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.