In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion The Liberal Subject, in Pieces How liberal is this liberal subject that encroaches on Sera, an Indian avatar of a fifteenth-century Tibetan monastery, and sweeps through the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, a place nearly as monastic and just as devoted to centuries-old philosophical texts? Remember: These are places populated by men who wear robes, in principle renounce the world, and spend their days poring over Buddha’s teachings . In suchplaces the liberal subject looks uncanny, and deliberately so. Buddhism’s specificity—all the things that make it different—should obtrude and break up the impression of this subject’s identity, for this is no act of replication. The Dalai Lama may seem to echo liberal aspirations and encourage fellow refugees to emulate this subject’s behavior, but it was the historical Buddha who is said to have discovered reason and rights, autonomy and freedom, long before Locke, Mill, and Jefferson. “Buddhism says you are your own master.” “Universal Responsibility.” “Every human being wants happiness and does not want suffering.” Liberal, Buddhist. Two parallel lines that converge at their vanishing point, or perhaps, as the Dalai Lama put it during moments that were at once critical and apologetic, it is Buddhism that completes the West’s Enlightenment. It offers a rigorous “inner science” that both complements the West’s materialistic science and compensates for modernity’s “lack of sympathy, compassion” (Anonymous 1976b:21). Far from slowing modernity’s march, Buddhism rounds out the West’s science and straightens its course. This craft of liberal mimicry cannot be reduced to pastiche, syncretism, or bricolage , nor is it just something that happens when discourses or cultures collide. It is a craft that involves the pragmatics of modernity. That mimesis can “do” things, that it can function pragmatically, is now a familiar proposition. Homi Bhabha, for instance , wrote of the way imperial Britain created inferior copies of its constitution 153 for subject states like India. Exhibiting the “ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite)” (Bhabha 1994:86; emphasis in original), these ersatz copies were meant to keep colonial subjects dependent. From the side of colonial subjects, many have detailed the craft and pragmatics of mimicry, like Paul Stoller, who wrote of Igbo craftsmen who “carved satiric images of white men and Europeanized Africans (collaborators),” and of Hauka spirit possession in Niger and Yoruba ouimbo masquerades (Stoller 1995:76, 122). I have highlighted the mimetic dimensions of monastic reform in India, showing how such reforms echo liberaldemocratic aspirations, and how this is meant to help actualize the aspirations of an ethnonationalist project, a project in which Tibetans in exile have felt obliged to cultivate strategic allies in the West by looking a little bit like the ideals to which these allies aspire. Critical allies like the United States had from the start discouraged the Tibetan exile government from framing its cause in terms of lost independence and sovereignty. Tibetans largely heeded this advice, but they also resisted it, fearing that it would jeopardize their chance of getting their country back. In addition to developing legal and historical arguments that proved Tibet’s nationhood and right to self-determination, the Tibetan exile government had to appeal to the doctrine of universal human rights and demonstrate some degree of commitment to liberal-democratic institutions. Given the transcendental anchoring of these institutions—the fact that they are supposedly universal, unmoored from time and place—they deserve everyone’s natural, unforced respect. Respect came at once, and from no less than the Dalai Lama. After crossing into India in 1959, he acknowledged to his people and to the world that Tibet’s old society had, indeed, been “backward.” In exile, as in a future, free Tibet, Tibetans would need to respect modern institutions and become more open and democratic. This was never a concession that Tibet’s religion had been backward, though, because at its core Buddhism already had what Western democracies prized. Buddhism was always already modern. The task was to peel back the layers that obscure Buddhism’s liberal-democratic core, to expose the religion’s essence so that Tibetans could behave accordingly and foreign spectators could feel reassured that the Tibetans’ aspirations converged with their own. I have suggested thus far that this new labor, which reflects on and worries about what debate and discipline look like, is an attempt to materialize the liberal subject for certain addressees, spectators, and overhearers . It is the liberal subject that Tibetans seem to invoke...

Share