Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  The Third Eye, first published in Britain in 1956, tells the autobiographical story of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, the son of a Lhasa aristocrat, who was one of the leading members of the Dalai Lama’s government. The author begins with his childhood. He had an elder brother, Paljör, and an elder sister, Yasodhara. Paljör died before his seventh birthday “and returned to the Land of Many Temples.” Tibetan children, however, are generally hardy, having survived a test during infancy to determine their ability to endure the harsh climate. Newborn infants are immersed in icy streams by their grandmothers, the child turning first red then blue until its cries cease. “If the baby survives, then it is as the gods decree. If it dies, then it has been spared much suffering on earth.”1 He grew up in a fashionable home in Lhasa, under the strict tutelage of one of the “men of Kham,” a seven-foot former member of the monk police named Old Tzu, who was wounded while fighting the troops of Colonel Younghusband during the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. Rampa attended school, where he studied Tibetan, Chinese, arithmetic, and wood carving (for printing blocks). Every day, the students recited the laws: “(1) Return good for good. (2) Do not fight with gentle people. (3) Read the Scriptures and understand them. (4) Help your neighbors. (5) The Law is hard on the rich to teach them understanding and equity. (6) The Law is gentle with the poor to show them compassion. (7) Pay your debts promptly.”2 Among sports, he enjoyed archery, pole vaulting, stilt walking, and especially kite flying, the national sport of Tibet. The kite season began on the first day of autumn, signaled when a single kite rose from the Potala.

  A great celebration was planned for Rampa’s seventh birthday. All of the noble families of Lhasa attended. They were served shark’s-fin soup and candied rhododendron blossoms in a festive setting where butter lamps hung from the branches of trees and floated in an ornamental lake. It was at this celebration that astrologers predicted the boy’s future: “A boy of seven to enter a lamasery, after a hard feat of endurance, and there to be trained as a priest-surgeon. To suffer great hardships, to leave the homeland, and go among strange people. To lose all and have to start again, and eventually to succeed” (p. 44).

  He thus sought to join the Chakpori lamasery, the Temple of Tibetan Medicine. But those who aspire to the higher ranks of that order must pass a test, and the young boy was made to sit motionless in the posture of contemplation in front of the temple gate before he was finally allowed to enter. He began a rigorous course of study, with a strong emphasis on mathematics and on the memorization of the Buddhist scriptures. The teachers shot questions at the students such as “You, boy, I want to know the fifth line of the eighteenth page of the seventh volume of the Kan-gyur” (p. 82). Rampa soon showed himself to be an excellent student and was chosen to receive the esoteric teachings so that the knowledge would be preserved after Tibet had fallen under an alien cloud. He thus began a period of intensive training designed to impart in a few years what a lama normally would learn over the course of a lifetime. The abbot warned him, “The Way will be hard, and often it will be painful. To force clairvoyance is painful, and to travel in the astral planes requires nerves that nothing can shatter, and a determination as hard as the rocks” (p. 61). He was given the ordination name of Yza-mig-dmar Lah-lu and placed under the tutelage of the great lama Mingyar Dondup, who oversaw the performance of a surgical procedure designed to force clairvoyance, after which Rampa could be instructed hypnotically. The operation, performed on Rampa’s eighth birthday, involved drilling a hole in his skull at the point between his eyes to create the third eye, an eye that allowed him to see auras, “to see people as they are and not as they pretend to be” (p. 88). When he recovered from the surgery he was summoned to the Potala, where he met privately with the Dalai Lama, the “Inmost One,” who, having scrutinized both the records of Rampa’s last incarnation (he had been the abbot of Sera monastery) and the predictions for his future, reminded him of the great work that lay before him in preserving the wisdom of Tibet for the world.

  Shortly after his twelfth birthday, Rampa took the examinations that one must pass in order to become a trappa, or medical priest. Each student was sealed inside a stone cubicle that was six feet wide, ten feet long, and eight feet high. Once inside, he was passed written questions to which he composed written answers. The students wrote for fourteen hours a day on a single subject; the battery of tests lasted six days. During that time they were locked inside the cubicle; tea and tsampa were passed through a small trap in the wall. After successfully passing his examinations, Rampa accompanied Lama Mingyar Dondup on an expedition to collect medicinal herbs. During their travels, they stopped at the monastery of Tra Yerpa, where the monks built box kites large enough to bear the weight of an adult. Rampa made several flights in such kites, and later suggested design modifications to the monastery’s kite master to improve their airworthiness.

  Upon his return to Lhasa, he was called upon by the Dalai Lama to sit in hiding in the audience room of the summer palace, the Norbulinga, and use his third eye to observe the auras, and thus learn the intentions, of the Chinese emissaries to the Dalai Lama. The Chinese were filled with hate, their auras showing “the contaminated hues of those whose life forces are devoted to materialism and evil-doing” (p. 175). Later he was called upon to read the aura of an English visitor. Rampa was astonished by his dress; the man wore trousers and shoes, neither of which he had ever seen before. Occasionally the man would hold a white cloth to his nose and make the sound of a small trumpet, which Rampa took to be a form of salute to the Dalai Lama. He assumed that the man was crippled because he had to sit on a wooden frame supported by four sticks. His aura showed him to be in poor health. However, he had a genuine desire to help Tibet but was constrained by the fear that if he were to do so he would lose his government pension. Rampa was to learn that the man’s name was C. A. Bell (Sir Charles Bell, 1870–1945, British political officer for Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet).3

  Rampa later accompanied Lama Mingyar Dondup on an expedition to the northern plain, the Chang thang, where after a perilous journey through frozen wastelands they came upon an Edenic valley, warm and luxuriant, where they encountered the yeti. Upon his return to Lhasa, around the time of his sixteenth birthday, he again entered the examination boxes, this time for ten days, taking written tests on topics such as anatomy, divinity, metaphysics, and yoga, followed by two more days of oral examinations. When the results came in, Rampa was at the top of his class, and was promoted from the rank of trappa to the rank of lama. He went on to study anatomy by working side by side with the Body Breakers, the disposers of the dead.

  Finally, the Dalai Lama declared that Rampa must undergo the initiation rites to become an abbot, the Ceremony of the Little Death. After three months of preparation and a rigorous regime of fasting and meditation, he was led by three aged abbots through the labyrinthine caves beneath the Potala until they reached a shining black house. Inside were three black coffins in which lay the huge golden bodies of gods from Tibet’s prehistoric age. Rampa was locked inside the house with the bodies of the gods, and traveling astrally returned through time to the great civilization of the giants, who inhabited Tibet before the earth was struck by another planet, moving Tibet from the warm seaside into the snowy mountains. When he returned from his astral travels after three days in the tomb, he had returned from death.

  Shortly thereafter he was again summoned by the Dalai Lama, who instructed him to leave immediately for China, yet warned, “The ways of foreigners are strange and not to be accounted for. As I told you once before, they believe only that which they can do, only that which can be tested in their Rooms of Science. Yet the greatest Science of all, the Science of the Overself, they leave untouched. That is your Path, the Path you chose before you came to this Life” (p. 217). The Third Eye ends with Tuesday Lobsang Rampa departing for China on horseback, looking back for the last time at the Potala, where a solitary kite is flying.4

  Rampa published a sequel in 1959 called Doctor from Lhasa.
It begins where The Third Eye ends, as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa departs Lhasa for China. The year is 1927. He travels on horseback from Lhasa to Chungking, encountering many things unknown in Tibet such as heavy, moist air; fishing (in Tibet fish had no fear of humans and were often pets); motor vehicles; bicycles; indoor plumbing; spring beds; and Russians preaching the glories of Communism from the backs of oxcarts. In Chungking he enrolls in a Chinese medical college, where he registers as “Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, Lama of Tibet. Priest-Surgeon Chakpori Lamasery. Recognised Incarnation. Abbot Designate. Pupil of Lama Mingyar Dondup.”5 His curriculum includes both Chinese medicine and American methods of medicine and surgery, with special attention given to electricity and magnetism. (In his electricity class he amazes the professor by painlessly enduring a 250-volt shock and by sketching a magnetic field, which he sees through his third eye.) By combining what he learns of Chinese and Western medicine with his knowledge of esoteric Tibetan healing techniques, he hopes to be able to reproduce a device he once saw in the ruins of a prehistoric city in a hidden valley in the Chang thang. It was an apparatus for reading auras that could be used to predict the onset of diseases, both physical and mental.

  Rampa’s most extraordinary confrontation with the modern world was his first encounter with an airplane. After being taken for a brief flight by a Chinese pilot interested in Tibet, he “borrowed” the plane and took off alone, teaching himself various maneuvers as he went, finally executing a smooth landing. He was soon recruited to join a special corps of medical airmen in Chiang Kai-shek’s army.

  Some years later he received a telepathic message from Lhasa that “the Inmost One, the thirteenth Dalai Lama, the last of his line, [was] shortly to pass from this world” (p. 103). He was summoned to Lhasa, and returned by car and then horseback to participate in the funeral ceremonies. Shortly after the ceremonies he returned to China with the knowledge that “Tibet was without a Dalai Lama, the last one had left, and the one yet to come [the fourteenth and current Dalai Lama], according to prophecy, would be one who would serve alien masters, one who would be in the thrall of the Communists” (p. 112).

  By the time he arrived back in China, war with Japan was imminent. He was given a commission as a medical officer in the Chinese army and, at the request of a Chinese general, went to Shanghai, where he set up a private medical and psychological practice while continuing to study navigation and the theory of flight. War with Japan broke out in 1937 and Rampa went into service flying an air ambulance; he was eventually shot down and taken prisoner. He was tortured brutally by the Japanese for information but said only that he was a noncombatant officer in the Chinese army. His training as a lama enabled him to withstand the torture and privation, which he describes in detail. He eventually escaped by feigning death and made his way back to the Chinese lines and to Chungking, where he recuperated from the many injuries inflicted by the Japanese.

  He returned to service as the director of a hospital, only to be captured by the Japanese again. Again he was beaten and interrogated; the Japanese wanted to know why a Tibetan lama was serving on the Chinese side. He was sent to a prison camp and escaped. But he was betrayed and recaptured; the Japanese broke both of his legs to prevent further attempts. He remained in the camp providing medical assistance to the other prisoners, using his Tibetan knowledge of herbs to cure many tropical maladies. Toward the end of the war the most incorrigible prisoners, including Rampa, were transferred to a special prison camp in Japan. The camp was located in a village near Hiroshima and on the day the bomb was dropped he escaped from the camp, made his way to the seashore, stole a fishing boat, and drifted into the Sea of Japan and into the unknown. Doctor from Lhasa ends there.

  The final work in the trilogy, The Rampa Story (1960), opens fifteen years later, in 1960. In Tibet, the lamas, through astral exploration, have located a network of caves and tunnels in the most remote region of the country and are busy physically transporting the most sacred and secret artifacts of the faith from Lhasa to this new site, where they can be hidden from the Communists. These include the golden figures of past incarnations, sacred objects, ancient writings, as well as the most learned priests. The abbots, having known clairvoyantly of the Chinese invasion, had been preparing for this for years, secretly selecting the most spiritually advanced monks for the new home where the ancient knowledge would be preserved by a new order called the School of the Preservation of Knowledge. At that time Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was living in Windsor, Canada. He was in telepathic communication with the lamas in Tibet. They informed him that his next task was to write a book “stressing one theme, that one person can take over the body of another, with the latter person’s full consent.”6 The author summarizes much of the first two books, adding incidents that were not included there, such as an account of an astral journey he made with Lama Mingyar Dondup to another planet in which he received instructions from extraterrestrials.

  Rampa recounts that the Japanese fishing boat eventually ran aground, and that he was left for dead, only to wake up in a cottage where an old Buddhist priest was watching over him. The boat had crossed the Sea of Japan and landed near the Russian lines. Because of his telepathic ability to calm the fiercest Russian mastiff patrol dogs (“not so fierce as Tibetan mastiffs” [p. 44]), he was drafted into the Russian army in Vladivostok to be a dog trainer. There he became known as “Comrade Priest.”

  Some weeks later he hid on a freight train bound for Moscow and was there arrested by security police. After being tortured in Lubianka prison, he was released and deported to Poland. On the way there the Russian truck he was riding in was involved in an accident and he was seriously injured. While in the hospital he was transported to a world beyond the astral, “The Land of Golden Light,” to recuperate, and there was met by Lama Mingyar Dondup (who had been murdered by the Communists in Tibet) and Sha-lu, a talking cat. He also met the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who urged him to return to earth and continue his work. The problem was that his body was in deplorable condition. But the Dalai Lama had a plan: “We have located a body in the land of England, the owner of which is most anxious to leave. His aura has a fundamental harmonic of yours. Later, if conditions necessitate it, you can take over his body” (p. 71). After the transfer was made, it would take seven years for a complete molecular transformation to take place, after which the new body would be the same as the old one, even bearing the same scars.7 He was warned, however, that should he decide to return to earth, he would “return to hardship, misunderstanding, disbelief, and actual hatred, for there is a force of evil which tries to prevent all that is good in connection with human evolution” (p. 71).

  Back on earth he recovered sufficiently to be deported to Poland, where he was assigned to a road crew. He and another prisoner commandeered a car and escaped to Czechoslovakia, where he was hired by a Viennese smuggler and later an American automobile dealer. He was eventually hired to drive a piece of heavy construction equipment to France. In Cherbourg he signed on as third engineer on a merchant vessel bound for New York. “So, probably for the first time in history, a Tibetan Lama, posing as an American, took his place aboard ship as a watch-keeping engineer” (p. 101).

  In America he was hit by a car in the Bronx and while unconscious found himself once more with Lama Mingyar Dondup, who informed him, “You are clearing up all Kharma [sic] and are also doing a momentous task, a task which evil powers seek to hinder” (p. 110). After nine weeks in the hospital he got a job as a dishwasher before being hired as a radio announcer in Schenectady, New York. He then took a job driving cars cross-country for a delivery service. In Quebec he sailed for England but upon his arrival was sent back to New York by a corrupt customs officer. Back in New York he was arrested but escaped by jumping off the police launch and was taken in by a family of African-Americans. Recuperating under their care, he was summoned once again to meet astrally with Lama Mingyar Dondup, who told him that there had been further discussions with the man who wanted to abandon his body. “A
t our behest he changed his name to one more suitable to you” (p. 134). For Rampa, the immediate task was “to get [his] body back to Tibet that it may be preserved” (p. 134). Before his departure he taught the African-Americans how to pray and about the Great Self and the ancient Egyptian art of creating thought forms. A benefactor bought him a ticket for the sea passage to India. In Kalimpong he met a delegation of disguised lamas who accompanied him to an isolated lamasery overlooking Lhasa. There he prepared himself to take over a new body, like the Dalai Lama “taking over the body of a new-born baby” (p. 147).

  In the company of an elder lama he made an astral journey to the Akashic Record to investigate the past of the man whose body he was to inhabit. The man was married and made surgical fittings for a living. During the war he had served as an air raid warden, having been unfit for active duty because of a medical condition. After being contacted by a lama in a dream, he changed his name “because that which he had previously had the wrong vibrations as indicated by our Science of Numbers” (p. 162). Rampa decided to meet with him in the astral plane. He learned that the man hated life in England because of the favoritism of the class system, but that he had always had an interest in Tibet and the Far East. He recounted how one day he had been approached by a lama after being knocked unconscious by a fall from a tree in which he had been trying to photograph an owl. The lama said

  I was drawn to you because your own particular life vibrations are a fundamental harmonic of one for whom I act. So I have come, I have come because I want your body for one who has to continue life in the Western world, for he has a task to do which brooks no interference. . . . Would you like the satisfaction of knowing that your Kharma had been wiped away, that you had materially contributed towards a job of utmost benefit to mankind? . . . Have you no thought for humanity? Are you not willing to do something to redeem your own mistakes, to put some purpose to your own mediocre life? You will be the gainer. The one for whom I act will take over this hard life of yours. (Pp. 167–169)