Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  This statement is followed by one from his wife, who supports her husband’s account of the name change. She writes, “to my dismay, my husband had an uncontrollable desire to wear Eastern dress and to behave as an Easterner” (p. 9). She confirms the story of the concussion, after which he was no longer the same person: “when I discussed an event of the past he would have no recollection of it. Instead he spoke of life in a lamasery, or his experiences in the war, prison-camp life, or Japanese tortures” (p. 10). Since the summer of 1949 “his whole make-up and manner have been those of an Easterner, his general appearance and colouring have also shown a marked change” (p. 10). She goes on to say that he never wanted to write The Third Eye but did so because he could not find employment. She signs her name “S. Ku’an.”

  The book also contains a foreword to the second edition dated May 25, 1964, in which he accuses English and German newspapers of waging a campaign against him when he could not defend himself because of a heart condition. Later, they would give him no opportunity to respond to the charges against him. He states again that all of his claims are absolutely true and that he has never been proven guilty. He explains that “My specific reason for insisting that all this is true is that in the near future other people like me will appear, and I do not desire that they should have the suffering that I have had through spite and hatred” (p. 5).

  This was not his only response to his critics. In Doctor from Lhasa he describes an unpleasant incident during the funeral ceremonies for the thirteenth Dalai Lama: “A foreigner was there who wanted all consideration for himself. He thought that we were just natives, and that he was lord of all he surveyed. He wanted to be in the front of everything, noticed by all, and because I would not further his selfish aim—he tried to bribe a friend and me with wrist watches!—he had regarded me as an enemy ever since, and has indeed gone out of his way—has gone to extreme lengths—to injure me and mine” (p. 107). This is perhaps a reference to Hugh Richardson, officer-in-charge of the British mission in Lhasa, although Richardson did not go to Tibet until 1936, three years after the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death.21

  THERE ARE A HOST of questions raised by Rampa’s books, questions raised both by their content and by their reception. At the most cynical level, they are the works of an unemployed surgical fitter, the son of a plumber, seeking to support himself as a ghostwriter. The first book, as Richardson suggests, could have been drawn from various English language sources, all easily available at the time (Edwin John Dingle’s My Life in Tibet seems one possible source), supplemented with an admixture of garden variety spiritualism and Theosophy; the books contain discussions of auras, astral travel, prehistoric visits to earth by extraterrestrials, predictions of war, and a belief in the spiritual evolution of humanity. It is this blending that may account in part for the book’s appeal, providing an exotic route through Tibet back to the familiar themes of Victorian and Edwardian spiritualism, in which Tibet often served as a placeholder.

  With the unexpected success of the book, the ghostwriter could go on to concoct a story that would allow the ghost to become flesh. The second and third books, indeed, have little to do with life in Tibet, even as described by Rampa. Their raison d’être, beyond the obvious demand for a sequel placed upon the author of an unexpected bestseller, seems to be to account, picaresquely, for the period between around 1930, when Rampa left Lhasa at the end of The Third Eye, and 1956, when The Third Eye was published. In a sense, the other two books serve as an extended apologia for the first in that they attempt to account not only for the time but more importantly for the authorship, explaining how an eyewitness account of life in Tibet in which everything is true could have been written by Cyril Hoskin, who had never left England.

  If we were to leave it at that, the works of Rampa would have little reason to detain the scholar, who has better things to do than concern himself with works that are clearly the products of an impostor. As the anthropologist Agehananda Bharati described Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine: “[it] is such a melee of horrendous hogwash and of fertile inventions of inane esoterica, that any Buddhist and Tibetan scholar is justified to avoid mentioning it in any context.”22 In seeking information from colleagues in the United States about Rampa, I found that, although everyone I spoke to had heard of The Third Eye, few admitted to actually having read it. But The Third Eye was a bestseller in twelve countries in the first year of its publication (earning its author twenty thousand pounds in royalties), and forty years later remains in print and widely available in several languages. How are we to account for this appeal? Its very popularity may be one reason why it has generally been ignored by professional scholars of Tibet.

  I recently used The Third Eye in a seminar for first-year undergraduates at the University of Michigan, having them read it without telling them anything of its history. (The edition currently available in the United States for some reason omits the “Statement by the Author.”) The students were unanimous in their praise of the book, and despite six prior weeks of lectures and readings on Tibetan history and religion (including classics such as R. A. Stein’s Tibetan Civilization), they found it entirely credible and compelling, judging it more realistic than anything they had previously read about Tibet, appreciating the detail about “what Tibet was really like,” giving them “a true understanding about Tibet and Buddhism.” Many of the things they had read about Tibet seemed strange until then; these things seemed more reasonable when placed within the context of a lama’s life. It is not that the things Rampa described were not strange; it was that they were so strange that they could not possibly have been concocted. When I told them about the book’s author, they were shocked, but immediately wanted to separate fact from fiction. How much of the book was true?

  With the author unmasked they awoke from their mystified state, and with eyes opened turned away from Rampa and toward me for authority. Each of their questions began, “Did Tibetans really . . . ?” “Did Tibetans really perform amputations without anesthesia, with the patients using breath control and hypnotism instead?” “Did monks really eat communally and in silence while the Scriptures were read aloud?” “If a monk violated the eightfold path, was he punished by having to lie motionless face down across the door of the temple for a full day, without food or drink?” “Are the priests in Tibet vegetarian?” “Did priests really only ride white horses?” “Were horses really only ridden every other day?” “Did acolytes really wear white robes?” “Did cats really guard the temple jewels?”23 “At the New Year’s festival, did monks really dress as giant buddhas and walk through the streets on stilts?” “Were there really man-bearing kites in Tibet?” And of course, “Did they really perform the operation of the third eye?”

  The answer to each of these questions was no. But by what authority did I confidently make such a pronouncement? I had not lived in old Tibet and so could not contradict Rampa’s claims with my own eyewitness testimony. It was, rather, that I had never seen any mention of such things in any of the books that I had read about Tibet—in English, French, or Tibetan. From reading other books, I had learned the standards of scholarly evidence, the need for corroboration by citing sources in footnotes.24 And because I had read a sufficient number of such books, I was awarded a doctorate some years ago, and with the proper documents in my possession to prove my identity had been given the power to consecrate and condemn the products of others, and the power to initiate others into this knowledge. This power, the power to speak both with authority and as an authority, that is, the power to bestow value, had been passed on to me by my teachers, who had in turn received it from their teachers. It was this power that was embodied in my “no.” But this power had come at a price. For by accepting this power I had had to forever disavow any interest in the possible commercial profits that might derive from my work. It was necessary that I renounce any self-interest in the economic value of my work, exchanging such capital for something higher and more noble because it was severed from
crass material interests. This was symbolic capital, which would in its own way provide for my financial security by insuring that I would never have to offer my services to a publisher as a ghostwriter in order to support my wife and my cat, as Cyril Hoskin had done.25 The work of scholarship, like the work of art, retains its aura only when it is not reproduced too widely. Were it to sell a million copies, its aura of authority would fade.

  It is not that Rampa’s claims can be dismissed because they are too strange. Had his research extended to include Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, he would have learned about grong ’jug, or “transference of consciousness,” one of the six teachings of the tenth-century Indian tantric master Nāropa (Na ro chos drug), whereby one can transfer one’s own consciousness into that of another being (preferably a well-preserved corpse). The most famous case of consciousness transference in Tibetan literature is found in the biography of Marpa (Mar pa, 1012–1096), the teacher of Tibet’s great yogin Milarepa. Marpa’s son, Darmadoday (Dar ma mdo sde), after fracturing his skull in an equestrian accident, transferred his consciousness into the body of a recently deceased pigeon, since no human corpse could be found on short notice. The bird was then given directions by Marpa for flying across the Himalayas to India, where it discovered the fresh corpse of a thirteen-year-old brahman boy; the bird transferred its consciousness into the boy and then expired. The boy rose from the funeral pyre prior to his immolation and grew up to become the great yogin Tipupa (Ti phu pa).26 Compared to this a Tibetan taking over the body of an unemployed Englishman seems rather mundane.

  Or Rampa may have appealed to Tibetan theories of possession. René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, in Oracles and Demons of Tibet (published in 1956, the same year as The Third Eye), describes in detail the manner in which a deity, a mundane protector of the dharma (’jigs rten pa’i srung ma), takes possession of the body of another, descending uninvited into an unsuspecting person who will become its medium, called in Tibetan the sku rten (physical foundation) of the deity. Nebesky-Wojkowitz details the tests that Tibetans use to determine whether the possessing entity is a deity or the roaming spirit of the dead.27

  Or Rampa might have made an appeal to one of the oldest and most storied Buddhist techniques of legitimation, the discovery of the text. Since scholars have little concrete knowledge about what the Buddha actually taught, it is in some ways misleading to use the term apocryphon to refer to a Buddhist text. Over the millennia, however, competing Buddhist groups have disputed the legitimacy of a given text. In arguing for the authenticity of the Mahayana sutras as the word of the Buddha, despite their having appeared some four centuries after his death, the proponents of those sutras explained that the discourses had indeed been spoken by the Buddha but to a select audience (which sometimes was not physically present but heard his words through the power of clairaudience). Then, at the Buddha’s behest, they were hidden—in the heavens, under the sea, in the earth—until a predetermined point in the future when the world would be more receptive to their revelation.28 As discussed in the last chapter, this argument was deployed as well for the teachings of Padmasambhava, who during his brief visit to Tibet at the end of the eighth century is said to have hidden teachings, called terma (gter ma), “treasures,” throughout the landscape. Hidden in rocks, at the bottoms of lakes, or inside statues and pillars, the texts were discovered over the centuries (and into the present century) at the appropriate historical moment by the future incarnations of the prophesied disciples of Padmasambhava. The prophecies themselves were generally contained in the rediscovered texts. (As Wilde writes of Wordsworth, “He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.”)29 Treasure texts could also be discovered not in the earth but in the mind of the discoverer. These were dgongs gter, “mind treasures,” teachings of Padmasambhava that had remained pristine and uncorrupted, concealed in the discoverer’s mind, to be revealed first to the discoverer and then to the world. The literature of the Nyingma and Bönpo sects contains entire canons of treasure texts, and there is a substantial literature on techniques for determining their authenticity.30 False discoverers of terma are said to be incarnations of evil ministers from Tibet’s ancient history, supported in their nefarious efforts by demons. As one text states:

  There are many people in this dark age whose minds are not stable, who want to do hundreds of things; who behave hastily like monkeys and start to carry out whatever ideas cross their minds without examining them. They are possessed by Theu ring and other spirits who enjoy playing with various kinds of deceptive miracles. These spirits exhibit many deceptive illusions in various forms such as psychic vision teachings and dream teachings, and they mislead such people. They have the same negative effects as in the case of false discovered texts.31

  Yet the authenticity of a terma is difficult to judge, and the behavior of the text discoverer is explicitly excluded from the criteria. False discoverers may be of good conduct and have harmonious relations with their community, and true discoverers may indulge in all forms of reprehensible behavior, thereby taking onto themselves obstructions that would ordinarily beset others, while demonstrating that all experience is ultimately of one taste (ro gcig pa).32

  Why not then see The Third Eye as a mind treasure, a dgongs gter, discovered unexpectedly in the mind of Cyril Hoskin at a crucial moment, in 1956, soon after the Peoples Liberation Army had occupied Lhasa and the Dalai Lama had met with Chairman Mao? Why not see the book as having brought the plight of Tibet to an otherwise indifferent audience of hundreds of thousands of Westerners, who would remain unconcerned were it not for the trappings of astral travel, spiritualism, and the hope of human evolution to a new age?

  What is perhaps of greater interest, however, is the compulsion of the scholar to “correct” Rampa, to point out those elements of the authentic Tibetan tradition that are somehow analogous to his fabrications, to suggest how, if only he had been better informed, if only he knew what the scholar knows, he could have made his hoax more credible. It is just such correction that I have provided with my duly footnoted reports on consciousness transference, spirit possession, and treasure texts.

  With Caucasian children in Europe and America now being identified as incarnations of Tibetan lamas (as in Bertoluccis The Little Buddha), what is it about The Third Eye that so enrages the expert, apart from the fact that Cyril Hoskin was of the wrong social class to qualify as an authentic English eccentric? It is a question of authority, and how it is established and maintained. The classic exposition of authority is that of Max Weber, who distinguishes between charismatic and traditional authority, which together eventually yielded, at least in the West, to legal authority. Weber defines charisma as “an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed,” and defines charismatic authority as “a rule over men, whether predominantly external or internal, to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person.”33 Traditional authority is domination that rests, instead, “on the belief in the everyday as an inviolable norm of conduct”; it is a “piety for what actually, allegedly, or presumably has always existed.”34 The distinction between charismatic authority and traditional authority is difficult to discern, much less maintain, in the case of Tibet, where so much authority of both forms has rested with religious clerics. Indeed, the entire system of incarnate lamas can be seen, in Weber’s terms, as an attempt to transform charisma into tradition, as something to be passed down through generations in time. Whether or not Rampa possessed charisma is difficult to judge; those who met him invariably noted the remarkable depression in the middle of his forehead. And The Third Eye derives its authority from the extraordinary quality of the person alleged to be the author. But Weber is less helpful on how charisma is lost, and that is perhaps the more mystifying question in the case of Rampa.

  Authority derives, at least terminologically, from the Latin auctoritas, four kinds of which are specified in Roman
law: the authority of the senate, of the emperor, of a trustee, and of the seller (auctoritas venditoris). The last refers to the authority of the seller to own the goods he sells; as a kind of speech, it is a guarantee of title required for a sale to occur.35 We can read the protracted tale of T. Lobsang Rampa’s possession of Cyril Hoskin’s body as the author’s attempt to rescue and restore his claim to the person of Rampa once it had been challenged by Richardson and others. That he was successful in securing the ability to sell is evident in the fact that he wrote a dozen more books after The Rampa Story. Yet he remains an object of derision among the cognoscenti, that is, the authorities.

  In a recent book, Pierre Bourdieu describes authoritative speech:

  In fact, the use of language, the manner as much as the substance of discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which governs the access he can have to the language of the institution, that is, to the official, orthodox and legitimate speech. It is the access to the legitimate instruments of expression, and therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference—irreducible to discourse as such—between the straightforward imposture of masqueraders. . . . and the authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the authority and authorization of an institution.36

  Rampa’s authority is established by his identity as a Tibetan lama. Once Rampa is shown to be nothing more than Cyril Hoskin the audience can no longer accept his authority. Doctor from Lhasa and The Rampa Story thus try to reclaim that authority by showing why Hoskin is Rampa. It is significant that in his various prefaces and author’s statements Rampa makes no attempt to argue for the accuracy of the contents of his books; he simply declares that they are true. By 1971 and The Hermit, his author’s statement had been reduced to the following: “I, the author, state that this book is absolutely true. Some people who are bogged down in materialism may prefer to consider it as fiction. The choice is yours—believe or disbelieve according to your state of evolution. I am NOT prepared to discuss the matter or to answer questions about it. This book, and ALL my books, are TRUE!”37 In an attempt to reclaim his authority he offers his readers the possibility of once more regarding him as if he were a Tibetan lama. This authority is essential to his identity, a point that eluded Agehananda Bharati in his diatribe against “Rampaism” when he wrote, “I never saw why Don Juan must be a Yaqui (which he is not) to teach something important, nor why a Hoskins [sic] must be a Tibetan (which he is not) if he has something important to teach.”38