THE SEARCH FOR THE PANCHEN LAMA

By Isabel Hilton

Norton. 336 pp. $25.95

VIRTUAL TIBET (forthcoming in May)

Searching for Shangri-La From the Himalayas to Hollywood

By Orville Schell

Metropolitan/Henry Holt. 368 pp. $26

Reviewed by Jeffery Paine

The Washington Post, April 16, 2000

Most dramas must necessarily end with the death of the hero; this one

begins with it. Of course, some people might not consider the Tenth

Panchen Lama, the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, a hero.

When the Chinese communists invaded Tibet in the 1950s, he stayed behind

and became a puppet-figurehead of their regime. He refused to denounce

the exiled Dalai Lama, however, and the communists rewarded loyalty with

torture and imprisonment, and in 1989 evidently poisoned him.

Then the drama began. For a high lama does not simply die but is reborn

amid signs and portents, as though he had specially chosen his new

reincarnation. Here was the quandary: If the Dalai Lama "recognized" the

new reincarnation, the Chinese communists might well annul his choice.

If the Chinese chose the new Panchen Lama, no Tibetan would believe that

it had the least legitimacy. This arcane conundrum might seem enough to

make a magazine article, but Isabel Hilton, an English journalist, has

skillfully expanded The Search for the Panchen Lama into a gripping

narrative of intrigue and diplomacy, which serves as a good introduction

to Tibetan-Chinese relations today.

In 1995, with all the traditional auguries pointing to the same boy, the

Dalai Lama risked a gamble. He announced the new Panchen Lama, hoping

that if the Chinese were allowed to keep the boy in Tibet and educate

him, they would accede to the choice. But no sooner had the Dalai Lama

made his announcement than the boy and his family were whisked off to

Beijing, not to be heard of again, despite protests from the European

Parliament, the United Nations and the U.S. Senate. The Chinese

authorities have meanwhile selected their own alternate Panchen Lama,

whom they keep sequestered, and whom most Tibetans accept about as much

as they would a stick figure poorly drawn.

Some of this story reads like high comedy, as the hard-nosed Chinese

communists began manufacturing for their alternate Panchen Lama miracles

and magical incredulities never encountered before in Marxist or Maoist

ideology. The controversy of the Panchen Lama (not to be confused with

the teenage Karmapa Lama, who recently made the news when he escaped

Tibet) reads like a skewed version of the "Babylonian Captivity," when

medieval Christendom had two popes, except here both young pontiffs are

invisible behind a Chinese screen. The moral of Hilton's book is far

from comic, however. While Germany has rejected Nazism and Russia

distanced itself from its Stalinist-gulag past, the Panchen Lama episode

testifies to the Chinese regime's continuation of earlier Maoist,

totalitarian repressions.

"Tibet has proved a powerful myth in the Western imagination," Hilton

observes in passing, and that observation becomes for Sinologist Orville

Schell the subject for an entire book. Earlier, when it was closed to

foreigners, and rumors floated over the Himalayas of wonder-working

hermit-sages, Tibet did attract its share of Western fantasies --

though, admittedly, it never occupied the place in the Western

imagination that, say, India, Romantic Arabia, or the "paradisiacal"

South Seas did.

But after 1959, after the mass exodus from Tibet began, hard knowledge

replaced myths, and accurate information overtook the fantasies. The

International Commission of Jurists documented early on that the Chinese

communists were conducting a genocide of the Tibetan people and culture.

But the "Tibet phenomenon" in the West has to do less with politics than

with spirituality, and here too, as lamas in exile mastered English and

Western psychology, myth and mystification gave way to a religion that

is delineated and knowable.

Politically, and despite his wide-ranging sympathies, Schell wishes to

downplay Chinese atrocities, perhaps worrying that -- if he wrote too

critically -- he would be denied access to China, which is his primary

interest. Schell thus informs the reader that "by 1994 China had

invested over $4 billion in Tibet" but omits mentioning that much of

this investment was used, as Isabel Hilton shows, to level Tibet's 6,000

monasteries, kill one-fifth of the population, reduce the rest to

second-class citizens and support Chinese population transfers.

Culturally and more tellingly, Schell's evinces little curiosity about

Tibet's all-pervasive religion, which narrows the scope of Virtual Tibet

radically. He acknowledges that multiple Tibetan Buddhist centers have

sprung up in nearly every American city, but it never occurs to him to

visit one. Instead he dismisses them by comparing them to Starbuck

franchises!

Most of Virtual Tibet retreats to the little corner of Buddhism in

Hollywood. If you want to tag vicariously along to a party at actor

Steven Seagal's, Virtual Tibet is your book. If you want to visit the

set of "Seven Years in Tibet" and be frustrated by not getting to speak

with Brad Pitt, Orville Schell is your author. He is quite astute about

how Buddhist techniques for diminishing egotistical excesses become, in

Hollywood, a means for fattening them. Ultimately however, to interpret

the Tibet phenomenon by focusing on Hollywood is about as instructive

as, say, studying fascism by analyzing Charlie Chaplin's movie "The

Great Dictator."

Schell supplements his reportage about Hollywood by interspersing an

account of earlier adventurers in Tibet, covering much the same ground

that Peter Hopkirk did in Trespassers on the Roof of the World (1982).

But "Actual Tibet," the real world, is mainly a nuisance here that keeps

getting in the way of Schell's expose of popular hype and media

hullabaloo.

Tibetan Buddhism was expected to perish the way conquered faiths have

since the time of the Aztecs and Incas, but instead it has remade itself

into a budding world religion. The Dalai Lama recently remarked that,

challenged by skeptical but sincere Westerners, Buddhism is now more

alive than at any other time since the Buddha walked the earth. Orville

Schell has related some amusing fantasies incidental to these

developments. But it is left to Isabel Hilton to give a realistic sense

of the politics behind what is fast becoming the story of stories of

religion in our time.

Jeffery Paine's "The Poetry of Our World" has recently been published,

and his "Father India" has been reissued in paperback.