The Zen of Tantra

Book excerpt: After the Zen boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Tibetan Buddhism increasingly captured the West's imagination. Today, entire stadiums fill when the Dalai Lama speaks, training centers mushroom, and books proliferate. Even the most esoteric form of Tibetan Buddhism, rDzogs chen or Great Perfection, has found numerous followers in the West. But the West stands not alone: in communist China, too, this form of Buddhism experienced a kind of camouflaged boom from the 1980s. Monica Esposito (1962-2011), one of Europe’s foremost scholars of Chinese religions, observed this process up close. After her discovery in 1988 of a Buddhist nunnery on Mt. Tianmu in China's Zhejiang province, she lived and practiced under the monastery's founder, a Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan rDzogs chen (Great Perfection) master called Fahai Lama (1920-1991). Dr Esposito's book offers a fascinating glimpse into the daily life and practices of a Chinese Buddhist monastery and into the teachings of a man who not only survived the Cultural revolution as an acupuncturist, Qigong master and recluse in a Daoist cave, but managed to found and build a Chan monastery to promote Tibetan Tantra in a still thoroughly communist environment.