by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/9/20
[A] friend of my mother remarked, "I could arrange for you to work in India with the Tibetan refugees. You could go tomorrow if you liked. You wouldn't get much pay and conditions are not great, I hear, but it would be interesting work. I know an English lady who has a school for Tibetan lamas at Dalhousie in the foothills of the Himalayas. She always needs teachers and secretaries."
A few letters were exchanged, and my job confirmed...
I was brought up in a Quaker household, though a very liberal one, and my mother's interests ranged over the years through Spiritualism and Theosophy to Buddhism....
-- Tibetan Tapestry, by Sarita [Cherry] Armstrong
The Young Lamas Home School was a school established by the 14th Dalai Lama and Freda Bedi in 1960.[1] Its funding was provided by Christopher Hills and its early abbot was Karma Thinley Rinpoche.
Freda Bedi asked Chogyam Trungpa to train young Tibetan monks, and then he became the spiritual advisor of them.[2] In addition to Chogyam Trungpa, there were Thubten Zopa Rinpoche,[3] Akong Rinpoche, Tulku Pema Tenzin, Gelek Rimpoche, Yeshe Losal, and the sons of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Chokyi Nyima and Tsikey Chokling Rinpoche who attended the school.[4] Freda Bedi was the principal of the school in Delhi which later moved to Dalhousie.
Tenzin Palmo and Robert Thurman were teachers there.[5][6]
References
1. Chögyam Trungpa, Sam Bercholz, Meditation in Action
2. Diana J. Mukpo, Carolyn Rose Gimian, Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa, p. 71
3. Jamyang Wangmo, The Lawudo Lama: stories of reincarnation from the Mount Everest region p. 191 : "The Young Lamas Home School started in Delhi in 1961 in the house of Frida Bedi, with Chogyam Trungpa, Akhong Rinpoche, Tulku Pema Tenzin, and Geleg Rinpoche as the first students. After a while, Mrs. Bedi rented a beautiful new house at L-7, Green Park, in the Hauz Khas area of New Delhi. When I joined the school in 1962 there were twelve tulkus attending."
4. Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie
5. Vicki Mackenzie, Cave in the snow: a western woman's quest for enlightenment, 1999, ISBN 1-58234-045-5
6. Why the Dalai Lama Matters, interview by Claude Arpi, 21 April 2010
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Part 1 of 3
14: The Young Lamas' Home School, Excerpt from The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi
by Andrew Whitehead
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Of all the ventures that Freda Bedi embarked upon in her varied life, the Young Lamas' Home School has borne the biggest legacy. This was entirely her initiative and although it wasn't either a large or a long-lasting venture, and was never intended to be, it was a crucial step towards enabling Tibetan spirituality to find a resonance in the west. 'Over a hundred incarnate lamas and monks have taken training in English,' she told Olive Shapley when looking back on the school's achievements. 'Many of them now are in different parts of the world.' Among the pioneering generation of Tibetan lamas to teach in Europe and North America, a large proportion were pupils at or associated with the Home School. The language skills they gained there, as well as the confidence and breadth of vision and the personal example that Freda offered of outside reverence for Tibetan spirituality, propelled many of the more adventurous among the tulkus to seek new fields of endeavour.
The idea of reincarnation or rebirth is common to several religions, particularly those with their roots in South Asia. In Tibetan Buddhism, this extends to the identification as a child of the reincarnation of the towering figures in the religion. The current Dalai Lama, the fourteenth in a line that stretches back 500 years, was formally recognised as the reincarnation at the age of four, about six years after his predecessor had died. There is elaborate protocol and tradition which guides the finding of tulkus, the incarnate lamas, as there is with many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. For a revered lama to choose reincarnation and so another life of suffering in the world is regarded as an act of great compassion. When her old Oxford friend Olive Shapley came to visit at Rumtek monastery in Sikkim, Freda sought to explain this aspect of Tibetan practice which is so alien to conventional western thinking.
An incarnate lama is a special lama -- a child who the Tibetans believe has in his former life been a big lama. And you see, the Tibetans are highly evolved spiritually and a rather extraordinary people. Really I do believe that they can find these children. They know the signs of a special child. Of course, in the west we also think about ... educating specially gifted children. They've been doing that with the incarnate lamas in Tibet for hundreds of years. There has to be a special way [to] bring up such children with special gifts .... And I also feel having worked among them for some time that there's something very special about these children.1
Suppose a Grand Lama dies, and a necessity arises to determine the place of his re-incarnation. The four temples dedicated to the four deities are ordered by the authorities to undertake the mysterious business of identification, this order being generally issued about a year after the death of the august Lama. All the priests of the four temples are summoned on that occasion, and they separately consult their own respective oracles. Their deities are, however, not infallible, and often prove just as divided in their judgment as ordinary mortals are, for very rarely do the four oracles coincide, and usually those oracles produce three different candidates. The choice has therefore to be made from among the three.
The three or four boy-candidates (as the case may be) are brought to Lhasa, when they have reached the age of five years. The ceremony of selection is next performed. This is of course conducted with great pomp and solemnity. The dignitaries who are privileged to take part in it are the Chinese Commissioner residing in Lhasa and the Regent Lama; also the Prime Ministers and all the Ministers, Vice-Ministers and a number of high Lamas are allowed to be present. First the names of the boy-candidates (three or four in number, as the case may be) are written on so many pieces of paper, and put in a golden urn which is then sealed. For the period of a week a kind of high mass is performed in the ceremony-hall, in order to entreat the divine intercession for the selection of the real re-incarnation. When this period expires all the dignitaries before-mentioned are once more assembled around the sealed urn. This is carefully inspected and the seal is then taken off. The Chinese Commissioner then takes a pair of tiny ivory sticks something like ordinary chop-sticks in shape and size and, with his eyes shut, puts them into the urn and solemnly picks out one of the papers. The name written on that paper is read, and the bearer of that name is acknowledged as Grand Lama-elect.
From what I have described, there is apparently little room, if any, for trickery, but I have heard from the Secretary of the Chinese Commissioner that dishonest practices are in reality not infrequent. Indeed the temptations are too strong for greedy and dishonest minds to resist, owing to the keen rivalry among the parents of the boy-candidates to have their own boys selected. Strong interest urges them on in this rivalry, for the parents of the Lama-elect are not only entitled to receive the title of Duke from the Chinese Government, but also enjoy many other advantages, above all the acquisition of a large fortune. Under these circumstances the parents and relatives of eligible boys are said to offer large bribes to the Chinese Amban, and to others who are connected with the ceremony of selection. I do not affirm the fact of bribes, but at least I have heard that cases of such under-hand influence have occurred not unfrequently.
The selection of the Grand Lama is thus made by an elaborate process, in which the influence of the oracle-invokers plays an important part. The priests who have charge of this business are in most cases men who make it their business to blackmail every applicant. Most of the oracle-priests are therefore extremely wealthy.
The Nechung who are under the direct patronage of the Hierarchy, are generally millionaires, as millionaires go in Tibet. This, taken in conjunction with another fact, that the re-incarnations of higher Lamas are generally sons of wealthy aristocrats, or merchants, and that it is only very rarely that they are discovered among the lowly, must be considered as suggesting the working of some such practices. I have even heard that some unscrupulous people corrupt the oracle-priests for the benefit of their unborn children, so as to have their boys accepted as Lamas incarnate when born. From a worldly point of view the expense incurred on this account not unfrequently proves a good ‘investment,’ if I may use the profane expression, for the boys who are the objects of the oracles have a good chance of being installed in the temples where their spiritual antecedents presided, which are sure to possess large property. This property goes, it need hardly be added, to the boys, after they have been duly installed. Whatever may have been the practical effect of incarnation in former times, it is, as matters stand at present, an incarnation of all vices and corruptions, instead of the souls of departed Lamas.
I once remarked to certain Tibetans that the present mode of incarnation was a glaring humbug, and that it was nothing less than an embodiment of bribery.
-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi
She described the lamas as the intelligentsia of Tibet, and she was determined to help them keep the tradition alive 'because it's very deep and very beautiful'. Tibetan society prior to the 1950s was built around Buddhism. The Dalai Lama was a rare, almost unique, institution in the modern world which combined spiritual leadership and temporal authority.
Question 22. Do Communists reject existing religions?
Answer: All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.
-- Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Although Tibet's high altitude and unforgiving climate did not deliver much in the way of agricultural surplus, the country supported a huge monastic community. Of Tibet's 6 million population, it's estimated that prior to the Chinese takeover about 200,000 were monks -- or approaching 10% of the adult male population.2
The Tibetan administration is of an anomalous description—a hybrid partaking of feudalism on the one hand and of the modern system of Local Government on the other.
The relation between Peers and commoners apparently resembles feudalism. The first recipient of the title was granted a certain tract of land in recognition of his service, and there at once sprung up between this lord of the manor, as it were, and the inhabitants of that particular place a relationship akin to that between sovereign and subject. This lord is an absolute master of his people, both in regard to their rights and even their lives.
The lord levies a poll-tax on the inhabitants, and even the poorest are not exempted from this obligation. The levy varies considerably according to the means of the payer, from say one tanka paid by a poor inhabitant to even a hundred paid by a wealthier member of the community. Besides, every freeholder must pay land tax, the land held by him being understood theoretically to belong to the lord. However heavy the burden of the poll-tax may be, each person is obliged to pay it, for if he neglects to do so he is liable to be punished with flogging and the confiscation of his property to boot. The only means of escape from this obligation consists in becoming a monk, and there must be in the Tibetan priesthood a large number of men who have turned priests solely with this object of avoiding the payment of taxes. The witty remark once made to me by my teacher, Ti Rinpoche, on this subject may illustrate the state of affairs in the Tibetan priesthood. He said: “I do not know whether to rejoice at or to regret the presence of so many priests in Tibet. Some seem to take this as a sign of the flourishing condition of the national religion and on that ground seem to be satisfied with it. I cannot quite agree with this argument; on the contrary I rather hold that it is better to have even two or three precious diamonds than a heap of stones and broken tiles.” The motives that lead people to become priests lying in that region, it is not strange that the Tibetan priesthood should contain plenty of rubbish with very few diamonds among them.
However, when it is remembered how heavy are the burdens imposed on the shoulders of the people, it is not strange that they should try to evade them by entering the Order. The condition of even the poorest priest presents a great contrast to that of other poor people, for the priest is at least sure to obtain every month a regular allowance, small as it is, from the Hierarchical Government, while he can expect more or less of extra allowances in the shape of occasional presents from charitable people. But a poor layman cannot expect any help from those quarters, and he has to support his family with his own labor and to pay the poll-tax besides. Very often therefore he is hardly able to drive the wolf of hunger from his door, and in such case his only hope of succor lies in a loan from his landlord, or the lord of the manor wherein he resides. But hope of repayment there is none, and so the poor farmer gets that loan under a strange contract, that is to say, by binding himself to offer his son or daughter as a servant to the creditor when he or she attains a certain age. And so his child when he has reached the age of (say) ten years is surrendered to the creditor, who is entitled to employ him as a servant for fifteen or twenty years, and for a loan which does not generally exceed ten yen. The lives of the children of poor people may therefore be considered as being foreclosed by their parents. Those pitiable children grow up to be practically slaves of the Peers.
The relationship existing between the Peers and the people residing on their estates, therefore, partakes of the nature of feudalism in some essential respects, but it cannot be said that feudalism reigns alone in Tibet to the exclusion of other systems of Government. On the contrary a centralised form of Government prevails more or less at the same time. The Peers, it must be remembered, do not generally reside on their own estates; they reside in Lhasa and leave their estates in charge of their stewards. And they are not unfrequently appointed by the Central Government as Governors of certain districts.
Consequently the Tibetans may be said to be divided into two classes of people, one being subject to the control of the lords of the manors and other to that of the Central Government. Not unfrequently the two overlap, and the same people are obliged to pay poll-tax to their lords and other taxes to the Central Government.
The work of revenue collection is entrusted to two or three Commissioners appointed from among the clerical or lay officials of higher rank, and these, invested with judicial and executive powers, are despatched every year to the provinces to collect revenue, consisting of taxes, imposts and import duties, these being paid either in money or kind.
The demands on revenue are many and various, and among the items of ordinary expenditure may be mentioned first of all the sums required for supporting, either wholly or partially, a large number of priests residing both in Lhasa and in the provinces, the former alone numbering about twenty-five thousand. The outlay on account of building temples and religious ceremonies is not small, but that on account of salaries paid to the officials of the Central Government appears to be less....
Part of the work done by the Tibetan Minister of the Treasury is the management of the subscriptions of the people. Everything offered to the Buddhist Temple and given to the priests at the time of the Great Assembly is at once paid into the Treasury, to be given out only by the order of the Minister of that department. Another business taken by the Minister is the household expenses of the Pope. These expenses are not fixed, and the Pope can draw out as much as he pleases within the limit of usage, and his own moderation. It is said that since the accession of the present Pope both the expenditure and the revenue have been greatly increased. The Minister of the Treasury has also to pay all the salaries of officials and priests in the service of the Papal Government. These expenses for salaries are very small, as compared with those of other countries, but the officials and priests derive an additional income from the land in their own possession.
Officers and priests in Tibet can each borrow fifteen hundred dollars from the Government at an interest of five per cent a year and they can lend it again at fifteen per cent, which is the current rate of interest in Tibet, though usurers sometimes charge over thirty per cent. Thus any officer can make at least ten per cent on fifteen hundred dollars without running much risk. If an officer or priest fails to repay the loan the amount is not subtracted from his next year’s loan. Compound interest is unknown in Tibet however long the debtor may prolong his payment; it is forbidden by the law. Another subsidy given by the Government is six dollars extra pay per annum to each priest of the Three Great Temples. In this connexion it must also be stated that the Three Great Temples just mentioned receive a vast amount of mal from the Government.
The supplementary resources of the Pope’s revenue are subscriptions from the members and laymen, the leases from meadow-lands in his personal possession, and profits acquired by his own trading, which is carried on by his own caravans. The Pope’s caravans must be distinguished from those of the Treasury Department....
The property of the Grand Lama, after his death, is divided in the following way: One-half of the property (in fact a little more than half) has to be divided among his relatives in his native place, and the remaining half is distributed as gifts among the priests of the Great Temples and those of the New Sect. In the case of an ordinary priest, if he leaves property worth five thousand dollars about four thousand is used in gifts to the priests and for the expense of lights, and almost all the remaining thousand is used for his funeral expenses, leaving perhaps three hundred to his disciples. In cases when a priest leaves very little money, his disciples are obliged to borrow money to supply the want of gifts and money for lights in his honor—a custom entirely foreign to the laity.
-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi
The Theravada Buddhism that Freda had encountered in Burma emphasised the human nature of the Buddha while the Mahayana school that prevailed in Tibet portrayed the Buddha as a transcendent force not limited to the human domain. It was an approach which, Freda said, 'fits me like a glove. It brings in all the compassion for all sentient beings and the great cosmic Mahayana point of view which attracts me very much. And of course I do feel a very great nearness to Tibetan culture and the incarnates.'3 Freda had been enriched by her encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. She wanted others to benefit in the same way, to share in her spiritual discovery. And once she had a cause or a quest, there was an impulsive aspect to her -- she just got on and did it, believing that if you got things started they could grow, while too much time planning and preparing was sometimes a drain on energy and enthusiasm.
Tortures are carried to the extreme of diabolical ingenuity. They are such as one might expect in hell. One method consists in drilling a sharpened bamboo stick into the tender part of the tip of the fingers, as already described. Another consists in placing ‘stone-bonnets’ on the head of the victim. Each ‘bonnet’ weighs about eight pounds, and one after another is heaped on as the torture proceeds. The weight at first forces tears out of the eyes of the victim, but afterward, as the weight is increased, the very eye-balls are forced from their sockets. Then flogging, though far milder in itself, is a painful punishment, as it is done with a heavy rod, cut fresh from a willow tree, the criminal receiving it on the bared small of his back. The part is soon torn open by the lashing, and the blood that oozes out is scattered right and left as the beater continues his brutal task, until the prescribed number, three hundred or five hundred blows as the case may be, are given. Very often, and perhaps with the object of prolonging the torture, the flogging is suspended, and the poor victim receives a cup of water, after which the painful process is resumed. In nine cases out of ten the victims of this corporeal punishment fall ill, and while at Lhasa I more than once prescribed for persons who, as the result of flogging, were bleeding internally. The wounds caused by the flogging are shocking to see, as I know from my personal observations.
A prison-house is in any case an awful place, but more especially so in Tibet, for even the best of them has nothing but mud walls and a planked floor, and is very dark in the interior, even in broad day. This absence of sunlight is itself a serious punishment in such a cold country.
As for food, prisoners are fed only once a day with a couple of handfuls of baked flour. This is hardly sufficient to keep body and soul together, so that a prisoner is generally obliged to ask his friends to send him some food. Nothing, however, sent in from outside reaches the prisoners entire, for the gaolers subtract for their own mouths more than half of it, and only a small portion of the whole quantity gets into the prisoners’ hands.
The most lenient form of punishment is a fine; then comes flogging, to be followed, at a great distance, by the extraction of the eye-balls; then the amputation of the hands. The amputation is not done all at once, but only after the hands have been firmly tied for about twelve hours, till they become completely paralysed. The criminals who are about to suffer amputation are generally suspended by the wrists from some elevated object with stout cord, and naughty street urchins are allowed to pull the cord up and down at their pleasure. After this treatment the hands are chopped off at the wrists in public. This punishment is generally inflicted on thieves and robbers after their fifth or sixth offence. Lhasa abounds in handless beggars and in beggars minus their eye-balls; and perhaps the proportion of eyeless beggars is larger than that of the handless ones.
Then there are other forms of mutilation also inflicted as punishment, and of these ear-cutting and nose-slitting are the most painful. Both parties in a case of adultery are visited with this physical deformation. These forms of punishment are inflicted by the authorities upon the accusation of the aggrieved party, the right of lodging the complaint being limited, however, to the husband; in fact he himself may with impunity cut off the ears or slit the noses of the criminal parties, when taken in flagrante delicto. He has simply to report the matter afterwards to the authorities.
With regard to exile there are two different kinds, one leaving a criminal to live at large in the exiled place, and the other, which is heavier, confining him in a local prison.
Capital punishment is carried out solely by immersion in water. There are two modes of this execution: one by putting a criminal into a bag made of hides and throwing the bag with its live contents into the water; and the other by tying the criminal’s hands and feet and throwing him into a river with a heavy stone tied to his body. The executioners lift him out after about ten minutes, and if he is judged to be still alive, down they plunge him again, and this lifting up and down is repeated till the criminal expires. The lifeless body is then cut to pieces, the head alone being kept, and all the rest of the severed members are thrown into the river. The head is deposited in a head vase, either at once, or after it has been exposed in public for three or seven days, and the vase is carried to a building established for this sole purpose, which bears a horrible name signifying “Perpetual Damnation.” This practice comes from a superstition of the people that those whose heads are kept in that edifice will forever be precluded from being reborn in this world.
All these punishments struck me as entirely out of place for a country in which Buddhist doctrines are held in such high respect. Especially did I think the idea of eternal damnation irreconcilable with the principles of mercy and justice, for I should say that execution ought to absolve criminals of their offences. Several other barbarous forms of punishment are in vogue, but these I may omit here, for what I have stated in the preceding paragraphs is enough to convey some idea of criminal procedure as it exists in the Forbidden Land.
-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi
With the support of the Dalai Lama, Freda's solution to meeting the educational needs of the young lamas was to do it herself. She was throughout her life a 'doer'. She didn't simply comment and diagnose -- she rolled up her sleeves and got involved. As a civil liberties campaigner in Lahore, she had made a point of travelling to villages to identify cases of police high-handedness. In Kashmir, she had become involved both in the [Communist] women's militia and in providing practical support to Partition refugees. In Misamari, she hadn't just compiled a report for the Indian government but had sought personally to provide redress for the problems she identified. She had teaching experience -- in both Lahore and Srinagar -- and was trusted both at the top ranks of the Indian government and among senior figures in India's Tibetan community. Her lodgers in Delhi, Trungpa and Akong, were potential collaborators who stood to gain from classes and could help in the running of the school. Trungpa in particular was keen to broaden his horizons. 'By contrast to the medieval world of Tibet, India was a very modern place,' he wrote in his memoirs. 'Here for the first time I had contact with Westerners, and I realized that it was absolutely necessary for me to study their language in order to spread the Dharma.'4 Their involvement also made the enterprise feel less like external do-gooding and more an initiative that Tibetans themselves were shaping -- though it was always very much Freda's show.
The Young Lamas' Home School opened in a large, detached house in Green Park in south Delhi in October 1961.
Green Park is an upscale and affluent locality, in the South Delhi district of Delhi, India. It is among the most posh and popular districts of Delhi. The Locality falls under Category 'A' of residential colonies in Delhi alongside other Category 'A' colonies like Greater Kailash, Defense Colony and Gulmohar Park. The neighbourhood registered a 4.4% growth in residential sales and was recently featured alongside Greater Kailash, Defense Colony, Vasant Vihar and Anand Niketan in the 2019 edition of Knight Frank's quarterly report on prime luxury residential properties in various mega cities around the globe.
Established in the early 1960's, Green Park today is among the most desired neighborhoods in the capital city. The Locality not only has its very own metro station on the yellow line but also has numerous professionally maintained parks in each block. It has its own prime market which hosts numerous chic salons, boutiques and eating joints. It also borders the famous Deer Park which is known to be among the very few large green spaces left in today's heavily urbanized Delhi....
It was established in early 1960's and today has all the amenities of a rich cosmopolitan culture along with large residential and commercial areas and many religious places. Green Park is considered by some as the "lungs" of Delhi, as it is near one of the largest green areas in the city. It is also believed to be an upscale residential area with real estate prices soaring as high as ₹100 crore (US $14.5 million).
-- Green Park, Delhi
It was, as the name suggests, home and school combined. A measure of support was provided by the Indian government while the Dalai Lama nominated the young lamas to be enrolled, who came from all four principal traditions within Tibetan Buddhism. They ranged in age from seven to twenty-one. 'I have 17 young Tibetan incarnate lamas in my latest effort for the refugees -- an English-Hindi language school, combined with their Tibetan studies,' Freda told Olive Chandler. 'Such a joy to have them here; to see their own happiness reflected in their faces.'5 Lama Yeshe, still a teenager, was associated with the school from the start. 'All the young lamas from all four schools were able to learn English and spread Buddhism in the world,' he says. 'It's her vision -- otherwise we could not have achieved it.' And as well as the educational and spiritual development, Freda also provided emotional support to young men who were, for the most part, without parents or separated from them. We all [had] to call her Mummy. She really like[d] everybody calling her Mummy. And she treated everybody like Mummy.'6
Through the Tibetan Friendship Group and the network of western well-wishers, Freda was able to attract independent funding for and interest in her new venture. Lois Lang-Sims arrived in Delhi just a few days before the school opened. She was a few years younger than Freda, a spiritual seeker who had helped to establish the Tibet Society in London and had 'adopted' a young lama as part of Freda's scheme. She wanted to see for herself whether the Home School was worthy of further financial support.
Lois Lang-Sims, who died on March 11 at the age of 97, was perhaps the last of Charles Williams’s ‘disciples’ – those who, for a time, took him as their spiritual teacher....Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) is the unjustly neglected third member of the Inklings, after C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien...
According to C.S. Lewis, everyone who met Williams fell in love with him—including many young women who became his disciples and with whom he practiced semi-sexual, semi-magical rituals of transference to heighten his creativity...
He was a member of A.E. Waite’s occult secret society, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, for ten formative years. He rose high in the ranks, leading initiates in practicing alchemy, astrology, Cabalism, conjuration, divination with tarot cards, and meditation on the Sephirotic Tree...
He was fascinated by the mystical body of Christ: he believed that sex is an act of co-inherence and that every romance corresponds to Jesus’ earthly life. In his Arthurian poetry, he carried the simple doctrine of Christian unity into a multi-layered symbolism infused with occult significance.
-- An Introduction to Charles Williams, by Sørina Higgins
One of the first English people to become aware of the sad plight of the Tibetan refugees who fled to Nepal and northern India after the Chinese invasion of 1959, she helped to found the Tibet Society, the first charity dedicated to helping them, becoming a friend of the Dalai Lama and other senior Tibetan lamas.
Her Tibetan adventures are depicted in a beautifully-written volume of autobiography, Flower in a Teacup.... [S]he was also the author of Canterbury Cathedral: Mother Church of Holy Trinity, a discursive account of the Cathedral, its history and its significance, as well as of One Thing Only: A Christian Guide to the Universal Quest for God and The Christian Mystery: An Exposition of Esoteric Christianity.
I met her in 2001, when I went to record her memories of Charles Williams. She lived in a care home in Hove, where, as a devout mystical Christian, she spent much of her time in prayer and contemplation.
-- Lois Lang-Sims (1917-2014), by Grevel Lindop
Lang-Sims described Freda as a 'tall, fair-haired Englishwoman, with a face that was both soft and strong, looking remarkably Anglo-Saxon despite the rumpled sari which she wore as if she had never known any other kind of dress.' But she also delved beyond first appearances and was keen to get the measure of Freda. 'Her personality was disturbingly potent; but I learnt to shake off its slightly hypnotic effect ... ' Lang-Sims recorded. When I got behind the barrier of her total self-dedication, her blind indifference to her own and other people's comfort and convenience, I discovered a humanity and a kind of pathos which drew me towards her in affection and friendship. Moreover I perceived that she was entirely sincere; and this was more than could be said for the majority of those persons who were concerning themselves with Tibetan refugee relief.'7
Lois Lang-Sims' passing reference to others' comfort, or the lack of it, was an elliptical reference to her own astonishment in discovering that the Bedis' flat, where she had arranged to stay, was full to overflowing.
There seemed to be a great many people in the room in which I found myself. They were all seated round a low table on the floor, with the exception of an elderly Tibetan monk who was dining apart from the rest on a raised seat. Two of those on the floor were young monks, and there were several other Tibetans, another fair-haired woman in a sari, [and] an Indian whom I guessed to be Freda Bedi's husband.
The old monk, Lois discovered, was not an incarnate but a geshe or teacher, and as such treated with particular respect. The young men were probably Trungpa and Akong, destined to be 'the senior pupils' in the new school.
I took a place in the circle and was handed a plateful of dahl and rice. The time was half-past ten in the evening but I could see that the working day had only just finished. I began to look round the room which had a dingy beauty of its own ... There were no chairs in this room, only cushions and mats and the hard bed-seat, covered by a Tibetan rug, which was occupied by the old monk. In the corner of the room was a Tibetan shrine glowing with lighted butter-lamps. As my eyes turned to the level of the ground I saw a large brown rat sidling along by the wall on soft feet.8
She was startled to find that the room where she was to sleep was both a passageway and in use day and night for meditation classes.
Lang-Sims saw at close quarters the setting up of the Home School. The house was newly built with stone floors, standing on raised ground on an 'exceptionally pleasant' site amid an expanse of scrubland. She was invited to stay there but demurred because the plumbing didn't seem to be up-and-running, but she was on hand when the first pupils moved in.
Immediately before the opening of the school two contingents of young Lamas arrived at the [Bedis'] flat. All were refugees and in sore need of the robes with which Freda intended to provide each one as a welcome-present. Several were no more than children; but the behaviour even of these was strangely adult. They sat smiling and talking quietly in Tibetan, accepting everything that was done for them with perfect courtesy and no trace of anxiety or fuss. When the time came for the move they piled into the taxis together with all the furniture, crates, boxes, bedding-rolls and miscellaneous oddments, their gentle gaiety as undisturbed as if they were off on a picnic.9
Two days later, Lang-Sims -- feeling guilty that she had abandoned Freda and the young lamas for a hotel -- returned to see how they were settling in. 'I followed Freda into the house and gazed about me in astonishment. The disorder was cleared away; everything was in its place even to the tankas [religious paintings] on the walls; there was an atmosphere of peace. I remembered the plumbing and glanced at a large pool of water in the vicinity of the wash-place. Something had overflowed but at least there was water to flow.'10 Still more impressive was the shrine that had been constructed in one of the two principal rooms, taking up the whole of a wall, 'a thing of wonder and yet made out of nothing but the simplest oddments, an ordered profusion of colours and shapes seeming as if it had fallen into a pattern of itself. There were a few small images; a number of crude prints and tinted photographs; scarves; ribbons; bits of coloured materials; rows of offering cakes (called 'tormas'); bowls containing water and offerings of seeds, sweets and rice; and, of course, the lighted butter-lamps.' Seated on floor mats, the pupils were chanting their morning office each one crouched over a sacred book and rocking to and fro. 'The boys, on Freda's instructions but left entirely to themselves, had produced this shrine in a day by their own unaided imagination and efforts. They were all working hard; although, of course, they did not expect to be asked to perform "menial" tasks: the actual work of the house was done entirely by Freda's servants and the servant-monks.'
Freda's energy, drive and organisation had established the school and marshalled the young lamas. She was every bit as effective at developing the profile of the new school, which was so important in ensuring continued government support and private fundraising. With an eye perhaps on both goals, Freda took Lois Lang-Sims to meet Nehru, then in his early seventies and increasingly worn-out after fourteen years in office. 'Freda expressed her gratitude for his encouragement and assistance in her school project: suddenly he really smiled, seeming to wake out of his dream, and said teasingly, in a very low, quiet voice: "It was not for you I did it." Then he half closed his eyes and appeared almost to go to sleep.'11 The encounter gave every indication that it was precisely for Freda that Nehru had put his weight behind establishing the school.
Within a few weeks of the founding of the school, the New York Times came calling -- though they weren't allowed inside. '"We're sorry, but one of our young lamas is in bed with chicken pox,'" their reporter was told. 'Mrs. Bedi treats the seventeen boys at the school as members of her family. She listens patiently to their problems of growing up. "Even lamas have them," she says.'12 Freda explained that the purpose of the school was to impart traditional education in the context of the modern world. '"It aims," Mrs Bedi said, "at constructing a bridge of understanding between the young lamas and the changing young people of their own generation. It will make them aware of the new world into which they have found their way after the tragic fate of Tibet.'" She estimated that there were in total about seventy-five incarnate lamas under the age of twenty-five in India. Each group would study for six months, then a new intake would take their place. Four such intakes would cover all the tulkus, then the initial group would return. The plan was to give three semesters of instruction to each group of lamas in rotation -- a six-year project. And the school was hoping for financial contributions from abroad, towards which goal sympathetic coverage in one of America's leading daily papers was as good as gold dust.
The school initiative was extempore all the same -- and as the New York Times pointed out, Freda was still a civil servant and supervising the lamas' school was supposedly a spare-time activity. Apart from the spiritual studies, most of the teaching was done by volunteers -- mainly young westerners who happened to be passing through. Anita [Plattner, nee] Morris, an English woman in her mid-twenties who by her own admission had been 'bumming around' Asia, was introduced to Freda and promptly started working at Green Park, teaching English and assisting more generally. She was not a Buddhist, had no Tibetan or Hindi, and her teaching experience was as a dance instructor. She liked Freda and the young Tibetans and relished being part of such a worthwhile project, but there were uncomfortable moments. 'I was going down with a couple of the tulkus to get to Green Park,' she recalls. 'I think Freda must have said: can you take them because they don't know the way. These were more adult people than children. And I can remember one of them suddenly rushing off and disappearing behind a tree. I was not quite sure whether he's going to be sick or he was going to shit. But he came out with a stick with a worm over the stick which had come out of him.'13
The school got off to a sound start but Delhi was not the ideal location. Even the more comfortable southern suburbs offered a lot of distractions and -- more crucially -- little respite from the often oppressive heat. As spring approached the young Tibetans were overwhelmed by the relentlessly rising temperature. Freda's plan had always been to move the school for the summer months to Dalhousie, an old colonial hill resort a day or two's travel by road to the north of Delhi and, at an altitude of 7,000 feet, a lot cooler. A large house overlooking the town was made available on rent. It bore the name 'Kailash', after one of Tibet's most commanding and sacred peaks. Several hundred Tibetan refugees had been encouraged to make their home in and around Dalhousie and the lamas felt less isolated here. When Freda, her volunteers and pupils departed from Green Park in the spring of 1961, it was a final farewell to the school's initial home. 'Dalhousie air is crisp + fresh as new pine needles. Such a heavenly view across the snows!' Freda said in a letter to Olive Chandler in England. And she added: 'To work for the Lamas is blessing unlimited.'14
Chime Rinpoche, then about twenty and a friend of Trungpa and Akong from their days in monasteries in eastern Tibet, remembers meeting Freda Bedi initially in Kalimpong and then being nominated by the 16th Karmapa for a place at the Home School. 'She [was] wearing saris,' he recalls, 'and she tried to look like [an] Indian -- she's not, she's very very English'. Freda clearly traded on her dual identity. She may sometimes have resented being regarded as an outsider after decades of living in India, but she was adroit in taking advantage of the profile her English pedigree allowed. She almost certainly got more attention, support and funding because potential donors and supporters were more comfortable with a westerner in charge. In a curious way, the English aspect of Freda became more prominent again as she became immersed in a new religion and culture. While others may have been curious about the clash of identities which Freda embodied, it wasn't something she dwelt on herself. She never regarded herself as constrained by the boundaries of race, religion, language or culture -- indeed these were barriers to be surmounted to gain access to wider sources of knowledge and stimulation.
Freda encouraged the idea that she had a maternal role towards the young lamas. Ringu Tulku Rinpoche was about ten when he arrived in Dalhousie shortly after the school moved there, and believes he was for a while the youngest pupil. He recalls Freda as 'a very kind and compassionate lady. Like a mother. We all used to call her Mummy. She was running this school. The teaching was done by volunteers. We had different kind of Tibetan and Buddhist classes, and we also had prayers together. But then we also had English classes, maths classes, and these were taught by these other volunteer teachers.' For the more vulnerable lamas, Freda's love and attention was a big support. 'She was especially kind to the younger ones,' Ringu Tulku recalls. 'In the evenings sometimes, she would call us and give hot chocolate, and that was really very nice. So sometimes I used to walk in front of her window, making some noise to remind her that I'm there. Not every day, but sometimes she would call me and then give me hot chocolate and I was very happy with that.' He describes Freda as kind hearted, clear minded and 'a very, very strong lady'. If young lamas didn't write back to the pen friend 'adoptees' Freda had arranged, or send thank you letters, she would reprimand them.
Chime Rinpoche also recalls Freda as a disciplinarian. At Dalhousie, he says, there were strict rules against any socialising outside the classroom between the lamas and the women volunteer teachers. And he admits to being afraid of Freda. He wasn't the only one. 'Freda was tall and, by this time, heavily-built. She wore a maroon sari and kept her well-oiled gray hair tied back in a bun. She had piercing blue eyes and was the quintessential memsahib whose imperious manner quelled even high lamas,' according to Tenzin Palmo, who as Diane Perry went out from England to volunteer at the Home School in Dalhousie. 'Indeed most lamas were somewhat in awe of her. She was not accustomed to being subservient and usually gave the orders! Of course, by this time she was already an older woman which made her dominance more socially acceptable. She was also great fun and a wonderful source of Tibetan lama gossip.'15
The move to Dalhousie obliged Freda finally to forsake the role of editor of Social Welfare which she had occupied since before the monthly started publication in 1954. The Central Social Welfare Board held a farewell party for her, recording that she had resigned 'to devote herself completely to the cause of the Young Lamas' Home School'.16 She was no longer a civil servant but alongside the greater freedom was the loss of her salary and her government accommodation. The ground-floor flat in Moti Bagh had been cramped but it was the focus of the family. Ranga was well established in the tea business and with a family of his own; Kabir was sixteen and on the cusp of admission to St Stephen's College in Delhi; Guli was just twelve and increasingly spent time in her holidays with her older brothers. 'My brothers and Ranga's wife Umi cushioned me from my insecurities,' she says. Kabir and Guli visited Dalhousie, and indeed Kabir taught there -- one renowned Buddhist lama insists with a broad smile that whatever the limitations of his spoken English, Kabir Bedi is to blame.
Baba Bedi moved from the government flat into Raj Narindra's house in Jangpura Extension in south Delhi where he had been a regular, if surreptitious, visitor for some years. He continued to write, if irregularly and without conspicuous success, and to embrace the occult and forms of mysticism. In June 1963, he sent Margaret Bourke-White an inscribed copy of his latest pamphlet -- 'Unity of Man & World Peace, by BABA, Grand Master of the Celestial Order of the White Lion, Master of the Occult Circle of India, Director, Institute for Inquiry into the Unknown'.
"As a student, athlete, politician, mystic and writer Baba Pyare Lal Bedi better known as Baba Bedi XVI, considered the sixteenth descendant of Nanak, who was in the past, one of the best known and active Sikh teachers.
Father of the well-known actor Kabir Bedi, he spread a Sikh spirituality. Its setting is different from that of the Sikh master Yogi Bhajan who founded a Toronto, in 1968, the 3HO organization, also known as Sikh Dharma. Master of the Occult Circle of India, he is the descendant of the sixteenth generation of Sat Guru Baba Nanak, Founding Master of the Sikh faith, in 15th century. Born in 1909 in Punjab, Northern India, he graduated from universities Punjab and Oxford; he was a researcher at the University of Berlin with a scholarship named after Alexander Von Humboldt, working with Prof. Werner Sombart and with the Prof. Rudolf Otto of the University of Marburg.
As an athlete he won the championship in the hammer throw in the Indian Olympic race and at the English inter-university meeting in Oxford. Returning to India in 1934 he began to participate, as a leftist revolutionary, in the liberation battle of India and passed a few years in concentration camps and in English prisons....
In 1953, after 20 years of political activity, he gave up politics and turned to mystical life. In 1961, to dig deeper into the heart of the occult, he founded the "Institute for Inquiry into the Unknown "(Institute of Investigation into the Unknown).
In 1963 he added a new dimension to his work by starting the Center for Psychic Art (Center for Psychic Art).
From 1972 onwards he came to Italy where, after numerous conferences in Rome and Turin, he stopped in Milan where he founded and lead the Aquarian Philosophy Center, from which it dissociates and opens his School of New Philosophical Thought by developing his philosophy for the Aquarian Age, taking courses to learn Vibration Therapy, and helping the development of human personality also through the Psychic expression. His teachings are about meditation, awareness of God, psychophysical well-being, evolution of personality.
In 1981 he chaired the International Congress on Reincarnation, held in Milan, and began the World Movement to "live according to Ethical Consciousness" as a means for achieve social Peace.
In the Italian years, Baba Bedi XVI published the 3 reference books of Aquarian philosophy: "Total Man" (1975), "Man in the Age of Aquarius" (1982), "Consciousness eye of the Soul "(1991). Furthermore, in 1981, he founded and directed the Aquarian philosophy magazine “La Resonance".
He revealed truly new positive dynamics to humanity, which can be implemented on all levels and at every level; as long as one desires it first. He never tired of repeating: “You can't bring the horse to the river and force him to drink, even if he is thirsty, no violation is possible to free will."
His works published jointly with his wife Freda M. Houlston Bedi*:
• *India analyzed, work in 4 volumes (1933-1934 London, Victor Gollancz);
• *Gandhi: Mahatma Gandhi, Saint and statesman, with a preface by Prof. Rudolf Otto, London 1934);
• Karl Marx - Letters on India, Lahore, Contemporary India Publication (1936);
• Sheikh Abdullah: his life and ideals (1949);
• Harvest from the Desert, Sir Ganga Ram Trust Society (1940);
• Muslims in USSR, Lahore, Indian Printing Works (1947);
• Mystic India, (3 vol.), The Unity Book club of India, New Delhi;
• Hands off West Irian: Indonesia's national demand from Dutch colonialists (1962);
• Prophet of the Full Moon: Guru Baba Nanak, founder master of Sikhism, New Delhi, Chaudhari Publishers, (1966);
• The art of the tetress, Bombay, Pearl books (1968), translated into Italian by La nuova Via ed. 1972;
• The pilgrim's way, with a preface by the Indian President S. Radhakrishanan, India (1969), Patiala, Punjabi University;
• *Dynamics of the New Age, New Delhi (1970);
• Conscience as Dynamics of the Psychic for Human Well-being, New Delhi, Institute for Inquiry Into the Unknown;
• Mystic & Ecstacy Eros, New Delhi, Institute for Inquiry Into the Unknown;
• The dynamics of the occult, New Delhi, Unity Publishers;
• The total man, Age of Uranus ed. 1977;
• Soul Eye Consciousness, ed. Zanfi, 2008, second edition of Cittadella Instit. Aquarian pedagogy.
-- Biographical note of Baba Pyare Lal Bedi XVI, by Alleva Franca
Although Freda and Bedi lived apart, they remained close. When in Delhi, Freda would on occasions come to stay in Jangpura Extension, often with a small retinue of monks and assistants. Some in the extended family described these visitations as 'Freda's revenge'.
Freda was exhaustive in seeking funds for the school. In April 1963, seventeen-year-old Kabir Bedi wrote a letter to 'Aunty Margaret', Margaret Bourke-White, acknowledging a donation which she wished to keep anonymous. 'Here in Dalhousie, the school has almost doubled its numbers and is expected to reach seventy-two Tibetans,' Kabir wrote, with a touch of exaggeration. We also have a team of volunteers who teach. I am also teaching until I join college in July.'17 Freda's reach even extended to her old friends in Derby. A historian of Parkfields Cedars school recorded: 'Something a little different in 1963 was a donation to a school for Buddhist lamas, founded by an Old Girl.'18 The term networking was not then in common use for maintaining and utilising a web of friends and contacts -- but that is what Freda was doing, with both determination and success.
The move to a bigger property at Dalhousie also allowed for some modest expansion of the school, requiring more volunteers and a gearing up of the administration. Cherry Armstrong, an eighteen-year-old whose mother was active in the Buddhist Society in London, arrived towards the end of the school's first summer in the hills.
So I went to the phone book, and I looked up “Tibet.” Now in London, there’s 12 million people, the phone book is in four volumes, but I looked up in the “T’s,” and there was only one entry that began with the word “Tibet.” And that was “The Tibet Society of the United Kingdom.”
So I saw that, and noted down the address -- I think it was 58 Eccleston Square -- and I didn’t think of phoning. I thought, “Well, I’ll go in person to see what happens.” ...
[S]o I got in the car, and I knew where Eccleston Square was, and I managed to find a parking place ... And it was sort of a Victorian townhome. And I went up the steps and there was a brass plate that said, “Buddhist Society.” And I thought, “Ha, that’s a good sign.” And underneath it it said, “Tibet Society.” So I pressed that bell push, the buzzer sounded, the door opened, and I went in.
-- Richard Arthure on Meeting Chogyam Trungpa, by The Chronicles of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche