Lobsang Rampa and The Third Eye

How Cyril Hoskins Fooled the World

Aug 7, 2007 George Frederick Winter

Lobsang Rampa was a fake Tibetan lama conjured up by Englishman Cyril Hoskins whose book, 'The Third Eye', was a bestseller

Lobsang Rampa

Born in 1911, he was the author of The Third Eye: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama, which was first published in 1956, and told the story of a young boy who trained, from the age of seven, to become a monk specialising in medicine. Rampa, his brother, Paljör, and sister, Yasodhara, were brought up in the fashionable district of Lingkhor in Lhasa. Their father was a leading man in the Tibetan Government, and both he and his wife ‘… came within the [country’s] upper ten families.’

Third Eye

Having joined a lamasery, Lobsang was told by Lama Mingyar Dondup that the day following his eighth birthday would be a good time to open the boy’s ‘Third Eye’. Eastern traditions have long-associated this ‘third eye’ with the brain’s pineal gland, which is located in the limbic system, and is supposedly the centre of human psychic activity. With an instrument made of shining steel, and shaped like a bradawl, a hole was drilled into the centre of his forehead, into which a sliver of wood was inserted. At a certain moment Lobsang experienced a blinding flash along with intense pain. The sliver remained in place for around a fortnight, and when it was removed Lama Dondup told him that for the rest of his life ‘… you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.’

Hoax

By the end of 1957 The Third Eye, recounting Rampa’s experiences of astral travel, telepathy, clairvoyance and levitation and a friendship with the Dalai Lama, was a bestseller in a dozen countries, and by 1990 at least twenty-one sequels had appeared. However, in 1958 it was revealed that readers were the victims of an elaborate hoax, and that ‘Lobsang Rampa’ was none other than Cyril Henry Hoskins, a plumber’s son from Plympton in Devon, England. Hoskins was exposed by a private detective called Clifford Burgess who was hired by a group of suspicious Tibetan scholars, which included Heinrich Harrer, author of Seven Years in Tibet.

Cyril Hoskins

In the 1958 edition of The Third Eye, the publishers, Secker & Warburg reported that the author claimed that in 1947 the spirit of an actual Tibetan lama had ‘entered into’ the body of an Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskins, and gradually drove out his mind and spirit, before replacing it with a Tibetan lama’s personality. Apparently this occurred when he had fallen out of a tree he had climbed into in order to photograph an owl. The back of the book shows a bearded, and rather thoughtful Cyril, clad in saffron robes and perhaps pondering the prospect of dwindling royalties following his exposure. He died in 1975.

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