Preface
In this book I am seeking—so far as possible—to suppress my own views and to act simply as the mouthpicce of a Tibetan sage, of whom I was a recognized disciple.
He was quite willing that I should make known his interpretation of the higher lāmaic teachings and of the subtle esotericism underlying the Bardo Thödol, following the private and orally transmitted instructions which he as a young man had received when living the life of an ascetic with his late hermit-guru in Bhutan. Being himself a man who possessed a considerable amount of Western learning, he took great trouble to enable me to reproduce Oriental ideas in a form which would be intelligible to the European mind. If, in amplification, I have frequently referred to Occidental parallels of various mystic or occult doctrines current in the Orient, I have done so largely because in my wanderings there, chiefly in the high Himalayas and on the Tibetan frontiers of Kashmir, Garhwal, and Sikkim, I had come across learned philosophers and holy men who have found or thought they had found beliefs and religious practices—some recorded in books, some preserved by oral tradition alone—not only analogous to their own, but so closely akin to those of the Occident as to imply some historical connexion therewith. Whether the supposed influence passed from East to West or from West to East, was not so clear to their minds. A certain similarity does, however, seem to attach to the culture of these geographically divided provinces.
I have spent more than five years in such research, wandering from the palm-wreathed shores of Ceylon, and thence through the wonder-land of the Hindus, to the glacier-clad heights of the Himalayan Ranges, seeking out the Wise Men of the East. Sometimes I lived among city dwellers, sometimes in jungle and mountain solitudes among yogīs, sometimes in
