Marion Dapsance's new biography of the French exploratrice extraordinaire, Alexandra David-Neel, delves into her subject's prolific writings to discover her real message and reinterpret the myth that has grown up around her for almost a century.
Though little known outside Western Europe, Alexandra David-Neel (1868 -1969) is celebrated in her native France as a major spiritual figure of the 20th century, a fearless adventurer, the bringer of Buddhism to the West, an erudite chronicler and author of over 40 books.
But far from adopting Buddhism, she is revealed in this work as a staunch materialist, hostile to all forms of religion. We follow her journey from Catholic convert to Protestantism, to her obsession with late 19th-century esotericism and finally to nihilism and anarchism, before she invented her own belief system after decades in the Far East, which she called Buddhist Modernism.
This book shows how her free-thinking independence is the true source of the myth of the intrepid journalist-orientalist, the "lamp of wisdom," the "woman with soles of wind."
Alexandra David-Neel: Spiritual Icon, Feminist, Anarchist, Marion Dapsance, Jorvic Press, Paperback, 204 pages, $18.95
Marion Dapsance holds a doctorate in the anthropology of religion from the �cole pratique des hautes �tudes (Paris), and is currently in residence at Columbia University in New York, where she teaches a course on modern Buddhism.
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