The
other day I was reading an interview in The Sun, an interrogation of
the Buddhist pundit Pema Chödrön, whose name, face, and quotes I see often in
some of the slick Buddhist magazines we subscribe to. There was a mini-article
introducing her, and this was surprisingly revealing, pointing up a lingering
uneasiness I had long felt regarding the sage in question.
It seems that Pema Chödrön was a student of the enigmatic Tibetan master Chogyam
Trungpa. One thing about this holy man: he died of sirrosis of the liver, just
like Pentecostal healer A.A. Allen did, only Trungpa drank himself under at the
premature age of 44 years! He used to speak portentously of the Buddhist
doctrine of craving while swilling a can of Colt 45. He was addicted to “love
affairs,” i.e., being a sexual predator among those tender souls who made the
mistake of trusting him. Yeah, this guy is the very epitome of a spiritual
guide! Do you think that the hip readers of mags like this would exercise
anything like the anticipated degree of tolerance if they were talking about
Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker? Because this is like claiming apostolic succession
from one of them.
But what about the venerable Pema Chödrön herself? Her name means “Lotus Torch
of the Dharma.” One might expect its bearer to be a wizened lady reminiscent of
Kwan-Yin, an Asian counterpart to Mother Theresa. Not a chance. The apple-faced
guru was born Dierdre Blomfield-Brown. Does that matter?
I thought immediately of a Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza’s
mother was persuaded not to divorce her husband by the wise words of Jerry’s
current girlfriend Donna Chang, whose advice Estelle Costanza had absorbed over
the phone. Grateful, Estelle invited Jerry and Donna over for dinner. It was
only then that she realized Donna was a blond Jew whose family name had been
shortened from “Changstein.” Confronted with the reality of her counselor,
Estelle yelled, “She’s not Chinese! I thought she was Chinese! That changes
everything!”
Yeah, it was funny because, as George pointed out, the advice should have been
as good no matter the ethnicity of the advisor. But you could see Estelle’s
point of view. She had been subtly cajoled into accepting Donna’s wisdom by the
exotic charisma of her Asian mystique. It had been the sugar that helped the
medicine go down. Jerry saw the same thing and accused Donna of being a fraud,
trying to trade on an illusory Chinese link to hype up her persona. And I
thought that maybe “Pema Chödrön” was another Donna Chang. How much of the
gravity of her teaching stems from a phony Tibetan mystique?
Was Pema much different from a channeler in my local Borders Books who claimed
to channel the spirit of a Tibetan Buddhist monk? When she transited into her
stage presence, she started speaking with a fake Chinese (not Tibetan) accent:
“Likee soupee?” Her nonsense would have been nakedly exposed as nonsense without
the trumpery, which it should have been anyway.
The larger issue here is another long-standing suspicion I have harbored
concerning the integrity of many Americans’ professions of Buddhist identity.
“I‘m a Buddhist,” I will hear someone say. And then I will consider it a moment
and think, “No, you’re not.” They’d like to think they are. They’d like others
to think they are. But I’m not convinced. Harvey Cox, in his 1977 book
Turning East, suggested that the evidence was leading him to believe that
Americans had hijacked Buddhism, the discipline of extirpating self and ego, and
turned it into one more pop self-realization therapy. That’s the
impression I get, too. Especially when you see in these magazines an article
about extinguishing materialistic desire cheek by Hoti jowl with numerous ads
for all sorts of Buddhist materialistic goodies including expensive statues,
meditation mats, robes, etc. Elizabeth Claire Prophet may have the balls to
print the name “Gautama Buddha” on a paperback volume of her channeled bullshit,
but that doesn’t entitle or oblige me to consider it Buddhism.
Pema Chödrön might be entitled to the name if she had assimilated herself into
the Buddhist cultural context. I teach Buddhism, too, in a Western academic
setting. I need to be neither an Asian nor a Buddhist to do that. But I do not
offer Buddhist spiritual counsel, nor am I competent to do so. When I learn that
someone positioning herself as a Buddhist sage with the name Pema Chödrön is
really Dierdre Blomfield-Brown, I think of the too-prolific paperback author
Lobsang Rampa, actually Irish plumber Cyril Henry Hoskyns. Why the stage name
unless it’s a schtick?
Especially when, in the interview, we read that our guru “do[es]n’t use Buddhist
terminology much.” This remark is a transparent bit of cheap rhetoric whereby
one claims to transcend, with masterful nonchalance, the very tradition one
pretends to derive one’s authority from. This implies the teacher doesn’t really
know the subject. Otherwise, why hide behind the alias? How much credibility
would you have in New Age circles if you billed yourself as the “Bodhisattva
Blomfield-Brown”?
Robert M. Price
