http://www.tricycle.com/feature/lobsang-rampa-the-mystery-three-eyed-lama
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 best-selling 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 Lama’s 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 Rampa’s 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.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
