Alexandra David-Néel

Alexandra David-Néel became a Tantric lama in Tibet at 52 and lived to 101. She was born in Saint-Mandé, France in 1868, the only child of parents who fought all the time. As a teenager, she traveled by herself through European countries, including a bike trip across Spain. When she was 21, she inherited money from her parents and used it all to go to Sri Lanka. She was especially interested in Buddhism and disguised herself as a Tibetan woman and managed to get into the city of Lhasa, which at that time was off-limits to foreigners. She became fluent in Tibetan, met the Dalai Lama, practiced meditation and yoga, and trekked through the Himalayas, where she survived by eating the leather off her boots and once saved herself in a snowstorm with a meditation that increases body temperature. The locals thought she might be the incarnation of Thunderbolt Sow, a female Buddhist deity. She became a Tantric lama in Tibet when she was 52 years old. In her 1929 book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, she wrote: “Then it was springtime in the cloudy Himalayas. Nine hundred feet below my cave rhododendrons blossomed. I climbed barren mountain-tops. Long tramps led me to desolate valleys studded with translucent lakes … Solitude, solitude! … Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?” She was a big influence on the Beat writers, especially Allen Ginsberg, who converted to Buddhism after reading some of her teachings.