Charting Tibetan Buddhism in the West

How did Tibetan Buddhism, a once little-known religion in a little-known country, win over the West?

That is the question posed by Jeffery Paine ’66 in his entertaining, absorbing, and easily read book, Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).

Paine notes that just a few decades ago, “had you ransacked the West, you would have located only two Tibetan Buddhist centers, one in Scotland, the other in Vermont.” But in the United States today, most large American cities are home to Buddhist centers, with eight in Washington, D.C., about 25 in Boston, and 40 in New York, and the religion keeps doubling its numbers faster than any other, with Tibetan Buddhism being the fastest-growing form.

Paine divides his reflection on Buddhism into five “books,” each telling the stories of fascinating figures who helped transform the Western attitude toward Tibet and its religion from ignorance to acceptance and who have contributed to Buddhism’s staying power.

In Book I, Alexandra David-Neel comes to life. A French woman who in the early 1900s made suicidal journeys through the mountains of Tibet, she became the first Westerner to enter the holy city of Llasa. She recounted her adventure and what she found there in her book, My Journey to Llasa.

“As she traveled up and down that vast land, where often no foreigner had set foot previously,” Paine writes, “she was kind of an ambassador of modern consciousness to an earlier age of religion.”

By 1959 Tibet was occupied by China, and foreigners could no longer cross the border to report about Tibet’s religion to the outside world. That became the role of lamas, and Paine describes two of them in Book II. Lama Yeshe and Chögyam Trungpa, though studies in contrast, were charismatic and gifted stewards of the ancient religion who adapted to Western life and were able to translate the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism for American followers.

Paine explains that Yeshe attracted Westerners through his joie de vivre, his emotional warmth, and his ability to connect. Ultimately, though, he was limited by his inability to master English. Trungpa, meanwhile, is described in a chapter aptly titled “Playboy of the Gods.” He identified with America and spoke its slang, and in little more than a decade starting in 1970, he established nearly 100 Tibetan centers in the United States, sold books by the thousands, and gave talks that filled lecture halls.

While Lama Yeshe believed that the essence of Tibetan Buddhism could make itself at home in the modern world, Trungpa had a much different view. He believed that he could not stand outside modernity with a pure idea of religion and hope to affect change. So he disposed of his lama’s robes and allowed no outward sign of his religious position. The entertaining section of Re-enchantment that describes his turn as a Buddhist leader includes tales of his heavy drinking and womanizing and recounts how he crossed paths with such offbeat figures as Alan Ginsberg.

Book III describes two fascinating followers of Buddhism. Diane Perry was an Englishwoman who transformed herself through Trungpa’s teachings into Tenzin Palmo and mediated alone in a cave for 12 years. Jetsunma was a lama from Brooklyn who was the first Western woman to be recognized as a reincarnated Buddhist figure.

Hollywood’s well-known followers of Buddhism, including actors Richard Gere and Steven Seagal, also are part of Paine’s examination of the religion’s emergence in the West. He explains the phenomenon of “Tibet chic” in Hollywood as “topping someone who boasts, ‘Stephen Spielberg said to me …’ by confiding, ‘As the Dalai Lama told me personally …’”

Paine closes out Re-enchantment with a look at how ordinary Americans become Buddhists. Though lacking the glitz, glamour, and intrigue of the previous sections, it is an interesting glimpse into the religious quest that some people take.

It also helps answer the author’s premise by taking Tibetan Buddhism out of the hands of its Western trailblazers and placing it in the context of Western culture as a whole.

—Dana Benson