CHAPTER THREE
1. T. Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), pp. 24–25. Subsequent citations are noted by page number in the text.
2. Ibid., pp. 20–21. For a more accurate account of Tibetan law, see Rebecca Redwood French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
3. After his return to England and his retirement from government service, Bell was apparently threatened with the loss of his pension when he refused to submit the manuscript of The People of Tibet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928) for censorship. But because he had been out of government service for six years, he was no longer subject to the Official Secrets Act, and Bell was not required to submit the manuscript. I am grateful to Alex McKay for this information, which results from his research in the India Office Library. For further discussion of Bell’s career, see Alex McKay, Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904–1947 (Richmond, England: Curzon Press, 1997). The specific information here may be found in India Office Library and Records L/P + S/12/3982.
4. The theme of kites in The Third Eye appears to have inspired the short story “Kites” in Pierre Delattre’s Tales of a Dalai Lama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 20–25.
5. T. Lobsang Rampa, Doctor from Lhasa (New Brunswick, N.J.: Inner Light Publications, 1990), p. 37. Subsequent citations are noted by page number in the text.
6. T. Lobsang Rampa, The Rampa Story (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 4. Subsequent citations are noted by page number in the text.
7. In his introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead Evans-Wentz reports that “So long as the body is the receptacle of the consciousness-principle, it is said to renew itself completely every seven years.”
8. For a brief biography of Richardson, see the appreciation by David Snellgrove in Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi, eds., Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1980), pp. vii–xi.
9. Personal correspondence from Hugh Richardson, June 24, 1996.
10. The publisher’s statement was included only in the first printing of the English edition, which I have been unable to locate. The statement provided here is translated from the French edition: T. Lobsang Rampa, Le troisième oeil, trans. François Legris (Paris: Club des éditeurs, 1957). My thanks to Professor William Ray for assistance in translating the passage. The aura of authority is enhanced in the French edition by the addition of numerous black and white photographs of scenes of Tibetan monastic life, with captions containing quotations from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
11. David Snellgrove, “The Third Eye: Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama,” Oriental Art 3, no. 2 (summer 1957), p. 75.
12. Review of The Third Eye, by T. Lobsang Rampa, Times Literary Supplement, 30 November 1956, 715.
13. Richardson’s dissent was shared by Guy Wint, who wrote in the Manchester Guardian, also on November 30, 1956 (p. 9), “It sounds all rather fishy. There is no Tibetan lama in the West, and almost certainly equally none inside Tibet, who is capable of writing in English such a book as Mr. Lobsang Rampa’s . . . Mr. Lobsang Rampa’s book is the more suspect because it is everything which the more simple-minded occultist could desire.”
14. Review of The Third Eye, by T. Lobsang Rampa, Kirkus 25, no. 62 (January 15, 1957).
15. Review of The Third Eye, by T. Lobsang Rampa, Library Journal 82, no. 670 (March 1, 1957).
16. The report was kindly provided to the author by Hugh Richardson, June 24, 1996. For further biographical details, see Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason (London: Harrap, 1973), pp. 245–46.
17. “Private v. Third Eye,” Time, 17 February 1958, 33. An exposé of Rampa by the Tibetan scholar Chen Chi Chang was published in the spring 1958 issue of the journal Tomorrow, pp. 9–16.
18. Daily Express (London), 3 February 1958, 7. See also Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 243.
Richardson reports in his letter of June 14, 1996, that Rampa had been asked by “a very great lady” to inscribe a copy of the book to her. He replied, “Dear Lady. I do not have my Tibetan pen with me. Let me take the book home.” Richardson describes the eventual inscription as “three lines of meaningless scribbles, some few resembling Tibetan letters.”
19. Scottish Daily Mail, 1 February 1958, 2.
20. Time, 17 February 1958, 33.
21. Richardson apparently did not recognize this portrayal (or chose not to mention it) in his brief review of Doctor from Lhasa in the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post (London) of August 7, 1959 (p. 14), which reads in full, under the title “Still Rampa”:
When “The Third Eye” was published I pointed out in THE DAILY TELEGRAPH that there were so many mistakes of fact and of interpretation that it could not possibly be by a Tibetan. Later it was proved that “T. Lobsang Rampa” was a Mr. Cyril Hoskins [sic] from Plympton who had never been outside the British Isles.
To wriggle out of this predicament Mr. Hoskins pretended that he had been possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan Lama. That is not likely to take in any but the most credulous and does not explain away the many mistakes in the book.
Now we have “Doctor from Lhasa” by the same writer. It is surprising that his present publishers should claim that experts were unable to disprove the “facts” of “The Third Eye.” 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.
Most of “Doctor from Lhasa” is about alleged activities in China. So far as Tibet is concerned the most realistic part is the picture on the dust-jacket: and we see in the photograph of the author that he does not even know on which side the cross-over of a Tibetan robe should come. Everything points to it being another exercise in fiction based on information which could be collected from published works and garishly coloured by a lively Walter Mitty imagination.
22. Agehananda Bharati, “Fictitious Tibet: The Origin and Persistence of Rampaism,” Tibet Society Bulletin 7 (1974): 3.
23. Rampa’s claims about the importance of cats in Tibet were accepted as ethnographic evidence of Tibetan feudalism by F. Sierksma in his Tibet’s Terrifying Deities (The Hague: Mouton and Company, 1966), p. 107, in which he writes, citing The Third Eye, “In the Land of Snows a servant was required to address his master’s cat as follows: ‘Would honourable Puss Puss deign to come and drink this unworthy milk.’”
24. Couldn’t resist.
25. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 74–75.
26. For an account of this story in English, see Tsang Nyön Heruka, The Life of Marpa the Translator (Boulder, Colo.: Prajñā Press, 1982), pp. 156–81.
27. See René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet: The Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective Deities (The Hague: Mouton and Company, 1956), pp. 409–66.
28. For an example, see Paul Harrison, The Samādhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present: An Annotated English Translation of the Tibetan Version of the Pratyutpanna-Buddha-Sammukhāvasthita-Samādhi-Sūtra (Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1990), pp. 96–109.
29. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 977–78.
30. For a traditional presentation of gter ma, see Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, Hidden Teachings of Tibet: An Explanation of the Terma Tradition of the Nyingma School of Buddhism (London: Wisdom Publications, 1986). For analyses of the tradition, see especially Janet B. Gyatso, “The Logic of Legitimation in the Tibetan Treasure Tradition,” History of Religions 33, no. 1 (1993): 97–134; and Janet B. Gyatso, “Drawn from the Tibetan Treasury: The gter ma Literature,” in Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. Roger Jackson and José Cabezón (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1995), pp. 147–6
9. See also Michael Aris, Hidden Treasures, Secret Lives (London: Kegan Paul International, 1989), pp. 15–106.
31. Tulku Thondup, p. 156.
32. Ibid., p. 157. See also Janet B. Gyatso, “Guru Chos-dbang’s gTer ’byung chen mo: An Early Survey of the Treasure Tradition and Its Strategies in Discussing Bon Literature,” in Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Fagernes 1992, ed. Per Kvaerne (Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 1994), pp. 275–86.
With the notable exception of Michael Aris in his Hidden Treasures, Secret Lives, Western scholars of Tibetan Buddhism have been reluctant to directly confront the question of the historical legitimacy of gter ma, to consider the rediscovered texts as, in fact, works composed by their discoverers and hidden only to be revealed. For a spirited defense of the authenticity of gter, see Lama Govinda’s introductory foreword in Walter Y. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. liv–lvi. The fact that the pious fiction of authenticity has been tacitly maintained for so long by scholars of Tibet is itself a fascinating topic to be considered with the larger issue of mystification.
33. Max Weber, “The Sociology of the World Religions” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 295.
34. Ibid., p. 296.
35. See Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 3.
36. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 109, 111. Although Lincoln’s and Bourdieu’s analyses are directed at speech acts, they also pertain to certain cases of textual authority.
37. T. Lobsang Rampa, The Hermit (New Brunswick, N.J.: Inner Light Publications, 1971), facing p. 7.
38. Bharati, p. 11. Bruce Lincoln describes authoritative speech as “the effect of a posited, perceived, or institutionally ascribed asymmetry between speaker and audience that permits certain speakers to command not just the attention but the confidence, respect, and trust of their audience, or—an important proviso—to make audiences act as if this were so.” See Lincoln, p. 4.
39. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 109. An earlier example of imposture, also from England, is that of George Psalmanazar (1679?–1763), a Frenchman who convinced his English hosts that he was a native of Formosa and lectured on Formosan culture, religion, and language, all of which he had invented. See Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., The Dictionary of National Biography: From Earliest Times to 1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 16:439-42.
40. For an analysis of a Tibetan exorcism rite, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Elaborations on Emptiness, Uses of the Heart Sūtra (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 216–38. The distinction between the scapegoat and the ostracized is drawn from J. P. Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” trans. Page du Bois, New Literary History 9, no. 3 (1978): 491–92.
41. For the full version of the parable, see Leon Hurvitz, trans., The Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 58–75. When Rampa is reluctant to write because so few will believe what he says (as has been the case with the first two books), he is telepathically reminded by the lamas that “the end justifies the means” (a view often associated with communism). It is unclear how this relates to his dilemma, but he is reminded by the lamas of the parable of the three chariots. In Rampa’s version, when the children escape from the burning house, the father gives them each the kind of chariot he had promised them; he seems to have missed the key point of the parable. See Rampa, The Rampa Story, pp. 16–17.
42. On disavowal, see J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), pp. 118–21.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Michael R. Katz, ed., Tolstoy’s Short Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), pp. 167–72.
2. Cited in Elizabeth Reed, Primitive Buddhism: Its Origin and Teachings (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1896), p. 30.
3. Garnet Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1972), pp. 221–22. Other theories were somewhat less suspicious. Emil Schlagintweit speculated in 1863 that the practice had originated when the study of scriptures was replaced by the “mere reading or copying of holy books” as a work of merit for delivery from metempsychosis. But because few knew how to read and those who did were otherwise engaged, the lamas “taught that the mere turning of a rolled manuscript might be considered an efficacious substitute for reading it.” See Emil Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India (London: Susil Gupta, 1969), p. 230. For interesting speculations on the origin and influence of the prayer wheel, see Lynn White, Jr., “Tibet, India, and Malaya as Sources of Western Medieval Technology,” American Historical Review 65 (1959–60): 515–26. Gregory Schopen has considered possible Indian antecedents in an unpublished paper, “A Note on the ‘Technology of Prayer’ and a Reference to a ‘Revolving Book-Case’ in an 11th Century Indian Inscription.”
4. Sir M. Monier-Williams, Buddhism: Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Its Contrast with Christianity (Varanasi, India: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1964), p. 378. In his 1926 The Road to Lamaland, M. L. A. Gompertz remarked, “Some day, when electricity is introduced into Thibet, salvation will become even cheaper than it is at present. An electro-motor prayer-wheel at 3,000 revolutions per minute would put heaven within the reach of all.” See M. L. A. Gompertz, The Road to Lamaland (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926), p. 186.
5. Filippo de Filippi, An Account of Tibet: The Travels of Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia, S.J., 1712–1727, rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Sons, 1937), p. 295.
6. Carl F. Köppen, Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche (1859; reprint, Berlin: Verlag von H. Barsdorf, 1906), p. 59. The translation appears in Sten Konow, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 12 (1925): 1.
7. See William W. Rockhill, The Journey of Friar William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, as Narrated by Himself (London: Hakluyt Society, 1900), pp. 145–46. See also Willem van Ruysbroek, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, trans. Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), pp. 153–54. Elsewhere, Rockhill cites the Latin text: “et dicunt semper hec verba, on man baccam, hoc est, Deus tu nosti.” See William W. Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), p. 326.
8. Cited in Sven Hedin, Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet (London: Macmillan, 1913), 3:307.
9. Ibid., p. 308.
10. See the appendix in Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China, trans. John Ogilby (1669; reprint, Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 40–41. For the French, see Athanasius Kircher, La Chine Illustrée (Geneva: Unicorn Verlag, 1980), PP. 95–96.
A similar description, in which Menipe has a head “that riseth up as a Sugar-loaf, in a monstrous manner,” appears in China and France, or Two Treatises (London, 1676), p. 107.
11. de Filippi, pp. 295–96.
12. See Thomas Astley, New Collection of Voyages and Travels (1747; reprint, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1968), 4:461.
13. See John Trusler, The Habitable World Described (London: Literary Press, 1788), 2:257.
14. Victor Jacquemont, Letters from India, 1829–1832, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (London: Macmillan, 1936), p. 124. A somewhat more colorful translation, in which the mantra is “Oum mani pani” and the translation is “Oh, diamond waterlily!” is in William Henry Knight, Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Tibet (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), p. 374.
/>
15. He goes on to explain, “The mystic triform Deity is in him of the jewel and the lotos (Sangha). But the præsens Divus, whether he be Augustus or Padma-páni, is everything with the many. Hence the notoriety of this mantra, whilst the others are hardly ever heard of, and have thus remained unknown to our travellers.” Hodgson’s article is reprinted in Brian H. Hodgson, Essays on the Languages, Literature and Religion of Nepal and Tibet (New Delhi: Mañjuśrī Publishing House, 1972). The passage quoted appears in the footnote preceded by a † on page 88.
16. Julius von Klaproth, “Explication et origine de la formule bouddhique om maṇi padmè hoûm,” Nouveau Journal Asiatique ou Recueil de Mémoires, d’Extraits et de Notices Relatifs à l’Histoire, à la Philosophie aux Langues, et a la Littèrature des Peuples Orientaux (Paris) 7 (March 1831), p. 188.
17. Ibid., pp. 205–6.
18. W. Schott, “Über den Buddhaismus in Hochasien und in China,” Philologische und historische Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (n.p., 1844), p. 187 n. 3.
19. Ibid., p. 221 n. 2.
20. Carl Friedrich Köppen, Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche (1859; reprint, Berlin: Verlag von H. Barsdorf, 1906), pp. 59–60.
21. Emil Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India (1863; reprint, London: Susil Gupta, 1969), p. 120.
22. Evariste-Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet, Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China 1844–1846, trans. William Hazlitt (reprint, 2 vols, in 1, New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 2:245-46.
23. Joseph Wolff, Travels and Adventures of Rev. Joseph Wolff, D.D., LL.D.(London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1861), p. 194.
24. William Henry Knight, Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Tibet (London: Richard Bentley, 1863), p. 375. The encounter with the corpulent lama is described on pp. 158–61. The prayer-wheel incident is described on p. 200.
25. H. P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings 1877: Isis Unveiled (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), 2:616.
Prisoners of Shangri-La Page 35