Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, with a new preface. By Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018. 283 pp. ISBN: 9780226485485 (paper).

Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, with a new preface. By Donald S. Lopez Jr. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018. 283 pp. ISBN: 9780226485485 (paper).

Passingly few academic books, I suspect, open with Bill Murray, Kyle MacLachlan, and Antonin Artaud—two actors famous for their oddball characters and one theorist of acting (was Artaud ever not acting?) famous for calling out the oddities of lived experience through his “theater of cruelty”—and their respective characters’ praise of Tibet, Tibetans, and Tibetan Buddhism. Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West cites these authorities to announce its overarching theme, its topics, its types of sources, its sense of playfulness, and its utter seriousness about the impact of popular culture on scholarship about Tibet in the twentieth century. At once a magical mystery tour through the eccentric, exotic corners of twentieth-century culture (the chapters) and an abiding reference work for the history of perceptions of Tibet in the West (the footnotes), Prisoners of Shangri-la, more than any other book (save perhaps Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s edited volume of the same period, Curators of the Buddha¹), called upon members of its academic readership to critique their own sensibilities as scholars, to squint at the object of their academic goals, and to wonder how much of it is mirage. Today it retains the capacity to do the same.

First published in 1998, Prisoners of Shangri-la offers students of Tibetan Buddhism “an exploration of some of the mirror-lined cultural labyrinths that have been created by Tibetans, Tibetophiles, and Tibetologists, labyrinths that the scholar may map but in which the scholar also must wander” (p. 13). The book's “labyrinths” are constructed from familiar and (mostly) harmless materials, such that one might get lost for a short time, bump into a hedgerow or two, and reemerge at the entrance relatively unscathed. Each of the first six chapters uses a key example—a word, a text, a prayer, an academic area—to illustrate twentieth-century Western entanglements with the ideas of “Tibet” and “Tibetan Buddhism.”

Crisp and concise chapter titles signpost each journey. Chapter 1, “The Name,” treats the history of Western engagement with the Tibetan word “lama,” introducing along the way the Dalai Lama, who was at the height...