Published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Summer 2001.
Tibetan Buddhism in the West: Is it working here?
An Interview
with Alan Wallace by Brian Hodel
Bio
Info: Since 1970, B. Alan Wallace has devoted himself to
the study of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, psychology, medicine, and meditation.
Trained for ten years in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland, he has
taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976; and he
has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives,
including H. H. the Dalai Lama. In 1987, he graduated summa cum laude from
Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, and in
1995 he earned his doctorate in Religious Studies at Stanford University, where
he wrote his dissertation on ways of training the attention in Tibetan
Buddhism. He has edited, translated, authored, or contributed to more than
thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture. He presently
teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, where he has been developing one program in the study of Tibetan
Buddhism and culture and another in religion and science.
Question:
Have Tibetan teachers of Buddhism had to make changes to accommodate a growing
community of Western students?
Alan Wallace: In Asia—India, Nepal, Sikkim, and
Bhutan, for example—since the late 1960s or early 70s, lamas have given public
teachings that have been primarily directed to the Tibetan community, but
Westerners have always been welcome to attend. Unless the teachings were of a
very, high level of, let's say, tantric teachings. Even then, if Westerners
qualified, had the appropriate initiations, or were encouraged to attend it by
their own lamas, then they were welcome to attend those as well. There are a
number of Tibetan monasteries in the south of India where training is quite
open to Westerners.
Q: And in the West?
In the West, when Tibetan lamas
offer teachings the format is altered because these lamas are usually on tour.
It's common for them to give weekend workshops, or one-night lectures. Or they
may stay in a place for a longer time and give a one-week or a two-week
retreat. But, for the most part, that's as long as it ever gets. Then some are
resident lamas with their own centers where more sustained training is given.
Q: In the
monastic setting, teachings follow a coherent order. What’s the effect of
teaching outside this format?
A: In the West, it is very common that a lama will
pass through a city and give a tantric Buddhist initiation and a weekend of
esoteric teachings on visualization practices or ways of experiencing a state
of pure awareness. What's missing here in the vast majority of cases is the
profound context: the theoretical context, the context of faith, the context of
a mature spiritual community. The teachings themselves, though perfectly
traditional, are being introduced in a radically non-traditional context. And
this, I think, has on numerous occasions led to terrible misunderstandings and
a great deal of unnecessary conflict, unrest, confusion and suffering.
A: Back in the late 1970s some very fine lamas came
to this country and gave a number of advanced teachings. A lot of the
Westerners in attendance, young men and young women, got very enthused by these
lamas who were teaching in concert, and a number of them, right off the bat,
were ordained right then and there with no context whatsoever, with no
monastery, no abbot, and no proctor to teach them the vows and help them to
assimilate and apply the vows in daily life. I think the vast majority, if not
every single one of that group, eventually returned their vows, because there
was no context for them and they entered into it with little understanding of
the step that they were taking.
Q: If a bunch
of new people wanted to take ordination right off the bat in Asia, would the
lamas have done it? I mean, it sounds kind off track in either context.
A: In Asia, responsible elder monks first question
those who express a wish to take ordination, and they grant that desire only if
they feel that the would-be monks or nuns are sufficiently prepared and if
there is some place where the novices can receive appropriate monastic
training. Here in the West we live in a profoundly non-monastic and
non-contemplative society. And so to adopt these profound and esoteric
contemplative practices and the monastic way of life without sufficient context
is highly problematic. And I am not sure that this has been sufficiently
addressed by many lamas who are basically living in Asia and occasionally
touring the West for weeks at a time. They seem to feel that since what they
are giving is traditional, what is being received is being received in a
traditional fashion. But in many cases that just isn’t so.
Q: Are you saying this group of lamas that gave the ordination vows was
unaware that these people had no context at all?
A: It was pretty obvious. So what was their
rationale for giving ordination and advanced teachings in meditation? I have
heard some lamas say, “I'm sowing seeds, and it’s better for people to be
exposed to Buddhism imperfectly than not be exposed at all.” And, to take a New
Testament parable, some of the grain will land on rocks or be eaten by birds
and some grains will actually fall into the soil and be fertilized and they
will sprout. That may be a very small proportion of the people attending the
teachings, but for some the teachings will sow the seeds for a sustained and
nourishing spiritual practice that will come to great maturity and benefit
themselves and others. And as for the others, the lamas' rationale, as I've
heard at least some of them express it, is that at least these people have been
exposed to the Dharma.
Q: Are there other more recent examples of this
problem?
A: My own feeling is that Buddhist tantric
initiations, practices, and vows are often given out too indiscriminately. All
these practices entail taking on serious commitments, and if people with little
or no background in Buddhism take such vows and so on without sufficient
background, this can lead to disillusionment and confusion.
Q: Why not
just stick to basic, foundational teachings? Why are these high teachings even
given as introductions?
A: I think the simple answer is:
if lamas confined themselves to teaching topics _such as ethical discipline,
renunciation, and the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion few people
would come. Before going on tour, lamas often ask what kind of teachings
Westerners would like, and the response is often a request for advanced
teachings, say on Dzogchen or Mahamudra, which are concerned with exploring the
nature of pure, conceptually unstructured awareness, or one’s own inner
Buddha-nature. Out of compassion and the wish to fulfill others’ wishes, many
lamas comply. Perhaps their rationale is that people will probably get more
benefit hearing something they are really interested in, than in hearing
valuable teachings in which they have no interest—in which case they probably
wouldn’t show up at all anyway.
So we have a commercial
situation of supply and demand, very unlike the Dharma scene in Asia. In the
West teachings are advertised and profit is made. So whether we like it or not,
there’s a commercial aspect to the teachings in the vast majority of cases. And
even if lamas have wealthy benefactors who are taking care of them, someone
still has to pay for their travel expenses and the use of the teaching site.
That's the long and the short of it.
Q: Isn't
there a problem here of appealing to the ego? I may request the highest
teachings because I want to attain realization as quickly as possible. But of
what value are the higher teachings if I haven't absorbed the basics? Isn't
that like throwing seed on stones?
A: In my experience, lamas who
are willing to give these very advanced teachings will strongly emphasize the
importance of the foundational teachings and practices, such as those
concerning the cultivation of renunciation and compassion. One of my teachers,
Gyatrul Rinpoche, has often given advanced teachings on Mahamudra and Dzogchen,
but he hammers home the message time and time again: “Yes, these are profound teachings.
Yes, it can be very helpful for you to do the practice. At the same time, do
not overlook the foundational teachings, because these are the ones that, in
the foreseeable future, are much more likely to really bring about evident
transformation for the better in your own minds and in your own lives.” Gyatrul
Rinpoche has taught for more than two decades in this country. He still
emphasizes the foundational teachings, but at times students complain that they
have already heard these teachings and don't want to hear them anymore. In many
cases, even though these students have not realized the foundational teachings
through practice, they've heard them and more or less understood them
intellectually. But out of familiarity they have lost interest in these
teachings, no longer wishing to practice them, and yearn instead for something
new, something profound, something that promises to bring about the kind of
spiritual transformation they haven’t gained so far.
As Gyatrul Rinpoche has often
commented, it's not that the lamas don't want us to hear or practice these
higher teachings. They just don't want us to do them instead of the
foundational teachings, because then we’ll wind up following the more advanced
practices without benefiting from them, while shunning the more basic practices
and therefore getting no practical benefit at all. The advice I’ve heard and
embrace is that we need to keep our feet planted in the ground of the
foundational teachings and reach to the sky with the more advanced teachings.
Q: If many
Western students are getting the higher teachings towards the beginning but
then have to go back to the foundational teachings, isn’t this
counterproductive?
A: It certainly can be!
Q: That doesn't sound very efficient.
A:
Overall, I don’t think there is much efficiency in the way that teachings are
taught or practiced in the West, even though we, being a consumer society, a
business-oriented society, prioritize efficiency. Also in the West- various
lamas of all the different orders of Tibetan Buddhism are passing through town
for weekend events. And this means you have the possibility of being exposed to
a hodgepodge of weekend teachings and initiations and your exposure to Buddhism
becomes random. It's like going to a buffet.
You pick up whatever is coming
through, but there's no order to it, no continuity, no progressive development,
and so again: it's very inefficient. This can turn a lot of people into
dilettantes, as they acquire a “taste of the town” of Buddhism, dabbling in one
flavor after another, without gaining proficiency in anything.
This
lack of continuity is due, in part, to a lack of patience. As a consumer
society we want snappy results. That's part of what we consider to be efficient.
If we go to a teaching we want to see results in a weekend, or at least in a
week! And some teachers are willing to cater to that type of mentality. I’ve
even seen advertisements for Tibetan Buddhist events that sound like Madison
Avenue hype.
The
upshot is that a number of lamas generally regard Westerners—with many fine
exceptions—as being impatient, superficial, and fickle. And in Tibetan society,
fickleness is considered to be one of the worst of vices, while reliability,
integrity, trustworthiness, and perseverance are held in high regard. So a few
of the finest lamas are now refusing even to come to the West, because they
figure they could be spending their time either teaching Tibetans in Asia, or
they could simply go into retreat and meditate. Some are feeling—given the
brevity and preciousness of human life—that devoting time to people with such
fickleness and so little faith is time not very well spent.
Q: Along with
the inefficiency of this “buffet-style” teachings, isn’t there also a danger of
picking and choosing, and trying to synthesize your own unique stairway to
heaven?
A:
That’s a danger, yes. But I believe a balance needs to be struck. One extreme
is what you have just suggested here, individualism: “I know what's best for
me! I will choose what I like.” This is like a kid going into a restaurant and
saying, “I'll just take what tastes good.”
The
underlying problem here is that, after all, we're coming to Dharma because
we're not enlightened, not because we're already enlightened. If we're not
enlightened, this means we're deluded. That's the core issue in Buddhism. And
so a person who is ignorant and deluded says, “I'm going to set myself above
the tradition with its own worked-out strategy and sequence of practices that
have been offered down over generations by enlightened beings.”
The
other extreme is a dogmatism that is radically disengaged from people's actual
experiences through the practice of Dharma. Tibetans over generations have
worked out strategies, teachings, rituals, and sequences of practice that were
designed for Tibetans. They did not simply replicate Indian Buddhism. I have a
lot of confidence that they did retain the core, the essence of Indian
Buddhism. But theirs is also a tradition that modified itself over the
centuries to best suit the Tibetan mentality, the Tibetan environment, Tibetan
customs. Now, the proof is in the pudding, because what turned out was
generation after generation of great Tibetan adepts. Going back to the time of
Padmasambhava, Sakya Pandita, Milarepa, Tsongkhapa, right on into the twentieth
century—it's worked!
With
that success, it is possible to conclude that since it worked for the Tibetans,
we Westerners must take their tradition, the pure
teachings, exactly as they were taught in Tibet, and introduce it in Los
Angeles or New York City. But the reason those teachings are considered to be pure is
that they worked in Tibet. The test is, do they
still work? If those same teachings, in the same format, with no adaptations
for the West, are transplanted in Europe or America, ignoring the difference of
cultural context, this can wind-up being rigid, fundamentalist, and dogmatic,
without even noticing whether those teachings are producing the same type of
wonderful effects and transformations in Western practitioners as they did in
Tibetan practitioners.
If they
do not yield the same benefits—if after thirty or forty years of Tibetan
Buddhism in the West we do not have people here ascending along the path to
enlightenment, developing deep states of meditative concentration,
contemplative insight, profound compassion, and unveiling the many wondrous
natural resources of consciousness itself, then we have to ask the question:
Are those same teachings that have worked for the Tibetans equally effective
for Westerners? Do we now have Western adepts comparable to the twenty-five
principal disciples of Padmasambhava, who achieved extraordinary states of
spiritual realization?
If
contemporary Western disciples, apparently engaging in the same practices as
their Tibetan predecessors, are not gaining comparable realization, then one
has to ask how these teachings and practices need to be modified in their
format, in their sequence, in their context. To what extent do the theories
need to come into dialog with Western worldviews? This is something relatively
few Tibetan lamas are doing to any significant extent - drawing the
presentation of Buddhist views, meditation, and way of life into dialog with
Western scientific, religious, and philosophical views, values, ways of life.
We do
have a civilization here after all. And to come over here as if we had no
civilization at all, as if one were simply dropping the teachings into a
cultural tabula rasa, is not reasonable. That is the
other extreme, whose proponents declare, “We have the pure teachings!” and
don't even notice whether those so-called “pure teachings” are really producing
good results, or whether they're just producing a lot of fundamentalists who
are rigid, arrogant, and elitist, declaring, “We have the only way!” To the
extent that that's happening in the West, it seems to me like a very quick way
to turn Buddhism into a museum piece or worse.
A: I’m afraid it’s fairly
common, especially in Dharma scenes where the students are expected to listen
quietly to the lamas’ teachings and accept and implement them without question.
When students are given the impression that the lama is infallible and that any
problem they experience or uncertainty they feel is only their fault, we have a recipe for
fundamentalism. I have heard some avid
Dharma students respond to any objections to the orthodoxy of their
Dharma center with the one-liner, “But the lama says...,” as if that is the one
solution to all problems.
Q: What's in
between the two extremes then?
A: One solution is a close and
respectful dialog between Western disciples and Tibetan adepts. If they don't
already know the West, try to inform them of where they're coming to, and what
kind of world views and values and way of life are considered the norm here.
And where there's resistance to receiving traditional Tibetan teachings, try to
understand why there's resistance, whether those teachings can be modified, or
whether Westerners need some preliminary teachings prior to engaging in the
more traditional teachings. Really bring in a lot of creativity.
Prior to the radical
transformation caused by the Chinese invasion in 1949, changes in Tibetan
society took place at a far slower pace than that of the modern West. They had
a spiritual tradition that was turning out a significant number of accomplished
contemplatives and scholars, so there was no need to be especially innovative.
In that situation you would emphasize preservation of the tradition rather than
ingenuity. But now, when the social context is changing so dramatically and
rapidly for Buddhism in Asia, let alone for Buddhism in the West, there needs
to be far more balance between preservation and intelligent adaptation and
Tibetans and Westerners need to discuss these things together.
Q: Are
Tibetan lamas in the West talking about this, asking questions about how
effective their teachings have been?
A: There must be individual
teachers, both Tibetan lamas as well as Western Buddhist teachers, who are
paying attention to this. But I haven't heard it very widely discussed. It’s a
little bit of a delicate topic. If students are not deriving deep benefits from
their Buddhist practice as taught to them according to Tibetan tradition, they
are often told simply that the defect is in them and not in the teachings,
which are pure and infallible. One alternative is not to conclude that the
Buddhadharma is defective, but to ask: Within the vast range of practices
taught by the Buddha and later Indian and Tibetan adepts, which ones and which
sequence of practices might be especially emphasized for Western students so
that they are of optimal benefit?
To
pursue this question we need to reintroduce a strong element of empiricism and
pragmatism, which is perfectly consonant with the Buddha's own teachings. And
that is: What really helps to purify your mind so that your mental afflictions
are attenuated, you find greater contentment, greater serenity, greater wisdom,
and greater compassion? What really works?
Q: You once said that it is essential for the health
of a religion, Buddhism especially, to continually produce professional
contemplatives—those totally dedicated to the contemplative life. Why is this
important?
A: The Dalai Lama commented on
one occasion that in Buddhism, extraordinary claims are made about the
potentials of human consciousness, about accomplishments that have been made by
contemplatives in the past—including the achievement of meditative
concentration, contemplative insights, and a wide range of paranormal
abilities, culminating in enlightenment itself. The Dalai Lama likened such
accounts to paper currency, which is worth something if people are confident
there's a gold standard behind it. The “gold standard” of the paper
currency of such Buddhist claims is people in the present generation achieving
similar states of realization.
Even if
there is only one-tenth of one percent of the Buddhist population who gains
such profound realization, this means you have at least a few individuals in
each generation who have achieved the gold standard for the teachings. Well, if
you've got a half-dozen people in a Buddhist community at any one time who have
achieved deep samadhi, display remarkable abilities as a result of their
contemplative realizations, and finally achieve the rainbow body when they die,
leaving only their hair and nails behind, that's pretty compelling! So if we
are going to arouse our inspiration to accomplish such heights of realization,
we need people who are living examples. We don't have many examples of
Westerners—and one can ask if there are any at all who have achieved some of
these advanced states of realization. And as the older lamas are passing away,
one may wonder whether there are now Asian
contemplatives who have achieved those states. If not, the paper
currency of Buddhism is going to look more and more like Confederate currency.
To maintain the integrity of the
Buddhist teachings we need both professional scholars and contemplatives—those
who are devoting themselves full-time, with pure motivation, to sustained study
and meditative practice. Not just for months at a time, but for life. And the
Buddhist lay public needs to dedicate itself to supporting monks, nuns, and
serious lay practitioners who are willing to make such a commitment. This has
been a key element to Buddhism flourishing in Asia, and it’s a mistake to think
that it will flourish in the West without similar commitment on the part of
teachers, students, and the Buddhist community at large.
Q: At this point, what’s your own sense of what might
work?
A: As I commented before, we in the West are living
in a non-contemplative society in which there is little or no theoretical,
practical, or social context for deep Buddhist practice. But many people are
interested to know more about Buddhism, and of course they would like to do
this as efficiently as they can. To my mind, this suggests the need for
educational centers that offer sustained, rigorous instruction in various
elements of Buddhist philosophy, psychology, ethics, meditation, and so on. And
such teachings should be offered in dialogue with, or at least with a
sensitivity toward, related themes in Western civilization. Secondly, there
need to be contemplative training centers that are designed to offer a
conducive environment for sustained, rigorous practice. And in such centers we
could also draw on the strengths of our Western traditions, of psychology and
so on, to observe carefully whether the practices are proving to be beneficial
in the ways for which they were designed. If so, great! If not, then in close
dialogue with Tibetan adepts, we need to see how the practices might be
modified for Westerners so that they can produced the desired transformations and
insights. We can enter into such an enterprise with a spirit of adventure. If
we choose, we can accept on faith the extraordinary claims of Buddhist adepts
about the nature and potentials of consciousness. But then, instead of leaving
our faith as a dogmatic belief, we can use it as a working hypothesis as we put
it to the test of experience. What greater adventure is there than the
exploration of the depths of consciousness!
Q: Where do you think all this is heading?
A: Some recent trends in Tibetan
Buddhism in the West suggest that it’s rapidly degenerating. One such trend is
the commercialization of Buddhism, and another is the loss of much of its
extraordinary intellectual and contemplative If these trends dominate, Tibetan
Buddhism runs the danger of losing its integrity in the West and being totally
assimilated into an amorphous New Age culture, like water being absorbed into
sand. On the other hand, I see an open-mindedness, sincerity, and a vigorous
spirit of inquiry among many Tibetan Buddhists in the East and West that
inspire hope that this spiritual tradition is undergoing a vital renaissance.
Perhaps its finest hour lies in the future. Which way it develops remains to be
seen. It’s in our hands.
