I don’t know when I first heard about Shangri La, although it was present in idea in the opium-induced poem by Coleridge, “Kublai Khan,” which thrilled all of us stoners back in the 60’s. Who didn’t want to go to such a strange and wonderful place that was both of this earth but also beyond, an exotic eastern Asian form of Eden? And then there was the band Three Dog Night, who wrote, “The Halls of Shangri La” (I think that’s the name) around that same time. How do the lights shine in the halls of Shangri La? They asked. We youngsters pondered. Eastern wisdom, beyond our silly Western minds. Yes, that was for me.
In college I tried to read the original story of Shangri La (the notion taken from Coleridge, or at least some other myth of the East then prevalent in the West) in the book Lost Horizon. I could not get through it, though. It was so thoroughly 1930’s, so built upon a stale idea of heaven that it was just boring, like our myth of heaven and harps and sitting around on clouds. The movie was worse – they tried to jazz up the book version a bit with a hot romance and fighting, but still, who wanted that boring Shangri La? Far in the Himalayas, it should be exotic beyond our comprehension. Coleridge got it; the others did not. We wanted what we thought was the real thing.
Many tried to get to Shangri La during the hippie diaspora, when thousands of burnt-out acid heads headed to India and Nepal with only a few bucks to find their guru, who would take them hand in hand to that paradise. The Beatles did it, too, John Lennon writing later in the song that ends “And it’s making me feel like I’ve never been born” (what was its name? “She Said” ?) of his disillusionment with the guru that his band made all-too-famous. A former Harvard psychologist, Richard Alpert, dropped out and tuned in to his guru, and stayed; he had found it, he said, although it was within himself. He went the full distance. But one wonders…did he have to leave Harvard Yard at all for that inner Shangri La?
One of my favorite travel accounts is by a woman named Alexandra David-Neel, who published in 1929 her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Done before the “triumphant” dominance of Mao and his Marxist paradise, she recounts endless examples of magic by the various priests and shamans of the world’s highest and, at that time, most reclusive nation. It was hard for a Westerner to get into Tibet then, and even harder for a woman. She must have been something. And her account was just what we wanted to hear – magic and mystery in the land of Shangri La. I believed her account and still do for several good reasons and one very bad one: I want to believe.
I want to believe badly enough to have gotten into Buddhist philosophy in some depth – although not so much in practice where the rubber really hits the road. It is a religion – or non-religion-religion as some say – which local customs shroud in mystery, although on the surface, there is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is summed up in the 4 noble truths and the 8-fold path, which teach one about non-attachment to avoid misery. There is something very mysterious about it all underneath, but on the surface, it really is as dry and as unappealing as unbuttered toast, emphasizing discipline, and then more discipline. But like the elephants in the Hindu rites to Ganesh, local custom has adorned them to impress the crowd, and for us in the West, this makes its eternal truths exotic and magical.
Now, I am reading a book by Pamela Logan titled Tibetan Rescue, published first in 2000. She is an American astrophysicist who became fascinated with Tibet and its religion (and became a Buddhist) after she was allowed to travel there in the late 1980’s. Her mission for the book was to help restore some of the old monasteries in Tibet for cultural reasons, something I did not think was allowed under communist China. We find, much to our surprise, that Buddhism is now back in style there, although Mao and his cultural revolution (1966-76) tried with everything they had, including mass-homicide, to demolish everything Tibetan. I will return to this book at a later time, but now I want to recall a Tibetan version of the conception of Buddha that she recounted: the souls of heaven were busy searching for the right vehicle for Gautama Buddha to be born into, and found it in a queen in northern India. It was then that a white elephant lay beside her and made her pregnant with the Buddha’s soul.
The full account is much more elegant, but we get the idea: an absurd idea, yet appealing in its magical-ness and, to us, its exotic nature. An elephant, really? And yet it is easy to see that this idea is similar, and with cultural adjustment, no less miraculous or absurd than the conception of Jesus in the Virgin Mary. We can see that the same idea is present in both: that neither was conceived through the normal rutting process, making both Jesus and Gautama exceptional right from the start. The virgin birth had been present as an idea of purity in the Mediterranean for millennia, just as the elephant had long been endowed with supernatural qualities in the east. In both, we could expect exceptional people, if not man-gods.
The point being not the equality of religions, but the nature of the exotic. What is exotic to one people is the norm for another; what is Shangri La for one is just another boring representation of heaven to another. Certainly, John Lennon could have found God near home in a local Christian monastery, just as Jewish Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Das) could have found Yahweh in a good local Synagogue. We chase around the world – or the world in our minds – for something that is already right in front of us.
And more, for God is not only found in a religious setting. The mysterious and exotic is always there, if we could see. In a moment’s notice, with only a slight adjustment of perception, the wall separating us from heaven, or Shangri La, can come down and find us in paradise in a cow field, or at Fenway Park. This is, and has always been, the true adventure. Our actual physical travels for the truth are an expression of our desire, and may yet lead us there, but it is never a location we go to. It would be so much easier if it were, if we could climb that mountain and find truth at the feet of the guru. And it might be that he could help, and that the exotic situation might shake us from our lethargy. That I grant. But the location, as Ram Das knew, was always right here, at the center of our circle.
This, too, is nothing new, but almost no one acts as if this were true. Maybe travel is that knock on the head that we all need to truly see, but it is only a clearing of the eyes, not a new territory. Shangri La is here, and in Tibet, and even in Beijing. It is brought to us by a virgin birth or a white elephant, by anything that takes, as Paul said, the scales from our eyes, but it is not the knock on the head that is heaven, but the vision that comes after – often with discipline, and always with faith and the gift of grace. FK
In college I tried to read the original story of Shangri La (the notion taken from Coleridge, or at least some other myth of the East then prevalent in the West) in the book Lost Horizon. I could not get through it, though. It was so thoroughly 1930’s, so built upon a stale idea of heaven that it was just boring, like our myth of heaven and harps and sitting around on clouds. The movie was worse – they tried to jazz up the book version a bit with a hot romance and fighting, but still, who wanted that boring Shangri La? Far in the Himalayas, it should be exotic beyond our comprehension. Coleridge got it; the others did not. We wanted what we thought was the real thing.
Many tried to get to Shangri La during the hippie diaspora, when thousands of burnt-out acid heads headed to India and Nepal with only a few bucks to find their guru, who would take them hand in hand to that paradise. The Beatles did it, too, John Lennon writing later in the song that ends “And it’s making me feel like I’ve never been born” (what was its name? “She Said” ?) of his disillusionment with the guru that his band made all-too-famous. A former Harvard psychologist, Richard Alpert, dropped out and tuned in to his guru, and stayed; he had found it, he said, although it was within himself. He went the full distance. But one wonders…did he have to leave Harvard Yard at all for that inner Shangri La?
One of my favorite travel accounts is by a woman named Alexandra David-Neel, who published in 1929 her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Done before the “triumphant” dominance of Mao and his Marxist paradise, she recounts endless examples of magic by the various priests and shamans of the world’s highest and, at that time, most reclusive nation. It was hard for a Westerner to get into Tibet then, and even harder for a woman. She must have been something. And her account was just what we wanted to hear – magic and mystery in the land of Shangri La. I believed her account and still do for several good reasons and one very bad one: I want to believe.
I want to believe badly enough to have gotten into Buddhist philosophy in some depth – although not so much in practice where the rubber really hits the road. It is a religion – or non-religion-religion as some say – which local customs shroud in mystery, although on the surface, there is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is summed up in the 4 noble truths and the 8-fold path, which teach one about non-attachment to avoid misery. There is something very mysterious about it all underneath, but on the surface, it really is as dry and as unappealing as unbuttered toast, emphasizing discipline, and then more discipline. But like the elephants in the Hindu rites to Ganesh, local custom has adorned them to impress the crowd, and for us in the West, this makes its eternal truths exotic and magical.
Now, I am reading a book by Pamela Logan titled Tibetan Rescue, published first in 2000. She is an American astrophysicist who became fascinated with Tibet and its religion (and became a Buddhist) after she was allowed to travel there in the late 1980’s. Her mission for the book was to help restore some of the old monasteries in Tibet for cultural reasons, something I did not think was allowed under communist China. We find, much to our surprise, that Buddhism is now back in style there, although Mao and his cultural revolution (1966-76) tried with everything they had, including mass-homicide, to demolish everything Tibetan. I will return to this book at a later time, but now I want to recall a Tibetan version of the conception of Buddha that she recounted: the souls of heaven were busy searching for the right vehicle for Gautama Buddha to be born into, and found it in a queen in northern India. It was then that a white elephant lay beside her and made her pregnant with the Buddha’s soul.
The full account is much more elegant, but we get the idea: an absurd idea, yet appealing in its magical-ness and, to us, its exotic nature. An elephant, really? And yet it is easy to see that this idea is similar, and with cultural adjustment, no less miraculous or absurd than the conception of Jesus in the Virgin Mary. We can see that the same idea is present in both: that neither was conceived through the normal rutting process, making both Jesus and Gautama exceptional right from the start. The virgin birth had been present as an idea of purity in the Mediterranean for millennia, just as the elephant had long been endowed with supernatural qualities in the east. In both, we could expect exceptional people, if not man-gods.
The point being not the equality of religions, but the nature of the exotic. What is exotic to one people is the norm for another; what is Shangri La for one is just another boring representation of heaven to another. Certainly, John Lennon could have found God near home in a local Christian monastery, just as Jewish Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Das) could have found Yahweh in a good local Synagogue. We chase around the world – or the world in our minds – for something that is already right in front of us.
And more, for God is not only found in a religious setting. The mysterious and exotic is always there, if we could see. In a moment’s notice, with only a slight adjustment of perception, the wall separating us from heaven, or Shangri La, can come down and find us in paradise in a cow field, or at Fenway Park. This is, and has always been, the true adventure. Our actual physical travels for the truth are an expression of our desire, and may yet lead us there, but it is never a location we go to. It would be so much easier if it were, if we could climb that mountain and find truth at the feet of the guru. And it might be that he could help, and that the exotic situation might shake us from our lethargy. That I grant. But the location, as Ram Das knew, was always right here, at the center of our circle.
This, too, is nothing new, but almost no one acts as if this were true. Maybe travel is that knock on the head that we all need to truly see, but it is only a clearing of the eyes, not a new territory. Shangri La is here, and in Tibet, and even in Beijing. It is brought to us by a virgin birth or a white elephant, by anything that takes, as Paul said, the scales from our eyes, but it is not the knock on the head that is heaven, but the vision that comes after – often with discipline, and always with faith and the gift of grace. FK
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