A Journey in Ladakh [Paperback]

Andrew Harvey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1984

Far in the north of India are the mountains of Ladakh. Cut off by snow for six months of the year, Ladakh is where the purest form of Tibetan Buddhism is practiced, with meditations that date back to 300 years before the birth of Christ. Harvey traveled the arduous road to Ladakh in search of the old Tibetan traditions. This is his story.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An exceptional book." The Washington Post

"One of the best books available on the Western experience of Tibetan spiritual life." -- NEW AGE JOURNAL

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

Andrew Harvey is the author of THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING and, forthcoming in March 2000, THE DIRECT PATH: CREATING A JOURNEY TO THE DIVINE USING THE WORLD'S MYSTICAL TRADITIONS.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 2nd prt. edition (October 17, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395366704
• ISBN-13: 978-0395366707
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,914,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Buddism, spiritual discovery and a travel log - in one book., July 31, 2000

By 

Allan M. Gathercoal "fdoamerica" (Norcross, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism (Paperback)

I read this unique book while trekking through Ladakh, India - the last place where you can see something of what Tibet must have been like before the Chinese invaded. Ladakh is the highest, most remote, most sparsely populated region in India, located on the China - Indian border in what is deemed "disputed territory." Tourists were banned until 1972, and entry into this region requires a special permit.

A Journey to Ladakh is written by a professed "half - Buddhist". It is foremost a book about spiritual discovery, and secondly a travel log on one of the world's most outback religious regions. Andrew Harvey, born in southern India and educated at Oxford, England, read all he could on different Buddhist traditions but decided to leave Oxford and return to India for one year to study Buddhism in its original form. This ultimately lead him to Ladakh, one of the last places on earth "where a Tibetan Buddhist society can be experienced".

The first part of the book is Harvey's travel journal through Ladakh. A group of my fellow sojourners plowed through the first hundred pages and finally put the book down. Comments such as "I lost interest" and "dull" were mentioned, however the book's value and true worth happens in the second half, when Harvey meets the Rinpoche ("master", "realized soul", "Buddha"). It is here, when Harvey records the wisdom of the Rinpoche, that the text shines, providing universal truths about life and its spiritual component. The tenants of Buddhist philosophy can be gleaned through Harvey's discourses with the Rinpoche ("There are no Gods in Buddhism," "There is only Emptiness - Nothingness," "To be freed from a false perception of Self is the end of Buddhism,".), but it is in the practical day to day life teachings that make this book worth reading.

The journey to Ladakh is a journey to discover the laws of the spirit, and the relationship of the spirit to those laws. What Harvey has done for you in this book is to start you on a journey . . . a journey that explores the very center of being - or in Buddhist terms the journey into nothingness. Recommended

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful,pointed marred by a biting afterward, October 10, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism (Paperback)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars some good stuff here..., January 19, 2006

By 

Alan Arcadia - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism (Paperback)

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.