To: K-list
Recieved: 1999/09/22 11:06
Subject: [K-list] Re: Yogananda
From: Nenad Barbutov
On 1999/09/22 11:06, Nenad Barbutov posted thus to the K-list:
Hi Martin,
Martin Thompson wrote:
> I can't find a reference to the plumber bit (it was in the Fortean Times
> a long time ago), but you can read his "Autobiography of a Yogi" at:
> http://www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/
Thanks for the URL.
About 'the plumber bit', maybe you confused Yogananda with Mr. Hoskins
aka
Lobsang Rampa (the guy who had 'his third eye opened' after a surgical
procedure involving a sharp object (a chisle ??) :)
There is a good article on that and more, `Fictitious Tibet:
The Origin and Persistence of Rampaism' by Agehananda Bharati
(Tibet Society Bulletin, Vol. 7, 1974). I've saved the text,
lost the URL, but you can probably find it with a search `engine'.
Or I'll mail it to you if you want (cca 35k html).
Author seems not to have too high opinion on Yogananda's
`Autobiography of a Yogi' either. A quote:
"The first and foremost problem, oddly enough, has a very simple
answer. How can the millions of intellectually inert, but good-willed
seekers after the mysterious East be informed about the actual
traditions of Buddhism, about the actual Tibet? The answer is that
the reading agents - libraries, booksellers, and publishers - have to
put in some additional effort to market authentic works on these
topics, along with the Rampaesque trash. Until a decade ago, good
works on these topics were indeed available only to scholars,
published by not too handy publishers, and in expensive editions with
a small circulation. But this is no longer so. A basic library, in
English, of works on Tibetan and other Buddhism is available in any
bookstore, and with no greater quest than the works of Rampa and
other pseudomystics and gurus. Helmut Hoffman's Religions of Tibet",
E. Conze's paperback introductions to Buddhism, and for the more
motivated, some of the works of Herbert V. Guenther, David L.
Snellgrove, and perhaps my own Tantric Tradition (an Anchor-Doubleday
paperback, if I may blow my own trumpet at this opportune moment),
are items that might be had for the asking, quite literally. Now some
might charge that mine is a naive assumption; that readers at large
will choose good books over inauthentic but interesting books in the
quest of truth. But I do not think matters are quite that simple, and
the common reading public is perhaps less dumb than meets the eye. I
would think that the initial reading of phony interesting stuff
(Autobiography of a Yogi, Lobsang Rampa, Castaneda, etc.) prompts most
readers to continue with something more authentic in the same line,
if what is more authentic is equally available. It now is, as I
pointed out, but it is not known to most that this is the case. It has
to be, and can be, made known by the book and publishing trade."
--
Nenad
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