Doctor from Lhasa
About This Book
Doctor from Lhasa is the second volume of T. Lobsang Rampa's autobiographical series — continuing the story begun in The Third Eye from the young Tibetan lama's earliest memories and esoteric training through his formal medical education (in which he combined traditional Tibetan medicine with the principles of Chinese and Western approaches), his developing clairvoyant and healing abilities, and the increasingly dangerous political situation in Tibet as the Chinese military presence grew throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The medical dimension of this volume gives it a different quality from the more purely esoteric Third Eye: Rampa's training as a physician brings him into direct contact with suffering in forms that the monastery's relative insulation from the world had not previously provided, and the specific experiences of his medical practice become the occasion for both practical healing accounts and deeper reflections on the nature of illness, consciousness, and the relationship between the physical body and the subtle energy systems that Tibetan medicine had developed its understanding of over many centuries.
The book's second major theme — the Chinese military threat to Tibet — gives it a historical and political dimension that adds both documentary and emotional weight to the account. Rampa describes the specific experiences that led him eventually to leave Tibet (in the account he gives) and the specific quality of the culture and civilisation that the Chinese invasion destroyed or irreversibly transformed. Reading Doctor from Lhasa as a document of a vanished world — the world of traditional Tibet, with its specific forms of spiritual development, medical practice, and community life — gives it a dimension that goes beyond the purely autobiographical.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the Tibetan medical tradition: how Doctor from Lhasa provides an account of the principles and practices of traditional Tibetan medicine — the specific understanding of the relationship between the subtle energy bodies and the physical body's health, the specific diagnostic and treatment approaches, the relationship between spiritual practice and healing capacity, and the specific medicines and therapeutic practices of the Tibetan tradition
• Grasp the healing ability development: how Rampa describes the development of his specific healing capacities — the awakening and progressive refinement of his diagnostic clairvoyance (the ability to perceive the condition of a patient's subtle bodies and energy centres), the development of healing touch, and the understanding of how consciousness can affect physical conditions in ways that purely physical medicine cannot account for
• Recognise the cultural documentation value: how Doctor from Lhasa provides an account of Tibetan life, culture, and spiritual practice in the period immediately before the Chinese invasion that transformed it irrevocably — and why this documentation (whatever one's view of its autobiographical authenticity) preserves something of a world that no longer fully exists in its original form
• Learn the consciousness-body medicine: the specific understanding of the relationship between consciousness, the subtle bodies, and physical health that informs Tibetan medicine as Rampa describes it — how specific mental and emotional patterns are understood to create specific physical conditions, how the subtle energy field is the primary vehicle through which healing occurs, and how the most effective healing addresses both the physical and the energetic dimensions of a condition
• Appreciate the continuation quality: how Doctor from Lhasa develops the understanding established in The Third Eye — deepening the account of Rampa's specific esoteric training, moving the story into the practical dimensions of the adult world, and beginning to address the historical and political forces that will eventually drive him out of Tibet — making it essential reading for anyone who found The Third Eye compelling and who wants to follow the full arc of the account
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