Shangri-Lalaland Poem by gershon hepner

LA isn’t Shangri-La,
but then neither is Tibet,
places where you may forget
who you were, and who you are.
Going to Tibet enables
you to climb the highest peaks,
less fantastic than the fables
which the Angeleno seeks,
stories that in LA-laland,
are packaged so that Hollywood
enables us to understand
its Shangri-Lala neighborhood.
Instead of lamas and the monast-
ries in which monks spin prayerwheels,
it stresses stories of dishonest
people making crooked deals,
and love with people who are not
their spouses, teaching us that hon-
esty does not provide a plot
film-covered folk can focus on,
providing no room to escape
reality with which they’re filled,
preferring sex, lies on a videotape,
and images of villains killed.
They shun time-worn Tibetan views
of emptiness and non-existence,
though LA sometimes may infuse
such feelings when seen from a distance,
though most who live there feel more close
to LA’s mountains, being fonder
of what is real, not religiose,
and fly more grounded than a condor,
than those who’re looking for the karma
that they believe is cultured best
on eastern mountains by a lama
with disciples in the west.
Inspired by Lydia Aran’s article on Tibet in the January 2009 issue of Commentary (“Inventing Tibet”) , and contrasts
The poem contrasts Tibetan beliefs, as outlined by Ippolito Desideri, who arrived in Lhasa on March 18,1716:
His goal was to compose in Tibetan a work he called The Essence of Christian Perfection. Unfortunately, war overtook the country soon after, and the king was killed. Lhasa became unsafe, and Desideri withdrew to a place eight days travel away where he continued to work on his treatise. He was to remain in Tibet until 1721 when he was recalled when the mission area was given to the Capuchins. The Essence of Christian Perfection has two parts. The first, which interests us here, is cast in the form of a debate with the Tibetan idea of emptiness against which it advances the Christian idea of God. The second part sets forth Christian beliefs in the form of a dialogue between master and disciple. Among Tibetan doctrines emptiness has been the most difficult for Desideri to grasp. He tells us how he struggled to understand it at Sera. He asked one of the doctors there to explain it to him, but the doctor claimed he didn’t understand it, himself. Finally, after much mental effort and prayer, Desideri felt that he had made a breakthrough. This understanding was vital to him because it seemed to him that the Tibetan view of emptiness served 'to exclude and absolutely deny the existence of any uncreated and independent being, and thus effectually to do away with any conception of God.' (An Account of Tibet, p.105) He summarizes the Tibetan teaching on emptiness as follows: 'Things are conceived as non-existent and devoid of any self… Nothing exists because nothing has any essence by itself, and therefore nothing exists which is not… unconnected, unfettered and without correlativity.' The soul who arrives at this insight 'is convinced that it has no existence, the principle and fundamental root of any passions which is the attractive and pernicious phantasm… or I, ceases to exist.' (Ibid., p.249) Desideri complains that even in the most sublime contemplation the Tibetans 'loose themselves in elaborate and futile subtilizations, pretending that man disappears, even to himself, and that to a cleansed and purified mind all things vanish, and that nothing exists.' (Ibid., p.299)

1/8/09