Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  The problem for Rampa, however, is that in the Tibetan tradition charisma is inextricable from institution. The authority to speak is passed on through a lineage, a lineage that operates regardless of historical gaps and fissures. Hoskin cannot serve as the authorized representative of Lamaism because he does not partake of the authority of any institution certified by Tibetans or Tibetologists. In his review of Doctor from Lhasa, Richardson wrote “No one of my acquaintance who has lived in Tibet and knows the Tibetans—including a genuine Tibetan lama to whom I read the book—had any doubt that it was an impudent fake.” Like the skeptron, the scepter, that was passed among the speakers in the Argives’ assembly, its possession authorizing speech, the institutions of Tibet, whether the monastic academy, the descent of a deity, or the identification of a tulku (even with a Golden Urn), authorize speech. As Bourdieu notes “The spokesperson is an impostor endowed with the skeptron.”39 Cyril Hoskin, like Thersites in book 2 of the Iliad., attempted to speak without the scepter being passed to him. And as Odysseus rebuked Thersites and struck him with the scepter, leaving a wound on his back, so Hugh Richardson (and the authorities he spoke for) showed Rampa to be an impostor who had no right to speak of Tibet, leaving one to wonder whether the depression between Hoskin’s eyes was not the sign of a more fatal wound, one that brought an end to his short life as an authority on Tibet, but also caused him to be reborn in another realm, for the condemnation by a scholar carries with it a kind of consecration. In wrathful tantric rites in Tibet, demons are dispelled with an act of sgrol, a verb that means both to liberate and to kill. We are left to wonder whether Hoskin would have assumed the identity of Rampa if he had not been exposed by the experts, for it is important to recall that the elaborate explanation of the transformation of Cyril Hoskin into Lobsang Rampa appears only after the public furor caused by the private detective’s report.

  And so Hoskin, or Ku’an, or Rampa, who wanted only to be a ghostwriter, became a ghost. As he says in The Rampa Story, “my lonely Tibetan body [lay] safely stored in a stone coffin, under the unceasing care of three monks” (p. 174). The unlaid ghost was left to wander from England to Ireland to Canada, where he died in Calgary in 1981. In the process he acquired the traditional authority of another institution, that of the vast literature of spiritualism, going on to write more than a dozen books on such authorized occult topics as interstellar travel, ouija boards, and the lost years of Jesus. Like a ghost he seemed to wander between two worlds, finding a home in neither. The representation of Tibetan Buddhism historically has been and continues to be situated in a domain where the scholarly and the popular commingle, a domain that is neither exclusively one or the other. The confluence of the scholarly and the popular is strikingly evident in The Third Eye, where Rampa draws on the accounts of travelers and amateur scholars (themselves sites of the admixture of the popular and scholarly) and combines them with standard occult elements (astral travel, rites from ancient Egypt, etc.) into a work that is neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction. It is evident that by the time Rampa wrote his “memoir” there was ample material available from scholars, travelers, and Theosophists to enable him to paint a portrait of Tibet in which his own contributions seemed entirely plausible. Furthermore, he was able to represent the Tibet of Western fantasies in such a way that he himself could be embodied within it. Tibet, a domain with the power to allow him to assume a new identity without leaving England: the son of a Devon plumber could become the scion of the Lhasa aristocracy; a man who made surgical fittings could become a surgeon; a criminal and accident photographer, confined to a world of mechanical reproduction, could see auras.

  The author of The Third Eye, decried as a fraud, was not exactly a fraud, because, if we are to believe the testimony of those who knew him, he really did believe that he was T. Lobsang Rampa. He may have been delusional; he may not have been a huckster. He set out to be a ghostwriter, someone who writes for and in the name of another, receiving payment in exchange for the credit of authorship. But he was not a ghostwriter in this sense, because he came to assume the identity of the one in whose name he wrote. And the book that he produced also confounds the standard literary categories. It may have begun as a bestseller, a book that is marketed for its short-term profitability, but in its own way it has also become a classic, a work that sells well over time. The bestseller is authorized by the public and those who serve it: the publishing companies and the popular media. The current edition of The Third Eye (which according to the cover is to be shelved under “Inspirational”) contains raves from the Times Literary Supplement—“It comes near to being a work of art”—and the Miami Herald: “What fascinates the reader is not only a strange land—and what could be stranger than Tibet?—but [Rampa’s] skill in interpreting the philosophy of the East.” The classic, on the other hand, is certified by the scholar, who insures its commercial durability by providing a reliable market for the book in the educational system, as I have done by assigning The Third Eye to my class.

  It is not simply that the scholar needs the dilettante to define his identity. Lobsang Rampa is rather like the lü (glud) (translated by some as “scapegoat” but derived from the verb bslu, meaning “to deceive” and “to seduce”), the ransom offered to the demons in a Tibetan exorcism ceremony in exchange for the spirit of the possessed. The officiating lama, the person authorized to perform the exorcism, makes a dough effigy of the person possessed. In order to empower the simulacrum, the possessed person both breathes on the effigy and mixes his saliva into the dough. The effigy is then dressed in a garment made from clothing belonging to the possessed. In addition, precious substances, such as pieces of turquoise, are pressed into the dough. The lama then summons the demons, offers them gifts, and effusively praises the effigy. In return for releasing the person they possess, the demons are offered something of greater value, the effigy.

  This does not seem to be a case of tricking the demons into thinking that the effigy is the person, but rather of convincing them that the effigy is of greater value. In effect, the person possessed, in order to save himself, gives up something of himself by pressing precious substances into the body of his substitute. Once the exchange is complete, the effigy, now considered to be in the possession of the demons, is carried to a safe distance outside the community, where it is abandoned. In this strange version of mimesis, then, a double is created: endowed with the qualities of beauty and wealth that one has so long desired, it is then expelled to be consumed by demons. To escape the demons, wealth and power must be renounced. The effigy is not, therefore, precisely a scapegoat because what is expelled from the city is not what is most vile, instead, the seductive and the exalted—beauty, wealth, and power—are ostracized.40

  And so Rampa, invested with the wealth of his royalties, which the scholar must renounce, is given to the public disguised as a Tibetan. In the bargain he derives his livelihood. Rampa wrote nineteen books that have sold over four million copies as well as a large quantity of incense, meditation robes, and crystal balls. His subsequent works include Living with the Lama (1964), dictated telepathically by his cat Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, and My Visits to Venus (1966, the royalties of which were to be donated to Save a Cat League of New York). In return, the scholar, by renouncing the public, gets his identity as a scholar back. He receives symbolic capital by disavowing that upon which he is ultimately dependent (and which is embodied by Lobsang Rampa): the continuing fascination with Tibet that sells Rampa’s books also brings students to our classrooms, the public to our lectures, and readers to our monographs. The question that remains is that of the persistent confluence of the two institutions that Rampa floated between, Tibetology and spiritualism, one that cast him out and one that embraced him. He remains a figure of ambivalence. When I was discussing Rampa with Tibetologists and Buddhologists in Europe, many confessed that The Third Eye was the first book about Tibet that they had ever read; for some it was a fascination with the world Rampa described that had led them to become prof
essional scholars of Tibet. Thus, some said, despite the fact that Rampa was a fraud, he had had “a good effect.”

  The parable of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra tells of a father distraught as his children blithely play, unaware that their house is ablaze. Knowing their respective predilections for playthings, he lures them from the inferno with the promise that he has a cart for each waiting outside, a deer-drawn cart for one, a goat-drawn cart for another, and so on. When they emerge from the conflagration, they find only one cart, a magnificent conveyance drawn by a great white ox, something that they had never even dreamed of. The burning house is samsara; the children are ignorant sentient beings, unaware of the dangers of their abode; the father is the Buddha, who lures them out of samsara with a variety of vehicles to liberation, knowing that there is in fact but one vehicle, the Buddha vehicle, whereby all beings will be conveyed to enlightenment. After telling the parable, the Buddha asks his disciple Śāriputra whether the father lied to his children. Śāriputra says no, the prevarication was necessary to save the children’s lives. The parable suggests that it is permissible for a buddha to teach what is not in fact true if it serves a greater good. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the only Buddhist text cited by Rampa in the trilogy.41

  Unlike Śāriputra, the scholars coaxed into Tibetology by Rampa must declare that what they learned in their academic study of Tibet was that the person who called them to their careers, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was a liar. In order to become professional scholars, they had to renounce any interest in that which had served as the precondition for their eventual scholarly identity. It is, indeed, the very reading of Rampa that ultimately brings about the death of Rampa. Some might see this as a case of killing the father, but it might be more accurately described in the Freudian sense as a disavowal or denial (Verleugnung), a mode of defense in which the subject refuses to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception: in this case the scholar fondly remembers Rampa for his “good effect,” refusing to acknowledge that he represents everything that the scholar most loathes, that it was this fraud that brought them to their profession.42

  At Borders Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, books on Asian religions are back to back with books on astrology, the tarot, and the New Age. The books face away from each other, making it impossible to peruse both at the same time, yet they support each other; one would fall without the other behind it. The ghost of Rampa continues to haunt us, sometimes looming behind, sometimes shimmering at the periphery. For not all bookstores have such an extensive inventory, and we will always be startled, in an uncanny moment, to find his books next to ours on the shelf marked “Occult.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Spell

  Om Mani padme hum, O, the Jewel in the Lotus: Amen. This prayer is an invocation of Padmapāni who is believed to have delivered it to the Tibetans; it is the most frequently repeated of all prayers, and has on this account excited the curiosity of the earliest visitors to Tibet. Its real meaning, however, was long involved in doubt, and it is only by the most recent researches that a positive determination has been finally arrived at.

  EMIL SCHLAGINTWEIT, 1863

  In the short story “The Three Hermits,” Tolstoy tells of a bishop traveling by ship across the White Sea. En route he notices a sailor pointing out a small island in the distance where three hermits are said to live. The bishop has the captain divert the ship to the island, where he finds three old men waiting on the shore, standing hand in hand. The bishop offers to instruct them, but first asks them how they pray. They tell him that their prayer is “Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us.” The bishop explains to them that, although well intentioned, they are not praying properly. He explains the doctrine of the Trinity and then teaches them the Lord’s Prayer, phrase by phrase. The hermits have great difficulty; one has no teeth, the beard of another has grown over his mouth. Eventually, however, they are able to recite the entire prayer without prompting and the bishop is rowed back to the ship, listening to them recite as he leaves the island. He returns to the ship grateful to God that he has had this opportunity to teach the hermits.1

  Tolstoy’s story raises certain questions: Who knows how to pray, the professional or the unlettered (though pure in heart)? And what of the words? Is it their form, repetition, enunciation, or meaning that is more important?

  When the term “prayer” occurs in accounts of Tibetan religion, it is often followed by the word “wheel.” No Tibetan artifact, not the skull cup or the thigh bone trumpet, has elicited more comment than the so-called prayer wheel, perhaps because during a time in Europe when science and materialism were increasingly seen as the opponents of religion and the spirit, the mechanism of the prayer wheel was construed as something that transgressed a boundary, an unholy union of religion and science, a machine for communing with the divine. Carlyle referred to it as a “Rotatory Calabash” and the Sinologist James Legge wrote, “Go to Tibet and Mongolia, and in the bigotry and apathy of the population, in their prayer wheels and cylinders you will find the achievement of the doctrine of the Buddha.”2 Travelers to Tibet and Mongolia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were intrigued by the cylinders packed with scrolls of mantras and fitted with paddles so that they could be turned by the current of a stream, or those that were stationed above a fire and mounted with wings, to be propelled around and around by convection. In his 1862 Narrative of the War with China in 1860, Garnet Wolseley observed:

  [S]ome indolent but ingenious devotee invented long ago a machine which is now generally used in all Lhama temples. . . . Prayers with the lips only, and not proceeding from the mind, we are told, avail nothing; but what would all our pastors say to those done by machinery? In Europe we have instruments for all sorts of curious purposes, from sewing trowsers up to calculating decimal fractions; but no one there has ever yet dreamt of carrying the substitution of machinery for mental or bodily labour to such an extent as to take out a patent for a prayer machine. Let me recommend the idea to my Roman Catholic friends as a good one to get through any number of penitential “Aves” at a brisk pace, and with comparative ease to themselves.3

  Sir Monier-Williams put it more succinctly: “It is to be hoped that when European inventions find their way across the Himālayas, steam-power may not be pressed into the service of these gross superstitions.”4

  The most common prayer wheels were handheld. The Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri saw them in Lhasa in 1728: “A portable Manì is a small cylinder pierced by an iron rod, one end of which is fixed into a wooden handle so that the Manì can be carried, as they often are; when the carrier moves his hand the cylinder turns round and he utters the words: Om, manì, pemè, hum.”5 It is this prayer that is most commonly printed on the seemingly endless scrolls of paper and placed inside prayer wheels large and small throughout the vast expanse of Tibetan Buddhist influence. And it is this prayer of only six syllables that has elicited more comment and speculation by Western writers than any other Buddhist formula.

  In his 1859 Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, Carl Friedrich Köppen described the role of the six syllables of the mantra in Tibetan life:

  [T]hey are the only thing the ordinary Tibetan and Mongol knows; they are the first words which the child learns to stammer, they are the last sigh of the dying one. The wanderer mutters them on his way, the herdsman at his flocks, the woman at her housework, the monk at all his studies of intuition, i.e., of doing nothing: they are the cry both of war and of triumph. They are to be read everywhere where the Lamaistic church has penetrated, on flags, rocks, trees, walls, stone monuments, implements, paper slips, human skulls and skeletons, etc. They are, according to the opinion of the believers, the essence of all religion, all wisdom and revelation, the path to salvation and the gate of bliss.6

  Even in Desideri’s day, more than a century before, this most famous of mantras was known to Europeans and its meaning was debated. Indeed, it has been an object of fascination since the thirteenth century, wh
en William of Rubruck observed in 1254, “Wherever they go they have in their hands a string of one or two hundred beads, like our rosaries, and they always repeat these words, on mani baccam, which is ‘God, thou knowest,’ as one of them interpreted it to me, and they expect as many rewards from God as they remember God in saying this.”7 In 1626 the Portuguese Jesuit Andrade reported on his recent mission to western Tibet:

  Another time I asked a lama in the presence of the King what means of salvation a sinner could use to be restored to the grace of God, and he replied that it was sufficient to utter the words Om ma’ny patmeonry, which is equivalent to saying: however much I have sinned, I shall still get to heaven. If that is true, I retorted, take a dagger and stab a man in the heart, rob the King of the pearls he wears, insult us with the most extravagant abuse, and then say simply Om ma’ny patmeonry, and you are at once absolved and purified from all sins. Do you think that is reasonable?8