8/7/2019 The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda - Living Wisdom From a Modern Tibetan Master

1/2

Richard Power(Ed.).

The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda : Living Wisdom from a Modern Tibetan Master(Wheaton, IL : Quest Books, 2007, 155pp.)

This is a good book with a misleading title. These are unpublished lectures by LamaGovinda given at the Human Dimensions Institute in upstate New York to a largely Westernaudience but not published. The lectures were hardly lost but are a welcome addition to his

published books such as the well-known The Way of the White Cloud and his more technicalwritings such as Psychological Attitudes of Early Buddhist Philosophy and Foundations ofTibetan Mysticism. Secondly, Lama Govinda is not a Tibetan Master but a German scholar of

Buddhism, born as Ernst Lothar Hoffman. He studied first the Thervada school of Buddhismin Sri Lanka, the Tibetan school of Mahayana Buddhism, often called Vajrayana. He later

became interested in the Chinese school Chan better known in the West in its Japanesestyle, Zen. He was also a student of the pre-Buddhist Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching.As the study of Buddhism requires not only learning the philosophy but also practicing

meditation, he practiced the forms of meditation associated with each of these schools,without, however without becoming a Sri Lankan, a Tibetan or a Chinese.

The longest lecture is devoted to meditation with a short related lecture warningagainst the use of psychedelic drugs as an approach to enlightenment as some in the US, such

as Timothy Leary, were proposing. All three Buddhist schools recognized the depth of hisunderstanding, and Tibetans were pleased to call him a lama (which means that one has

knowledge, not that he is a monk or a member of one of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism.)Lama Govinda was not a monk having married one of his students whom he had met when hewas teaching at the school in Bengal created by Rabindranath Tagore. She took the pen name

of Li Gotami and collaborated in Govindas research and travels.

Meditation, he says is the means to reconnect the individual with the whole, that is, tomake the individual conscious of the connection. It is the only positive way to overcome theego complex, the illusion of separateness, which no amount of pious preaching and

exhortation will achieve. To give up the smaller for the bigger is not a sacrifice, but a joyousrelease from oppression and narrownessThe special function of meditation is to reunite the

inner and the outer world, instead of renouncing the one for the sake of the other. Meditationis not an escape from the world, but a means to look deeper into it, unhampered by prejudicesor by the familiarity of habit, which blinds us to the wonders and the profound mysteries that

surround us.

Pathways East and West would have been a more accurate title. As Lama SuryaDas writes in the Foreword, Lama Govinda was a genuine gnostic intermediary a termC.G. Jung coined to describe those extraordinary individuals throughout history who bring

spiritual fire into the world by translating, transforming, and helping to make timelessmystical truths relevant to contempory life.

As Lama Govinda wrote The East discovered the eternal recurrence of the sameconditions and similar events. The West discovered the value of the uniqueness of each event

or existential condition. The East kept its gaze fixed upon the cosmic background, the Weston the individual foreground. The complete picture, however, combines foreground and

background, integrating them into a higher unityOnly those who, while recognizing and

8/7/2019 The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda - Living Wisdom From a Modern Tibetan Master

2/2

understanding their Western inheritance, penetrate and absorb the heritage of the East can

gain the highest values of both worlds and do justice to both.

Two important chapters deal with other gnostic intermediaries Robert Assagioli,father of the psychosyntheis school of transpersonal psychology and Pierre Teilhard de

Chardin, the French Jesuit, who spent most of his working life in China. Govindas close,Germanic reading of Assagiolis The Act of Will and Teilhards Hymn of the Universe bringout well the richness of the synthesis of Eastern and Western approaches to knowledge,

serious scholarship fused with deeply personal, experiential commitment and a cross-culturalperspective.

As the Editor, Richard Power, writes in his long introduction to Lama Govindas lifeSomething new, something planetary, is coming into being and consciousness, and men and

women like Govinda and Li Gotami served as bridges not one-way bridges either tothat twenty-first century mysticism.

Rene Wadlow