No one seems to be talking about Lobsang Rampa now, and "The Third Eye" has long since been forgotten. It was considered a fantasy even when it was a best seller, fifty years ago. I was in Bhutan as a young officer in the early sixties. During that period, I wrote a piece which surfaced recently. A very brief excerpt from that some what long article is attached for those who care for the world of the Lamas.
What appeals to me is the last sentence of the piece. And it makes me chant:
"Buddham sharanam gachhami
Dhammam sharanam gachhami
Sangham sharanam gachhami"
Maj Gen Surjit Singh (Retd)
“THE THIRD EYE” By Lobsang Rampa
I beseech you to forgive me for my jaded memory. I am a senior citizen and no one is willing to hire me for even a worthless job. Here, I seek apology for a very minor offence: I have forgotten whether I read the captioned book before 1964 or after that. And the reason why I seek this concession is that I am not sure whether I read Lobsang’s book before I went to Bhutan or after that.
Be that as it may, there are two events which have left a profound influence on my psyche: reading the above book and my service in Bhutan during 1964-65 where I met a lot of thoroughbred Buddhists in Trashigong Dzongkhag. I was a little more that 22 years old then, and very impressionable. What I saw in that tiny Kingdom has left a lasting memory. I learnt a great deal from their unorthodox social order and it caused me to doubt the propriety of our social system.
Permit me to share something which I observed there. I was told that if a man was caught after having committed a crime in the Buddhist world, he was tried by the appropriate authority and, if found guilty, he was thrown into the prison cell. That is much the same as the rest of the world. The difference is that, in their system the term of the imprisonment was not specified. I was stupefied, and sought to know the reason for this. A learned Lama told me,
“A criminal is like a sick man. In the prison we ‘treat’ him. And as soon as he is ‘cured’ of his malaise, we let him go back to live with his people”
I probed further, and asked, “How do you find that?” and he said,
“Just like how you are able to discharge a patient from a hospital. Do you specify the period for which patients suffering from different ailments must stay in the wards?”
The argument makes a lot of sense to me. We human beings respond differently to treatment: some get cured early, others take time. If that be so, why should the prison term be specified?
I was also told that the condemned men were thrown into ill lit dudgeons and the ‘prisoners’ were made to undergo indignity. But in the evenings, they were allowed to take a stroll on the streets of the town, and breathe fresh air. The people are taught to look at them with a kindly eye, because, the Buddhists believe that, we would all be criminals, had we been caught!
Surjit
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