LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA

Born Ernst Lothar Hoffman, Lama Anagarika Govinda (May 17, 1898–January 14, 1985), was the founder of the order of the Arya Maitreya Mandala and a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.  The son of a German father and a Bolivian mother, he was born in Waldheim, Germany.  His family, who owned silver mines in South America as well as a cigar factory, was quite well to do.

After spending two years in the German army during World War I, he contracted tuberculosis and was discharged.  He briefly studied philosophy and archeology at Freiburg University and then, from 1920 until 1928, lived in an international art colony on Capri in Italy.   There he worked as an abstract painter and a poet, receiving some money from his family.  He conducted archeological research in Naples and Cagliari and studied tumuli, that is, burial mounds, in the Mediterranean, including North Africa.   Still intending to earn a doctorate, he eventually abandoned the ambition when he became interested in Buddhism and meditation.

He then moved to Sri Lanka where he became a Buddhist monk of the Theravada tradition.  Tibetan Buddhism, though, he was quite critical of from the start, considering it the home of demons.  Indeed, in 1931 he went to a conference in Darjeeling to convert Tibetans to a more pure form of Buddhism.  In nearby Sikkim, however, he met the Tibetan teacher Tomo Geshe Rimpoche (1866–1936) who completely turned around Govinda's views.  From then on he embraced the Tibetan form of Buddhism.

After founding his order in 1933, he lived a secluded life for three decades at Crank's Ridge outside Almora in northern India.  From there he undertook travels through the remotest areas of Tibet, where he made a large numbers of paintings, drawings and photographs.  He described these travels in his book The Way of the White Clouds. 

Due to his German birth, Govinda was interned by the British army during World War II.  In 1947 he married a Persian-speaking photographer Li Gotami (original name Ratti Petit).   In the 1960s he began travelling around the world to lecture on Buddhism, settling, in his twilight years, in the San Francisco Bay, where he was hosted for a time by Alan Watts.  He died in Mill Valley, California.