By
David Bartley
Tibet. A country forbidden to Europeans. A country that has, for centuries, jealously guarded its secrets from the west. Imagine, then, the excitement that greeted the publication, in November 1956, of an extraordinary book. The Third Eye was the first ever autobiography of a Tibetan lama, and it created a sensation. This is the strange tale of its author: the remarkable man who called himself ‘T. Lobsang Rampa’.
The Third Eye lifted, once and for all, the veil of secrecy that had shrouded this inscrutable land. It spoke of astonishing mystic practices, never before heard nor dreamt of by all but a few hierophants in the West.
The work took its title from an operation, undergone when the author was eight, to open the so-called third eye. ‘A strong looking lama sat behind me and took my head between his knees. The second lama opened a box and removed an instrument made of shining steel … He pressed the instrument to the centre of my forehead, and rotated the handle … There was no particular pain as it penetrated the skin and flesh … Suddenly there was a little “scrunch” and the instrument penetrated the bone.’
A sliver of wood, which had been treated with fire and herbs, was then inserted into the incision. ‘Suddenly there was a blinding flash … like a searing white flame. It diminished, died, and was replaced by spirals of colour, and globules of incandescent smoke.’ The third eye had been opened. ‘The lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said “You are now one of us, Lobsang. For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”’
The operation was a success; a runaway best seller was launched. But what of the book’s provenance? And what of T. Lobsang Rampa, the extraordinary individual who wrote it?
Our story begins two years earlier, in 1954, in London. Visits to the offices of literary agents by Tibetan lamas were, then as now, rather rare. But just such a personage presented himself at the office of Cyrus Brooks, of the Heath Agency. His purpose? To try to interest Brooks in taking on a book he had in the mind, a book on do-it-yourself surgical corset-making. Brooks gently explained to his visitor that works on do-it-yourself corset-making, surgical or otherwise, were notoriously absent from the best seller list.
But his visitor intrigued him. Dr Ku’an-suo, was, it seemed, no ordinary lama. Whilst serving as a medical officer in the Chinese army during the Second World War, he had been captured by the Japanese. Having made good his escape, the intrepid holy man then progressed, in a small fishing boat, to Korea, and slowly made his way, via Moscow and New York, to England. Having picked up a smattering of English in the Japanese prisoner of war camp, he was eager to put his therapeutic knowledge at the disposal of the western world. Brooks was beguiled. Why don’t you, he said, write your own story?
A few weeks later, the first chapters arrived. And what remarkable chapters they were. In addition to the tale of the third eye, they told of the author’s early life as the son of a highborn family in Lhasa, the Forbidden City. Of his astonishing life in a Tibetan lamasery. Of his training in the mystic arts of clairvoyance, levitation, and astral projection. Of intimate colloquies with the Dalai Lama, of encounters with an Abominable Snowman, of marvels and wonders.
The book had by this time been accepted for publication by Secker and Warburg, with £800 advanced against royalties. A tidy sum for those days. (This information, as does much of what follows, comes from the engaging and waspish autobiography of Fredric Warburg, published in 1973, All Authors Are Equal. Under Warburg’s leadership, the firm were the distinguished publishers of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Editors were appointed to oversee the book, schedules were drawn up, work proceeded apace. Only one question remained to be settled: was any of it actually true?
Three publishers, it turned out, had already passed on the book. But, as Warburg reasoned, it was far from unusual for publishers to do so, for any number of reasons. He was heartened when Elliott Macrea, the President of the highly respected American publishing house, E. P. Dutton, threw his hat into the ring and picked up the U.S. rights.
Warburg was convinced that if the book was authentic, he had a lulu of a best seller on his hands. ‘From the beginning there emanated from Dr Kuan’s masterpiece a magical aroma of enchantment.’ (In his chapter on "The Great Lama Mystery," Warburg refers to ‘Dr Kuan’ throughout.) But if it was merely the work of an overheated imagination … not quite as profitable.
Dr Kuan was duly invited in for a meeting of minds at the S&W mother ship. Warburg and his team, though somewhat nervous as to how their auras would appear in the mystical gaze of the savant, were impressed. Dr Kuan, fully-robed, proved to be a self-possessed, rather reticent and rather unworldly individual – no doubt due to the strenuous religious training he had undergone. His appearance, though, was reassuring. ‘Between the eyes, slightly to the left of centre’ Warburg reported, ‘a small purplish-red mark could be seen, almost the size of a collar button, the scar no doubt of that remarkable incision.’ To further get the measure of his man, Fredric Warburg unleashed the most powerful weapon in any publisher’s armoury. He took his author out to lunch.
It did not begin well. In preference to the scampi and rice that Warburg had assumed might suit his palate, Dr Kuan ordered fish and chips. A Tibetan lama eating fish and chips? But, as Dr Kuan explained, ‘I can’t stand rice, I had too much of the horrible stuff in Japanese prison camps.’ He tucked in with gusto. Somewhat shaken, Warburg returned to his office. Not to worry, he was assured by his editor, who had spent a year knocking about India, these gurus were often quite vulgar chaps, unconcerned with the social niceties.
According to his chapter on the Rampa affair, Warburg now decided that there were five possibilities. The work was genuine but embroidered here and there, as with so much autobiography. The work was authentic, but the person he knew as Dr Kuan was a front for the real Tibetan author, in hiding from the vengeful forces of Communist China. The work was partly true, partly made up. Possibility No. 4 was that ‘the manuscript was the work of a brilliant psychopath who had thought himself thoroughly into the mind of a lama, after studying the history of Tibet and the theory and practice of Lamaism.’ No. 5: ‘The manuscript was a fake, written to deceive.’
By early August, 1955, the MS. had been delivered, most of the large advance had been handed over, the first descriptive note for the trade had been written, interest had been piqued and orders from booksellers were already flooding in. As Warburg recalled in his memoir, ‘There could hardly be any going back now. The die was cast.’
Come September, come the first bombshell. Macrae at Dutton had by now sent the chapters for appraisal to three acknowledged experts on Tibet. All were agreed that a series of troubling mistakes had been introduced into the manuscript. Discrepancies in the geography of Lhasa, the author’s native town, for example. Buildings appearing on the wrong side of the city. Certain previously unobserved eccentricities of dress and custom amongst the Tibetans he described. Unusual objects, such as golden candlesticks, not noted before by other, authenticated visitors. Ear-rings worn by people of insufficient rank. A seeming unfamiliarity with the intricacies of Tibetan robes. A mysterious and never before reported Tibetan reverence for cats. Et cetera. One reader thought it possible that the author was Tibetan, but from an outlying province. The others believed that his descriptions of both Tibetan life and religious beliefs were bogus, and to boot, seemingly produced by the time-honoured method of copying them from already published books. Not altogether accurately, alas. Most worryingly of all, perhaps, the author did not seem to be able to write correct Tibetan.
Warburg, rattled, stopped all payments to Dr Kuan. He now made the momentous decision to seek his own expert advice, and determined to ask the Professor of Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Dr David Snellgrove (who died only in 2016) to give his assessment as to the work’s authenticity, or otherwise, on his return from holiday. Meanwhile he summoned Dr Kuan for a showdown.
Loaded for bear, Warburg gave his author both barrels. ‘”You are not a Tibetan lama”, I told him grimly, “and you have no real knowledge of the Tibetan language. Our reports demonstrate that elementary mistakes have been made in the Tibetan script, most if not all of which has been copied, sometimes very clumsily, from readily available sources.”’
The deflated author shuddered, and passed a weary hand across his face. ‘Part of what you say is true’, he finally acknowledged. But he was by no means down and out of the game. ‘”When I left Tibet I served, as you know, as a medical aide with the Chinese armies fighting the Japanese invaders. The Nipponese captured and tortured me. … They had seized Tibetan documents and plans: now they wanted me to translate and explain them!”
“Yes, but what has this got to do with your mistakes in Tibetan?”
“Do you think I would reveal important secrets to the bloodthirsty Japanese? … I imposed a hypnotic block on my knowledge of the Tibetan language. After that I could no longer read or write or understand Tibetan. The secrets were safe. Even today, trying to read or write Tibetan brings on a fearful migraine.”’
Explaining that for the last six years he had been suffering from an incurable disease, had less than two years to live, and wished he’d never even started the wretched book, Dr Kuan left Fredric Warburg to ponder his doubts. Doubts that that were little assuaged when Dr Snellgrove’s assessment came into his possession. ‘The book is a complete fantasy, culled from the work of others’, the professor concluded. ‘The fellow is a complete impostor and has probably never been to Tibet. He should be properly unmasked, as such men are dangerous.’
So much then, for T. Lobsang Rampa’s credentials, and so much for hundreds of orders that had already flooded in from booksellers all around the world. So much, too, for the £500 that had already been advanced to the author.
Warburg now slipped rapidly through the gears of the familiar cycle of grievous loss: denial, anger, despair, pain, and finally a sorrowful resigned acceptance that an important part of one’s life was now gone forever. But then a ray of sunlight penetrated the gloom of the publisher’s mood. ‘Could we not publish it after all,’ he asked himself, ‘while warning the reader that we had been unable to authenticate it?` Why not indeed?
Happily rolling the dice one more time, Warburg decided to approach another expert. This was John Morris, ‘a fine Orientalist… who had travelled widely in the East.’ On this wayfarer Warburg pinned his last tattered hopes.
And he was rewarded for his perseverance. ‘This is a curious mix of fact and fantasy’, Morris reported. ‘There is not the slightest doubt that he was brought up in Tibet from an early age.’ Warburg breathed a sigh of relief. Of the mystical elements, Morris was less convinced, finding them ‘very hard to swallow.’ ‘My own opinion is that the author is some sort of psychopath living in a private world of his own. It is even likely that he has persuaded himself that all this occult nonsense is true.’ But no matter. With this ambiguous imprimatur ringing in his ears, Warburg decided to forge ahead, and devil take the hindmost.
‘I would reject the other experts whose views contradicted each other. We should publish The Third Eye with a ‘beware’ notice, but without suggesting that it was a complete fabrication. It would, I felt certain, become a best seller. As a publisher, I could not reject it. The decision was made. Publish! At least then, I thought, the truth will somehow emerge.’
In November 1956 the book was proudly launched into the world.
‘I am a Tibetan,’ began the author’s preface, ‘one of the few who have reached this strange western world. … Some of my statements, I am told, may not be believed. That is your privilege, but Tibet is a country unknown to the rest of the world. The man who wrote of “the people who rode on turtles in the sea” was laughed to scorn. So were those who had seen “living fossil” fish. But these men were eventually proved to be truthful and accurate. So will I be.’
In a carefully worded Foreword, Secker & Warburg made it clear that they did not entirely share the author’s confidence in this regard. In a masterpiece of equivocation they invited their readers, more or less, to take it or leave it, and make up their own minds as to whether the book was genuine or not.
‘The author must bear – and willingly bears – a sole responsibility for the statements made in this book. We may feel that here and there he exceeds the bounds of Western credulity … None the less the publishers believe that The Third Eye is in its essence an authentic account of a Tibetan boy in his family and lamasery … Anyone who differs from us will, we believe, at least agree that the author is endowed to an exceptional degree with narrative skill and the power to evoke scenes and characters of absorbing and unique interest.’
But of course the publishers, they assured the reading public, had not placed the book on the shelves without due diligence, and plenty of it. ‘In an attempt to obtain confirmation of the author’s statements the Publishers submitted the MS. to nearly twenty readers, all persons of intelligence and experience, some with special knowledge of the subject. Their opinions were so contradictory that no positive result emerged. Some questioned the accuracy of one section, some of another; what was doubted by one expert was accepted unquestioningly by another. Anyway, the Publishers asked themselves, was there any expert who had undergone the training of the Tibetan lama in its most developed forms? Was there one who had been brought up in a Tibetan family? (Mysteriously this caveat lector was only included in the first two editions; thereafter it disappeared.)
‘Some with special knowledge of the subject’ (my italics.)… ‘Their opinions were so contradictory that no positive result emerged.’ This is a little disingenuous. As far as I can ascertain, from this distance in time – and of course this may simply be an unhappy coincidence – every single person who could be regarded as an expert in Tibet in any meaningful way had pronounced the book bogus. Only readers – like John Morris – who had not been to Tibet, and never claimed to have done, were willing to grant it even a grudging credence. David Snellgrove was one of the leading scholars of Tibet in the western world, and he was utterly damning of the MS. And only a small handful of Europeans alive had actually visited the country before 1950, at which point it had become terra incognita. Three in particular were to play a starring role in the subsequent history of The Third Eye. One was Marco Pallis, a wealthy Anglo-Greek connoisseur and amateur violist, who had travelled widely through Tibet, and published an acclaimed book about his experiences. Another was Heinrich Harrer, the author of the famous Seven Years of Tibet, published in 1952. (He and a party of German mountaineers had been stranded in India when war broke out. Having escaped from a British POW camp, Harrer and a companion subsequently made their way to Lhasa.) Harrer had gone on to tutor the present Dalai Lama in English.
The last in this significant triumvirate of Tibetan experts was Hugh E. Richardson, a Scottish scholar-diplomat who had been our first, and last ‘Man in Lhasa’. (From 1936 to 1940, and again from 1946 to 1950. At which point, to his immense dismay, His Majesty’s government had pretty much washed its hands of Tibet’s problems with her Chinese aggressors.) He and Harrer had become close friends.
I met Hugh Richardson in the early 1990s – a spry, charming, patrician presence, then in his late 80s, living only a fairway or two’s distance from the Royal and Ancient golf course at St Andrews (he had introduced the game to Tibet in the 1940s, albeit with mixed results). Still sharp as a tack and blessed with extremely good ‘recall’, still wryly despairing of the fact that The Third Eye – ‘an impudent fake’ – had been published at all, he very kindly provided me with copies of his own files on the affair. Hugh Richardson was one of the three outside experts that E. P. Dutton (but not Secker & Warburg) had approached. Indeed it was his comprehensive trashing of the manuscript that was the main spur for the American publisher’s dropping out. (To be replaced by Doubleday.)
Richardson’s documents still in my possession include two of the three pages of closely typed, rather exasperated notes sent to him by Harrer back in the late 1950s – the first page was lost. Harrer may also have been approached by the assiduous E. P. Dutton, he may have been sent the MS by Richardson himself, or he may have been commenting on the published book. Either way, his annotations are far from a ringing endorsement.
‘Ignorance as he shows on the last two pages,’ Harrer writes, having reached page 91, ‘make me doubt that the author is even a Tibetan.’ Between pages 76 and 255, which his surviving notes cover, he identifies some 45 mistakes in Tibetan geography, language, life and manners. (Had he seen the photograph on the back cover of the published book, Harrer may also have been surprised to see that the author would seem to be wearing the outer part of his robes the wrong way round. But perhaps that was a printing error.)
In his personal note to Richardson Heinrich Harrer mentions that he approached Secker & Warburg, asking to meet T. Lobsang Rampa and discuss the book with him. In Tibetan. The guru, however, proved tricky to pin down. He was meditating and couldn’t be disturbed, Harrer was told. On pressing further, the news was conveyed that Dr Kuan was, reportedly, in Canada.
Despite these trifling cavils the reviews – on the whole – were highly favourable. The Times Literary Supplement thought that the book was a ‘work of art’. The Observer pronounced it ‘extraordinary and exciting’ while the New Statesman congratulated the author ‘for having written a book in a language not his own.’
The very perception, it might be added, that had rather baffled some of the experts who were willing to believe that the book was – broadly – authentic. Just how, in a few short months in a Japanese POW camp, had the author managed to acquire such a grasp, not just of correct English (in marked contrast to his Tibetan), but of the kind of patois familiar to fans of Billy Bunter and his oafish chums in the Greyfriars Remove?
‘A stunning crash – I thought my head had split – and the sound of voices. “New boy. One of the high born. Come on, let’s scrag him!” … There was a sudden loud bellow. “What’s going on here?” A frightened whisper: “Oh! It’s old Rattlebones on the prowl.” … The Master of the Acolytes reached down and dragged me to my feet by my pigtail… “You one of the future leaders? Bah! Take that, and that!” (And what of the traces some observers – including a BBC producer – claimed to have noticed, in Dr Kuan’s speech, of a west country accent?)
There were some nay-sayers amongst the reviews, it’s true. Hugh Richardson slaughtered the book for the Telegraph. ‘Anyone who has lived in Tibet will feel after reading a few pages of “The Third Eye” that its author is certainly not a Tibetan.’… ‘If I am mistaken I should be happy to make amends to the author in person and in Tibetan.’ But as we’ve seen, such a conversation, with Pallis, Harrer or Richardson could not, owing to Dr Kuan’s harrowing experiences while a prisoner of the Japanese, be possible.
No matter. The Third Eye was a huge success. Reprint after reprint followed. By the end of 1957 Secker and Warburg had shifted more than 45,000 copies, in hardback. The book was translated into several languages. (Heinrich Harrer’s review of the German language edition was so scathing that its publisher threatened to sue him.) Corgi soon issued a paperback, which too became a best-seller. As Fredric Warburg remembered concluding at the time, ‘Another gamble had succeeded. Or had it?’
No. Just as the clouds gather over the jagged peaks of the Himalayas in the darkening twilight, so now a storm was rolling and tumbling towards the London offices of Secker and Warburg. For not everybody was as charmed with T. Lobsang Rampa as were the majority of the reviewers.
On the last day of January 1958 Fredric Warburg took a call from Hugh Medlicott, a reporter from the Daily Mail. ‘Would it surprise you to know’ he asked, ‘that your Tibetan lama is a hoaxer?’ Warburg’s heart, he tell us, skipped a beat. But he rose magnificently to the challenge. ‘It’s no surprise to me at all.’ The next day’s headline, on February 1st, 1958, did not beat about the bush. ‘THIRD EYE LAMA EXPOSED AS FAKE.’
Unbeknownst to Warburg, Dr Kuan had by now relocated to Howth, the hill overlooking Dublin Bay. Here he was soon to be besieged by the world’s press. For T. Lobsang Rampa, alias Dr Ku’an-suo possessed, it seemed, an unusual background for a Tibetan lama, unique even amongst that remarkable body of men. He had, in fact, been born Cyril Henry Hoskin, in Plympton, Devon, in 1910, the son of a plumber. Later, he had moved to Nottinghamshire, there to work in a surgical goods factory. In the early years of the war he took himself to Thames Ditton, Surrey, and enrolled as the clerk of a correspondence school. And there the man who became Rampa began to emerge.
In 1947, neighbours testified, Dr Ku’an-suo, as Hoskin now styled himself, shaved his head, grew a beard, adopted oriental dress, and was occasionally to be seen taking his cat for a walk on a lead. In the early 1950s he was to be found running an unsuccessful book, surgical corset and women’s clothing shop in Ladbroke Grove. But how had Dr Kuan only now come to be exposed?
He had, it seemed, acquired a disciple early in 1957. This was Sheelagh Rouse, described in the press as a ‘socialite’ (in 1950s Britain this was considered an occupation) and ‘a well-known Mayfair party-goer’. She had, at the age of 25, fallen under the savant’s spell, and left her husband and three young children in order to sit at the guru’s feet, there to drink freely from the cup of oriental wisdom. Her now-estranged parents had approached Scotland Yard, and an interview with Dr Kuan – presumably under caution – had been conducted. He had, it turned out, no passport, of any kind. He could neither have entered, nor indeed have left the UK. But as no crime had been committed – there was nothing in the Constable’s Powers of Arrest and Charges that covered impersonating a Tibetan lama, and of course Mrs Rouse was over 21 – the police took no further action.
Equally concerned about Dr Kuan’s activities were Messers Pallis, Harrer and Richardson. Certain that the man Rampa was an egregious fraud, still smarting from the fact that Secker and Warburg had brushed aside their suspicions, they had set out to prove them. Into the story, then, comes Clifford Burgess, a private detective from Liverpool, ably assisted by his ‘pretty young assistant’. Whether he was employed by Sheelagh Rouse’s wealthy parents – which they strongly denied to the press – or whether by Marco Pallis, which became the official version, isn’t clear. Hugh Richardson indicated to me that Mrs Rouse’s parents had approached the Tibetan experts to seek their help in unmasking the bogus lama (as the press now liked to call him), presumably in the hope that in doing so their daughter might come to her senses. (She never did.) Over three weeks, travelling the length and breadth of the country, taking scores of statements, the shamus began to piece together a rather different picture of the author of The Third Eye to that offered by the mystic himself.
When the story broke in the newspapers, Dr Kuan was holed up in Howth in the company of his wife, his secretary, Mrs Rouse, and his two cats. He had retired to bed, announcing that he was now in the grip of both heart disease and terminal cancer, with but a short time to live. The unsatisfactory auras of the gentlemen of the press, he added, who were regularly managing to sneak into the house, were making him iller still.
Finally, after a day of stalemate, Mrs Kuan herself came out to break the deadlock. ‘About the middle of 1949,’ she told the waiting reporters, “my husband, after a slight accident, with apparent concussion and headaches, was no longer the same man. For some weeks he seemed to be very vague about many things, and when I discussed an event of the past with him he had no recollection of it. Instead he spoke of life in a lamasery, of experiences in the war, prison camp life and Japanese torture.’ Bang went an appearance on Mr & Mrs.
Soon a further clarification, in the form of a communiqué from Dr Kuan himself, was issued to the impatient throng. Hoskin, the reporters were now told, had merely adopted the name of Dr Kuan so as to shield the real personage behind the book, who was even now living in fear of Communist reprisals. Then Fredric Warburg attempted to shed light on the matter, in an article he wrote for the Daily Express. In it, while generously acknowledging that the Hoskin angle was an unwelcome development, he concluded, ‘But is the truth, the whole truth out? How could the man alleged to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, known to me as Dr Kuan, write a book which thrilled the world?’ How indeed? ‘Why did he choose this subject? How did he gain the material? …. Was he perhaps the mouthpiece of a true lama, as some have alleged?’
To get to the bottom of the matter once and for all, Warburg sent one of his employees, Eric Newby, to beard the lama in his lair. Newby would, of course, later the very same year publish his own excellent, but in this case true account of an Asiatic experience – A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Installing himself with a tape recorder at the ailing author’s bedside, Newby was able, finally, to set down for posterity the true facts behind this baffling turn of events. (They were later issued as a statement to the press by the guru himself, How I Became A Tibetan. A yet fuller account was offered in his astonishing fourth book, The Rampa Story.)
It now turned out that Madam Kuan’s mention of the ‘slight accident’ that had befallen her husband in 1949 was something of an understatement. While climbing a tree in his garden at Thames Ditton, in order to photograph a young owl, Mr Hoskin had, it appears, overreached himself (perhaps not for the last time) and fallen to the ground.
’There was a blinding pain, and a flash, as if of coloured lightning, and all went black. I do not know how long I lay a crumpled inert mass beneath the tree but quite suddenly I became aware that I was disengaging myself from the physical body … Then a sudden movement, the only movement in this strange world of mine, attracted my eye, and I nearly screamed, or should have screamed if I had had a voice. Approaching me across the grass was the figure of a Tibetan lama dressed in the saffron robe of the High Order.’ The lama, after a certain amount of karmic horse-trading, grasped Hoskin’s astral form, severed the silver cord connecting it to the world of the spirits and entered his earthly body.
Cyril Henry Hoskin, then, simply became T. Lobsang Rampa. Or perhaps it was the other way round. At any rate, the troubling question of how the earthly husk of Hoskin had written an account of a country in which it had never been present, at least in any conventional corporeal sense, was at last cleared up in a satisfactory manner.
For certainly, this explanation didn’t harm The Third Eye’s’ sales. Far from it. Another 10,000 hardbacks were sold after Rampa furnished the true story of his remarkable transubstantiation. Secker & Warburg, indeed, received letters from several readers who had read sarcastic press accounts of the supposed hoax and angrily claimed to have had undergone the exact same operation themselves, and, what’s more, to be in possession of fully functioning third eyes.
The book continued to sell. As Fredric Warburg remarked in his 1973 memoir, ‘It was one of the most profitable books we ever published.’ The Corgi paperback sold upwards of 300,000 copies. (And that may be a conservative estimate). And while he never quite re-captured his early glittering success, T. Lobsang Rampa went on to write a further nineteen books, all of an intoxicatingly esoteric bent. One of which was dictated to him by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers. (Whether the animal was also fronting for another spiritual presence is not entirely clear.) None of them, strangely, was published by Secker & Warburg.
The most interesting of the subsequent works was My Visit To Venus, written (it seems) in 1957 but only published, by other hands, ten years later. And, eventually acknowledged by Rampa as the real McCoy after insisting on a couple of alterations. This book told of his thrilling journey in a spaceship, during which he was able to meet what he described as the masters of several other planets. It’s a surprise that the publishers of The Third Eye passed over this extraordinary tale, as it would surely only have helped to cement the guru’s mystic credentials.
Not everyone, it’s true, took all these works in the serious spirit in which they were undoubtedly offered. In a cruel and tasteless jibe at the savant’s expense, the Telegraph, on the occasion of the publication of Rampa’s third book, in 1959, Doctor from Lhasa, looked forward to a series of future works along the lines of the then highly popular ‘Doctor’ novels of Richard Gordon, portrayed on screen by Dirk Bogarde. ‘Lama in the House, Lama at Sea, Lama in Love’, et cetera. They were not forthcoming.
Despite his coronary thrombosis and non-specific cancer, Rampa/Kuan/Hoskin managed to struggle on for a further 23 years after the press frenzy at Howth, before shuffling off (at least) his mortal coil at the respectable age of 70, in 1981. Sheelagh Rouse having remained his devoted helpmeet and secretary the whole time.
***
Nothing dates quite like a fake. The poems of the dodgy Gaelic bard Ossian, the Vermeer knock-offs of Van Meegeren, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan … within a few years they become, for most observers at least, glaringly obvious frauds, and we wonder how anyone was ever taken in. The Third Eye, of course, benefited from the clue afforded us by the author himself in his own preface back in 1956: ‘Tibet is a country unknown to the rest of the world’. And as Fredric Warburg finally asked himself, at the end of his chapter on The Great Lama Mystery, ‘Why should Dr K. [Secker & Warburg were the English publishers of Kafka], who had declared himself Chinese, pose to us as a Tibetan? Simply that too much was known about China and so little about Tibet.’ A most illuminating perception.
And yet, to be fair, Warburg had on several occasions begged Dr Kuan, if this be the case, to admit that he had made the book up. He clearly had a great gift for imaginative writing. The author adamantly refused to agree that the work was a fiction. There seems no reason, indeed, to doubt that he himself ever wavered in his belief in the essential veracity of his work.
He was not alone. The Third Eye, a preposterous mash-up of sub-Blavatskian hogwash, along with Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, a riff on The Tibetan Book of The Dead, went on to become an Ur-text of the burgeoning hippy movement of the mid 1960s. Before LSD took over as a chemical version of the ‘third eye’ karmic surgery, with its short cut to instant satori.
Lobsang Rampa/Cyril Henry Hoskin remains to this day a revered figure amongst some devotees of the occult arts. He is, to take a quote pretty much at random from the web, ‘a true mystic and trailblazer of the New Age.’ But let us leave the last word to T. Lobsang Rampa himself, and his wise exhortation in The Third Eye – a formulation of which Schopenhauer himself would surely have been proud – ‘Leave this, the World of Illusion, and enter into the Greater Reality.’ Indeed.
Credits: This article originally appeared in 2016 online at the David Bartley blog (which now seems to have gone missing).
