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Prisoners of ShangriLa: Tibetan Buddhism and the West,Used
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To the Western imagination, Tibet evokes exoticism, mysticism, and wonder: a fabled land removed from the grinding onslaught of modernity, spiritually endowed with all that the West has lost. Originally published in 1998, Prisoners of ShangriLa provided the first cultural history of the strange encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. Donald Lopez reveals here fanciful misconceptions of Tibetan life and religion. He examines, among much else, the politics of the term Lamaism, a pejorative synonym for Tibetan Buddhism; the various theosophical, psychedelic, and New Age purposes served by the socalled Tibetan Book of the Dead; and the unexpected history of the most famous of all Tibetan mantras, om mani padme hum. More than popculture anomalies, these versions of Tibet are often embedded in scholarly sources, constituting an odd union of the popular and the academic, of fancy and fact.Upon its original publication, Prisoners of ShangriLa sent shockwaves through the field of Tibetan studieshailed as a timely, provocative, and courageous critique. Twenty years hence, the situation in Tibet has only grown more troubled and complexwith the unrest of 2008, the demolition of the dwellings of thousands of monks and nuns at Larung Gar in 2016, and the scores of selfimmolations committed by Tibetans to protest the Dalai Lamas exile.In his new preface to this anniversary edition, Lopez returns to the metaphors of prison and paradise to illuminate the state of Tibetan Buddhismboth in exile and in Tibetas monks and nuns still seek to find a way home. Prisoners of ShangriLa remains a timely and vital inquiry into Western fantasies of Tibet.
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