestrialism does the opposite. Extra-terrestrialism serves as a master key for Grant to dive head long into a maddening soup of material and traditions, where the lines between outer and inner reality, literal and figurative, fact and fabrication are permanently blurrry. Engaging with what he called the non-rational, suppressed ‘nightside’ of consciousness, a parallel world of hidden possibility he dubbed ‘Universe B’, Grant revels in liminality. His magical adventures in consciousness take place in the spaces between waking and sleep, between subjective and objective reality, in a space he calls the ‘mauve zone’. To make his unexpected connections Grant relies as much on hidden qabalistic word/number correspondences and ritually-induced visions as on academic (and not-so-academic) scholarship, which he cites alongside lines from works of narrative fiction as if they were equivalent sources. In this way, for example, he ‘proves’ that the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism is of a piece with H.P. Lovecraft’s pantheon of vast amoral alien gods, and that Lam as Leader of the Greys, is the Master of a new Aeon, a gateway to trans-plutonian forces who brought tantric Buddhist teachings to Bhutan/Tibet from outer space millenia ago.

At times Grant seems to insist on the positive existence of extra-terrestrial forces, at times they seem a grand metaphor for the transpersonal, for inner and outer ‘cosmic’ or transcendent truths. As with Mack, such distinctions quickly get hazy, even irrelevant. Grant’s cryptic language, his shared emphasis on Indo-Tibetan non-dual  philosophies, is a strategic form of para-rational ‘creative imagining’, “a new manner of communication” (what scholar Henrik Bogdan has called an alternative epistemology) that is designed to make the mind receptive to “an influx of certain concepts that can, if received undistortedly, fertilize the unknown dimensions of…consciousness.” For all his weirdness and multiple (often conflicting) claims, Grant, like Crowley before him, prioritized individual experimentation, with each magician being expected to find their own way in inner and outer realms, reaping their own insights through ritual, reflection and experimentation with non-human entities. Contemporary post-Crowleyan magicians’ agnostic stance, their relativisim in the face of religious ‘tradition’ and their utilitarian approach to belief can thus give rise to a highly idiosyncratic spiritual omnivorism. Peter Levenda, writing about Grant’s contributions to occultism, excuses Grant’s distortions of various religious traditions by describing approvingly how Grant and magicians like him cannibalize non-Western traditions, dissecting them and detaching them from their native socio-political contexts to extract from them powerful active ingredients or ‘technologies’ for spiritual transformation. This approach gives rise to what occultist Phil Hine has described as an attitude of ‘natives have traditions, (we less naive) magicians have techniques’.

Religious syncretism goes back to contemporary Western esotericism’s origins in the religiously hybrid landscape of Greco-Roman Egypt . The idea of a perennial philosophy that transcended and united different cultural and religious traditions is likewise old, pre-dating Blavatsky’s promotion of a universal Wisdom-Religion. These ideas remain vital in contemporary magical practice today. The politics of universalism, however, and appeals to transcendent, ‘esoteric’ truths can mean that when challenged on their representation of non-Western traditions, Western esotericists can do as Blavatsky did and dismiss those indigenous positions as ‘merely exoteric’. One of Blavatsky’s key strategies for accounting for primary or secondary native sources that contradicted her representations of Indian and Tibetan history and culture was to claim that such perspectives were at best partial, at worst wholly misled. The average Western scholar, and even the ordinary Hindu or Buddhist priest could not be expected to have access to the deeper, true mysteries to which she and a handful of others were privy, caught up as they were in either academic materialism or quotidian ritual priorities. By contrasting her superior ‘esoteric’ perspective with the supposedly exoteric misapprehensions of the masses and orthodox texts, Blavatsky could thus position her personal, Orientalist take on ‘true Buddhism’ or Hinduism as paramount, something Crowley himself calls Blavatsky out on in his 1919 commentaries. The individual syncretic magician thus becomes an unassailable authority, and the perspective of the Western re-interpreter remains secure and privileged.

My stance as an anthropologist of contemporary Tibet and as someone with a personal background in Western esotericism made me curious to understand both how contemporary magicians today were understanding Lam’s ‘Tibetan-ness’ and were engaging with non-Western traditions like Tibetan Buddhism. What is clear is that access to reliable information about Tibetan culture and history has not caused Western esotericists to abandon commitments to either historical Tibet or their own ‘fabricated’ Western esoteric traditions. Preliminary interactions with magicians engaging with the Typhonian Tradition and related esoteric currents have revealed that many practitioners are in fact engaging with Tibetan tantric Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist teachers directly as students (and with indigenous experts from other cultural contexts as well) in complex ways. Scholars have characterized Left Hand Path, neo-tantric traditions like Grant’s that incorporate ‘transgressive’ sexuality as arising from the heady intersection of late modern, neo-liberal individualism and consumption, New Age orientalist fantasy and the ongoing globalization of Indo-Tibetan tantric traditions. Such practices represent a complex melding of Asian tantric traditions with distinctly western esoteric practices, most particularly with ‘sex magic’ (what Hugh Urban has defined as as “not just any loose association of sex and spirituality, and not simply the optimization of sensual pleasure during intercourse, but rather the explicit use of orgasm (whether heterosexual, homosexual, or autoerotic) as a means to create magical effects in the external world”.

Western practices and histories of sex magic have often been conflated with Asian tantric ones and vice versa, resulting in a situation where, as Urban puts it, neo-tantric and Asian tantric traditions have been “hopelessly muddled”. Acknowledging the reality of hybridity is one thing, but so far very little ethnographically-focused research has been done to understand how contemporary neo-tantric practitioners are parsing this ‘hopeless muddle’ in practice. That magicians are practicing ‘orthodox’ Tibetan Buddhism under Tibetan teachers, while simultaneously engaging with deeply syncretic post-Theosophic practices, should make it clear how much more complicated the politics of either syncretism or ‘conversion’ is in contemporary Western esoteric practice.

The Tibetan alien is one way of approaching this complex terrain. On one level, it points to a special, even fetishized role for certain non-Western cultures as mediators of truth – Tibetan Buddhism and its representatives, a la Mack, as having some privileged understanding of higher awareness that can explain modern mysteries. On another level, the alien is a sign that gestures ‘Beyond’ toward an ineffable, transcendent Gnosis that resolves the tensions between truth and fiction, subjective and objective reality. While by no means all contemporary ritual magicians credit Grant-style extra-terrestrialism, the alien serves for some practitioners as a mechanism for managing both religious and epistemological heterogeneity.

More anthropological research is needed to understand how individual practitioners manage their commitments to different ‘Masters’, to different religious traditions and lineages, each with their own distinct vocabularies and notions of right practice. How do contemporary Western esoteric practices that promote  the forging of idiosyncratic and hybrid ‘personal’ systems sit alongside Tibetan Buddhism as transmitted by living Tibetan teachers, with its concern for scriptural precedent and its wariness of outright innovation? Can one be an orthodox tantric practitioner and a ‘neo’ one at the same times? How does one compartmentalize (or not) one’s multiple spiritual ‘lives’ and lineages, and when, where and how can Gnosis or Illumination be said to defy all boundaries?

These questions are preliminary, mere scratches on the surface of the complex cross-fertilizations, contestations and collaborations that have taken place and continue to do so between native and neo-practitioners. Like another alien enthusiast, though, I want to believe that future research will deepen our understanding of these dynamics.

Paging through the comic I observed that rather than opening with King Nyatri’s birth, the book’s authors had started their account instead with the beginning of all life on earth. They had also decided to describe the creation of the Tibetan people in general before they attended to the circumstances of Nyatri’s birth specifically. Glancing at this sequence I noticed something interesting. I was familiar with the traditional Tibetan account of how the early ancestors of the Tibetan people had emerged from the union of a wise and compassionate monkey and a blood-thirsty, cthonic Tibetan demoness, a story which technically speaking, the comic reproduced. What struck me, though, was how through its pictures and descriptions the comic had reworked earlier versions of this origin myth so as to align the tale with science, or with what at least on the surface looked like science and contemporary theories of evolution. Here are the first nine pages of the comic, with my rough translation:

(1) A long, long time ago, this land of Tibet of ours was covered by a great ocean and even Mount Everest was but a small hill beneath it.

(2) After many millions of years had passed, this land gradually bulged outwards and oceans and rivers drained out in all four directions. Then later, the land developed a hot climate and became a center in which all sorts of animals and plants could live.

(3) At a certain time, a kind of ‘man-bear’-like creature called a draksin or ‘Rock Ogress’ appeared. This ferocious creature lived in the rocky mountains of the Yarlung region, loved to fight and was devoted to eating blood and meat. Having taken possession of the Yarlung forest she lived as she pleased.

(4) Within the upper reaches of the thick Yarlung forest there were a great many kinds of monkeys who depended on fruits and vegetation as their food. From among these, there was an intelligent and gentle monkey who treated everyone with loving-kindness who all the monkeys made their leader.

(5) One day, the chief-monkey and the rock ogress felt desire for one another and from their intercourse at Tsethang (rtsed thang – ‘the field of play’) in the land of Yarlung, many kinds of monkey-ogress hybrid progeny emerged. These later gradually became the human race and the ancestors of Tibetan people.

(6) From among the monkey-children (beings of) diverse natures emerged. Some of the children were red-faced like the monkey but had flat feet, no tails and little fur. Some were black-faced like the rock ogress, but lacked claws.

(7) Able to get up from their parents and go about and do many jobs with their hands, the monkey children walked standing upright, and were dextrous, intelligent, powerful, and ferocious. They all made use of fruit as well as blood and meat as food.

(8) Gradually the children got big and by having sex with one another became even more sharp of mind and skilled of hand. Their descendants multiplied and bit by bit invaded the areas of the other monkeys in the forest.

(9) After many thousands of years of eking out a living, these creatures came, by stages, to possess the bodily form of what are known as ‘human beings’. They learned how to say many things by sign language and falteringly with words, as well as how to wear leaves as clothes and how to make huts from plants”

What jumps out here is the way in which the origin myth’s key characters have been brought down to earth, have been ‘naturalized’ or stripped of their overt religious affiliations. One earlier version of the tale appears in the Mani Kabum (maNi bka’ ‘bum), a compilation of stories and rituals that were revealed by various twelth century Tibetan Buddhist visionary-saints (gter ston). In the Mani Kabum’s version of events, the monkey appears as a magical emanation (sprul pa) of Chenresig (spyan ras gzig), a deity that embodies the Buddhist ideal of totally selfless, omniscient compassion. Likewise, the Mani Kabum’s ogress is identified as an emanation of Chenresig’s divine consort Drolma (sgrol ma), the Tibetan Buddhist Mother-Saviour goddess. The ancestral couple’s identification with these deities is central to the Mani Kabums’ overarching narrative in which Chenresig is positioned as the primary progenitor and patron of Tibet, Tibetans and Buddhism in Tibet. By doing this, and by reframing the early Tibetan kings as emanations of Chenresig as well, the Mani Kabum lent an air of predestination to Tibet’s Buddhicization, and promoted the indigenization of Indian religious culture and the mythologization of the imperial period (7th-9th century) in the Tibetan imagination.

In the Mani Kabum’s account, the rock ogress (brag srin [mo]) embodies the morally ambiguous wildness of Tibet’s pre-Buddhist landscape. A spectre materializing out of Tibet’s endemic mountains (brag = rocky cliff face), this ‘crag-hag’ is an emblem for Tibet’s cthonic, primordial powers. Categorically bloodthirsty and feminine, these forces must be tamed or ‘civilized’ by contrastingly masculine (and initially foregin) agents of Buddhism. In addition to being used to translate the Sanskrit word ‘rakshasi’ into Tibetan (rakshasi are man-eating ogresses in Indian folklore) the word srin refers to a (pre-Buddhist) class of dangerous spirits with a long history of being associated with cthonic, sub-terranean forces (srin can also refer to bugs and various creeping things, and resurfaces in Tibetan neologisms for ‘virus’ and ‘bacterium’) .

In a related mythic narrative, the Chinese bride of the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo discovers that the reason Buddhism is failing to ‘take’ in Tibetan soil is because the whole country of Tibet is in fact one giant srinmo ogress lying on her back. Buddhism finally flourishes when it systematically and forcefully pins down this demoness through a network of Buddhist shrines that are erected on top of her body’s vital-energy points (I use this sexualized language advisedly – a phallic effigy is placed at the point identified with the srinmo’s genitals). While not killed per se, she is, like similar monstrous mothers from other cosmogonies from around the world, repurposed – her energies are suppressed, pacified, and redirected towards Buddhist projects.

In the above Department of Education version, we read nothing about emanations of Chenresig or Drolma. Other versions describe how the ogress bullied the ascetic monkey-saint – who had come to Tibet to meditate in seclusion – into having sex with her, and describe him as assenting to her aggressive advances solely out of a compassionate desire to placate and ultimately ‘tame’ her and her wild unenlightened appetites. Here we have only page five’s matter-of-fact prose and the suggestive positioning in its accompanying image to hint at any kind of gendered power-play. Likewise, the subjugation narrative and pointed demonization of the ogress appear only in a muted or oblique way, when the comic explains that the monkey’s behaviour is ‘tamed’ i.e. ‘gentle’ or ‘civilized’ (spyod pa dul ba) in contrast to the ogress’ vicious anti-socialness. We read about how the pair’s offspring inherited distinct physical, but not moral, traits from each parent (in other versions Tibetans’ ‘wildness’ and less noble qualities are traced directly to the srin mo)

Overall, the rock ogress appears in the comic less as a blood-drinking vampiress and more as a kind of bad-tempered Big Foot. She is described as being ‘a kind of [thing] resembling a man-bear’ (mi dred ‘dra ba’i rigs shig). ‘Man-bear’ here is cognate with ya dred, a regional Tibetan term from which the English yeti derives. Mi dred and similar words for ‘bear’ in Tibetan dialects are somewhat ambiguous. At times they can indicate certain extant (and possibly extant) species of flesh-and-blood bears endemic to Tibet and the Himalayas (see here ongoing research relating to the hunt for the abominable snow man along these lines, for example), and yet can also refer to a whole different category of more ambiguously corporeal, ‘magical’ beasties. While admittedly the line between these two categories can be blurry in Tibetan contexts, the comic’s imagery and descriptions work together to thoroughly naturalize the ogress, and transform her from a cosmological monster into a crypto-zoological one. In a similar vein, the progressive transformation of the monkey and ogress’ offspring into humans is depicted in a way that suggests contemporary theories of human evolution, with multiple lineages of primates and early human ancestors interbreeding and competing for resources. Rather than reading about how Chenresig and Drolma supply their offspring with magical food so they can slowly grow and lose their tails and so on, a sense of autonomous, natural selection over long historical periods of time prevails.

The question arises: why exactly did the Department of Education repackage the story this way? The comic was produced by the department of traditional education (srol rgyun shes yon sde tsan). A supplementary unit internal to the DoE, this department was founded in 2002 (this is the date given in the comic’s foreword, 2003 is listed on the DoE’s website) with the express purpose of ensuring that chief aspects of both oral and literary Tibetan traditional culture do not deteriorate but instead increase among Tibetans in exile. Given this emphasis on preservation, it is noteworthy that the authors saw fit to re-present classic material in this way. While I have not yet had the opportunity to speak with the comic’s authors and artist about their thinking when it came to the comic’s images, text, and design, their book might be seen as pointing to broader developments relating to education, cultural preservation and the separation of church and state in exile.

From the 17th century until just prior to the Chinese invasion, under the Dalai Lama’s government in Central Tibet religious and political affairs were formally hyphenated under a system known as ‘religious-and-temporal (affairs) united’ (chos srid zung ‘brel). Still, formal philosophies of continuity and compromise aside, religious and political authority and interests were just as likely to be at odds with one another than they were to overlap or co-operate. Since coming into exile, finding consensus on the relationship between religious power and worldly, political power on the one hand, and between religious knowledge and scientific understanding has continued to engage Tibetans. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exile administration have developed various projects and institutions to bolster secular education and scientific literacy both in exile monasteries and in Tibetan society more generally (not least of which is the Tibetan Children’s Village TCV or standardized exile schooling system geared towards providing Tibetan refugee children with a culturally-rich yet still rounded education.)

The Dalai Lama has encouraged dialogue between Tibetan Buddhist experts and foreign scientists, and has championed the idea of Buddhism’s compatibility with science. He has actively supported collaborative clinical studies, conferences (like the now annual Mind and Life meetings that bring together philosophers, Buddhist practitioners, psychologists, and neuroscientists), publishing projects, and pedagogical exchanges between Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and academic researchers. Still, debates about the need for more or less secularity in education and society continue. In the past, authority figures like former prime minister and monk Samdhong Rinpoche have stated that the TCV system would benefit from monastic instructors and from more religiously-orientated material. Equally, while marginalized religious groups within Tibetan society like the Jonang sect have recently protested in a demand for more representation in parliament, many Tibetans are wondering if there should be seats reserved for sectarian representatives in the Tibetan exile parliament at all. Stories of families and individuals in smaller Tibetan refugee settlements in South India being subjected to fines and other punishments for not attending community prayer gatherings and majoritarian political events also circulate and provide important talking points for Tibetans’ discussions about the appropriate role of religion in the public sphere.

So where does our comic, our srin mo-yeti-early-human-ancestor come in? While the comic claims to be concerned with preserving traditional knowledge it gives this knowledge a secular gloss. As stock-images of prehistory, artistic supplements like jelly fish and ferns make of Tibet’s ancient mythological ocean a primordial soup. Given the comic’s pop anthropology style of depicting early human life and evolution, it’s certainly tempting to see the tale of the monkey/srinmo as a compelling case of myth-as-ethno-science, especially given new research on contemporary Tibetans’ ancestors’ sexual encounters with that mysterious species of ancient humans the Denisovans. Indeed, the myth has not only been cited by anthropologists as an exemplary example of ethno-primatology, but it has also appeared repeatedly in novels and alternative histories as evidence for the fact of extra-terrestrials having interbred with early Tibetans and/or humans. This mention of aliens is more than incidental. Jamyang Phuntsok, a Tibetan scholar at Pennsylvania State University, commenting on an earlier Facebook post I made about my initial thoughts on the comic, had this to add about the way the comic had naturalized mythological material:

“I wonder what purpose is served by such ‘naturalization’? It is faithful neither to the original creation myth, which must be preserved and presented as one would a literary work or piece of artwork, nor to the scientific findings (according to which adaptation and settlement of the Tibetan plateau became possible AS A RESULT of introgression with the Denisovans). Isn’t this a kind of revisionism? Kind of like trying to rewrite Sherlock Hollmes stories by taking cues from the latest forensic techniques.”

Is the secular or ‘sciency’ flavour that the comic’s art and descriptions impart to the myth merely gratuitous or cosmetic? How does it serve the cause of furthering either scientific or cultural literacy? Jamphuk’s Sherlock Holmes analogy reminds me of similar processes of (relative) rationalization or updating, what scholar of religious history Mikael Rothstein has referred to as ‘mythological modernization’. Rothstein uses the term to describe how the Tibetan ‘Mahatmas’ or ‘Masters’, those super-beings that were supposed to be the higher powers behind Victorian esoteric movements like Theosophy, were later recast by new new religious movements as visitors from outer space. According to Rothstein, this move brought the ambiguously corporeal (and controversially located) Masters of a previous period up-to-speed with recent developments – it made them seem (relatively) less kitsch and (relatively) more tangible and reasonable too. (In my next post I will explore in more detail the phenomenon of Tibetan aliens, and the roles they have played in interactions between Indo-Tibetan and Western esoteric traditions). This sort of mythological modernization has proven exceedingly popular more recently, as the likes of best-selling conspiracy theorist David Icke and the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens have reframed gods and spirits from the world’s pantheons as (maybe mostly probably) flesh-and-blood aliens to weave their alternative histories.

While the DoE’s comic is probably more understated and subtle than either Icke or Ancient Aliens could ever be, it’s possible that the DoE likewise wanted to present something ancient and mythological as compatible with the (relatively more) secular, rational, and science-y. (It’s certainly a myth that’s good to think with – once, while teaching English names for parts of the mouth and jaw to Tibetan monks, I found myself explaining the existence of ‘canine’ teeth alongside molars by comparing it to the idea of shared human parentage from a fruit-eating monkey and a flesh-devouring demoness). Still, while mythological modernization might bring religious cosmologies more in line with current preferences or assumptions, it is, importantly, still cosmology that is at stake.

Ultimately, the draksin captures much of Tibetans’ ongoing deliberations about the relative moral and political value of different forms of knowledge today, about the relative worth of the ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, of culture and science. Suggesting fraught indigeneity and ambiguous inheritance, she is a worthy mascot for Tibetan ‘tradition’: at times the indomitable-and-powerful and at times the slightly-embarrassing grandmother. She and the comic above hint at the way in which secularization is an ambiguous and uneven process in exile. A somewhat awkward hybrid, she alerts us to the uncertainties that remain when it comes to working out how local and indigenous regimes of knowledge should engage with (apparently) universal and transcendent ones.

Mass monasticism has often been used as a shorthand for Tibetan civilization in general. Over the last few decades in particular, large-scale Buddhist monasteries, whether in diaspora or in Chinese-occupied Tibet, have become key symbols for the continued vitality of Tibetan culture in the face of adversity. Yet even so, for centuries, ngakpa have existed in Tibetan societies as an alternative, smaller community of religious professionals, who though they are not monastics, nonetheless embody many of the possibilities and particularities of Tibetan culture life. Like monks and nuns, ngakpa are professional Buddhist renouncers, individuals who have taken formal vows to devote their lives to religious attainment. Unlike monastics, however, ngakpa are non-celibate and can engage in activities forbidden to the monastic community. Ngakpa thus straddle lay and monastic worlds and reside in a shifting third space of both accommodation and resistance to more centralized political and religious institutions. While monastics are the ‘yellow’ clothed community (ser) and laypeople are ‘grey’ householders (mi skya), i.e. clothed in no particular religious uniform, ngakpa, with their long hair and white and-red cotton shawls and robes, are known as the gos dkar lcang lo sde, the ‘white-robe, dreadlock [wearing] community’ of non-celibate yogis. Able to marry, have families, and pursue worldly work, ngakpa nonetheless spend much of their time in study, meditative retreat or working as ritual specialists for hire. 

Meeting ngakpa in her travels in Tibet during the early 20th century, French explorer and early convert to Tibetan Buddhism Alexandra David-Neel profiled them as ‘shamanists’ disguised as Buddhists (1992). To be sure, David-Neel was projecting her own categories and judgements onto native practitioners, and her turn of phrase has lurking behind it a long tradition of foreigners claiming that (as far as they were concerned) much of Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t really ‘real’ Buddhism at all. At the same time, David-Neel’s description usefully captures issues of esoteric power, authenticity, legibility, representation, and transparency that have proven to be central so far in my fieldwork with ngakpa living in exile. Ngakpas’ association with tantra, the esoteric forms of Buddhism that came to Tibet from India from the 7th century onwards, is key to understanding their position and importance in Tibetan societies. It is also key to understanding what makes them interesting anthropologically. Anthropologists have long been interested in how cultural histories, practices, and institutions are sustained and transformed cross-generationally in situations of major change and upheaval. They have described how shared religious beliefs and practices have served as a basis for political mobilization, for the legibility of diasporic groups, for the forging of transnational moral communities and ethno-nationalist imaginaries (phew!), and for the development of marked forms of cultural identity. As specialists in esoteric Buddhism living in exile, ngakpa present rich opportunities for exploring how religion, identity, and politics may intersect in situations where religious knowledge and power are distributed highly unequally, and where religious authority and practices that contribute to cohesive moral communities depend upon secrecy, ambiguity, and restricted occult knowledge. 

Esoteric or tantric Buddhism (the so-called Vajrayana or ‘Vehicle of the Adamantine Thunderbolt’) with its alchemical register,  stresses that what is impure and poisonous can be transmuted into the highest medicine. It promises that through a shrewd re-orientation towards the sensory arisings and afflictive emotions that are often treated in more exoteric Buddhist contexts as sources of contamination and suffering, these obstacles can be transformed into sources of realization. Tantric practitioners’ ritual repertoires draw on elaborate iconographies that embody Vajrayana’s unique orientation to visceral forces of sex, violence, and death. Through intensive imaginative engagement with both peaceful and forceful tantric Buddhist deities and vital forces in the subtle channels of the body, practitioners of various systems of tantric yoga seek to rapidly transform their (apparently) impure bodies, speech and minds into their innately pure and blissful state of Buddha-nature. Pursued under the guidance of a legitimate guru, and with proper preparation and intention such methods can guarantee enlightenment in a single human lifetime. Practiced incorrectly, however, they can bring corruption, madness and death.

While pretty much all aspects of Tibetan Buddhism have a tantric sensibility or aesthetic, concerns about the preservation  and regulation of high-level and especially non-celibate tantric practices have been longstanding in Tibetan societies. Ngakpa lineages, which are strongly associated with the Nyingma (rnying ma) school, the most ancient sect of Buddhism in Tibet, were consolidated and elaborated during Tibet’s ‘Dark Age’. During this so-called ‘period of fragmentation’ (dus sil bu, approx. 842 to 986 C.E.) large-scale monastic institutions and state patronage/co-optation of religious power foundered in Tibet. Ngakpa, transmitting esoteric teachings within families, outside of monastic and state surveillance and regulation, were instrumental in adapting and indigenizing tantric Buddhist teachings from India and helped keep such traditions alive during a time of civil war and intense political upheaval. Anxieties about tantra going ‘rogue’ are particularly linked to the age of fragmentation in Tibetan histories. Records from this time describe non-celibate ‘village tantric masters’ misinterpreting tantra, and pursuing esoteric practices for selfish, immoral or harmful ends, without a proper Mahayana Buddhist motivation to liberate all beings from suffering. Since monastics with the proper training can and do engage in higher tantric practices, celibacy and monasticism have sometimes been seen as providing a more controlled context for the pursuit of potent but easily misused tantric methods.

Ngakpas’ non-celibacy and closeness to the  ‘wildness’ of everyday, worldly life is thus part of what makes them powerful and what makes them ambiguous. Ngakpas’ ambiguous charisma has shown up historically in various ways. As wandering ‘crazy’ ascetics ngakpa have lampooned entrenched institutions, yet as a hereditary clergy authorized to employ ritual violence as part of potent tantric rituals to exorcise and manipulate natural forces such as the weather, they have figured prominently in everyday community activities. Ngakpas’ shifting status can be seen in traditional legal codes from Tibet: ngakpa are forbidden from giving legal testimony for fear that they might delude their audiences with magic, yet their same powers may be called upon as an extra-judicial measure to settle intractable disputes (French 2002). Visiting groups of ngakpa attached to monastic institutions in early 20th century Eastern Tibet, David-Neel observed how ngakpa had been able to sell their unenviable but valuable talent for subduing demons to monastic authorities, thereby earning a partial incorporation into institutional, administrative structures, and a measure of prestige, privilege and payment. In my current research, I am interested in how such mediations of religious power between ritual specialists and institutional authorities are continuing in exile. How are ngakpas’ esoteric expertise and ambiguous charisma faring in the face of calls for increased democratization, clarity and standardization in Tibetan exile society? 

Since the People’s Republic of China invaded Tibet over six decades ago, stateless Tibetan refugees who have fled their homeland have struggled to rebuild and stabilize their political and social institutions in exile. As the spiritual leader of Tibetans, the fourteenth Dalai Lama has spearheaded efforts to both preserve and to reform Tibetan life in diaspora. In particular, he and the Tibetan administration have taken measures to promote co-operation and inclusion among Tibetans’ diverse religious communities. One major development along these lines has been the establishing of the Central Tibetan Administration’s Office of Religion and Culture in McLeod Ganj, India, and the selection of formal ‘heads’ to represent the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet’s pre-Buddhist religion Bon in exile. Ngakpa, like other religious professionals, have thus found themselves newly consolidated under the leadership of sectarian authorities in exile. With the encouragement of religious authority figures from both within and without their sectarian communities, they have built new educational and ritual colleges (ngakpa dratsang, sngags pa drwa tshang) and transmitted their lineage-practices to new students for the sake of posterity.

Yet drives for standardization and categorization can sit uneasily with ngakpas’ distinct styles of religious practice. Recently, I was told a story by a ngakpa friend about how some decades ago ngakpa in McLeod Ganj had complained to the Office of Religion and Culture about having been passed over by community members when it came to receiving donations for ritual services they had performed on behalf of the administration and the public. While monks had received alms for their religious labours, these ngakpa, feeling that they ought to receive adequate recompensation and recognition for their contributions, felt short-changed. The Office’s response, apparently, was that ngakpa had not been dressing properly – having failed to consistently wear markers of their affiliation as members of the ‘white religious community’ people had not known who, or what, they were. It was thus suggested that ngakpa at least wear their white yogi shawl when performing such services so as to avoid confusion.

The Dalai Lama has frequently stated that religious vow-holders should dress more consistently and distinctly to reduce ambiguity and misunderstandings  (especially among foreigners) about what is and isn’t permissible for different classes of practitioners. Invoking the way in which the early Tibetan kings set up distinctive boundaries between laypeople, ngakpa and monastics in accordance with the Buddha’s own teachings, the Dalai Lama has warned that inconsistency in dress and conduct can become a cause for the criticism, repudiation and deterioration of the teachings. Nonetheless, research shows that ngakpa rarely stay in uniform. Not only do ngakpa often dress in lay clothing when not conducting ceremonies, but recommendations that ngakpa stick to their white, long-hair ‘uniforms’ brush over the very real historical and regional diversity of ngakpa lineage-practices. Ngakpa in exile hail from different parts of Tibet and hold a range of major and minor vows. They conduct their work and embody their tantric commitments in distinct ways. While for some ngakpa heaped masses of dreadlocks point to their maintaining of a ‘natural’, ‘unfabricated’ (rang bzhin, ma bcos pa’) state of mind in the midst of worldly life, other practitioners prefer less elaborate hairstyles, tying their washed and combed hair back discreetly. From time to time, some practitioners have shaved their hair entirely, citing reasons of both practicality or necessity (itchiness, lice, heat etc) and modesty. Likewise, despite their association with white and red yogis’ robes, tantric ritual specialists from some regions have traditionally worn other colours, such as black or brown –  what one exile ngakpa described to me as a ‘low’ colour, appropriate for the very high practice of maintaining an ordinary, outer appearance alongside a lofty state of inner cultivation.

Resistance to ‘standard uniform’ is thus also strongly linked to the ways ngakpa understand the relationship between outer and inner forms of religious practice, and to how they engage with larger tantric themes of revelation, concealment and the relativity of appearances. While ngakpas’ specific vows are concretely and visually marked through the various tantric ornaments, clothing, hair-stylings etc. associated with in scripture with a tantric vow-holder, ngakpas’ frequent foregoing of full regalia is tied up with culturally-specific understandings of self-presentation, modesty and secrecy. In conversation, ngakpa have often been quick to remind me that without inner commitment and attainment, the material trappings of their practice remain merely symbolic and trivial. Indeed, rather than suggesting discipline or transparency, staying in costume may sometimes indicate untrustworthiness. Tales about young Tibetan and sometimes foreigner men who flaunt elaborate dreadlocks and full tantric finery just to drink beer and pick up women (individuals ngakpa and scholar Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche once labeled ‘appearance ngakpas’ ) surface often in conversation. Such anecdotes suggest by way of contrast the figure of the ‘hidden yogi’ (sbal pa’ rnal ‘byor pa), the accomplished practitioner who avoids advertising their spiritual accomplishments through strategic performances of ordinariness. They underscore how no one but a Buddha can truly know the state of another being’s mind, how easy it is to be mislead by appearances, to dress up and merely pose as a tantric practitioner, and how much harder it is by contrast to consistently maintain one’s vows and the mental orientations associated with them in every situation. At the same time, while ngakpa often warn one not to judge based on misleading appearances and be wary of showiness, respected practitioners’ great potency or ritual efficacy (nus pa chenpo), is something concrete and demonstrable – emerging from the accumulation of vital-force and special abilities (dngos drub) in one’s person that can be pointed to and benefitted from by others. Status and self-disclosure tie into the gendered politics of religious practice as well. While ngakma or female non-celibate tantric vow-holders play important social and religious roles, they appear more often as the wives and sexual consorts of male practitioners than as stand-alone practitioners or experts in their own right. The cultural politics of being in and out of the lime light thus take on even further layers for female practitioners. 

Such ambivalence aside, representation and transparency still matter for Tibetans today. While exile ngakpas’ self-presentation varies contextually and individually, their vows and moral commitments as a religious community remain unambiguous and codified. In a social context where advertising one’s own spiritual accomplishments can sometimes be tantamount to providing proof you don’t have any, religious authority must be both secured and contested through daily and ongoing performances, and complex interpersonal and community dynamics. Today, ideas and practices connected to Tibetan religion are circulating more and more widely, and ngakpas’ knowledge and power are involved in ever broader economies of value and exchange. With the rapid globalization of Tibetan Buddhism since 1950, Tibetan refugee lamas are more and more catering to non-Tibetan students for whom the possibility of engaging with advanced Buddhist teachings without having to become celibate is distinctly practical and appealing. While Tibetan ngakpa continue to fulfill important functions within diasporic communities, new emphases on secular education and employment in exile have also meant that many exile-born Tibetans are opting not to take up hereditary religious vocations. As tantra is being reappropriated and reapplied in new contexts and for new audiences, and as more and more non-Tibetans are coming to adopt ngakpa styles of dress and religious practice, fears about the corruption of the teachings and about the spread and regulation of tantra outside of monastic – and native Tibetan contexts in particular -are as salient as ever. Various tantra-related ‘casualties’ – vow-breaking controversies and abuses of power involving Tibetan Buddhist convert communities that frequently operate beyond the pale of Tibetan structures of authority – reveal the extent to which truly centralized or standardized channels of authority or regulation do not exist for the deeply heterogenous (and now significantly transnational) landscape of contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. The current moment in Tibetan history can thus be compared to an earlier period of fragmentation, characterized as it is as much by dispersal and decline as by innovation and an unprecedented proliferation of Buddhist teachings. Ngakpa/ma thus provide a particularly relevant, albeit under-explored lens through which to understand processes of cultural and religious change as they are affecting Tibetans today. Ngakpa/mas’ shifting relationships with centralized authority and with material expressions of power show how the forging of cultural coherence and stable institutions in diaspora involves both creativity and contradiction – how cultural life revolves around tensions that are as unsettling as they are meaningful.

REFERENCES: 

David-Neel, Alexandra. 1992. “Tibetan Journey,” New Delhi: South Asia Books.

French, Rebecca. 2002. “The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet,” Boston: Snow Lion Publications.

You know that guy. He talks about ‘Tantric yoga’ in casual conversation. Maybe he has dreadlocks. Maybe he’s shaved his head. He’s definitely not had a beverage with regular milk in it for years. He’s probably white and affluent. He’s probably been to India. And he probably wears Buddhist prayer beads as jewelry.

It’s easy enough to compare this stereotype to the ‘serious’ convert to Buddhism, who though they too may talk about Tantra, sport distinctive hairstyles or be white and affluent, seem at least to wear their prayer beads as more than just a fashion statement. Yet, how easy is it to identify where religious conversion begins and cultural appropriation ends?

For ‘world’ religions like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam the distinction is perhaps obvious. These religions operate according to an evangelical logic: everyone can (and often must) enjoy access to the means of salvation. Accusations of cultural appropriation, suggesting group-specific rights and restricted entry, might seem incompatible with an ethos of universalistic salvation. Tibetan Buddhism, like Islam and Christianity, is an enthusiastically evangelical religion. Buddhist theology widens the possibilities of evangelizing enormously: beyond spreading the Dharma to their fellow human beings, Tibetan Buddhists say prayers for everything from ants to vampiric spirits so that these beings might be swiftly reborn in human form and achieve salvation through Buddhist practice. Like Islam and Christianity too, Tibetan Buddhism is today an increasingly global religion. Unlike Christian and Muslim missionaries, however, today’s cosmopolitan Tibetan lamas have been motivated by both a universalist theology and by a sense of urgency to preserve their religion in the face of persecution by Chinese authorities in Tibet. As such, Tibetan Buddhism’s significant spread westwards in recent decades cannot be separated from Tibet’s colonial history: from Tibet’s occupation by the People’s Republic of China in 1950 and the exodus of thousands of Tibetans from their homeland following a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. The political context of Tibetan Buddhism’s globalization then has made the Western convert an ambiguous figure.

A newcomer to Buddhism, the convert is on the one hand culturally and spiritually impoverished: dependent on Tibetan experts, she is a beneficiary of Tibetan lamas’ spiritual charity. Compared to most Tibetans, who are stateless refugees or occupied people, however, she is distinctly advantaged. Her material and political privilege means she is often positioned by Tibetans in the traditional role of patron (jindak), yet while Tibetans may expect or hope that converts will serve as allies and advocates for Tibetans’ interests, commitment to Buddhism doesn’t guarantee any particular political subjectivity. These dynamics can make the lines between conversion and cultural appropriation blurry in the Tibetan Buddhist context.

ISC protesters in Upper West Side New York in November 2014

In November of last year, the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso completed an extensive lecture tour of the USA. Of the thousands who showed up for the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s talks, one group arrived without fail to each of his events: crowds of mostly white protestors in Tibetan robes who came to boycott the religious leader. Brandishing placards and shouting slogans, they accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite, a liar and a denier of religious freedom. Calling the leader ‘the worst dictator in this modern day’ and a ‘false Dalai Lama’, the demonstrators seemed to be channelling the most zealous of Chinese Communist Party ideologues. Yet these were no party cadres. Rather, they were converts to the Dalai Lama’s own school of Tibetan Buddhism. As representatives of the ‘International Shugden Community’ (ISC), the protesters came to highlight their grievances over the Dalai Lama’s opposition to a Tibetan deity known as Dorje Shugden, and the discrimination and human rights violations they claim the religious leader’s rejection of this being and its followers has engendered.

The ISC is a major mouth-piece for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), a sect of almost exclusively non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan Buddhism that currently spearheads the global pro-Shugden, anti-Dalai Lama agenda. On the surface, the NKT’s almost two decades-long global campaign against the Dalai Lama and his supporters – that is, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist global population – appears to be primarily about a dispute hinging on opposing theological positions within a single tradition. The Dalai Lama believes that Dorje Shugden is a dangerous demon masquerading as a benign deity, the NKT believes that the being is a bona fide Buddha. What I want to argue here is that the controversy, and specifically NKT’s involvement in it, points as well to the politics of race, appropriation, and privilege involved in conversion and new religious movements, and highlights ongoing tensions between ethno-nationalist and universalist impulses in the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture.

The Dalai Lama and NKT converts are all members of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, in which at least since the 19^th century, Dorje Shugden has been seen by some practitioners as a particularly potent worldly ‘protector’ (in Tibetan Buddhism such protectors are powerful, yet ferocious, egotistical spirits that have been ritually converted into defenders Buddhism). Although the Dalai Lama is technically not the highest spiritual authority in the Geluk school (this is the Ganden Tripa), his line’s historical political leadership of Tibet has made him one of the school’s most prominent figures. His dual role as a national leader and sectarian authority, however, has generated some tension, and historically the Dalai Lamas’ more inclusive, nationally orientated policies have clashed with the narrower sectarian priorities of some Gelukpa elites. Himself once a Shugden propitiator in accordance with his Geluk education in Tibet, the current Dalai Lama began to voice reservations about the spirit in the 1970s. Shugden’s reputation for ruthlessly punishing (and assassinating) prominent Gelukpa practitioners who engage with teachings from other schools has made the spirit iconic of a certain brand of Geluk supremacism. Such bias is in fundamental conflict with the Dalai Lama’s particularly non-sectarian vision of Tibetan Buddhism and a Tibetan nation in exile. Thus, to protect himself and the Tibetan people from what he sees as a dangerous demon, the Dalai Lama has prohibited those with ritual commitments to the spirit from attending any of his teachings, and some officials have set about purging exile monastic and government posts of anyone associated with the being.

Different actors and institutions in exile have interpreted and responded to the Dalai Lama’s statements about the spirit in their own diverse, haphazard, and inconsistent ways, with different community prohibitions being indepedently implemented on-the-ground.  Ultimately though, given Shugden’s current status, ties with the spirit automatically preclude involvement with any exile administrative institutions. While some pro-Shugden lamas continue to hold posts in exile monasteries, their continuing relationship with the spirit ensures their isolation from mainstream religious life.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, who studied with one of the Dalai Lama’s teachers in Tibet, refused to accept the spirit’s demotion. In 1977, under the auspices of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) – a Geluk organization in exile that has over time come to cater increasingly to non-Tibetan converts – Kelsang Gyatso relocated to England and quickly amassed a number of inji (non-Tibetan, typically white) students. By the time the FPMT formally went along with the Dalai Lama’s rejection of the spirit, Kelsang Gyatso had already moved away from the organization and its leadership. In 1991, he founded the NKT, and set himself up as its sole spiritual director. From this moment, Shugden reliance, opposition to the Dalai Lama and a strict focus on Geluk exclusivism became pivotal parts of Gyatso’s disciples’ identity. Unyielding in his conviction that Shugden was an enlightened protector and increasingly disturbed by what he saw as the laissez-faire, ecumenical approach of his Gelukpa peers in exile, Kelsang Gyatso came to believe that he alone could preserve the authentic and unadulterated Geluk tradition for posterity. Importantly, despite becoming one of the largest, fastest-growing Buddhist group in Britain, when Gyatso cut ties with the FPMT and the Dalai Lama, the NKT became effectively isolated from the wider Tibetan world. Not just cut off from but actively hostile to virtually all other Tibetan Buddhists, NKT members became the Death Eaters to the broader Hogwarts of global Tibetan Buddhism.

NKT members have made their quarantine into something of a virtue. NKT converts claim Tibetans have become too worldly and politically-focused to be worthy of functioning as custodians of pure Buddhist teachings. Though inji monks and nuns entering the NKT rely on a Tibetan guru, adopt Tibetan names, wear traditional robes and preserve lineage practices hailing from Tibet, any direct engagement with Tibetan politics or culture is denounced as retrogressive and unnecessary. The NKT’s philosophy is one of ‘one lama, one yidam (meditational deity), one protector’ in reference to their sole reliance on Kelsang Gyatso and his particular teachings, a stance distinctly odds with how Tibetan Buddhism has historically been practiced. Today, the NKT curriculum is based exclusively on Kelsang Gyatso’s texts, and ritual activity and teaching in NKT centres worldwide happens pretty much entirely in languages other than Tibetan.

How legitimate are NKT members’ claims of human rights violations? The Shugden controversy has had serious consequences in Tibetan communities. Tibetans thought to be associated with Shugden have suffered discrimination. Evidence remains patchy, but it appears that individuals and families have been denied services, harassed and attacked. A mood of paranoia prevails, with Shugden ‘scares’ and witch-hunts periodically erupting in Tibetan communities. Monastic communities have been split. In 1997, Lobsang Gyatso, a Gelukpa geshe and close friend of the Dalai Lama was murdered in Dharamsala, India, along with two of his students in a ‘revenge killing’ by assailants who were identified through a letter at the scene as Shugden advocates (the NKT denied any involvement and the perpetrators were never apprehended). The Tibetan administration in exile continues to publish lists of Tibetans who have taken part in Shugden protests around the world, replete with specific, personal information.

As the Shugden controversy has evolved, a policy change internal to the Tibetan societies has come to implicate not only Tibetans but non-Tibetan converts across the world. On one level, inji NKT converts want to expunge themselves of Tibetanness. On another, to make themselves heard and intelligible, they have appropriated the suffering of Tibetans affected by the Shugden controversy as their own. While NKT members claim to speak for Tibetan Shugden practitioners, and amass cases of Tibetan-on-Tibetan discrimination in exile to bolster their cause, they fail to explain how their subjectivities and politics diverge from those of Tibetans so affected. For most Tibetans raised in Shugden propitiation, especially newcomers arriving from Tibet, family or monastic histories of Shugden practice do not equal a wholesale rejection of the Dalai Lama or of Tibetans and their politics. This inconsistent solidarity from typically anti-Tibetan injis is both curious and perversely ironic. The ISC/NKT’s tireless, well-coordinated and well-funded attacks on the Dalai Lama – which ultimately have very little to do with the merits or demerits of Shugden reliance – have helped cement for Tibetans an image of Shugden practitioners as a unified and organized group, unambiguously and unanimously opposed to the Dalai Lama (not to mention have helped fuel popular theories that the NKT are Chinese agents on a CCP payroll). An insidious circularity is at work here: protestors’ agitating against the Dalai Lama helps persuade exile Tibetans of the real threat of Shugden supporters in their midst, a witch hunt mentality ensues, and then the NKT uses this as legitimation for its claims and efforts. Tibetan activist Tenzin Dorjee has underscored NKT converts’ privilege in no uncertain terms:

“The Ultimate Insult: After 300 years of colonizing, plundering and devastating the East, the White man in the West now claims they’re the victims of a homeless refugee monk who has no army nor police nor an inch of territory on which to set up a tent? If these people feel oppressed by the Dalai Lama, all they have to do is take off their robes and walk away, back to their edifice of European privilege built largely from the bricks of former colonies.”

Ultimately, the Shugden controversy underscores the challenges involved for Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhist converts in negotiating the links between religion and politics and in deciding how ethnic identity is mobilized in response to these. To what extent and in what ways does conversion oblige political commitment? Where does religion end and culture begin?

The Dalai Lama has often stated that Tibetan Buddhism in the West need not import Tibetan culture wholesale, nor follow any particular politics. He has admonished Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike to disaggregate core Buddhist teachings from ‘folk’ (Tibetan) practice. By engineering a (Tibetan) Buddhism where Tibetans are expendable, the NKT might seem to exemplify just this kind of independent Western Buddhism. Yet the NKT presents a more complex picture. In his zeal to perfectly preserve the teachings of his own lineage, Geshe Kelsang has prioritized non-Tibetan disciples and interests over Tibetan ones. His is an extreme and peculiar case, one he has rationalized in terms of a plan by Shugden himself to relocate the teachings to the West for posterity. Here Buddhist evangelical and sectarian imperatives overpower any loyalty to ethnicity and nation. Yet considering that one of Tibetans’ key strategies in appealing to the world for political support against China over the last half century has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of Tibetans’ culture and civilization as enshrined in Buddhism in particular, this is troubling. By arguing that the flame of pure Dharma has passed to the West and to the NKT specifically, NKT members reprise a stubborn Orientalist trope. Namely, that the erasure of Tibet as a distinct nation is what will allow for the universal teachings of the Buddha, once sequestered and ‘frozen’ in timeless Tibet, to at last become ‘open-access’, to be enjoyed by their truest, most deserving heirs: modern (typically white) Westerners.