MADAME ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Alexandra David-Neel (1869-1969) was a convert to the Tibetan form of Buddhism. She spent some thirty years in Asia after completing studies in Sanskrit at the Sorbonne and in Belgium. As a child she was extremely precocious, interested in oriental and occult subjects. She wanted "to go beyond the garden gate in search of the Unknown." One of her many trips took her from India to China across vast mountain passes and plateaus no European had seen previously. She went to Tibet to do research in the various forms of religion that became lamaism. Lamaism borrowed doctrinal and ritualistic elements from Bon, tantrism, shamanism, and other Altaic and northern religions that had infiltrated Tibet over the centuries. Madame David-Neel's visit to Tibet included trips to Lhasa and Shigatse, normally barred to foreigners, and she was permitted to interview both the Dalai and Tashi Lamas. Her stay grew to fourteen years, two of which were spent in a cave in the Tibetan side of the Himalayas where she lived as a hermit. As a professed Buddhist, she enjoyed many of the psychic experiences--siddhis--she described in her writings, though she usually spoke of them in third-person terms. Madame David-Neel spoke all of the dialects of Tibetan. Among her seventeen books, translated into many languages including English, the three most famous are My Journey to Lhasa, Initiation and Initiates in Tibet, and, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, also known as With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. The latter is probably her most famous work. Her frequent traveling companion, a young Tibetan monk named Yongden, she adopted as her son. Madame David-Neel spent her last years at her own lamasery, Samten Dzong, at Digne in France's Maritime Alps, where she died at the age of one hundred.

THE BARDO THODOL OR THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

Detailed accounts of the kinds of experiences natural to the post-death state--brought back, according to Tibetan legend, by one or more highly-trained lamas who "died" and later returned to report their findings--have been kept for centuries in the sacred lore of Tibetan Buddhism, and especially in the Bardo Thodol or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As recorded by Dr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz and Tibetan scholar and linguist Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the "forty-nine symbolic days" spent by the psyche on the Bardo plane, afford an interesting comparison with the forty-nine days of testing common to world teachers like Jesus in the desert and the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. There are also a number of provocative connections with the doctrine of purgatory, certain long-neglected Christian books on the art of dying, the ancient Greek mystery rites and even more recent records kept by the British Society for Psychic Research and other accredited groups investigating so-called "spiritualism." The Tibetan Buddhist "science of dying" stresses, however, with typical Buddhist psychological insight, the reminder that all the Bardo experiences--similar to dreams and nightmares--are in reality merely the dead man's own thought forms. The phenomena he experiences in the after-death state are related to his own development, tastes, habits, desires and thoughts during his lifetime. "The deceased human being," writes Dr. Evans-Wentz, "becomes the sole spectator of a marvelous panorama of hallucinatory visions; each seed of thought in his consciousness-content karmically revives, and he, like a wonder-struck child watching moving pictures cast upon a screen, looks on." He is unaware, though, of the source of the phenomena unless he has been previously prepared, through training and contemplative exercises, to understand the "non-reality of what he sees." It is understood, of course, that not all human beings will experience exactly the same phenomena in the after-death state any more than the living do in their real life or in their dreams. Reminiscent here is the widespread belief that a drowning person relives his whole life in mere seconds.

DR. W.Y. EVANS-WENTZ AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (February 2, 1878 – July 17, 1965) was an anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism. He was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and as a teenager read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy. He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats. He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford. There he adopted the form Evans-Wentz for his name. He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt and later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India. He reached Darjeeling in 1919 where he had first-hand access to Tibetan religious texts.

Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Evans-Wentz credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes, the actual translation of the texts performed by Tibetan Buddhists. The principal translator was Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (1868–1922), a teacher of English at the Maharaja's Boy's School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe.

Evans-Wentz was a practitioner of the religions he studied. He became Dawa-Samdup's "disciple," his own term for it, and wore robes and ate a simple vegetarian diet. He met Ramana Maharshi, the notable Hindu sage, in 1935, and meant to settle permanently in India, but returned to the U.S. when World War II compelled him to do so. He passed his final twenty-three years in San Diego, and provided financial support to the Maha Bodhi Society, Self-Realization Fellowship, and the Theosophical Society. His Tibetan Book of the Dead was read at his funeral.

RENUNCIATION AND AUSTERITY

In his book My Guru and His Disciple, Christopher Isherwood describes a situation where spiritual lecturer Gerald Heard, an early follower of Swami Prabhavananda, decided to resign his association with the Swami's Vedanta Society of Southern California. His reason for doing so, as Heard stated in a letter to Prabhavananda, was that the Swami's way of life there in California violated the monastic standards of austerity. It was too social, too comfortable, too relaxed. This was to say, the Swami had Hindu notions of hospitality and often invited guests to lunch--some of them not even devotees, but just their relatives or friends. Appetizing meals were served--that is, if one liked curry--and they were not necessarily vegetarian. The Swami had a car at his disposal. He chain-smoked, which set a bad example for those who were struggling with their own addictions. The women, nuns, waited on him hand and foot and he accepted their service as a matter of course. His relations with them--though doubtless absolutely innocent--could easily cause misunderstandings and suspicions among outsiders. For, after all, he WAS the only male in a household of females.

Even if Heard's letter was tactfully worded, it hurt Pravananda's feelings deeply and he later answered Heard indirectly in an article entitled "Renunciation and Austerity," which he wrote for the Vedanta Society magazine. It read in part, "You would identify the life of renunciation with a life of poverty and discomfort and you would say that if a spiritual teacher lives in comfort and in a plentiful household he is inevitably not living the consecrated life. Your view is too simple. A man of true renunciation concerns himself neither with poverty nor with riches. If the poor man hugs his few trivial possessions, he is as much attached and as much a worldly man as the rich man. Only, the poor man is worse off--because of his envy. Mere outward austerity is a degenerate form of ritualism. A spiritual soul never makes any demonstration of his renunciation. . . ."

According to Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, another of Prabhavananda's early followers, was distressed over this rift. It was a disaster, Huxley said, when two sincere practitioners of the spiritual life fell out with each other--especially since there were so few of them. "Judge not that ye be not judged," he murmured to himself several times--which suggested that he thought Heard was wrong. Heard had his own style which others might well disagree with too, he seemed to be saying; Heard could be seen as too much of a "life-hater," as Isherwood put it, and a task master.

This, however, was not the end of the Prabhavananda and Heard relationship. The spiritual college that the latter went on to build in the Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles was not as successful as Heard had hoped, resulting in his turning it over to the the Swami and the Vedanta Society with whom it had a brighter future, ironically as a monastery.