Subjectivity Politics in Sorrow Mountain: Transnational Feminism and Tibetan Autobiography (Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun) (Critical Essay‪)‬

[1] It has become a commonplace to describe growing Western engagement with Buddhism as a search for relief from spiritual vacuity and deep dissatisfaction produced by modernity. Buddhism in this narrative figures as either pre-modern or timeless, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in particular symbolizing an otherwise lost authenticity. The search for "the authentic" within the popular imaginary conflates Tibet and Buddhism, simultaneously divorcing both from modernity and ironically spawning an industry devoted to what Chogyam Trungpa termed spiritual materialism: religious texts, meditation products, dating services, retreat centers, guided tours, and the like that cannot ever complete the consumers' identification with a pre-colonial, Buddhist ordained, "Tibetan." Circulating among these "enlightenment" products is an increasing selection of Tibetan autobiographies produced with spiritual, inspirational, and political goals. Looking specifically at Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley's Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun (2000), I analyze the confluence and conflicts of these goals through the book's paratextual and literary features. Although Sorrow Mountain deploys images of "authenticity" noted above, acquiescing to the seduction of the authentic reproduces the split between religious tradition and secular modernity and furthers the reader's desire for what must remain literally a lost cause. To avoid such vacating of anti-colonial political will against Chinese control of Tibet as well as to provide grounds for an imaginative affiliation with Ani Pachen, I argue for an expansion of feminist and postcolonial critical discourses to recognize the form of Buddhist subjectivity Ani Pachen represents. [2] In "Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies," Dipesh Chakrabarty, member of the Subaltern Studies collective and self-identified "male, Bengali, (Hindu) middle-class Marxist (of some kind!)," articulates the problem of conceptualizing religious identifications within an Enlightenment-inspired, "hyper-rational" modernity: "The problem is... that we do not have analytical categories in academic discourse that do justice to the real, everyday and multiple 'connections' we have to what we, in becoming modern, have come to see as 'non-rational'" (262). Limited in our ability to read either Chakrabarty or Ani Pachen's multiple subject positions simultaneously, we too often revert to what he accurately terms the "untenable and problematic binaries"--which are also gendered--of "'[t]radition/modernity', 'rational/nonrational', 'intellectual/emotion'" (262). In this paper, I want to examine the ways in which a sole focus on identity, no matter how problematized, works against the political objectives of these Tibetan autobiographies. Sorrow Mountain, I argue, invites us to engage in a limited transnational feminist praxis, in the form of reading practice, to explore alternative conceptions of the subject and her agency. As Janet Gyatso notes in Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary: "A key question that readers will bring to Tibetan Buddhist autobiography is how such an eminently self-obsessed genre can be written by someone who believes the self to be an illusion" (xiii). In partial response to Gyatso's question, I insist on the distinction between identity and subjectivity, a distinction central both to poststructuralist feminist and Buddhist conceptions of selfhood.