Tibet became a territory of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1720; by 1917, it had become a de facto independent state. However, when the Chinese Community Party established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, one of their goals was to unite former territories, and in the case of Tibet, secure their mountainous border, claim their resources, and “liberate” people from a theocracy. In 1950, China invaded neighboring Tibet and quickly overcame its much smaller military force. Tibet was then forced to sign an agreement that ceded authority to China. In the following years, China sought to establish its authority but was faced with growing discontent. In 1959, this exploded into a rebellion that the Chinese government quashed harshly. They forcibly relocated Tibetan people, destroyed monasteries, and abused the population to consolidate their power. Tibet suffered a catastrophic loss of culture that brought their plight to global awareness, and this tension continues presently; China still claims Tibet, while many view their presence in Tibet as an illegal military occupation.

 In The Sea, the Sea, the character of James Arrowby is a serious and practicing Buddhist, the result of his time in Tibet. He is a former officer of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps who served in India at Dehra Dun, became attached to Tibet, learned the language, and made several journeys across the border before the 1950 Chinese invasion. The novel treats his attachments to Tibet as historically specific: He mourns the destruction of Tibetan civilization, maintains a collection of Tibetan artifacts, and explains to Charles in their last evening together a version of the bardo, the intermediate state between death and rebirth in which the consciousness encounters projections of its own attachments.

This material had a specific cultural life in Britain when Murdoch wrote. The Dalai Lama had fled from Tibet to India in 1959; W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s translation of the Bardo Thödol as The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927) had been continuously in print and influential among writers and intellectuals; Marco Pallis and other British academics had produced books on Tibetan religion that circulated in mainstream culture. Murdoch was reading Plato alongside Buddhist sources throughout the 1970s, and her published philosophy from this period treats Buddhist ethics as a resource for thinking about the surrender of the self. James’s claim that “white magic is black magic” (441)—that any spiritual power, however well-intended, generates “demons” that make mischief afterward—is the novel’s most sustained statement of this idea. It connects to Charles’s situation: His “magic,” intended to be positive, produces the disasters that follow.