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Lobsang Rampa

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Tuesday Lobsang Rampa is the name of a spirit of a Tibetan lama that a British man named Cyril Hoskins (1911-1981) claimed had taken over his body. The name Tuesday relates to a claim in one of Rampa's books that all upper class Tibetans were named after the day on which they were born.

In 1956 a book called The Third Eye was published in the United Kingdom. It was written by a man by the name of Lobsang Rampa and purported to tell of his experiences while living in a monastery in Tibet. The title of the book relates to an operation in which a "third eye" was drilled into Rampa's forehead, allegedly giving him the power of clairvoyance. The book describes the operation as follows:

The instrument penetrated the bone. A very hard, clean sliver of wood had been treated by fire and herbs and was slid down so that it just entered the hole in my head. I felt a stinging, tickling sensation apparently in the bridge of my nose. It subsided and I became aware of subtle scents which I could not identify. Suddenly there was a blinding flash. For a moment the pain was intense. It diminished, died and was replaced by spirals of colour. As the projecting sliver was being bound into place so that it could not move, the Lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said:" You are now one of us, Lobsang."

The Third Eye was a successful book and was published in several countries, but scholars expressed doubts about its origins and accuracy. The explorer Heinrich Harrer hired a private detective named Clifford Burgess to investigate Lobsang Rampa, and the detective reported back that the author of the book was a man named Cyril Henry Hoskins, the son of a plumber who had been born in Plympton in Devon in 1911. Hoskins, it turned out, had never been to Tibet and spoke no Tibetan.

When confronted with these allegations, Rampa did not deny that he had been born as Cyril Hoskins, but claimed that his body was now occupied by the spirit of Lobsang Rampa. According to an account given in his third book The Rampa Story, he had fallen out of a tree and been concussed, and on regaining his senses had seen a monk in saffron robes walking towards him. The monk then took possession of his physical body.

Lobsang Rampa went on to write over a dozen more books containing a mixture of religious, New Age and occult material, although none ever achieved the same degree of success as The Third Eye. One of the books, Living With The Lama, was claimed to have been dictated telepathically to Rampa by his pet cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers. Faced with repeated allegations from the British press that he was a charlatan and a con artist, Rampa went to live in Canada in the 1970s where he died in Calgary in January 1981.

Books by Lobsang Rampa

Books by his wife San Ra'ab Rampa:

My Visit to Venus is based on a manuscript which Lobsang Rampa did not approve for publication and was published some years after it was written. It describes how Rampa supposedly meets the masters of several planets during a trip in a spaceship.

External links

Further reading: The Guinness Book of Fakes, Frauds and Forgeries by Richard Newnham, ISBN 0-85112-975-7.

 

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