I T I N E R A R I E S

with his wife still in Tibet. In 1971 he made a journey to America and Canada. In 1972 he was on tour in Europe. He became a mediator andpeacemaker between Wests. Govinda’s Tibetan experiences are recounted in his book The Way of the White Clouds, which includes elements from several genre-spiritual journals, adventure narratives, anthropological field reports and philosophical commentaries. It is one of the century’s classic spiritual autobiographies. Lama Govinda’s final years were spent in California living in the San Francisco Bay area on Alan Watts’ houseboat, then in Mill valley. In San Francisco he established an American branch of the Arya Maitreya Mandala, called “Home of Dhyan”. He is considered to be perhaps the most influential in introducing Tibetan Buddhism to the West. He died in 1986. His ashes are contained in the Nirvana-Stupa, which was erected in 1997 on the premises of Samten Choeling Monastery (a Tibetan Monastery), in the district of Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.

LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA AND THE HERMIT ABBOT OF LACHEN IN NORTH SIKKIM

An outstanding example among modern hermit is the hermit abbot of Lachen ‘better known as the Gomchen of Lachen, who had his hermitage on the border between Northern Sikkim and Tibet. The Earl of Ronaldshay (later Marquis of Zetland), former governor of Bengal, has written admiringly about the Gomchen: ‘ Over a period of twenty six years he had been in the habit of retiring from the world from time to time and living a life of solitary meditation in remote cave- high up and difficult of access, among the cliffs of an inhospitable mountain tract above the path to Thangu. One of the periodic retirements from the world had been extended over a period of five years, during which he had seen no human being and had kept body and soul together on a minimum of food.’ The Lachen Gomchen was no other than the Guru of the famous French Orientalist and explorer Alexandra David Neel. In 1937 when Lama Anagarika Govinda was the guest of the Chogyal of Sikkim, he visited the Hermit Abbot of Lachen in his mountain retreat near Thangu, at an altitude of 13000 feet in the Sikkim Himalayas. He was in ardent desire to meet the hermit as he was already over seventy years old, and he felt he had no time to loose. He did not mind the two weeks journey on horse back through the most mountainous region of the world (Sikkim is said to have the greatest number of mountains above 24000ft compared to any other area in the world of similar size) He risked the fast approaching winter and the risk of the hermitage being closed to visitor as it happened so often when he was engaged in along period of meditation.

He put up in a horribly cold and doughty wooden rest house not far below the hermitage of the Gomchen. The next morning he climbed up to hermitage and he was received by the Gomchen discussed about David Neel and the subject of meditation and its various methods and experiences.

The Great Hermit Abbot of Lachen, Lama Anagarika Govinda has long been gone, but the cave in the cliffs is still there in the beautiful mountains of North Sikkim.