Matteo Pistono

Tertön Sogyal (born in 1856) was a rough-cut youth from the eastern Tibetan region of Kham whose father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a bandit. Instead he chose as a very young man to train under the learned lamas of his day and became a tantric mystic revealing a prolific number of termas. He was a lay yoga and his tantric consort Yeshe Tsogyal was of great help to him and had mystical powers of her own. He became an advisor of the Thirteenth Dali Lama instructing him in Vajrakilaya practice. His contributions to maintain the integrity of Tibet during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries were numerous. The author has provided a very readable narrative and smoothly written poetic passages. This edition should be a welcome addition to the history of Tibetan Buddhism and one I would be happy to have in my personal colle… (meer)

This potboiler of a book is a fast, if occasionally annoying, read. Its author played an instrumental role in bringing to light China's perpetration of human rights abuses against ethnic Tibetans, but those experiences largely take a narrative back seat to Pistono's retelling of the region's quasi-mythological history. Much of this in turn revolves around the travels of one Terton Sogyal, Buddhist adept and adviser to the XIII Dalai Lama, as he collects artifacts and spells hidden throughout Tibet by another monk-adept, Padmasambhava, in the 8th century. It all resembles nothing so much as the transcript of a fantasy roleplaying game ("You recite the mantra of summoning, raising a protective dhakini and banishing the wrathful mountain spirits. A door opens up in the solid rock face of the cliff, revealing a powerful Phurba Wand of Protection and several spell scrolls...") Pistono accepts these mystical incidents as historical truth (perhaps serving as a nice wake up call to the people who go around trumpeting Buddhism's "superior rationality" vis-a-vis other world religions). This actually does much to diminish the power of his factual narrative. To wit: if Terton Sogyal et al. really were such powerful lamas, why was Tibet lost to China? And if the fault lies with Tibet's rapacious, corrupt Buddhist priest-politicians, as Pistono states ad nauseum that it does, how can readers be expected to sympathize with "peaceful, pure" Tibet's plight against the warlike, impure Chinese, when Pistono's narrative itself illustrates that Tibet was nothing of the sort? Neither is Pistono's cause aided by his own actions--the vignette in which he sleeps with a lonely Han Chinese policewoman because because it seemed the best way to weasel state secrets out of her is a case in point.

All of which is to say that In the Shadow of the Buddha makes for an entertaining read if approached as a piece of moderately well-written paranormal adventure fiction; but serious history of Tibet or examination of China's human rights record in the country it is not. Readers searching for the latter are advised to look elsewhere (Tragedy in Crimson springs to mind), but those looking for an accessible introduction to popular Tibetan Buddhism that hasn't been sanitized for western tastes could do worse.… (meer)