Lobsang Rampa: The Mystery of the Three-Eyed Lama

A decade after this poem was written, many people came to believe in a
three-Eye Lama. A guiding light to spiritual seekers, an inspiration to
scholars, an acclaimed war hero, a seer who saw auras: but who was Lobsang
Rampa?
A one-L Lama, hes a priest,
A two-L Llama, hes a beast
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isnt any three-L Lllama
- Ogden Nash, 1945

In 1956, the British firm Secker & Warburg published The Third Eye: The
Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama. It remains in print to this day, the bestselling book about Tibetan Buddhism.
The Third Eye introduced Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism to hundreds of thousands
of readers in Europe and America in the 1950s and 60s. Over the last four
decades, readers around the world have discovered the book in sidewalk
kiosks, airport newsstands, and university bookstores. It is a work that has
evoked sympathy for the plight of Tibet under Communist occupation and even
inspired some to become Tibetologists, professional scholars of Tibet. Its author
was Lobsang Rampa, the son of one of the leading members of the Thirteenth
Dalai Lamas government.
Rampa had spent his earliest years as a schoolboy in Lhasa. He studied
Tibetan, Chinese, and the art of carving wood for printing blocks. He enjoyed
kite-flying, the national sport of Tibet, whose season began on the first day of
autumn, signaled when a single kite rose from the Potala, the great palace of
the Dalai Lama. On Rampas birthday, astrologers had predicted an eventful
future for the child: A boy of seven to enter a lamasery, after a hard feat of
endurance, and there to be trained as a priest-surgeon. To suffer great
hardships, to leave the homeland, and go among strange people. To lose all
and have to start again, and eventually to succeed.
Young Lobsang was admitted to the Temple of Tibetan Medicine, where he
underwent a rigorous course of study that emphasized mathematics and
memorization of the Buddhist scriptures. Proving himself an excellent student,
he was chosen to receive the esoteric teachings and serve as a repository of
knowledge against the prophesied day when Tibet would fall under an alien
cloud. Under the tutelage of the great Lama Mingyar Dondup, he began a

period of intensive training designed to impart in a few years what a lama

would normally learn over the course of a lifetime. In order to further his
instruction by hypnotic methods, Mingyar Dondup prescribed a surgical
procedure to channel the power of clairvoyance.
The operation was performed on the boys eighth birthday. A hole was drilled in
his skull to create another eyea Third Eye that allowed him to see auras. After
the surgery, he was summoned to the Potala, where he met privately with the
Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Lobsang was reminded of the great work that lay before
him in preserving the wisdom of Tibet for the world.
Shortly after his twelfth birthday, Lobsang passed a punishing round of
examinations and was certified as a medical priest. On an expedition in search
of medicinal herbs, he stopped at a monastery where the monks built box kites
large enough to bear the weight of an adult. Lobsang made several flights in
such kites, and later suggested design modifications to improve their
airworthiness to the monasterys Kite Master.
Following a further series of examinations on his sixteenth birthday, the young
monk was promoted to the rank of lama. He studied anatomy with the Body
Breakers, the disposers of the dead who chop up corpses and feed them to
vultures. When he had passed initiation as an abbot, he was again summoned
by the Dalai Lama, who now instructed him to leave Tibet immediately and go
to China, saying:

The ways of foreigners are strange and not to be accounted for. As I told you
once before, they believe only that which they can do, only that which can be
tested in their Rooms of Science. Yet the greatest Science of all, the Science of
the Overself, they leave untouched. That is your Path, the Path you chose
before you came to this Life.

The Third Eye ends with Lobsang Rampa looking back for the last time at the
Potala, where a solitary kite is flying.

I recently used The Third Eye in a seminar for first-year undergraduates at the
University of Michigan. The students were unanimous in their praise of the
book. They judged it more realistic than anything they had previously read
about Tibet, appreciating the detail about what Tibet was really like. Many of
the things they had read about seemed strange until then; these things
seemed more reasonable when placed within the context of a lamas life.

It was not that the things Rampa described were not strange; it was that they
were so strange that they could not possibly have been concocted. . . .

But were there really man-bearing kites in Tibet? Did priests really only ride
white horses? Did cats really guard the temple jewels? Are the priests in Tibet
vegetarian? Did they really perform the operation of the Third Eye?

Unfortunately, perhaps, the answer to each of these questions is No.

Publisher Fredric J. Warburg had first met the shaven-headed and bearded
author at the presss offices in London. The lama had introduced himself in
fluent English. He had read Warburgs palm, correctly told him his age, and
informed him that his firm was the karmically appropriate one for his book. In
spite of this assurance, Warburg retained doubts about the manuscripts
antecedents. He sent copies to almost twenty Tibet experts, among them
several who had lived in Lhasa during the period covered in the book. None had
ever heard of Lobsang Rampa or Lama Mingyar Dondup.
On a subsequent occasion, Warburg greeted the lama with a foreign phrase,
only to receive a blank look in return. When informed that he had been
addressed with the Tibetan for Did you have a pleasant journey? Rampa fell
to the floor in apparent agony, rising to explain that during the war, in order to
prevent himself from divulging secrets to the Japanese, he had hypnotically
blocked his own knowledge of Eastern languages. To that day, the sound of his
native tongue was enough to reinflict their tortures. When Warburg confronted
Rampa with the scholars objections, offering him the option of publishing the
book as a work of fiction, Rampa continued to insist that it was entirely factual.
Secker & Warburg then issued the book with a preface that began, The
autobiographical account of the experiences of a Tibetan lama is such an
exceptional document that it is difficult to establish its authenticity
This is a shameless book, was the opening line of Tibet scholar David
Snellgroves review. Heinrich Harrer, who had recently spent seven years in
Tibet, wrote a review so scathing that the books German publisher threatened
a libel suit. Tibetologist Hugh Richardson, whose earlier report on the
manuscript had induced the publishing house of E. P. Dutton to turn Rampa
down, had this to say in the Daily Telegraph:

There are innumerable wild inaccuracies about Tibetan life and manners which
give the impression of Western suburbia playing charades.
The samples of the Tibetan language betray ignorance of both colloquial and
literary forms, there is a series of wholly un-Tibetan obsessions with cruelty,
fuss and bustle, and, strangely, with cats . . . .
. . . One can regard only as indifferent juvenile fiction the catchpenny
accoutrements of magic and mystery: the surgical opening of the third eye;
the man-lifting kites; the Abominable Snowman; the Shangri-la valley and eerie
goings-on in caverns below the Potala.

Rampas book sold 300,000 copies in the first eighteen months after
publication. It went through nine hardback printings in two years in the U.K.
alone. When scholars asked for a chance to speak with the author, Warburg
refused.
But events were closing in on the mysterious lama. In January 1957, Scotland
Yard asked him to present a Tibetan passport or a residence permit. Rampa
moved to Ireland. One year later, the scholars retained the services of Clifford
Burgess, a leading Liverpool private detective.
Burgesss report, when it came in, was terse. Lama Lobsang Rampa of Tibet, he
determined after one month of inquiries, was none other than Cyril Henry
Hoskin, a native of Plympton, Devonshire, the son of the village plumber and a
high school dropout.
According to the detective, Hoskin had been in London ever since moving there
in 1940 and finding work at a surgical fittings manufacturer. Later the same
year, he moved on to a position as a clerk at a correspondence school. During
his time with this firm, Burgess stated, He became more and more peculiar in
his manner, and among many strange things he did was(1) he used to take
his cat out for walks on a lead (2) during this period he began to call himself
KUAN-SUO and he had all the hair shaved off his head. Burgess found it more
difficult to account for the years 1950 through 1953, noting only that during
this period Hoskin had been seen by one acquaintance to whom he represented
himself as a criminal and accident photographer. He resurfaced in 1954 as a
resident of the London neighborhood of Bayswater under the name of Dr. KuanSuo.
The report on Cyril Hoskin concluded with this statement: Until he went to live
in Dublin there is no evidence of his ever having left the British Isles.
Elsewhere, the detective related that after changing his name, the former
Hoskin had written a rhyme to his supervisor at the correspondence school:

You may wonder why I go on so/But will you please remember I am Kuan Suo.
He was fired shortly thereafter, and some time later approached a literary
agent with two manuscripts, one on surgical fittingsotherwise known as
corsetsand one on Tibet, to be called The Third Eye.
The FULL truth about the Bogus Lama, screamed the Daily Express. During
the first week of February 1958, the Bogus Lama was the main story in the
British press. When Cyril Hoskin was finally located in Dublin, he refused to
meet with the press on doctors orders because his heart was too weak. He
sent word through his wife, however, that he had written the book for the real
Dr. Kuan, a Tibetan whose family was in hiding from the Chinese Communists
and whose whereabouts could therefore not be revealed. But another
explanation was soon provided, both fuller and more mysterious.
eye feature image 3 winter 1998When The Third Eye was reprinted, it
contained A Statement by the Author that began, In the East it is commonly
acknowledged that the stronger mind can take possession of another body. It
went on to recount that in late 1947, Hoskin had felt a strange and irresistible
compulsion to adopt Eastern ways of living. He legally changed his name and
quit his job. In June 1949, he suffered a concussion when he fell out of a tree
trying to photograph a bird. When he regained consciousness, he was not
himself. His memories of his life as an Englishman had completely vanished,
replaced by full memories of the life of a Tibetan from babyhood onward.
Over the next four years, the author further addressed the question of just how
a Tibetan lamas spirit came to inhabit the body of an English high school
dropout. The account was extensive enough to occupy two more books.
According to Doctor from Lhasa, the sequel to The Third Eye, Lobsang Rampa
departed Tibet for China, where he enrolled in a medical college. Putting his
skills at both healing and flying to good use, he enlisted in the war against
Japan as the pilot of an air ambulance. Shot down, Rampa ended up in a prison
camp near Hiroshima. On the day the bomb was dropped, he escaped and stole
a fishing boat, drifting into the Sea of Japan.
The Rampa Story opens fifteen years later, in 1960. In Tibet, the lamas had
located a remote network of caves and tunnels through astral exploration. They
were engaged in transporting the most sacred artifacts of the faith to this new,
secret site. Though by this point Lobsang Rampa was himself physically
established in Canada, he continued to keep in touch with his homeland via
telepathy. The lamas were thus able to inform him of his next task: to write a
book stressing one theme, that one person can take over the body of another,
with the latter persons full consent.
Rampa recounted that the fishing boat had eventually run aground on the
Asian mainland, near Russian army lines. After being arrested and tortured by

the Communists, he was released, but was seriously injured in a road accident.
His soul was transported to a world beyond the astral to recuperate. There he
met the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who urged him to return to earth and continue
his work. The problem was that his body was in deplorable condition.
The Inmost One explained: We have located a body in the land of England, the
owner of which is most anxious to leave. His aura has a fundamental harmonic
of yours. Later, if conditions necessitate it, you can take over his body. He
cautioned his disciple: You will return to hardship, misunderstanding, disbelief,
and actual hatred, for there is a force of evil which tries to prevent all that is
good in connection with human evolution.

Rampa communicated astrally with his host-to-be. The Englishman confided

that he hated life in Britain because of the favoritism of the class system, but
had always had an interest in Tibet and the Far East. He was duly instructed to
fall out of a tree and to knock himself unconscious. Then, with great difficulty,
Rampa entered the Westerners body, rose to his feet, and was helped inside
by the mans wife.
When he had recovered sufficiently, he took various free-lance jobs to support
his new wife and cat. It was when inquiring about a job as a ghostwriter that he
was encouraged by a literary agent to write his own book. Me, write a book?
Crazy! All I wanted was a job providing enough money to keep us alive and a
little over so that I could do auric research, and all the offers I had was to write
a silly book about myself.
But at the insistence of his agent, he undertook the arduous task of writing The
Third Eye.
Hoskin/Rampa would go on to write ten more books, which were increasingly
devoted to discussions of auras, extraterrestrials, future wars, the lost years of
Jesus, and expositions of the Law of Kharma. He published a volume entitled
Living with the Lama, dictated telepathically to him by Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers,
and donated all the royalties from My Visits to Venus to the Save a Cat League
of New York. His books have sold more than four million copies.
The influence of The Third Eye, in particular, has been far-reaching. It inspired
some to attempt to perform the operation of the third eye on themselvesin
one unhappy case in the Netherlands, with a dental drill. In the 1970s, Tibetan
lamas teaching in Europe and North America were invariably asked whether
they knew Lobsang Rampa and if they themselves had undergone surgery to
open the third eye. Rampas fixation on auras, the astral, and crystal balls has
done much to forge the dubious link between Tibetan Buddhism and the New
Age.

Yet this very link has brought Tibet to the attention of an audience of Western
readers who might otherwise have been unconcerned, a multitude who would
have had no interest in Tibetan culture or its tragic fate had it not been for
Rampas New Age trappings. And a number of prominent scholars of Tibetan
Buddhism, who shall remain nameless, have confessed that they were first
inspired to pursue their lifes work by reading The Third Eye.
For such people, who have since graduated to more orthodox works of
Tibetiana, the word fraud is easy to apply to The Third Eyes author. Yet
opportunism or simple self-aggrandizement falls somewhat flat as an
explanation of Hoskins motive, for there seems little doubt that he really did
believe himself to be Lobsang Rampa.
Perhaps it is not in terms of material greed, but rather in a more complicated
and deeply rooted desire, that the mystery of Cyril Hoskins Oriental
masquerade should be assessed. In his third eye, he visualized the fantasy of
Tibet in such a way that he could himself be embodied within it. Tibet: a place
with the power to allow him to assume a new identity without leaving England
a place where the class-conscious son of a Devon plumber could become the
scion of Lhasa aristocracy, and a fitter of surgical goods could become a
surgeon; where a correspondence school clerk could lay claim to a medical
degree, and a criminal and accident photographer could see auras.
Viewed in retrospect from the 1990s, from these times in which Caucasian
followers of Tibetan Buddhism are routinely recognized as incarnations of lamas
(numerous children and an action-movie star among them), it may even seem
that the tragedy of Hoskins imposture was a simple lack of authorization.
Hoskins ideas about possession and astral travel owed more to a homegrown
spiritualism than to any recognized Vajrayana schooland yet teachings such
as phowa (transference of consciousness), as described in Evans-Wentzs
1935 Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, could have provided him with an
authentic Tibetan precedent, had he just known where to look.
In The Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow asked for a brain and was rewarded with a
diploma. Would Lobsang Rampas career have been different if his claim to
knowledge had only been certified, by a Tibetan lineage holderor by those
three magic letters: Ph.D.?
Rampa died in 1981 in Calgary, where the Canadian Rockies provided a fitting
resting place for this exile to the land of snows. To the end, he insisted that
everything in his books was true. His circle of disciples and millions of readers
around the world seem never to have been in doubt. Those who knew him
invariably noted the depression in the center of his forehead.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., is Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the

University of Michigan and a contributing editor to Tricycle. His most recent
book is Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West.

Image 1 and 2: details from the cover of the Balantine paperback edition of the
bestselling The Third Eye.
Image 3 and 4: from the Scotish Daily Mail of February 1, 1958; the Daily
Express, February 3, 1958; the Daily Telegraph, November 30, 1958; detail
from the cover of a Corgi Books edition of Candlelight, one of his later works.