White Lama: The Life of Tantric Yogi Theos Bernard Tibet's Lost Emissary to the New World

About this book

An amazing often overlooked story of the man who brought Yoga and Tibetan culture to America. Theos Bernards colorful enigmatic and sometimes contradictory life captures an intersection of East and West that changed our world. After years of forcibly stopping foreigners at the borders the leaders of Tibet opened the doors to their kingdom in 1937 for Theos Bernard. He was the third American to set foot in Tibet and the first American ever initiated into Tantric practices by the highest lama in Tibet. When Bernard left that sacred land he was sent home with fifty mule loads of priceless essential Buddhist scriptures from government and monastery vaults. Bernard brought these writings to America where he achieved celebrity as a spiritual master. Appearing four times on the cover of the largest-circulation magazine of the day befriending some of the most famous figures of his era including Charles Lindbergh Lowell Thomas Ganna Walska and W. Y. Evans-Wentz and working with legendary editor Maxwell Perkins the charismatic and controversial White Lama introduced a new vision of life and spiritual path to American culture before mysteriously disappearing in the Himalayas in 1947. Biography travel and adventure a history of Tibets opening to the West and the story of Buddhism and Yogas arrival in America White Lama: The Life of Tantric Yogi Theos Bernard Tibets Lost Emissary to the West is the first work to tell his groundbreaking story in full and is a narrative that thrills from beginning to end. Includes 15 photographs shot in Tibet in 1937 by Theos Bernard part of a collection that has been described as the best photographic record of Tibet in existence.