The Upper-Middle Way

In the 1960s, a wacky Scotsman calling himself Tues day Lobsang Rampa began marketing Tibet. Claiming to be possessed by a disembodied Tibetan lama, Rampa wrote a series of books about life in Lhasa. He described flying monks, a maze of secret passageways under the Potala Palace, and an arcane Tibetan surgical operation which involved making an incision in the forehead and removing the patient's pineal gland. This, he explained, was done in order to open up the 'third eye' which made the Tibetan lamas clairvoyant.

Completely loopy, you say? Of course he was. But his pulp fiction masterpieces like The Third Eye sold by the millions. And things have only moved on since. Today, the number of books on the "land of snows" and its national religion have multiplied to the point where entire bookstore sections are devoted to it. And with musicians like Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys and Hollywood luminaries Richard Gere, Whoopi Goldberg and Uma Thurman (to name a few) serving as spokespersons for Tibetan Buddhism/independence, Tibet has been hot for a while.

While one can hardly doubt the contribution that the Dalai Lama and other lamas have made to spiritualism in the 20th century, the problem is that the Rampaesque flakiness continues. Consider the following dialogue witnessed in Baudha at the heart of Kathmandu's Tibetan quarter. The setting is one of the larger monasteries where an incarnate lama or rinpoche, precious one, is teaching his Western disciples: