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The Buddha said that the world is like a house being consumed by flames, and that we are inside it. I remember when I first read that, almost forty years ago. I thought, someone has stared into the depths of suffering and has told what he has seen.
To me, his statement seemed ironically to contrast with and to confirm a truth most evident about Catholicism, in which I had been raised. It appeared to be burning up in front of me, but, at the same time, it could no longer recognize the flames. I wouldn't have put it this way then, because I vaguely welcomed the changes that were occurring in the Church, but as I look back on it now, I believe we were losing our nerve. We refused to appreciate how deeply into the very particles of matter and spirit our suffering and sin were implicated, and how vain were our attempts to engineer a new Church, a new society, a new human being, and a new age. We saw evil, but it was outside us, we thought, in "structures of oppression."
We made felt banners and no longer talked about Hell or sin or guilt or penance. We no longer knelt much, or fasted, but feasted instead. We gathered around a table and held hands or played guitars. We sang about happiness and love. We did street theater to speak Truth to Powers and Principalities. We pretended we were already in Heaven. We supposed we were as gods, and as The Whole Earth Catalog put it, that we might as well get good at it.
We were no longer serious. The only real sin seemed to be to believe that one was a sinner. So why be Catholic—or Christian—at all? Why bother going to church or to confession? Judging by the decline in church attendance over the past decades, I was far from being the only one who asked those questions.
Kierkegaard has a parable in which a clown, not having time to take off his makeup, suddenly appears onstage and shouts "Fire," but the audience thinks it is part of a comedy. They laugh—but soon they perish in the flames. while I sat on my living room couch and read the Buddha's sermon, however, I saw that the flames onstage were real.
As I continued my study, Buddhist Tibet became part of that stage. China had set it afire and it was burning during the 1960s and 1970s. People were fleeing and telling about the conflagration in such vivid terms that it seemed to have sent its smoke all over the world. As Tibetan Buddhist elementary logic texts put it, the existence of smoke, seen on a mountain pass, entails that fire is present there. I could see that smoke from where I was and so I could understand the existence of the fire. Anyone can still catch a glimpse of it, even from a living room couch, just by paging through some books on Tibet.
An excellent place to begin is Matthew Kapstein's The Tibetans, a balanced, clear, and comprehensive introduction to the geography, ethnography, religion, and history of the region. Its maps are helpful, although its photographs are not quite up to the quality of those in some of the older survey books on Tibet that it has superseded. And readers who are unfamiliar with the basics of Buddhism will need to supplement Kapstein's explanation of it, as well as his discussion of the recent politics of the region.
That politics is complex. China and Tibet, ethnically and culturally distinct, have sometimes advanced armies against each other and claimed sovereignty over each other. For much of the last few centuries, China has exercised some power over Tibet, although by the beginning of the 20th century, that power was purely nominal. Then the Chinese People's Liberation Army swept into the region in 1950. Determined to eradicate religion, the Communists killed, tortured, and imprisoned teachers and other "counter-revolutionaries," destroyed monasteries and temples, and smashed religious images or sold them on the international market. Tibetans died in forced labor gangs and through famine induced by agricultural collectivization.
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