It seems to my that the author either never went to Tibet. If he did he never bothered to learn the language and the translations he got were so misinterpreted that he wrote fantasy instead of fact. I believe that Mr. Waddell wrote the book from his armchair and used fantasy and other books. The original was written @ 1900, so the books that he had to rely on were sparse and were not very insightful into the real Tibet of the time, or were plain fantasy. It is amazing that he wrote such a long book (I guess that he had nothing else to do for a while.) Though there are a very few facts about Tibet in the author's book, most of it is wrong and very misleading. I suggest that you pass this one up or read it as you would a fairy story.

When LA Waddell put out his stuff on Lhasa/Tibet you have to remember the times he was living in. People of today like to think of themselves as relative sophisticates, free from "ethnic" or "racial" prejudice.

Sure Waddell was a person of his times; still he put out what was then some of the most definitive information then available to the West on what was then a totally "hidden kingdom"--thanks to the isolation of the area AND to the isolationist decrees of the lamas who held power of literally life and death over their subjects.

He was also shedding light on an area that until then people like Blavatsky had romanticized into a "Shangri-La" paradise and added their own ridiculous conclusions on such chimera as the existence of a "great white brotherhood" and so on.

To my understanding Waddell was one of the first (if not THE first) white to fully examine "Lamaist" belief systems, delineating the existence of numerous dharmic practices not to mention the beliefs (and often corrupt politics) of the lineages. He also approached his subject using the Victorian "scientific" method--unlike a lot of present-day "sophisticated" New Age influenced people who seek to infuse thier own ideas and speak for Tibetan Buddhism, or the often-westernized lamas of today.

Mistakes Waddell might make-but they were the mistakes of an honest explorer in search of the hidden truths of the heretofore unknown kingdom of Tibet.

If read in its context Waddell has a lot to offer.

Wayman's translation is a noble effort, and has probably been of some use to academics and fearless students of the Lam rim tradition.

However, his approach to the translation of a part of the Lam-rim chen-mo (quite possibly the most important text on spiritual paths ever written) is questionable in approach and methodology; often Wayman uses inappropriate occidental paradigms, and also misses idiomatic phrases, which would have been clarified if he had relied more upon the active interpretations availiable in the Tibetan academic community. Secondly, the grammar and sentential structure of his English text is not particularly clear, and although considerably better than his translations of the concentration and wisdom chapters (ASIN-0231044046), the text remains pretty obfuscatory.

As a rule, I would heartily recommend the new translation as an alternative- ASIN-1559391669.

Or even better, to learn Tibetan and read it in the original.

The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path of Enlightenment is the first of a series of three projected volumes. In this first volume the reader is brought into basic Buddhist teachings as characterized in a Buddhist monastic setting, for people of little or middling capacity in religion to cultivate the awakening of Bodhichitta. The work is being expedited by a committee of exceptional Buddhist scholars and is being translated in a straightforward manner without commentary or cumbersome notes. It is hoped that the next two volumes will quickly follow However there is currently two provisional translations of these sections by Alex Wayman. The second volume describes the path of the Bodhisattva path. This work is available in part in Ethics of Tibet: Bodhisattva Section of Tsong-kha-pa's Lam Rim Chen Mo translated by Alex Wayman (SUNY Series in Buddhist Studies; State University of New York Press). Asanga's Chapter on Ethics With the Commentary of Tsong-kha-pa: The Basic Path to Awakening, the Complete Bodhisattva translated by Mark Tatz (Edwin Mellen Press) also addresses stages of the path and basic Buddhist morality but draws upon another commentary by Tsong-kha-pa. Alex Wayman's Calming the Mind and Discerning the Real (Columbia, 1978) provided a pioneering translation of the third part focuses on the practical integration of quieting techniques with spiritual discernment that leads to wisdom. It is true that Wayman's translations have been held up to censure by the Lama trained cadre of scholars who are now making this new edition. It is also true that some of their reservations are deserved but I still find much of value in the Wayman editions and until the next two volumes of The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path of Enlightenment are available I suggest they be consulted. All told The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path of Enlightenment is one of the masterpieces of world religion, a non parallel introduction to the fundamentals of Buddhist practice in all its subtlety and powerful psychological insight. The work will repay close study for anyone drawn to the salvific motive of religion, anyone who wishes to engage in-depth the nature of life and the way to knowing through meditation. By setting the conditions for practical reason, Tsong-kha-pa opens up the vast possibility of what we can approach and achieve as human beings. Do not pass up this most powerful work.

This book details several journeys to, and attempts to climb, Sepu Kangri. The chapters are written alternately by Bonington and Clarke, both of whom write engagingly. The alternation of voices keeps the narrative moving. However, I found the book somewhat slow, because much of it concerns the problems of Third World travel, plumbing (or lack thereof) and medicine rather than actual climbing. Readers who are non-climbers, though, may well find this lack of focus on technical mountaineering to be a plus. One certainly does get a good picture of what Tibet and its people are like today. Perhaps one of the book's best features is the lovely photography of some very striking peaks.

After a slow start, where the history of the Sepu Kangri area in Tibet was discussed, the pace picked up as Clarke and Bonington described their intial reconnaissance looking for a way to the mountain and a possible climbing route. The joy of roaming across terrain, essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, comes across in the narrative. I enjoyed reading about their discoveries and meeting the local Tibetan people. The story of the climbs themselves in two different years are not as detailed as in other climbing books, but a feeling for what it was like comes across. It definitely is from a perspective of a sixty-plus year old, yet I can only hope that I am as adventurous and physically able to roam the earth's wild places as Bonington and Clarke still do. The book is similar to Bonington's other books in style. There is no fast-paced, heart stopping, climbing action; but it's a story that I could imagine myself being a part of.

This is an odd but interesting book from the UK Government Stationery Office -- part of a series aimed at opening access to the Stationery Office's London archive. This volume is an abridged version of hearings published in 1904 following Britain's ill-considered invasion of Tibet. The best recent account of the 'mission to Lhasa' as it was known at the time is Patrick French's wonderful biography of the mission's leader, Francis Younghusband.

With reluctant backing from London, Younghusband and around 2000 British and Indian troops marched into Tibet in 1903, determined to counter what was (wrongly) thought to be growing Russian influence over the Dalai Lama. After one of the most uneven military actions in the history of British expansionism, Younghusband destroyed the Tibetan 'Army', marched on Lhasa and imposed a 75-year treaty on the Dalai Lama, forcing Tibet to pay reparations and defer to London on foreign relations. Already embarrassed by the killing of so many Tibetans at the battle of Gyantse, London effectively repudiated the treaty. Younghusband's military career was severely retarded. In the long term the mission arguably served the interests only of China, which slowly extended its control over Tibet at a time when London wanted nothing to do with the place.

For those interested in strategic issues and how governments make policy, this is a fascinating case study. It's doubly unfortunate that this book gives only the smallest glimpse of the story. There is no introduction to provide historical context to the documents that make up the volume. The reader is simply plunged into the diaries, letters and official correspondence between the mission as it moves into Tibet and the UK Government's India Office. Mysteriously the book ends shortly after the battle at Gyantse, with Younghusband sending conflicting cables about the number of Tibetans killed. So the story of the arrival of the force at Lhasa and negotiations with the Dalai Lama are left out altogether.

All of this is a great pity because one doubts the Stationery Office will publish another volume on this, Britain's last attempt to expand the Empire in South Asia. For all its faults, though, the documents offers a glimpse into the experience of what it must have been like to mount a horse-back invasion of the world's most isolated country. Read in conjunction with Patrick French's 'Younghusband' biography, these documents give the reader some added insight into one of the strangest episodes of the history of the British Empire.

Tibet occupies a unique place in the Western mind. It is seen as both a place of wisdom and spirituality and as a war-torn land with a culture in crisis of becoming extinct. In this novel, Charlotte Painter recounts her 1989 voyage to Tibet to meet with a native woman with alleged magical powers. Painter discovers that Tibet is a land with no easy answers, where nothing is as straight-forward as it seems.

Intermingled with Painter's travel diary is a fictional story entitled 'The Golden Road,' where Painter puts all of the hardship and struggle she sees into fictional terms. She acknowledges that there are problems in Tibet which she cannot address, and therefore uses her fictional characters to enact change.

One cannot find fault in Painter's willingness to show the dark side of Tibet, but there are still definite problems in her book. The fiction sections especially can seem very contrived at times, and too idealistic in comparison with the hardships facing the Tibetans of today. Also, the characters are flat, and due to their secondary nature within the book, there is no motivation to care about them. Tibet is the main character of the novel, and although Painter does a fair job of 'conjuring' it, I finished the novel wishing she had included more about how Tibetans view their own country.

Tibet Handbook with Bhutan, by Gyurme Dorje (Footprint Handbooks, Bath, England, 2nd edition 1999, 952pp plus maps).

The greatest strength of this book is that it is the only guidebook to give a substantial account of all parts of the Tibetan plateau, both inside and outside the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region. For that reason it is, despite its conspicuous faults, indispensable for the traveller to Tibet whose itinerary extends beyond the familiar lands of central Tibet. The book is not to be confused with "Tibet Handbook" by Victor Chan.

"Tibet Handbook with Bhutan" is a guide to all Tibetan regions governed by the People's Republic of China, with additional chapters on Bhutan and the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. It would have been useful to include the Tibetan borderlands in Nepal and north-west India Ä although it is no doubt expedient politically to imply that no part of Tibet lies outside the territory China governs.

At 650 grams, the new edition (paperback) is almost twice the weight of the first, hardback, edition - a curious development for a travel guidebook.

The book includes useful background information about Tibetan religion, iconography and history. The bulk of the book deals with the regions of the Tibetan plateau by devoting a section to each one of the 158 counties into which the People's Republic of China divides it. This approach turns out to be surprisingly intelligible.

There is extensive information about religious places, and buildings and their contents. There is much less information about other matters such as topography, agriculture, educational facilities, military establishments, and political structures. It is as though, in a way, those things belong to a different Tibet.

The book enjoys the benefit of the author's experience as a scholar and tour guide. It also suffers the limitations of that experience, and is often short on practical details for the independent traveller. It is written in a concise style that betrays no trace of personality.

The second edition has been expanded considerably, mainly with valuable information about counties where information in the first edition was inadequate. Unfortunately, the author has not taken the opportunity to check the much more extensive material carried over from the first edition. If he would make time to do that, he would find innumerable internal contradictions within the text and between the text and the often wildly inaccurate small county maps. Almost any numeral, particularly distances, should be treated with suspicion. The relationship between the county population figures and those in the 1996 edition show impossible fluctuations; they go unremarked, but indicate that at least one of the sets of figures is worthless, and perhaps both. The inherent confusion in the existence of both Tibetan and Chinese names for the same places demands a consistency of usage in a guidebook which this one does not quite manage to attain.

An indispensable book, with the scope to become much better.

I read this book because I am hoping to visit Tibet. I had earlier read Love is a Many Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin. I found "Lhasa: An Open City" to be a very pro-China account of Tibet. So in that sense it was disappointing. The language was uninspiring. However, if you retain your objectivity, there is a lot of useful information about Tibet and it is definitely worth a read on that account.

This is a nice collection of works that deal with the Tibetan Buddhist approach to death. Note that it is basically an edited volume of translated pieces, and as such is not perhaps the best introduction to the subject. The first two translations in the volume, especially "Death and the Bodhisattva Trainings" are very instructive and inspiring. Many of the other translations, however, are quite esoteric and detailed. If you have some previous knowledge of this subject, this could well be a rewarding read. If you are looking for a good introduction to the topic, however, better would be "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying."

Next days, a english version.

MARCO PALLIS. Peaks and Lamas. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York). - Bien qu'il ait déjà été parlé ici de cet ouvrage à deux reprises (nº de juin 1940 et de janvier-février 1947) nous devons y revenir encore pour signaler un important chapitre intitulé The Presiding Idea que l'au-teur y a ajouté spécialement pour l'édition américaine, et dans lequel il s'est attaché à définir d'une façon plus explicite le principe d'unité qui est propre à la civilisation thibétaine et qui la distingue des autres formes de civilisa-tions traditionnelles. Que ce principe se trouve dans la doctrine bouddhique, cela n'est pas douteux, mais une telle constatation est pourtant insuffisante, car, dans les pays autres que le Thibet où elle s'est exercée, l'influence du Bouddhisme a produit des résultats três différents. En fait, ce qui caractérise surtout la civilisation thibétaine, c'est l'importance prédominante qui y est donnée à un des éléments de cette doctrine, à un degré qui ne se renconlre nulle part ailleurs ; et cet élément est la conception de l'état de Bodhisaltwa, c'est-à-dire de " l'état de l'être pleinement éveillé qui, bien que n'étant plus lié par la Loi de Causalité qu'il a dépassée, continue cependant librement à suivre les vicissitudes de la Ronde de l'Existence en vertu de son identification avec toutes les créatures qui sont encore soumises à l'illusion égocentrique et à la souffrance qui en est la conséquence". Une apparente difficulté provient du fait que l'état de Bodhisattwa. est, d'autre part, considéré communément comme constituant un degré inférieur et préliminaire à celui de Buddha ; or cela ne semble guère pouvoir s'appliquer au cas d'un être "qui non seulement a réalisé le Vide, en un sens transcendant, mais qui aussi l'a réalisé dans le Monde même, en un sens immanent, cette double réalisationn'étant d'ailleurs qu'une pour lui", puisque la Connais-sance suprême qu'il possède est essentiellement "sans dualité" . La solution de cette difficulté paraît résider dans la distinction de deux usages différents du même terme Rodhisattwa : dans un cas, il est employé pour désigner le saint qui n'a pas encore atteint l'ultime degré de perfection, et qui est seulement sur le point d'y par-venir, tandis que, dans l'autre, il désigne en réalité un être , et natu-rellement, elle a aussi un rapport évident avec la doctrine des A vatâras. Dans la suite du chapitre, qu'il nous est impossible de résumer complètement ici, M. Pallis s'appli que a dissiper les confusions auxquelles cette conception du Bodhisatlwa pourrait donner lieu Si elle était fausse-ment interprétée, conformément à certaines tendances de la mentalité actuelle, en termes de sentimentalisme "al-truiste" ou soi-disant "mystique" ; puis il donne quel-ques exemples de ses applications constantes dans la vie spirituelle des Thibétains. L'un de ces exemples est la pratique de l'invocation, largement répandue dans tout l'ensemble de la population ; l'autre concerne particulière-ment le mode d'existence des naldjorpas, c'est-à-dire de ceux qui sont déjà plus ou moins avancés dans la voie de la réalisation, ou dont, tout au moins, les aspirations et les efforts sont définitivement fixés dans cette direction, et que les Thibétains, même relativement ignorants, regar-dent comme étant véritablement les protecteurs de l'huma-nité, sans l'activité "non-agissante" desquels elle ne tar-derait pas à se perdre irrémédiablement. René Guénon, 1949

This book purports to be a true account of the author's adventures in Tibet in the 1930's.Foreigners were not allowed into Tibet, so the author claims he disguised himself as a Tibetan and learnt the rudiments of the language.However, his story is full of holes and just doesn't add up.Tibet is very remote and one man alone would not find it easy to enter.In fact, he gives no details of how he entered the country.The more I read, the more suspicious I became of the truth of this book.The author had blue eyes and always adverted them when he met people.This would raise suspicion.He was German, and going by his picture in the book he looks nothing like a Tibetan.He says he stained his face each day to make it darker, but this would have made him look like some comic actor.It just doesn't add up.He must have stuck out like a sore thumb.He propounds his own religious ideas instead of giving an accurate picture of Tibetan religion.This book cannot be taken seriously.

Well, after reading the book, I have the feeling that it is just another make-believe story; the author really stayed in Tibet??

A better bet would be to read "A Journey to Lhasa" by Alexander David-Neel (ISBN: 080705903X). There's even a website devoted to her works... Other books by her concerning Tibet are also interesting.

Obviously after reading the negative reviews, this book is not for everone. It does not try to be all things to all people, just one man's spiritual journey through Tibet. His experiences with enlightened "Hermits" as well as the phoney pretenders (majority) is well documented. The companion book "Darkness Over Tibet" even portrays the dark side of spiritual persuits. In some respects, the author's experience is somewhat similar to the Carlos Castenada books.

Having done extensive reading in the new age and spiritual/channelled material of today, this is a refreshing first person narrative even though it was written in the 1930s. Unfortunately, a lot of the modern written stuff is full of mumbo jumbo [junk] and and outright disinformation. I found this book worthwhile as the author goes through many trials and tribulations in discerning the truth from the lies and fiction of the pretenders who throw just enough truth to hook people and then divert and distort the rest for the purpose of control. The same thing occurs today as it does then. Not all things are "love and light", yet he prevails in his arduous journeys as a spiritual seeker of truth.