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With Mystics and Magicians

in Tibet

Alexandra David-Neel

With an Introduction by Dr. A. D'Arsonval

Digital copy obtained from:

http://www.algonet.se/~johnnyfg/books/mmtibet/index.htm

Penguin Books

London

English edition, first published 1931

First published in Penguin Books 1936

Reprinted March 1937

Reprinted September 1937

Made and Printed in Great Britain for Penguin Books Limited

by Furnell and Sons, Ltd., Paultron (Somerset) and London

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Author's Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Tibet and the Lamas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

A Guest of the Lamas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

A Famous Tibetan Monastery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Dealing with Ghosts and Demons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Disciples of Yore and their Contemporary Emulators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

Psychic Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

Mystic Theories and Spiritual Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

Psychic Phenomena in Tibet – How Tibetans Explain them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet Contents

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With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet Contents

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Introduction

For many Westerners Tibet is wrapped in an atmosphere of mystery. The "Land of

Snows" is for them the country of the unknown, the fantastic and the impossible.

What super-human powers have not been ascribed to the various kinds of lames,

magicians, sorcerers, necromancers and practitioners of the occult who inhabit

those high tablelands, and whom both nature and their own deliberate purpose

have so splendidly isolated from the rest of the world? And how readily are the

strangest legends about them accepted as indisputable truths! In that country

plants, animals and human beings seem to divert to their own purposes the best

established laws of physics chemistry, physiology and even plain common sense.

It is therefore quite natural that scholars accustomed to the strict discipline of exper-

imental method should have paid to these stories merely the condescending and

amused attention that is usually given to fairy tales.

Such was my own state of mind up to the day when I had the good fortune to make

the acquaintance of Madame Alexandra David-Neel.

This well-known and courageous explorer of Tibet unites in herself all the physical,

moral and intellectual qualities that could be desired in one who is to observe and

examine a subject of this kind. I must insist on saying this, however much her mod-

esty may suffer.

Madame David-Neel understands, writes and speaks fluently all the dialects of

Tibet. She has spent fourteen consecutive years in the country and the neighbour-

ing regions. She is a professed Buddhist, and so has been able to gain the confi-

dence of the most important Lamas. Her adopted son is an ordained lame; and she

herself has undergone the psychic exercises of which she speaks. Madame David-

Neel has in fact become, as she herself says, a complete Asiatic, and, what is still

more important for an explorer of a country hitherto inaccessible to foreign travel-

ers, she is recognized as such by those among whom she has lived.

This Easterner, this complete Tibetan, has nevertheless remained a Westerner, a

disciple of Descartes and of Claude Bernard, practicing the philosophic scepticism

of the former which, according to the latter, should be the constant ally of the scien-

tific observer. Unencumbered by any preconceived theory, and unbiased by any

doctrine or dogma, Madame David-Neel has observed everything in Tibet in a free

and impartial spirit.

In the lectures which, in my capacity as professor of the College de France, suc-

ceeding my master Claude Bernard, I asked her to deliver, Madame David-Neel

sums up her conclusions in these words:

With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet Introduction

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Alexandra David-Néel - With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet.pdf

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