Life in the mid-1800s was vastly different from life today. To give you a reminder of this time period, consider that the United States was less than a century old, and slavery was still a common practice. The U.S. Civil War occurred from 1861-1865, with two world wars that would not occur until a half-century later. The French Revolution had just ended in 1799. In London and other crowded European cities, widespread epidemics that caused massive deaths occurred frequently. Germ theory had not yet been widely accepted, and illness was mostly attributed to the wrath of god. The light bulb was not invented until 1876, automobiles were not invented until 1885, and airplanes were not invented until the early 1900s. These were the good old days when it was dangerous to travel, and easy to die. Alexandra David-Neel was born in Paris in 1868, and lived for over one-hundred years until her death in 1969. She traveled extensively, most notably spending a collective fourteen years in the snowy peaks of Tibet. Crossing the treacherous Himalayas disguised as a Tibetan man, she was the first and only western woman to ever see the forbidden city of Lhasa. A scholar and adventurer, she spent much of her time actively studying and practicing the secret Buddhist teachings and rituals of the region. She had a big influence on the heroes of the American beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Watts. Her life is a true story of the indestructible spirit of adventure, and illuminates an era of human greatness now lost to us forever in the melting snows of ancient Tibet.

If there was one thing certain of old Tibet, it was that foreigners were not welcome. In the late 1800s Tibet was a sovereign country situated in the center of Asia, bordered by India, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and China. Neighboring superpowers like Russia, China, and colonial British India all had interests in Tibet, and attempted invasions from China and Great Britain had already occurred. Still, Tibet managed to retain a tenuous sovereignty until a half century later when the Chinese government would be successful at a violent and unjust occupation of the country (www.friends-of-tibet.org.nz). All through Alexandra's life, conditions surrounding old Tibet were inhospitable on several fronts. The British and Chinese, with a heavy military presence along the borders, both had their own interests in the state-affairs of Tibet and they did not want anyone interfering. If one were to somehow circumvent these border-guards, there would still be the Tibetan authorities to deal with. The few well-traveled roads in Tibet would be watched, with the rest of the land being relatively unexplored, unmapped, and deadly. Within Tibet's natural mountainous borders, the unforgiving climate claimed the lives of many locals every year. Temperatures could become cold enough to freeze a horse's hoofs, and frostbite was common place. Wild predatory animals such as wolves and bears were known to attack humans, and remote villages were guarded by giant mastiffs that would tear a stranger to pieces. Most Tibetans lived in poverty, and food was often scarce. Travel was made even more dangerous by hordes of roaming bandits that would leave your frozen body on the side of the path for a coin or a loaf of bread (Foster & Foster 3). These were the conditions under which one Victorian-era French woman thrived.

It remains unclear whether Alexandra was more motivated by her abundant scholarly curiosities, her undying thirst for adventure and new experiences, or just a healthy compulsion to make a fool of the British and Chinese authorities. While her intellectual interests clearly had no end, they seemed to gravitate most towards topics which required some deviation from the pitifully dull buffet of mainstream human preoccupations (Foster & Foster 32). Alexandra had an ongoing interest in matters of mysticism and the occult, yet she approached these topics from a very skeptical and scientific minded angle. Even while remarking on the Magic and Mystery in Tibet, the pages of her books are generously adorned with comments about the mad superstitions of the common Tibetan people. For example, “Western [sic] travellers who have approached the Tibetan border and formed a superficial idea of the common folk's superstitions will be most surprised to hear of the strangely rationalistic and [sic] sceptical opinion of prodigies which these apparently credulous simpletons [sic] harbour in the depth of their minds. (David-Neel, 299)” While she clearly valued the use of critical thinking, she was open minded enough to give the odd customs and peculiarities of a place like Tibet their due respect within the context of her adventures. In one noteworthy example, Alexandra recalls seeing a legendary lung-gom-pa runner. These monk-athletes were purportedly able to accomplish impossible feats, traversing over rough terrain without rest for days at a time, moving at the fleet-footed speed of a horse. As Alexandra attempted to get her Camera, a trusted local in her small party stopped her, claiming that she must not distract the runner lest he break his meditation which “would certainly kill him.” According to Foster & Foster, “The French skeptic doubted this, but she knew she must respect even the grossest superstition if the people believed it. (Foster & Foster, 198)”

In order to survive the brutal conditions of the Himalayas, Alexandra learned a secret Tibetan method of breathing called tumo – an advanced breathing technique which allowed the body to remain warm, even when subjected to the deadly arctic chill of winter in Tibet. And a good thing it was that she learned tumo, because in the conditions under which she often travelled, it saved her life numerous times. She spend most of her fourteen years in Tibet traveling with the young lama Yongden, whom she later adopted as her son. Because they were always trying to evade the British, Chinese, and Tibetan authorities, they disguised themselves as poor beggars, and always took the road less traveled. On her journey to Lhasa, Alexandra was forced to take a very unusual route in order to evade Tibetan officials who were looking for her. In a letter to her husband she described part of that journey, “I walked for forty-four days, crossed a dozen peaks with snow up to my knees, slept in icy caves like a prehistoric woman, without food, almost barefoot, the soles of my moccasins being worn out by the rocks in the road. (Paine 40)” She spoke fluent Tibetan and was not only a well educated Buddhist but a practicing one. She had met with and was favored by the thirteenth Dali Lama, as well as the Panchen Lama – both were supreme religious leaders in Tibet. It was for all these reasons, combined with the fact that she was over 50 years old at the time of her journey to Lhasa, that Alexandra was able to live in Tibet for so long. Several other European explorers had attempted such feats, and been expelled with velocity.

According to Alexandra herself, the circumstances which first brought her to the Himalayas followed a private audience with the thirteenth Dali Lama, who was at the time, seeking political refuge in India due to a Chinese invasion. In her own words from The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects, “Very few strangers have ever approached the monk-king hidden in his sacred city, in the Land of Snows. Even in exile, he saw no one. Up to the time of my visit, he had obstinately refused an audience to any woman except Tibetans and I believe, even to this day, that I am the only exception to this rule... 'Learn the Tibetan language,' he told me... If one could believe his subjects who call him the 'Omniscient,' the sovereign of Tibet, when giving me this advice, foresaw its consequences, and consciously directed me, not only towards Lhasa, his forbidden capital, but towards the mystic masters and unknown magicians, yet more closely hidden in his wonderland. (David-Neel 3)”

Alexandra's rare perspective was the expression of an intelligent woman who, since childhood, had sought to escape the constraints of an absurd social order dictated by domesticated and mediocre people. Through her various books and indeed the way she lived her life itself, she made it very clear that nobody – neither her parents nor the elements nor the British empire itself – could effectively halt her undying drive for adventure and learning. I am suggesting that perhaps, a small rebellious streak did play a part in her life's direction. After all, could she not have chosen some place a bit safer to explore? Or was it perhaps that she had already been acclimated to the prospect of danger from a very young age? In a letter she wrote to her husband in 1913, she relates an interesting story from her early childhood, which occurred amidst revolution and violence in post-Napoleonic France. “Yesterday I suddenly realized it was March 18th, the anniversary of the Commune... I never told you I was there, at the wall of the Federals, after the firing squad [and] while the corpses were being hurriedly piled in trenches dug [by them] for the purpose... A phantom memory of that stays with me. Since you are first learning of the fact, you will ask who brought me. It was my father, who wished for me [always] an impressive reminder of human ferocity. (Foster & Foster 20)” Alexandra loved her father dearly though, as is evident in her writings. She did however seem to harbor a serious grudge against her mother, whom she regarded as a “sheep unable to stray far from the flock. (Foster & Foster 29)” However, to what extent her colorful upbringing influenced her character is the subject of another essay.

The year now is two-thousand and eight, and nearly half a century has passed since the many chapters of Alexandra's life have come to an end. She did not die buried atop twenty-thousand feet of snow. No, she retired some years before her end, alone somewhere in southern France. She used those last years of her life to write several books about her strange adventures in old Tibet. How curious then, that the Tibet she wrote of was being systematically eradicated, even as she captured every beautiful nuance of that dying world with her pen. For every word she wrote, some local Tibetan was killed, imprisoned, or driven out by the Chinese invaders. For every book she published – a sacred text was burned, a monastery shelled, or some priceless piece of ageless wisdom lost forever. That magical world she described is gone, annihilated by the same human ferocity witnessed at the fall of the Commune. So when her work was done, Alexandra wrote, “I can write no more.” She put down her pen, and died eighteen days later, almost a month before her hundred and first birthday (Paine 49). Her books today are regarded as the primary and authentic source of old Tibet, or so says the Dali Lama himself. You see, Alexandra found for herself a purpose, and then stubbornly refused to die until it was completed. And how ironic it is, that in a way her gift to us was one final kick in the face of authority, because in the end the Chinese failed to completely extinguish that spark, and in their failure lives the hope of a better future for humanity.

Works Cited

David-Neel, Alexandra. Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Kessinger Publishing. Whitefish, MT. 2004.

David-Neel, Alexandra. The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects. City Lights Books. San Francisco. 1967.

Foster, Barbara & Michael. Forbidden Journey: The Life of Alexandra David-Neel. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. New York. 1987.

Paine, Jeffery. Re-Enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York. 2004.

www.friends-of-tibet.org.nz