1、1No Slave to ShangrHaREACHING for descriptions ofTibet,the word “mystery“ rollsoff many peoples tongues.However Harvard TibetologistLeonard W.J.Van der Kuijp refused touse this word,believing as he does thatTibet is in a kind of conceptual slavery toromantic notions held in the West.“Peo-ple tend to
2、 impose their imagination onTibet.Tibet is not heaven,neither hell.Itis a place between heaven and hell,likeany other place in the world.“ Failing for Tibet If anyone dares venture such a no-tion,few people know better what theyare talking about than Van der Kuijp.In197o,when 18 years old,he happene
3、d topick up a library book about Tibet.It wasa translation by the well-known Germansinologist Reinhold Giinther.Van derKuijp was a college freshman and mathe-matics and biology major at the time,butat once succumbed to a fascination forthis remote place.“My interest had noth-ing to do with religion;
4、 it was purely aca-2demic.It was a hunger for knowledge.“ He soon arrived at the University ofSaskatchewan where Reinhold Gfintherwas teaching.There he obtained a mas-ters degree and studied the Tibetan,Chi-nese,and Mongolian languages.In 1976Van der Kuijp left Canada for Germanyto devote himself to
5、 Tibetology,Sinol-ogy,Indology and philosophy,getting hisdoctorate from Hamburg University in1979. The Tibetologist always credits hisacademic success to his studies in Ham-burg.Liu Maocai,a famous linguist,wasone of his strictest teachers.“He taughtme and one.other student the Book ofMencius,“ Van
6、der Kuijp recalled.“Wehad to read ancient Chinese texts lateinto the night,but he never failed us inthe examination.“ Armed with academic credentials,Vander Kuijp returned to Canada and foundhimself jobless,and possibly unemploy-able - a painful price for his decision tofollow his interests as a car
7、eer choice.“Myfriends all laughed at me,but I never feltregret.“ He got a job driving a cab and un-dertook the study of agroeconomies. The turning point came a year later.His tutor in Germany recommendedhim for a research job in Nepal.This wasthe Tibetologists first real-life experi-ence of South As
8、ia.More 3opportuni-ties to learn came from some respectedlamas he met there.“They were greatpeople.They were not common monks,they were mentors.“ In the first threeyears,he worked as principal on a manu-script preservation joint project (Nepal-Germany) at the Nepal Studies Center inKatmandu.Later he
9、 carried out researchin Nepal and India. The real meaning of living as a Ti-betan Buddhist started to dawn on himin Nepal.“You can really understandwhat you read only if you understandpeoples lives,and then you can feel it,“he says,“just like seeing a Thangka.Ifyou know the process of creation,if yo
10、uknow why people prepare to contemplatea Thangka - dean themselves and sit inmeditation - this is the basis of a muchdeeper understanding of this art.“ An invitation arrived to teach at BerlinUniversity and Washington Universityafter Van der Kuijp left Nepal,a movethat became a stepping stone to Har
11、vardUniversity in July 1995 where he joinedthe Department of Tibetan and HimalayaStudies with a remit to get their Tibe-tological research on the right track.In1997 he was elected Chairman of the De-partment of Sanskrit and Indian Studieswhere his research focused primarily onIndo-Tibetan Buddhism,T
12、ibetan Bud-dhist intellectual history,and Tibetan-Mongol and Tibetan-Chinese relations. 4The project that absorbs much of hiswaking hours these days is the TibetanTranslation of Chinese Calendric En-cyclopedia Commissioned by EmperorKangxi.This calendric work was intro-duced to China by Western miss
13、ionariesduring Emperor Kangxis reign (1662-1722),and translated into Chinese,thenfrom Chinese to Mongolian,and finallyfrom Mongolian to Tibetan.In the early 19th century,the Tibetan version wasprinted in Beijing,and now rests in thePotala Palace in Lhasa.Van der Kuijpplans to select two of its chapt
14、ers andcompare them to the Mongolian andChinese versions to set up a glossary andcorpus. Scriptures are a source of endless de-light to this scholar.“Just imagine,whatI read in my office in the U.S.was writ-ten by some lamas in the 12th or 13thcentury,“ he says,“and I am a white manborn in the Nethe
15、rlands.Thousands ofmiles away,hundreds of years betweenus.Isnt that amazing?“ During the198os,he spent three summer vacationsin the library of the Cultural Palace ofthe Nationalities,Beijing.He feels some-what frustrated that its so hard to readall scriptures that he wants to read,andjokes that he w
16、ill move into the libraryafter his retirement. As a teacher,Van der Kuijp is knownfor his “liberal“ teaching style.“Healways talked to us about what preoc-cupied 5him,and occasionally digressedfrom the subject,“ says Liu Guowei,theprofessors doctoral student and lecturerat Fo Guang University in Tai
17、wan,“butfor me,his influence goes very deep,andI have learned a lot from him.“ Now Vander Kuijp lectures regularly on Tibetol-ogy at Renmin University of China andSiehuan University. A Culture Endangeredby Modernization At a Renmin University symposiumin the summer of 2010,Van der Kuijpexplained his
18、 concept of Tibet as a “slaveto Shangri-la.“ James Hiltons novel LostHorizon was popular in the West andwas adapted into an even more popularfilm; Shangri-la was an idyllic place ofeternal life that remained perfect andseparate from the real world.Peoplegradually came to idealize Tibet as aplace of
19、enchantment.Many Chinesehave the same idea.Obsessed with thisso-called place of mystery,many whovisited were nevertheless disappointedafter aetually traveling there.Tibet is areal society,much like societies in otherplaces. The first time Van der Kuijp went toTibet was in 1982,as a tour guide for a
20、Hong Kong agency.“The best place forstudying is not the school,“ he quipped.His journey took him from Hong 6Kong,via Guilin,Hangzhou,Dunhuang,Xinji-ang,and finally to Tibet.He has returnedalmost every year.This year he accom-panied an academic group to Lhasaand Nepal.Last year he rode the newlyopene
21、d Qinghai-Tibet Railway,a routethat rewarded him with the most beauti-ful scenery. “I saw changes every year: new high-ways,new railways.All the changes aregood,but there are some problems.“ Vander Kuijp thinks Tibetan culture is facinggreat challenges right now,“It is gradu-ally declining.But this
22、is not the govern-ments problem,not Gods problem.Itsthe problem of modernization.“ Van der Kuijp foresaw Tibet wouldfind itself in such a situation and pre-pared for this time.In 1999,he co-founded the Tibetan Buddhist ResourceCenter,TBRC,a non-profit corporationdedicated to the preservation,organiz
23、a-tion and dissemination of Tibetan lit-erature using the latest technology.Thepreservation process is labor intensive.To create a digital text,TBRC scans theink-print copy one page at a time.Eachpage is then reviewed to ensure thatit is legible.As pages are scanned andchecked,they are published int
24、o a digitallibrary.In future,Tibetan masters,schol-ars,translators and all interested read-ers will have access to the full range ofTibetan literature wherever they live orwork.TBRC has scanned 7over six millionpages,covering traditional medicine,as-trology,astronomy,alchemy,art,history,geography,bi
25、ography,grammar,folk cul-ture,poetics,and extensive philosophicaland religious treatises.Eighty percent ofthe texts are of top historic or academicvalue.TBRC has also designed a com-plete catalogue search system about Ti-betan Buddhists and their works,greatlyfacilitating scholars and researchers.Th
26、esystem has been installed in many orga-nizations including the Palace Museumin Beijing. Perhaps we forget that at the end ofthe film,some of the protagonists re-turn to the imperfect world from whichthey came.Van der Kuijps Tibet is not aShangri-la to be preserved as a timelessenclave in isolation from the rest of hu-man society,but an ancient and fabulouscivilization that deserves the very bestprotection our latest digital technologiescan offer.
