In Western academia, Tibetan studies has been dominated by Buddhist scholars working on classical Tibetan Buddhist texts and premodern subjects. However, that academic trend is slowly shifting: the field is becoming more diverse, and its research methodologies are evolving as a new generation of scholars is exploring new areas. As a result, more books focused upon modern Tibet have emerged in the past decade. Nicole Willock's Lineages of The Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China makes a genuine contribution to the field. Her book has the potential to inspire and encourage scholars to pay closer attention to the complex and diverse world of Tibetan history, religion, culture, and language in modern times. In other words, this book is a must-read, even if it provides only a glimpse of modern Tibetan scholars and their complex roles within modern China.
Lineages of the Literary consists of five chapters in addition to an introduction. Chapter 1 presents biographical overviews of Tseten Zhabdrung, Muge Samten, and Dungkar Lozang Trinle, the modern Tibetan scholars who came to be called “the three polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) after the Cultural Revolution (1966–78). It further highlights their symbolic connections with three historical polymaths—Mar Shakyamuni, Yo Gejung, and Tsang Rabsel—and their role as “cultural symbols” (p. 68) preserving and sustaining Tibetan culture. Chapter 2 analyzes the seemingly new autobiographical genre in Tibetan literature called “telling what happened” (Tib. byung ba brjod pa) and looks at how Tseten Zhabdrung and Muge Samten's narration of their life stories differs from the parameters of traditional autobiographies. Willock considers their discursive practices through the notion of the “spiritual friend” and “spiritual friendship” and highlights the hope for the continuity of Tibetan Buddhism discernible in H. H. the Dalai Lama's poem called “Monlam to Mao” (1954).
Chapter 3 touches upon the variety of ineffable experiences and testimonies written about the Maoist years in both English and Tibetan by Tibetan writers, former political prisoners, and monastic scholars, including Tseten Zhabdrung and Muge Samten. Willock draws comparisons among them and especially emphasizes the spiritual writings and realizations of Tseten Zhabdrung and Muge Samten within the parameters of Buddhist truth and linked to their qualities as “scholar-adepts” (Tib. mkhas grub) in Geluk Buddhist epistemes.
Chapter 4 discusses Dungkar Lobzang Trinle's highly acclaimed yet controversial 1977 work, An Explanation of the Merging of Religious and Secular Rule in Tibet, and his critique of the politics and religion of Tibet from a Marxist perspective. Dungkar Lozang Trinle's argument is intriguing because it is based heavily on Tibetan materials that he knows well. Additionally, Willock provides important comparisons between Muge Samten's 1981 A History of Traditional Fields of Learning and Dungkar Rinpoche's book in order to emphasize different approaches to promoting Tibetan Buddhist culture in China.
Chapter 5 is about the central roles played by the polymaths (along with other Tibetan scholars) in rebuilding Buddhist institutions, reviving the Tulku lineage, and launching academic teachings of Tibetan studies at Nationalities Universities in China. Willock presents each chapter, with its own objective and argument, in a manner that is well organized.
Willock's scholarly efforts in bringing the three polymaths together by scrutinizing their “boundary-breaching acts” (p. 36) of safeguarding, teaching, and adapting Buddhist epistemes, practices, and institutions in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution is stimulating and insightful. However, we must recognize the impossibility of analyzing all of their works together, as Willock acknowledges. In the Chinese Nationalities Publishing House editions, Tseten Zhabdrung's works comprise thirteen volumes, Muge Samten has six volumes, and Dungkar Lozang Trinle has eight volumes on various aspects of Tibetan knowledge systems. Willock confronts the enormous amounts of writings available by focusing on life writing, rather than on historical, religious, and linguistic publications. She analyzes their lives, works, and roles, most of which are recorded in autobiographical accounts, along with some of their major literary works—both religious and secular—under complex sociopolitical circumstances. She explains and examines their actions by employing the concept of “moral agency,” defined as “a capacity for action bound by historically and culturally specific disciplines of subject formation performed in relationship with a secularizing other” (p. 19). This approach allows her research to transcend the existing binary framework, which considers such modern scholars’ historical roles in terms of either resistance to or collaboration with the political powers that be.
Some of the terms that Willock employs to analyze Tibetan scholars and their relationship with others are enriching but can be problematic. The use of terms such as “spiritual friend” and “spiritual friendship” is understandable, given their historical meaning and practice in Indic literature. Willock articulates their function as a form of mutual respect among scholars, such as Muge Samten and Tseten Zhabdrung in their collective literary projects during the Maoist period. However, the notion of geshe (Tib. dge bshes) or gewai shenyen (Tib. dge ba'i bshes gnyen) in the Tibetan Buddhist context is not equivalent to the meaning of spiritual friend. Among Tibetan readers, the concept of “spiritual friend” as a translation of those terms would produce considerable misunderstanding as they commonly refer to the notion of spiritual master or teacher in Tibetan Buddhist culture. The notion of a spiritual friend could have been further enriched if the author had placed more emphasis on its Tibetan cultural implications than its literal etymology.
Willock's approach to the spiritual aspects of Muge Samten and Tseten Zhabdrung's remembrances of violence and grave injustices is insightful and provides a fresh perspective. Her argument sometimes depends upon the literal description of the situation—the texts’ use of “positive, purposeful, and joyous” language (p. 122). Furthermore, it relies on references from the Geluk Buddhist tradition. A fuller portrait of their spiritual aspects would have emerged from looking at the whole context provided in their autobiographies, especially that of Muge Samten. He describes the hardships that he endured, including being reduced to eating horse meat and participating in the public shaming of his colleagues during the Cultural Revolution.
Also, a fuller understanding of Tseten Zhabdrung's remembrances of his twelve-year imprisonment would require extratextual analysis, such as an examination of oral histories. His less than one-page-long description of a twelve-year imprisonment gives us space to analyze its spiritual aspects more deeply, as well as to consider the texts’ absences, aporias, and other spaces that cannot be filled with expressive language because of the trauma and political persecution involved. Writing under such trying circumstances entails strategic decision-making and political calculations, even when describing spiritual practices. Therefore, we need to be highly aware of the ambiguities and coded language concealed within these modern Tibetan writings.
In addition, Willock's comparison of the remembrances of Muge Samten and Tseten Zhabdrung during the Maoist years and the detailed testimonials given by other Tibetans should be further analyzed, because the latter were published in exile, in English, and even those published in Tibet were not printed by the Nationalities Publishing Houses. Therefore, it is necessary to think about differences in publishing culture related to state censorship, self-censorship, and other complex editing processes that go largely unexplored in this book.
The journey this book takes its readers on is extremely rewarding, as it critically analyzes the life and works of three major scholars of modern Tibet. For anyone with a specific interest in modern Tibetan history and biographical literature, this is essential reading. It should prove equally vital to modern Chinese history as well.
