magic. Hoskin claims that the soul of "Rampa" was transferred by Lamas. If he had suggested Bonists he would at least have been describing the right sort of person. (But I don't mean to say the Bonists could have done it.) This suggests that he was ignorant of the real Tibet.

Hoskin wrote books which depend for their effect on people's ignorance about Tibet - and also their fears about magic. There are other books about Tibet which describe it as it really was. The best way to be sure that the Rampa books are fiction is to read books about the real Tibet. A good description of Tibet in the years before the Chinese invasion is "Seven Years in Tibet" by Heinrich Harrar, a German who lived in Lhasa before the Chinese invasion. It may be found in a good library. There are also articles about Tibet and its history in good encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica from which much of the above information has been taken. The truth about Tibet is quite interesting enough. A country in which the ceremonies of the Buddhist religion remained the most important activity of the people and where to be a monk was considered to be the highest good and where all this continued into the middle of the 20th century is full of interest. But we can read about these things in truthful books.

The harm done by Hoskin's books is that the real struggle of the Tibetans for independence will be hindered by false and rather silly information about them.

The language of the Rampa books
Another way of judging books like this is to look at the sort of English they are written in. The Rampa books are written in a semi-literate form of English. Signs of this are the use of very very (this is never used by educated writers in non-fiction books), the use of CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis (an educated writer indicates emphasis by the use of appropriate words or sentence structure), the use of special unnecessarily and a very rambling style. The rambling style is shown by the fact that a small amount of material is expanded to several pages (what is sometimes called waffle by teachers). For example, in As it was! (1976), there is a description of the making of a charcoal writing pencil (which he pretends is a mysterious Tibetan device, though found in any culture which does not possess modern pencils). He spreads the description of how to make it over a page and a half (18-19). The description is not of a mysterious magical process but of an ordinary, almost industrial, process. It seems unlikely that in the real Tibet there was a department of the government (Potala) devoted to making charcoal sticks.

These scribble sticks were an invention dating back many thousands of years but they were made in precisely the same manner as they had been made two or three thousand years before. There was, in fact, a legend to the effect that Tibet had once been by the side of a shining sea and support was lent to the legend by the frequent finding of sea-shells, fossilised fish, and many other items which could only have come from a warmer country then beside the sea. There were buried artefacts of a long-dead race, tools, carvings, jewellery. All these, together with gold, could be found in profusion by the side of the rivers that ran through the country.

But now the scribble sticks were made in exactly the same way as they had been made previously. A large mass of clay was obtained and then monks sallied forth and picked from willow trees suitable saplings, thin pieces of twig about half as thick as one's little finger and perhaps a foot long. These were very carefully gathered and then were taken back to a special department of the Potala. Here all the twigs would be carefully examined and graded, the straight flawless ones would have particular care devoted to them, they would then be peeled and then wrapped in clay, much caution being exercised to ensure that the twigs were not bent.

Those twigs which had a slight bend or twist were also wrapped in clay because they would be suitable for junior monks and acolytes to use in their own writings. The bundles of clay, each with a seal-impression showing which was super class (for the highest lamas and the Inmost One himself), and then first class for high class lamas and second class for ordinary lamas, would have a very small hole made through the clay so that steam generated during a heating process could escape and obviate the bursting of the clay wrapping.

Now the clay would be laid on racks in a large chamber. For a month or so they would just lie there with the moisture evaporating in the low-humidity atmosphere. Sometime between four to six months later the clay bundles would be removed and transferred to a fire - the fire would also be used for cooking

Useful reading

T Lobsang Rampa - As it was