A Japanese Priest’s Travels In Tibet
KAWAGUCHI, Ekai.
Three years in Tibet with the original Japanese illustrations …
Madras, The Theosophist Office; Benares and London, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1909.
8vo, pp. xv, [1 (blank)], 719, [1 (blank)]; with half-title, 11 photogravure plates (1 folding), 63 illustrations in text, and 1 folding map; light foxing to title and map; very good in original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, upper cover lettered in blind; light wear to extremities, spine very slightly faded.
First edition of the travel narrative of Ekai Kawaguchi, a Buddhist priest who may well have been the first Japanese citizen to visit Tibet. Kawaguchi left Japan, initially for India, in 1897. The subsequent year he spent in Darjeeling, partly in order to try and learn the Tibetan language. In 1899 he set off for Nepal, and by July 1900 he was in Tibet, where he was to spend the following two years, before returning to India in the spring of 1903. This included, in 1901, a visit to the Dalai Lama (pp. 310 ff.), who first became aware of Kawaguchi due to his reputation as an excellent doctor while in the forbidden city of Lhasa (in which Kawaguchi was forced to wear a disguise).
This copy, the first and only English edition of Kawaguchi’s travel narrative, is based on translations of papers which Kawaguchi first published in Japanese newspapers: the translation was facilitated by his friendship with the English theosophist and politician Annie Besant, who became president of the Theosophist Society in Madras (Chennai) in 1907. Kawaguchi’s narrative combines his shock at the barbarism of many Tibetan customs – particularly their lack of hygiene, both medicinal and spiritual – with admiration of and close friendships with a number of Tibetan individuals. For a long time he was seen as the foremost Japanese expert on Tibetan culture.
The work also contains a number of photogravures of prominent political and religious figures in India, Nepal and Tibet, as well as woodcut illustrations depicting aspects of Tibetan life and culture.
Yakushi K35.
