NATURE 



301 



THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 1910. 



.1 JAPANESE PRIEST IN TIBET. 

 Three Years in Tibet. By The Shramana Ekai 

 Kawaguchi. Pp. xv + 719. (Adyar [Madras], 

 Benares and London : Theosophical Publishing- 

 Society, 1909.) Price ifts. net. 



A NEW book on Tibet, offered to " the EngHsh- 

 ■'- »■ knowing public " by a Japanese priest who 

 acted for a time as physician to the Grand Lama, 

 raises our expectations of finding therein some fresh 

 and interesting views of Tibetan life as seen from the 

 inside. For the author enjoyed the advantage of 

 moving freely behind the scenes, in the palace and in 

 the monastic temples, in intimate relations with the 

 "Living Buddha," and with many of the notabilities 

 of this Old-World State, at a time when it was pur- 

 suing the even ftnour of its existence, undisturbed by 

 war's alarms. 



.\ perusal of the volume, however, even in this 

 respect, is somewh.Jt disappointing to a European 

 reader. It is a shallow, rambling, and whimsical 

 narrative, from the standpoint of an emotional 

 oriental monk, upon his wanderings on a pilgrimage 

 from shrine to shrine in a land which he knew little 

 about, and over ground mostly described in detail by 

 European writers. Of geographical or scientific data 

 there is positively nothing of any value, and little that 

 is new even in regard to the religion of the country. 

 Nevertheless, the reader who patiently perseveres 

 through much that is trivial and tiresome may pick 

 up some grains of information respecting the life in 

 the great lamaseries. 



The personality of the writer himself is quaintly 

 romantic at times. On starting from Japan for 

 Tibet in 1897, on what he tells us was a search for 

 Sanskrit Buddhist books — a search in which he proved 

 wholly unsuccessful — Mr. Kawaguchi, in ' his 

 Buddhistic zeal, extracted from his friends, as farewell 

 presents, their pledges to abstain from stimulants or 

 tobacco-smoking and from " the brutal business " of 

 catching fish. " About forty persons willingly granted 

 (this) my appeal." 



His aesthetic Japanese instinct leads him to break 

 out frequently into a rhapsody or "iita" at the sight 

 of some picturesque scene or aspect of nature ; though 

 at times he regretfully tells us that " I wished to em- 

 body my sentiments in a few verses, but the inspiration 

 would not come." In " the Dalai jungle," which is 

 the nearest he can get to the Himalayan "Tarai," 

 where he halted on the way through Nepal to the 

 Tibetan frontier, he heard a tiger roar, on which "an 

 uta came to me : — 



"The night sleeps still and calm, the moon shines 



bright, 

 What ho! — so loud a roar the stillness breaks. 

 Vibrating — ah ! it is a tiger fierce ! In ripples rough 



his roar terrific throws 

 The surface even of the mountain stream." 



The cuckoo's cry for him, instead of being a 

 pleasure, was "awful." 



NO. 209S, VOL. 82] 



" My sense of loneliness was heightened by the note 

 of the cuckoo, who now and then broke the oppressive 

 silence and an uta then came to me thus : — 

 "In tortuous paths my lonely way now lies 



Among rough mountain tracks and scenes all 



The rocks and giant trees in silence stood wild 



With naught to break the silent depths around 



Except the solitary cuckoo's notes 



That make the awful silence more profound." 



A flock of cranes leads him to fire off the fol- 

 lowing : — 

 "Like feathers white the snows fall down and lie 



There on the mountain-river's sandy banks ; 

 Ko-Koxv, Ko-wow ! sounds strange, a melody 



I hear — I search around for this strange cry. 

 In majesty these mountain cranes 



I find are proudly strutting — singing thus." 



His visionary temperament, indeed, fired by a 

 generous credulity, causes him often to fail in 

 distinguishing fancies from facts. At Sna he heard 

 the voice of a supernatural being calling to him, and 

 again at Sera monastery ; and he elsewhere tells us 

 " I was still in an extatic {sic) mood." This must have 

 been his mood also when he saw Lhasa and Potala 

 from the track over the " Genpa " (properly Khanipa) 

 pass of the Yamdok, the one followed by the Mission, 

 and whence both Lhasa and Potala were certainly 

 invisible. Facts, indeed, are weak points with him 

 throughout. To begin with, even his very first word 

 in the title of his book, ''Three Years in Tibet" (on 

 the strength of which he absurdly claims for himself 

 a position of greater authority on Tibetan matters than 

 Csoma and Jaeschke, whereas his book shows him to 

 be utterly lacking in scholarship, and even in ordinary 

 knowledge of the language), is falsified by his own 

 proof. On p. 76 he tells us that he crossed the Tibetan 

 frontier for the first time on July 4, 1900; and on 

 pp. 641 and 650 that he finally re-crossed it on emerg- 

 ing from Chumbi on June 14, 1902, thus giving the 

 duration of his entire stay in Tibet as only one year 

 and 345 days instead of the "three years" to which 

 he gratuitously lays claim ! This sort of thing is 

 typical of his matter throughout, so that he is not 

 to be taken too seriously. Nor does he allow his 

 ignorance of details to stand in the way of providing 

 precise fictitious ones. He carried no map or any' 

 instruments with him, save a small compass 

 registering the cardinal points, yet he devotes a 

 chapter with the heading "22,650 feet above the sea- 

 level " to a description of his sensations in a snow- 

 storm, when he was somewhere on the plateau, he did 

 not know where. It will be news to the Mission 

 force and to the hundreds of men of the convoys who 

 drank the water of the Yamdok Lake at Nagartse, &c.. 

 for several months to be told that the water "is 

 poisonous." 



He travelled in the guise of a Chinese Buddhist 

 priest, which his Mongoloid face and acquaintance 

 with the Chinese language rendered not difficult for 

 him. What was more important, he posed as a 

 physician, and, endowed with unbounded assurance 

 and luck, acquired such fame by his "cures" that 

 this brought him to the favourable notice of the 

 Grand Lama. " I came to be regarded as a god of. 



M 



