Published by: World Tibet Network News, Tuesday, Mar 12, 1996

Pamela Burdman, Chronicle Staff Writer

The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, March 10, 1996

ROBERT THURMAN - THE FIRST AMERICAN TO BECOME A TIBETAN BUDDHIST MONK, NOW A PROFESSOR OF RELIGION AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, DISCUSSES HIS OWN SPIRITUAL JOURNEY, CHINA AND TIBET, AND THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT IN THIS COUNTRY

Robert Thurman was ordained a monk more than 30 years ago by the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader. He later left the monastic life behind for scholarly pursuits and has become one of the world's foremost experts on Tibetan Buddhism. He now teaches at Columbia University, where he holds the first endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the country. Thurman has published more than a dozen books about Buddhism, including an English version of ``The Tibetan Book of the Dead,'' as well as a long list of essays, journal articles and translations of obscure Buddhist texts. A fascinating lecturer with a skill for putting ancient philosophies in contemporary terms, he is in great demand as a public speaker. A frequent traveler to Asia, Thurman joined with Richard Gere and other friends of Tibet in efforts to focus the world's attention on the destruction of the culture and physical environment of Tibet under Chinese rule. Thurman is married and has five children, including his daughter Uma Thurman, who

starred in ``Henry and June'' and ``Pulp Fiction.'' He is spending February and March as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury area.

Q: You were the first American to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. What took you in that direction?

A: I was an undergraduate at Harvard and in 1961 I took an infinite leave of absence. I thought I was taking an indefinite leave of absence and somehow I misspelled it or else I was making a joke at the time. And this was in the same year that I lost this (left) eye in an accident, which was a great shock to me but very good in the sense that it jolted me into wanting to use my life in some more useful way than just being a sort of English major at Harvard and just racing cars around and being an idiot. I got this idea that I had to go to India and find a teacher and a guru and do yoga and all this. And that my teachers at Harvard were not really teaching me reality. I thought I could figure out the universe if I only had the right teaching. And I didn't think they had it at Harvard, in Western philosophy. I thought India had some sort of yoga or something that would show you how to look inside and deal with these rather turbulent emotions that I was very much gripped in at the time. I was only 20 years ol

d.

Q: Did you find what you were looking for?

A: I found that there's not a quick solution. But I think I found a civilization that has a curriculum that . . . let's say, I'm confident that if I can keep at it and if I had more time, maybe a few more lifetimes to work at it, I think I can get to a complete understanding. The answer is coming to an understanding where you know how to ask more questions and you know how to deal with unanswered questions without freaking out. I came to like Christianity and Islam and Judaism and things which I hadn't liked -- theistic religions. Buddhism made me like them, as it made me like the university system. I really got to like that in the Buddhist culture, the way to -- so to speak -- be a graduate scholar, life-long, is to be a monk. You get a life-long fellowship, basically, sort of like a free lunch forever and you just wear this robe and you shave your head and you give up peripheral concerns. So I was monking away there, which means studying all the time, basically, meditating. Then I reached a certain point

about '65, '66 -- it had a lot to do with the Vietnam thing. One of the things that was very powerful for me was the image of the Vietnamese monk who burned himself, the first one -- remember him? -- it was an amazing image. And now I had many friends who were in the civil rights movement. And some of them were dying in Vietnam, some of them were resisting Vietnam. I was 4-F -- I was a monk, which made me untrustworthy holding a gun, I guess, for one reason, and the second reason, I did have only the one eye. I was not available for the draft so I didn't have to do any protest. But I just felt badly that I was kind of like just pursuing my own knowledge and being in a sort of Buddhist ivory tower. So I thought I should do something more active. And I came back to the States. There was a small monastery in New Jersey that I spent time at, but somehow it was not really connected to American society. After some different hits and misses, I realized that the obvious thing was -- and my teacher, this Mongolian g

entleman, urged me to do this, actually -- to go back to the university and get my degree. Some cynic might say I was just restless and I was tired of celibacy and all this. And maybe that was the real underlying subconscious drive, I don't know. But consciously, I left it as a sort of career choice. Because, you know, in the Buddhist society there is so much support for a monastic that it's not thought of as a deprivation, it's thought of as a privilege. It's actually considered like getting a Macarthur fellowship.

Q: You're in a unique position to comment on influences the West has had on Buddhism in the years that it's become more popular here. Would you say those influences, on balance, have been positive or negative?

A: I think there's been a good influence. I think Buddhism in Asia had become, you might say, somewhat routinized. It occupied a sort of niche and had become a little bit complacent in most of the countries where it existed. It doesn't really influence the mainstream lives of most of the people in Asia. And what has happened in the States, as we are going over the threshold into the post-modern era, is that we've become disillusioned with the great progress myth of industrialism. I think there have been several generations of people who are interested in trying to find some meaning to their lives in a larger social context where everything is kind of meaningless. The philosophy of the day is pretty much materialism, whether you're a capitalist or a communist, it still is materialism and sort of ``Eat, drink and be merry because life doesn't have a big meaning and you have no soul and when you die, you're a goner.'' And so whatever you did, was what you'll have done. And you might as well do a lot. It's a s

lightly nihilistic social matrix we all live in. So that in a way is kind of good, actually, for people. Because it puts them in a state of wishing to examine the fundamental basis of what they're doing. They're not just accepting some myth: ``We're the great so- and-so's and we should convert everybody else to our belief or we should exterminate all those who don't share our belief.'' And they're looking for how to develop love and compassion in their lives and how to find meaning in what they do. And how to make the planet of value for their children, if they have them, and be responsible to it. And they are kind of confused how to go about it. And many people are pretty doomsday-ish and apocalyptic in their outlook. That is actually the kind of climate in which Buddhism originally flourished. The main way you attain salvation, or liberation, or whatever you want to call it, in Buddhism, is through education and through cultivating understanding. So this is really excellent. America has this wonderful idea

of the separation of church and state which led to religious pluralism which led to the possibility of universities having religion departments where different world philosophies could encounter each other and debate and could be freely compared and looked at in an open forum without anybody trying to convert anybody. And Buddhism thrives in that sort of situation.

Q: Do you see the Tibetan people's conflict with the Chinese government eventually resolving itself or growing more volatile?

A: Some people would rightly say, I think, that Tibet is in danger of being finished off. Sort of like Bosnia or something. When Mao went in there in the '50s, he said, ``I'm going to have 50 million Chinese in Tibet within 10 years. And it's wonderful, it's a great acquisition for the motherland,'' and blah blah blah. But this is the reason that, I think, Tibet will be free, you see: Forty years later, there are still only about 7 million Chinese in what was once greater Tibet, and the vast majority of those are in the borderland area, which is below 10,000 feet. Although right this minute, they're pushing in a lot and they're doing all these hydroelectric things and making attempts to create an artificial infrastructure that could support a larger Chinese population. But most Western people don't realize that a lot of these areas are really quite non-Chinese, historically the Chinese have never lived comfortably in those areas. But, of those areas, Tibet particularly is the one they can't live in. Why?

It's three miles too high. The Tibetan plateau is, on average, 15,000 feet high. When they tried to plow it, the steppe, and put in wheat with tractors, soil just blew away and they had famines. And it's only livable by people who herd animals. Chinese, even after several generations, send their wives down to Chengdu or Lanzhou below 5,000 feet to give birth. So I actually don't think that the Chinese in the long run are going to want to spend that huge subsidy that they've spent all this time to keep their military up there.

Q: But do you see a way for the Chinese to back down without losing face?

A: Absolutely. They can gain huge face. This land is actually no longer of any value to them. They're not trying to fight off Russia. They are not going to invade India. They've taken most of the the statues and everything. They've taken 80 percent of the forest. You can invest in a country without running its government and maintaining a big expensive army of people who don't like being at that high altitude. They have to fly rice in there for all of their Chinese colonists. It's simply not cost effective, you know. And so, (they can say), ``OK, federate. Have your self-determination.'' You make a nice tourist industry up there, which is the thing Tibet is really of value for. But it's not a best-seller when people see Chinese troops in the streets with unhappy Tibetans. It's a best-seller when Tibetans are dancing and singing and the Dalai Lama is making prayers and blessing people. It's much more profitable for them to let go of it. Then the world will begin to trust them in a different way. Particularl

y their own overseas Chinese will trust them. The Chinese want them back there, using their entrepreneurial creativity to make a really beautiful China. Not to speak of the inhumane and merciless repression of the Tibetan people that they're performing. Getting themselves a kind of bad karma and a bad reputation. So I'm sad that that continues, but I think it will turn around soon. But what I say those who think I'm nuts is that if someone had told you that, you know, the Russians really would do better and they will eventually move out of the Balkan states and the Ukraine and Tajikistan without having to suppress all those people . . . If you'd say that in 1988, people would have laughed at you. Right? And look what happened -- '89, '90, '91. I mean, it was incredible. And it will happen too in China, I'm sure.

Q: As a professor of religion, how you explain the recent rise of the Christian right in this country?

A: I consider it very unfortunate. But it's part of a worldwide trend, actually. It has to do with the breakdown of the industrial progress myth, the idea that we're going to conquer every mosquito and every germ, and we'll all be one happy world with IBM and Westinghouse making everybody a washing machine in every Indian village and all that. So, that fantasy of progress, everyone is disillusioned with it. And there's famine everywhere and terrible wars and the defense industry is thriving. So, people are realizing that this modernity and the myth of sort of progress was a mistake, actually. Technology over-promised. The negative reaction to that is (to say) the whole modern thing is all wrong and materialism was Satan's work, and we can go back to a pre-modern attitude and sort of a close little community like Ronald Reagan's little city on a hill. We'll return to some hallowed age and we'll trash technology and we'll put women back in the kitchen. And so in the name of religion, really what they are doi

ng is retreating from the reality of the modern world. So I think it's really sad. The whole reason America has done well over the past couple of hundred years, for all of our faults and all of the things that we haven't done, is that we've had freedom -- relatively -- and that freedom has enabled people to invent computers and airplanes and to do all these things that you wouldn't do if some church guy was having you arrested because ``Men don't fly,'' or ``You don't have boxes talking like that, that's the devil's work.'' We allowed the human inventiveness to come out by freeing it up from all these shackles. And you can't put them back on. It leads to this atrocious movement in this country now that somehow we're supposed to balance the budget and we're supposed to save ourselves by crushing even more the most defenseless people in the country. The poorest children -- not supposed to have lunch. The poorest families are not supposed to have any kind of safety net or medical care. I mean, it's atrocious, a

ctually. It is totally unchristian, it is totally inhumane, and to parade that kind of racism and classism and selfishness in the name of Christianity is a travesty.

_________________________________________________________________

ROBERT THURMAN -- 1941: Born August 3 in New York City

-- 1961: Left Harvard College and traveled to Dharamsala, India, where he was later ordained a Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama

-- 1967: Returned to Harvard to study Tibetan Buddhism

-- 1972: Received Ph.D in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University

-- 1973-88: Taught religion at Amherst College

-- 1984: Published ``Tsong Khapa's Speech of Gold: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet''

-- 1987: Founded Tibet House New York with Richard Gere

-- 1988-present: Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University

-- 1991-95: Chair, Department of Religion, Columbia University

-- 1995: Published ``Essential Tibetan Buddhism''

-- 1996: Visiting scholar at California Institute for Integral

Studies; writing ``The Tibetan Book of Inner Science'' with the Dalai Lama