T. Lobsang Rampa: The Unbelievable Lama

 

I first came across the books of T. Lobsang Rampa when I was a teenager. His Corgi paperbacks were always in the New Age, Mind/Body/Spirit sections of secondhand bookshops, and I dismissed them as being a more or less personal take on Buddhism. This was partly correct, but I hadn’t realised just how far he had strayed from orthodoxy. It was when I later bought Dr Christopher Evans’ Cults of Unreason (to read about Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard), that I first discovered the story behind Rampa.

 

First edition of The Third Eye, Secker and Warberg, 1956

It appeared that the man who had written The Third Eye (1956), the autobiography of a Tibetan lama, had in fact been the son of a plumber from Plympton in Devon called Cyril Hoskin. After he was exposed by the newspapers, his reputation never quite recovered. It didn’t help that he offered explanations of transmigration that stretched the credulity of all but his most ardent admirers. Nevertheless, he continued to write and to find a readership for his books, which became ever more outrageous and rambling. In the Third Eye he not only related details of a physical operation to reveal his third eye, he wrote of feats of levitation and invisibility, discussed yetis, and described seeing the gilded mummies of extraterrestrials. Had he written only this one book, it might have remained a cult classic, although anyone who knew anything about Tibet would have dismissed it. (The Dalai Lama certainly did.)

 

Promotional photograph of T. Lobsang Rampa, c. 1958 from the back of the dustjacket of reprints of The Third Eye.

The trouble is that with each subsequent book, Rampa casually shared his knowledge of astral travel, civilisations on Venus, UFOs, etc. One of his books was even meant to have been dictated to him by his cat. The books started to repeat themselves, and were often used to air his grievances against the taxman, the police, students, strikers, etc. If his starting point had been Tibetan Buddhism, loosely described, he was soon bringing in elements of Theosophy (the Akashic Records), pseudo-history, ideas of a hollow-earth, and as many other alternative ideas and beliefs as he could pack into his pages.

I have been researching Rampa for a while now and hope to publish the results in a biographical study some time next year. Apart from tidying-up various errors and misrepresentations of Rampa, I wanted to explore what was far more interesting than the fact that a Tibetan lama’s father may have been a plumber from Devon (or that Hoskin once had been a surgical fitter) . . .

 

The only extant photo of 'Cyril Henry Hoskin'

Ten years before the publication of The Third Eye, Cyril Hoskin had changed his name to Kuan-suo and had started to adopt Eastern dress. He had already been making claims of accomplishments that were unlikely, and when he changed his name from Kuan-suo to Dr Carl Kuan, he added the surprising distinction of having become a doctor. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was the next development, but after The Third Eye, he seems to have spent the next thirty-five years consistently in this character, insisting at every opportunity that all his books were ‘true’.

What I have found out about his life has been fascinating, and I will share it all soon. In the meantime, if anyone knows anything about Rampa and can help with my research, I would be very happy to hear from them.