The Lama’s Story

The greatest sensation in occult circles for many years was caused by the not too convincing ‘exposure’ of Lobsang Rampa, author of the best selling autobiography The Third Eye. A completely one-sided view was expressed by the newspapers and, whilst regarding the whole matter detachedly, we feel that the other side of the question, in all fairness, should be presented to our readers. Students of the occult among us feel that the overall detail of the book is accurate though there may be some over-dramatisation of some descriptions. Extract From The Daily Mail Newspaper There follow extracts from the London Daily Mail of 1 February 1958. After these, comes the reply which Lobsang Rampa offered to his critics. Finally, comments made by Lobsang Rampa’s wife are presented. It is for the reader, with his sounder knowledge of esoteric teachings, to decide whether to form his own judgment or accept that of the layman.

The Press ‘Exposure’

‘The man accepted by thousands as the Tibetan Lama of ‘The Third Eye’ has been exposed as a brilliant hoaxer. He is no Lama from Tibet. He is a plumber’s son from Plymouth, Devon—plain Mr Cyril Henry Hoskins. At his cliff-top villa near Dublin, he and his wife live as Dr and Mrs Kuan with 27-year-old Shelagh Rouse, once a gay (lively ed.) member of West End society. She is one of his many followers who believe in his celestial and clairvoyant powers, produced, as he has claimed, by a brain operation which gave him ‘the third eye’. ‘As Dr Kuan-Sou, or under his favourite alias of Dr Kuan, he reads the stars and gives advice on spiritual and health problems for a fee. His wife, who was a state registered nurse at a Richmond hospital when they married on April 13, 1940, told me: “The book is fiction. He had tried to get a number of jobs without success. We had to have money to live, so he was persuaded to write the book. We depend on its sale for money.” Now he has been exposed as one of the biggest hoaxers of the century by a Liverpool private detective. ‘The claim of Dr Kuan (Mr Cyril Hoskins) has been made in the greatest detail in his book. On the dust cover, he describes how at the age of seven he entered a Tibetan Lamasery, and the Dalai Lama decreed that his exceptional clairvoyant powers be enhanced by a surgical operation known as ‘the opening of the third eye.’ In the book he explains his 17-day-long ordeal which gave him his third eye. ‘But he has never been to Tibet. He has never had a brain operation. He is a sick man with heart trouble and other ailments. These are some of the claims he makes: That after he left Tibet he fought with the Chinese Nationalist Forces against Japan and was taken prisoner. That after the first A-bomb dropped on Japan he escaped in a fishing boat to Korea and made his way to Britain by way of Moscow and New York. That he has flown in a flying saucer and is a son of prince of Tibet. ‘These are the facts: He is 47, the son of master-plumber, until he died in 1937, then went with his mother to live in Nottinghamshire. He worked for a firm of surgical instrument manufacturers, and there became a clerk with a correspondence school of engineering. There he shaved his head, grew a beard and changed his name to Dr Kuan-Suo. Now he and his wife live with Mrs Rowse, daughter of Mr John Isherwood, paper mill owner of New Mills, Derbyshire, at Howth near Dublin. ‘From his sickbed, Mr Hoskins sent me a message maintaining the authenticity of the book. It said: “This story is true, but for very special reasons the identity of the Tibetan author cannot be revealed. I have never bedraggled anyone in my life, no matter what the cost. I shall not bedraggle anyone now. I have almost no chance of life. This shock is reducing it even more. I must be guided by my conscience in what I do. My life has been hard and bitter and I consider in this other blow of publicity I am doing what is right.” Mrs Rowse’s husband, John, ex-regular Army Officer, who lives in Kensington, said atbhis city office last night: “I know the stories that are circulating about Lobsang Rampa, but I believe none of them and I do not want to discuss them. I have known him for two years and I am convinced he is thoroughly genuine. He has been a guest in my home, a good friend of my wife and myself, and I am quite sure he is no phoney.” ‘Mrs Rowse’s mother, Mrs Margaret Isherwood, told me: “She has told me he is a brilliant surgeon and she believes implicitly that he is from a high-ranking Tibetan family. She believes he has wonderful mystic powers.” His agent, Mr Brooks of Mayfair, said: “I am surprised. He possesses extra-ordinary powers of telepathy. He has given me proof on a number of occasions.” ‘Mr F. J. Warburg, director of the firm who published the book, said: “I am very surprised. I thought he was Chinese. We were not sure ourselves about the book and sent it to twenty different people who all gave it different opinions. In the first edition we printed a foreword in which we said we could not check the authenticity of the facts and left it to the reader to judge. It is published as a nonfiction work.”

Lobsang Rampa’s Reply

The Third Eye is absolutely true and all that I write in that book is fact. I, a Tibetan Lama, now occupy what was originally the body of a Western man, and I occupy it to the permanent and total exclusion of the former occupant. He gave his willing consent, being glad to escape from life on this earth in view of my urgent need. The actual change-over occurred on the 13 June 1949, but the way had to be prepared some time before that. I know that I have a special task to do, and I became aware that it would be necessary to come to England for various reasons connected with it. In the latter part of 1947, I was able by telepathy to send impressions to a suitable person. In February 1948, he changed his name by legal Deed Poll and took the name of Kuan Suo as directed by me.To make the change-over easier, he altered his addresses a number of times and lost contact with all friends and relatives. On the 13 June 1949, he had a slight accident which resulted in concussion and which ‘knocked him out of himself.’ This enabled me to take over. I tried very hard indeed to obtain employment in England but for various reasons there was no assistance from the Employment Exchange. For years I visited Employment Exchanges and the Appointment Bureaux in Tavistock Square, London. I was also registered with a number of private Employment Agencies and paid quite a considerable amount to them in fees but none of them did anything for me. For some time we lived on capital which had been saved and upon anything which I was able to earn from doing free-lance writing or advertising.
I have a special task to do because during my life in Tibet I had been to the Chang Tang Highlands where I had seen a device which enables people to see the human aura. I am clairvoyant and can see the aura as I have demonstrated to many people at many times, but I was aware that if doctors and surgeons could see the human aura then they could determine the illness afflicting a human body before it was at all serious. It was not possible for me to come to England in the body which I then had. I tried, but to no avail. The aura is merely a corona of discharge of the body, of the life force. It is similar to the corona discharge from high tension cables which can be seen by almost anyone on a misty night, and if money would be spent on research, medical science would have one of the most potent tools for the cure of disease. I had to have money in order to carry out my own research, but I have never taken money for curing people’s illnesses or for taking their troubles off their shoulders, as has been misrepresented in a certain paper. And how did The Third Eye come to be written? I certainly did not want to write it but I was desperate to get a job so that I could get on with my allotted task. I tried for job after job without avail, eventually a friend offered to put me in touch with a gentleman who might be able to use my service. Mr Brooks said that I should write a book. I insisted that I did not want to write a book and so we parted. Mr Brooks wrote to me again and once more suggested that I should write a book. In the interval between seeing him and receiving his letter I had been for other interviews and had been rejected. So, with much reluctance I accepted Mr Brooks’ offer to write a book, and  here again I repeat that everything in that book is true. Everything said in my second book Medical Lama is true also. One should not place too much credence in ‘experts’ or ‘Tibetan Scholars’ when it is seen how one ‘expert’ contradicts the other, when they cannot agree on what is right and what is wrong, and after all, how many of those ‘Tibetan Scholars’ have entered a lamasery at the age of seven, and worked all the way through life as a Tibetan, and then taken over the body of a Westemer? I have!

Testimony of Sanya Kuan S.R.N.

‘It is an ill wind … As far as I can see, it appears that the announcement regarding the author of The Third Eye has done nothing but enhance Lobsang Rampa’s prestige, and resulted in bringing his best seller more than ever before the public eye. One lady, an authority on Eastern methods and religions, made the remark that if the facts were true, then Lobsang Rampa was an even greater person than ever. Now she is certain that the facts are true. Many people will wonder about the one who occupied that Western body before it was taken over by a Tibetan, and I, as the wife, would like to tell something of the events leading to the change of personality . ‘At the first indication of something different, I was more than a little startled. We were leading a quiet life in Surrey, my husband being on the staff of a Correspondence College, in an advisory capacity, and the war had been over for two years. Out of the blue came his remark toward the end of 1947. Sitting quietly for some time, he startled me by saying, “I am going to change my name.” I looked at him aghast for I failed to see any point in doing such a thing. We had nothing to hide, nothing from which to run away. It took me some time to recover after he continued, “Yes, we will change our name by Deed Poll. We will call ourselves Kuan Suo.” By February 1949, all legal formalities had been completed and we had no further right to our previous name. My husband’s employer was not pleased, but there was little he could do about it, especially as at about that time one of the firm’s directors had made an alteration to his own name. ‘Of course, everyone thought that we had at least taken leave of our senses, but that never bothered me. I had lived with my husband for eight years and knew that if he had a hunch to do anything at all, there was a very good reason for it. Soon, however, we noticed people were not saying our name when addressing us, and even after seeing it written, they didn’t seem able to spell it; for that reason we later contracted it to Kuan. I want to clarify this point to show that we have at no time used an alias as has been mistakenly suggested. ‘At about this time my husband talked a great deal about the East and on occasions he did in fact wear Eastern dress; he often seemed to be very preoccupied in his manner, and I have known him to fall into a ‘trance state’ and speak in an unfamiliar tongue, which I now believe to be a language of the East. In July 1948, he again made a sudden  decision—this time to give up his job. This he did to the consternation of the employer who had always found him to be a very useful and conscientious member of his staff. The idea behind this was so that we could leave the district and lose all contact, which we did. Within a year we had completely lost touch with previous acquaintances and with our former life. We managed to exist on what we had saved, together with what we could earn from various forms of writing. ‘The day I happened to look out of the window and see my husband lying at the foot of a tree in the garden, is something I shall never forget. I hurried out to find he was recovering, but to me, a trained nurse, he seemed to be stunned or something. When eventually he regained consciousness, he seemed to act differently and in a way I did not understand. After getting him indoors and upstairs to our flat to rest, the main thought in my mind was to get a doctor as quickly as possible, but I was reckoning without him. He seemed to sense my alarm, and implored me not to do so, assuring me that he was quite alright. Certainly his speech seemed different, more halting, as if he was unfamiliar with the language, and his voice appeared deeper than before. ‘For sometime I was quite concerned, for something seemed to have happened to his memory … before speaking or moving he appeared to be making calculations; much later I learned that he was ‘tuning in to my mind’ to see what was expected of him. I do not mind admitting that in the early stages I was very worried, but now it seems quite natural. I have never ceased to wonder that such an ordinary individual as myself should be so closely associated with such a remarkable occurrence as the advent of a Tibetan Lama to the Western World.