9. For a document purportedly discovered in Ladakh purporting to describe Jesus’ travels in Tibet, see L. Huxley, The Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (London: John Murray, 1918), 2:334-35. See also Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), for the “translation” of a manuscript discovered by the author in Ladakh, “The Life of Saint Issa,” which describes Jesus’ activities in India and Nepal. Some of the publications arguing for Jesus’ presence in Tibet and Ladakh have been credulously collected in Elizabeth Clare Prophet, The Lost Years of Jesus (Livingston, Montana: Summit University Press, 1987).
10. Alfred Percy Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), pp. 181–82. The conviction that there is a secret brotherhood in Tibet, its presence unknown to Tibetans (save, often, the Panchen Lama), has remained a constant in spiritualist literature. See, for example, something called The Urga Manuscript, which purports to be a 1921 letter from Do-ring, scribe of the Panchen Lama (rendered here as “Precious Green Sage”), to Wing On, “his friend concerning the inner life”: “Here exists a conflict that is deep, yet understandable. The present religion of Tibet is not an ancient one as the history of Bod land goes. There are those who are the servants of the present religion who do not support the work of the Inner Temple, who feel that the magic of the priests must not be the final word, yet we who have lived the life of the Inner Courts well know that in our courts there is more true light than has ever been shed in any age. Thus we of the courts have had much power and have been an influence for good in the High House which was not always welcomed.” The Urga Manuscript (Gerrads Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1976), p. 8.
11. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 6th ed. (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1971), 5:389. Proponents of Madame Blavatsky continue to argue that she did indeed study in Tibet and that the Stanzas of Dzyan and The Voice of the Silence derive from ancient tantras (rgyud sde, hence Kiu-te), thought by the uninitiated to have long since been lost. Hence, the devotees of HPB are undaunted by the fact that neither the Tibetan originals of the Stanzas of Dzyan nor The Book of Golden Precepts has been discovered in the tantras or tantric commentaries of the Tibetan canon. For defenses of the authenticity of these works, see Sylvia Cranston, HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), pp. 80–101; Gregory A. Barborka, H. P. Blavatsky, Tibet and Tulku (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974); and David Reigle, The Books of Kiu-te or the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras: A Preliminary Analysis, Secret Doctrine Reference Series (San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1983). For a sustained attempt at aligning Theosophical doctrine with Buddhism, see Alice Leighton Cleather, Buddhism the Science of Life (Beijing: China Booksellers, 1928).
12. The influence of Theosophy on the study of Buddhism in Europe and America remains a largely unexplored topic. On some of the esotericist and spiritualist precursors of the Theosophical Society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see James Webb, The Occult Underground (La Salle, Ill.: Library Press, 1974); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Antoine Favre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). For a useful history of the Theosophical Society, see Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Received (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). For an entertaining account of the Theosophical Society and its legacies, see Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).
Links between Theosophists and Tibetan Buddhism also merit a book-length study. For defenses of Madame Blavatsky’s claim that she studied in Tibet, see the works of Cranston and Barborka cited above. Although these claims are generally dismissed by scholars, other links between Tibetans and early members of the Theosophical Society warrant further research. An important key here is the Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling, Sikkim. The school opened in 1874. The first headmaster was Sarat Chandra Das and the Tibetan teacher was Ugyen Gyatso, a “lama” of Tibetan-Sikkimese descent. The school had been opened on the orders of Sir George Campbell, the British lieutenant-governor of Bengal, in order to provide an education for Tibetan and Sikkimese boys. Its true purpose, as explained in Derek Waller’s The Pundits (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), p. 193, was to “train interpreters, geographers and explorers, who may be useful if at any future time Tibet is opened to the British.” Thus, the boys were taught English, Tibetan, and surveying. Beginning in 1879, Das (sometimes disguised as a Tibetan lama or a Nepalese merchant) and Ugyen Gyatso made numerous trips into Tibet to make maps and gather intelligence as secret agents of the British Survey of India. On their first trip, they went to Tashilhunpo monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama (generally referred to by Europeans of the day as the “Tashi Lama,” the “Teshu Lama,” or “Teshoo Lama,” the latter used by Kipling as the name of the lama in Kim; Das is said to have been the model for Huree Chunder Mookerjee). There they were welcomed by the “prime minister” of the Panchen Lama, one “Sengchen Tulku,” the abbot of Dongtse monastery, whom Das instructed in Sanskrit, Hindi, and the use of the camera and the magic lantern. (He appears to have been the incarnation of Seng chen Blo bzang bstan ’dzin dpal ’byor, 1784–1843, whose collected works have been published.) Das describes his time with him in detail in his Autobiography: Narrative of the Incidents of My Early Life (Calcutta: Indian Studies: Past & Present, 1969), pp. 56–89, summarized by Waller, pp. 197–204. When it was later determined that Das was a British agent, Sengchen was arrested, imprisoned, and publicly flogged in Lhasa, before being brutally drowned in the Tsangpo River in June 1887, described by Ekai Kawaguchi in his Three Years in Tibet (Benares and London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1909), pp. 17–20. After his death, his line of incarnation was proscribed.
Both Blavatsky and Olcott mention their acquaintance with Das, with the colonel praising him in diary entries of June 1885 and July 1887, noting in the latter that he had read his Narrative of a Journey to Lhasa in 1881–82. See his Old Diary Leaves (Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974–75), 3: 265—67, 4:4-6. In his The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 195–96, K. Paul Johnson speculates that one of the chelas of the Mahatmas, one Chandro Cusho, is a fictionalization of Sarat Chandra Das, and that the Mahatma Ten-Dub Ughien is based on Ugyen Gyatso. Although it is also possible that Madame Blavatsky’s obsession with Tashilhunpo and its secret archives and with the Tashi Lama may have come in part from a reading of Bogle, it may also have been derived from the connection of Das and Ugyen Gyatso to the monastery and to the Sengchen Lama, from whom they received Tibetan texts that they brought back to Darjeeling. (A preposterous connection between these texts and HPB’s Stanzas of Dzyan and The Book of Golden Precepts is suggested by Johnson, pp. 203–4.) In her hagiography of HPB, Sylvia Cranston reproduces the Tibetan text (and provides a mistranslation) of a verse purportedly written by the sixth Panchen Lama and included in the 1927 Chinese edition of The Voice of the Silence (Beijing: Chinese Buddhist Research Society, 1927). See Cranston, p. 86.
Das had died by the time Evans-Wentz arrived in Sikkim, but another figure from Darjeeling provides a link between this remarkable cast of characters. He is the Mongolian monk Sherab Gyatso, the personal assistant to the Sengchen Lama who was able to escape the punishment that befell his master because he was in West Bengal, serving as abbot of Ghoom monastery in Darjeeling (where Lama Govinda met Tomo Geshe Rinpoche). Like Ugyen Gyatso, Sherab Gyatso had been involved in surveying activities for the British. See Lt. Col. G. Strahan, Report of the Explorations of Lama Serap Gyatso, 1856–68 [and others] in Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet,
published under the direction of Col. H. R. Thuillier, Surveyor General of India (Dehra Dun: Survey of India, 1889), pp. 3–7. See also Lt. Col. R. E. Holdich’s “The Narrative Account of Lama Ugyen Gyatso’s Third Season’s Explorations in Tibet in 1883,” in Records of the Survey of India 8, pt. 2 (Dehra Dun, 1915), pp. 339–57. Later, Sherab Gyatso taught Ekai Kawaguchi and was the chief author (as attested by the Tibetan title page) of Das’s 1902 Tibetan-English Dictionary. Sherab Gyatso was also the teacher of two of the monks who provided translations for Evans-Wentz in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation.
13. See Sylvia Cranston, HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), p. 84.
14. See Mircea Eliade, No Souvenirs: Journal 1957–1969, trans. Fred Johnson, Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 208.
15. On Tingley, see Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mediums, Mystics, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken Books, 1993), esp. pp. 108–14.
16. See Daniel Caracostea, “Alexandra David-Neel’s Early Acquaintances with Theosophy, Paris 1892,” Theosophical History (July–October 1991): 209–13.
17. Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), pp. 15, 17, 19.
18. Ken Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light (Berkeley, Calif.: Dawnfire Books, 1982), p. 44. The other biographical information on Evans-Wentz in this chapter is drawn from Winkler’s book. A useful summary is provided by John Myrdhin Reynolds in Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1989), pp. 71–78.
19. This summary is drawn from Marion Meade’s biography Madame Blavatsky: The Woman behind the Myth (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), pp. 413–17. For another useful summary, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 18–22.
20. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Los Angeles: Theosophy Company, 1947), 2:743. This is a facsimile of the original 1888 edition.
21. Alfred Percy Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885), p. 68.
22. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2:445.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 2:303.
25. Ibid., 2:196 n.
26. Ibid., 2:168.
27. On Jung’s relation to spiritualism and Theosophy, see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). Despite his apparent respect for Tibetan Buddhism, Jung refused to sign a letter protesting the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. See Frank McLynn, Carl Gustav Jung (London: Bantam Press, 1996), p. 516.
28. See, for example, Luis O. Gómez, “Oriental Wisdom and the Cure of Souls: Jung and Indian East,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 197–250.
29. The biographical details that follow are drawn from the rather reverential biography by Ken Winkler, A Thousand Journeys: The Biography of Lama Anagarika Govinda (Longmead, England: Element Books, 1990).
30. Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1969), p. 25.
31. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Inner Structure of the I Ching: The Book of Transformations (New York: Weatherhill, 1981), p. xi.
32. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, p. 13.
33. Ibid., p. 14.
34. In his introduction to Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa, there is a less ambivalent statement: “As from mighty broadcasting stations, dynamically charged with thought-forces, the Great Ones broadcast over the Earth that Vital Spirituality which alone makes human evolution possible; as the Sun sustains the physical man, They sustain the psychic man, and make possible mankind’s escape from Sangsāric Existence.” See W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 18.
35. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1:303.
36. H. P. Blavatsky, “Tibetan Teachings,” in Collected Writings 1883–1884–1885 (Los Angeles: Blavatsky Writings Publication Fund, 1954), 6:98. On the fascination of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists with Tashilhunpo monastery and the Panchen Lama, see note 12 above.
37. For the early Theosophists, “science” was often used as a synonym for “theosophy.” See, for example, Henry Steele Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism, 44th ed. (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1947).
38. Evans-Wentz’s deviation from Buddhist doctrine on the issue of rebirth as an animal was pointed out in 1968 by Francis Story (Anagārika Sugatānanda) in the essay “The Buddhist Doctrine of Rebirth in Subhuman Realms.” The essay is reprinted in Francis Story, Rebirth as Doctrine and Experience (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1975), pp. 64–100. See also John Myrdhin Reynolds in Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1989), p. 137 n. 6.
39. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 116 n. 1.
40. In his introductory foreword, Lama Govinda argues that the book is “not merely a mass for the dead, to which the Bardo Thödol was reduced in later times” (p. lxi).
41. Evans-Wentz reminds the reader that as early as 1911, in The Fairy-Faith in the Celtic Countries (London: H. Frowde, 1911), he had argued that the ancient Druid theory of rebirth provided “a scientific extension and correction” of Darwin’s theory of evolution. He was thus gratified to find support for the theory of human reincarnation among such eminent scientists as T. H. Huxley, E. B. Tylor, and William James (pp. x, 60–61).
42. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1976), p. 12.
43. Ibid., pp. 11, 30, 31. That such sentiments remain exciting to some three decades later is evidenced by the fall 1996 special issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (vol. 7, no. 1), which is devoted to “Buddhism and Psychedelics.”
44. The life and teachings of Trungpa Rinpoche are discussed in chapters 13 and 14 of Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Boston: Shambhala, 1986). See also his autobiography, Born in Tibet (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1977).
45. Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1975), p. xvi.
46. See “A Prayer for Deliverance from Rebirth,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 451.
47. Fremantle and Trungpa, p. 4. Tibetan texts speak of passing through similitudes of the stages of death when passing in and out of dreams and view the space between moments of thought as a kind of intermediate state. However, Trungpa Rinpoche appears to be referring to something else here.
48. Ibid., pp. 5, 6.
49. Ibid., p. 8.
50. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 14.
51. For example, a translation of a Geluk text on the stages of death, Lati Rinbochay and Jeffrey Hopkins’s Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1981), has sold some fourteen thousand copies.
52. He made the statement in a public lecture during a conference on Tibetan culture and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on May 1, 1993.
53. He also makes the remarkable statement, “I think of Gandhi, Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, of Shakespeare, of St. Francis, of Beethoven, of Michelangelo. When Tibetans hear of such people, they immediately say they are bodhisattvas” (Sogyal Rinpoche, p. 101).
54. Robert A. F. Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), p. xx.
55. Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées, trans. Martin Turnell (London: Harvill Press, 1962), pp. 200–205.
56. Michel de Certe
au has described the contractual nature of belief. Under this contract, the believer, in a position of inferiority to the object of belief, gives something away in the hope of getting something back, not now, but in the future. In order for the contractual relation to be maintained, there must be the expectation of some return on the initial investment, a surety of some salvation, and this in turn depends on the presumption of the ability of the object of belief to guarantee the loan. For de Certeau, it is only when the believed object becomes severed from this contractual relation that it becomes a “belief,” a mental occurrence, a representation in the mind of someone else, “known as ‘beliefs’ precisely because we do not believe them any longer.” That is, the view of belief as an inner state, as an assent to a proposition, can occur only with a loss, when the believer has terminated the contract with the believed, leaving the object of belief as a lonely component of someone else’s religion, either of another time or of another place. See Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 192–202. The discussion here is drawn from pp. 193–96, the quotation from p. 196.
57. Robert A. F. Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), p. 35.
58. On the uses of this and related mortuary texts in the Nyingma sect, see David Germano, “Dying, Death, and Other Opportunities,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 458–93. Germano provides a useful bibliography of related works on pp. 479–80.
59. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 188.
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