Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
Found Horizon
By Ian Buruma
Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood
by Orville Schell
Metropolitan Books, 340 pp., $26.00
The Search for the Panchen Lama
by Isabel Hilton
Norton, 336 pp., $25.95
Traveling recently by bus from Shigatse to Lhasa, squeezed in between a heavily made-up bar hostess from Sichuan who was vomiting her breakfast out the window and a minor Tibetan official in a shiny brown suit who asked me about Manchester United football club before noisily clearing his throat to deposit a green gob of spit beside my left shoe, I wondered what it was about Tibet that has made so many intelligent people go wobbly. The landscape, with its jagged chocolate-colored mountain peaks, its glassy lakes and emerald rivers, is spectacular, to be sure. And some of the other passengers on my bus—a herdsman with finely worked silver daggers, a monk in burgundy robes and Nike shoes, country women with turquoise jewelry threaded through their hair—looked exotic enough. But there was nothing really to suggest that we were in a particularly spiritual place, where wise men knew the meaning of life, and incarnations of great lamas could fly.
Review, 5479 words
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