Beautiful,pointed marred by a biting afterward

books:


	• A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism Andrew Harvey Mariner Books, 2000 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Classic "Journey to the East"

Other reviewers have given a synopsis of the book, so I won't repeat it here. Also, I read an old edition without the Afterword, so didn't have to read the author's repudiation of his youth.

I thoroughly enjoyed this classic "Journey to the East" travelogue. Harvey observes keely and writes from the heart. This book is for anyone who has travelled and fallen in love with a foreign culture, or who has travelled and hoped to find a new way of being.

A Spiritual Journey

After being advised to visit Ladakh by a number of people, traveller & writer Andrew Harvey finally arrives in the remote Himalayan region. His journey is more of a spiritual quest & is further propelled by his meeting of a Tibetan Rinpoche. He finds himself torn between his rational Western ego which is telling him that this Tibetan Rinpoche could be a fraud & giving up his former life to stay in Ladakh & immerse himself in Tibetan Buddhism.

Like any Westerner who visits such a remote region, he laments over the encroachment of the West to an ancient culture & wonders what will happen to Ladakh in the future. Wishing that he could help conserve Ladakh's unique identity, his hope is that this book will show an honest account of Ladakh, it's people & it's culture.

A brilliant book for anyone travelling on their spiritual journey.

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As far as philosophy goes this book is definitely worth the read. There are some beautiful and quite moving passages about the nature of our collective struggle to be happy in a world of pain, the beauty of a discipline such as Tibetan Buddhism, and the quite common search for an understanding of it all.
I particularly liked the part on page 104 where he writes "It takes a great courage when you are suffering to see beyond your suffering to the clear relations between things, to the laws that cause and govern your suffering; it takes great courage to be ruthless with one's griefs."
That being said, I don't think this is a perfect book. There were several things that I found increasingly troubling as I read. One was the issue of language. Harvey mentions periodically that this or that character spoke good English, but there is no cogent explanation of just how communications between all of these divergent characters worked. I found it very hard to believe that all these people spoke english as well as they appear to in the book. In fact, everyone in the book spoke english more fluently than most people I know, i.e. native english speakers. Which brings me to my second issue. Harvey appears in the book to have the ability to travel to a very foreign culture and almost instantaneously forge deep and intensely personal bonds with everyone he meets. I'm not saying this is impossible. Just unlikely. It's almost never happened to me even in my own culture. That could be because I'm a curmudgeonly and cynical guy, granted. But still it didn't seem very likely to me. I question how much of the dialogue was accurate and how much was the result of Harvey's idealized memories of his journey. It reminded me, unfortunately, of "Mutant Message Down Under", though nowhere NEAR as bad, I hasten to add. That book was dreadful. At least the first half was; that's as far as I got. Harvey's book is infinitely better, but does have a hint of the same idealization of the "spiritual, untarnished, third world wise man" in it. I've met so many people who have visited Nepal and surrounding areas who say the same thing that I guess there must be an element of truth to it. It just seems a bit simplistic.
The last thing that bugged me was how the Rinpoche was said to be so dedicated to his people that he was always exhausted from helping them, yet seemed to have all the time in the world for the author. What's so special about him? I don't know, maybe he's a tulku or something. The Rinpoche would know better than me. It just seemed to fit into a cultural pattern that I've seen too many times.
For a refreshingly different account you should read 'Amazon Beaming' by Petru Popescu, about a guy who gets stranded in the Amazon with the Mayoruna tribe. The only way he makes it with these people, the only role that's available to him in their culture, is that of a total buffoon who can't do anything for himself. Which was accurate, of course, within their context. If Harvey's experience in Ladakh was different, isn't that in itself a symptom of the Westernization which he and everyone else decries? In a culture totally unfamiliar with Western ways, someone whose life consisted of computers, cars, working for money, investing money, and travelling to distant lands on airplanes for no particular reason, would seem pretty bizarre. What role would there be for us if we hadn't created one?
But I digress.
It didn't help any to search Andrew Harvey on the Internet and discover that he's now offering tours of South India at a cost of $3700.00 for two weeks (not including airfare). Sure, I'm a naysayer and a devil's advocate, but that's my burden, not yours.
Read this book and enjoy the good parts. I definitely enjoyed it, I just thought I should mention some reservations in order to counter the all too common, five star, "ooh, unbelievable, changed my life" reviews which are a little too common these days, like standing ovations for non-spectacular performances. Well, what can you do? We live in a world where The Celestine Prophecies has sold 10,000,000,000,000 copies. Have you read that? DON'T!
ps - I really dig my "real name" attribution. That means I'm a source you can trust. I feel almost like a corporation.

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A Must-Read for any Ladakh Traveler

Ladakh is an unbelievable spot, very unique. Although almost 30 years old, this book hasn't lost any of its magic and relevancy. It helped me understand Ladakh and its Buddhism better.

Beautiful,pointed marred by a biting afterward

Andrew Harvey is an excellent writer.his writings,even on esoterica,have a light touch, making them accessible to those of us without a first at Oxford. This book is a well written decrpitive early gem by Mr. Harvey.Ladakh is [was?]the last pristine place of tibetan buddhism left on the planet. Mr Harvey goes in search of it,and ,of course, himself. The results are surprising, and very well done. The early parts of the book deal with the travel,and it occasionally borders on poetry.The meat of the book,as it were,is Mr. Harvey's encounter with a Tibetan Rinpoche,and the subsequent effect on his life.His conversations with the rinpoche,juxtaposed with his nights drinking chang[the local brew]in a Ladakhan saloon, are wonderful, and make the text much more enjoyable, and less self inflating. After all of this, Mr. Harvey writes an afterward 20 years later[this is a reprint]and he seems to have been ahving a bad day.After stopping just short of accusing the dalai lama of homophobia[traced to some of The Dalai lamas remarks made in San Francisco, I think,}he pounds the tibetan exile community,brings up the patrichial setup of traditional tibetan life[from a feminist perspective],and generally gets more heated in 3 pages than the previous 220+. Odd way to end a lovely book.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Now considered a classic among readers interested in Tibetan Buddhism and pilgrimages of the spirit of all kinds, A Journey in Ladakh is Andrew Harvey's spiritual travelogue of his arduous journey to one of the most remote parts of the world--the highest, least populated region in India, cut off by snow for six months each year. Buddhists have meditated in the mountains of Ladakh since three centuries before Christ, and it is there that the purest form of Tibetan Buddhism is still practiced today.

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