The reasons which have inspired the writing of the present work are two-fold. The first is the personal contact with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness the Panchen Lama of Tibet. The year 1956 A.D. was marked by the millions of Buddhists in the East and the West as the 2,500th anniversary of Lord Buddha's birth. This anniversary or the Buddha-Maha-Jayanti was officially celebrated by the Government of India, sponsored and supported by the Buddhists and the Hindus alike. In connection with this celebration, a Buddhist Symposium was held at New Delhi and the two Pontiffs of Tibet were invited by the Government to participate in the Symposium and thereafter to tour the holy places of Buddhism.
At that time I was the Bhiksu in-charge of the Ananda Vihara, Bombay, a Maha-Bodhi Society centre, and I took the rare opportunity to invite the Tibetan spiritual and temporal heads to our temple. The invitation was graciously accepted and responded to on the 9th of December, 1956. All those who had the privilege to be present during the Tibetan reception ceremony at the Ananda Vihara were deeply impressed by the nobility, friendliness and informality of the two young Grandlamas who won the heart of the Indian people. After this historical visit, quite a lot of visitors approachad me to know about the Creed of the Lamas of which they confessed their ignorance. Some others frankly admitted that they had the idea that Tibetan Buddhism or Lamaism was a crude and corrupted form of Lord Buddha's teachings, connected with devil-worship, black magic and sexual "rituals". I tried my best to explain the true nature of Lamaism and then I was urged by the inquirers to prepare a book on the subject of Lamaism. A few days later, I was again with the two Grandlamas at Holy Isipatana-Sarnath, the place where Lord Buddha delivered his first great Sermon. Thereafter we proceeded to Buddhagaya in order to worship at the famous temple and under the Bodhi-tree where the former Sakya prince Siddhartha obtained the Highest Enlightenment, and there I took a vow to write as soon as possible, a book on Lamaism, an introduction and guide to further studies.
The second reason is the inspiration that I got by reading the life and works of the Hungarian scholar of Tibetology, Alexander Csoma de Koros, who was born in 1784 at the village of Koros in the state of Transylvania (in Hungary). His family belonged to the aristocratic military nobility who were for many generations stationed near the Turkish border. Young Alexander studied at different universities of his country and then at Gottingen in Germany. His intention was to become a surgeon, but he gave up this plan in favour of re-search on the origin of the Magyars (the people of Hungary) who, he supposed, originated in the Trans-Himalayan region. In 1820, when he was 36 years old, he left his home with a little luggage on his back and a stick in his hand and wandered literally on foot to Persia, Afganistan and arrived a year later in the Punjab (India), crossed Kashmir and entered Ladakh. At Kanam, near the Tibetan border and at other places also, he studied the Tibetan language, while, living in the poorest possible condition, and facing a rough climate and also starvation. Csoma de Koros's ambition to find the trace of his people in the sacred Tibetan scriptures failed, but this did not hinder him from continuing, with zeal and determination, the study of those scriptures. He remained at Ladakh up to the beginning of 1831 and then proceeded by stages to Calcutta, where he became a sub-librarian of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Tibetan-English dictionary and published it in 1834. In 1842 Here he completed his first he left Calcutta in order to reach Lhasa the holy city of Lamaism in Tibet, via Sikkim, but unfortunately he fell ill at Darjeeling and died there in direct view of the Himalayas. His death was a great loss for the learned world, because Tibetology was then just in its infancy, and the place of Csoma de Koros could not be filled so soon. It is due to this great scholar that Tibetology has become more and more popular. In gratitude, the Hungarian Academy of Science presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal a marble bust of Csoma de Koros, which is now standing at its entrance. The Japanese Buddhists, however, went a step further and canonized him as a Bodhisattva, a future Buddha, and built a temple to him.
In the present work I have tried to give all fundamental features of Lamaism, the Tibetan form of Buddhism; its history, rituals, Tantricism and Iconography, but I do not pretend to have given a complete account of this vast field of religiophilosophical ideas. It is impossible to cover the whole field in one book. For the most earnest student of Lamaism and Tibetology, I have given at the end a list of books which may be consulted for further studies.
Art (289)
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Tantric Buddhism (90)
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