This article reviews four recently published or republished works that bear on changing Western perceptions of Tibet over the past two centuries. It acknowledges that Tom Neuhaus’ study provides the clearest framework for categorising, if not explaining, the shifting images produced both by those who travelled to the country and those who observed it from afar; and it accepts his contention that there was a significant change in European attitudes to Tibet
that owed much to the damage to the continent’s conception of itself and its
values wrought by the First World War. But the argument is made that other
events must be considered in any diagnosis of the growth of Western selfdisgust,
and that the problem also has an important American dimension. The
conclusion reached is that the West’s mythmaking with regard to Tibet is
certainly revealing, but that it is chiefly symptomatic of a crisis of selfconfidence
and identity that will not overcome by a search for esoteric wisdom
beyond its borders.
Paul G. Hackett. 2012. Theos Barnard, the White Lama: Tibet, Yoga, and
American Religious Life. New York, Columbia University Press. Pp. xxii,
494. ISBN 978 0 231 15886 2 (hardback).
Arthur Henry Savage Landor. 2011. In the Forbidden Land, Volumes I and II:
An Account of a Journey in Tibet, Capture by Tibetan Authorities, Imprisonment,
Torture, and Ultimate Release. Oxford, Benediction Classics. Pp. 499.
No ISBN: reprint of original publication of 1898 (hardback).
Tom Neuhaus. 2012. Tibet in the Western Imagination. Basingstoke, England,
Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. ix, 264. ISBN 978 0 230 29970 2 (hardback).
Colin Thubron. 2012. To a Mountain in Tibet. New York, Harper Perennial.
Pp. 227. ISBN 978 0 06 176827 9 (paperback).
Wading into Manasarovar Lake:Tibet as Balm for the West’s Self-Doubt
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069-084_Peter Luff
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