Post by Tamrin on Dec 6, 2008 2:05:51 GMT 10
Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was a writer who claimed to have been a Lama in Tibet before spending the second part of his life in the body of a British man. Cyril Henry Hoskin (8 April 1910 – 25 January 1981) described himself as the "host" of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. The name Tuesday relates to a claim in The Third Eye that Tibetans are named after the day of the week on which they were born.
The explorer and Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer was unconvinced about the book's origins and hired a private detective from Liverpool named Clifford Burgess to investigate Rampa. The findings of Burgess' investigation were published in the Daily Mail in February 1958. It was reported that the author of the book was a man named Cyril Henry Hoskin, who had been born in Plympton in Devon in 1910 and was the son of a plumber. Hoskin had never been to Tibet and spoke no Tibetan. In 1948, he had legally changed his name to Carl Kuon Suo before adopting the name Lobsang Rampa. An obituary of Fra Andrew Bertie, Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, claims that he was involved in unmasking Lobsang Rampa as a West Country plumber.
Rampa was tracked down by the British press to Howth in Ireland and confronted with these allegations. He did not deny that he had been born as Cyril Hoskin, but claimed that his body was now occupied by the spirit of Lobsang Rampa. According to the account given in his third book The Rampa Story he had fallen out of a fir tree in his garden in Thames Ditton, Surrey while attempting to photograph an owl. He was concussed, and on regaining his senses had seen a Buddhist monk in saffron robes walking towards him. The monk spoke to him about Rampa taking over his body and Hoskin agreed, saying that he was dissatisfied with his current life. When Rampa's original body became too worn out to continue, he took over Hoskin's body in a process of transmigration of the soul.
Rampa maintained for the rest of his life that The Third Eye was a true story, and in the foreword to the 1964 edition of the book, he wrote:
Rampa was tracked down by the British press to Howth in Ireland and confronted with these allegations. He did not deny that he had been born as Cyril Hoskin, but claimed that his body was now occupied by the spirit of Lobsang Rampa. According to the account given in his third book The Rampa Story he had fallen out of a fir tree in his garden in Thames Ditton, Surrey while attempting to photograph an owl. He was concussed, and on regaining his senses had seen a Buddhist monk in saffron robes walking towards him. The monk spoke to him about Rampa taking over his body and Hoskin agreed, saying that he was dissatisfied with his current life. When Rampa's original body became too worn out to continue, he took over Hoskin's body in a process of transmigration of the soul.
Rampa maintained for the rest of his life that The Third Eye was a true story, and in the foreword to the 1964 edition of the book, he wrote:
“ I am Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, that is my only name, now my legal name, and I answer to no other. ”
Hoskin's explanation might have had a bit more credibility had it come before Harrer's exposure of him.
Cyril Hoskin, a.k.a. Lobsang Rampa
