Lama Govinda embarked at an early age on the pilgrim's path of deepening insight and commitment to spiritual knowledge. His path led from his native Germany to Sri Lanka and Burma, then to India and Tibet, where he visited ancient monasteries and sat at the feet of great masters. He spent years thereafter in study and meditation at his Himalayan ashram. at home in two vastly different worlds, Lama Govinda is widely acclaimed for his skill communicating Buddhist teachings to the West. This volume presents thirteen of his later teachings on Buddhism, art, and the spiritual dimension. Contents include:

• Pilgrims and Monasteries in the Himalayas


• A Tibetan Buddhist Looks at Christianity


• Meditation in the Vajrayana: First Steps


• The Eight Forms of Guru Padmasambhava


• Buddhist Art and Architecture


• Buddhism and Hinduism


• The Realm of Religion

Insights of a Himalayan Pilgrim, Lama Govinda, Dharma Publishing, Paperback, 196 pages, $16.00

Lama Anagarika Govinda (1898-1985), born Ernst Lothar Hoffmann, was the founder of the order of the Arya Maitreya Mandala and a teacher of Buddhist meditation, as well as a painter and poet. For many years, Lama Govinda lived in Sri Lanka and then India, offering spiritual direction to a great number of western Buddhist students. A European intellectual and artist, he experienced much of the history of that time both as a participant (a soldier in WWI and a non-combatant prisoner of war in WWII), and from the 1930s as an observer of the system of beliefs that Tibetan Buddhism represented. In 1947, he married the Parsi artist Li Gotami, who was from Bombay and had been his student at Santiniketan in 1934. His spiritual autobiography, The Way of the White Clouds (for which Columbia University Professor Robert Thurman wrote the introduction) recounts his 1947-1948 trip with Li Gotami to Tibet and details his study with Domo Geshe Rinpoche (1866�1936) and other Tibetan Buddhist teachers. Up until his death, Lama Govinda was a popular figure in spiritual conferences and lecture series, and a contributor to countless journals and magazines. His other books include: Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, Psycho-Cosmic Symbolism of the Buddhist Stupa, The Inner Structure of the I Ching as well as Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness, and Insights of a Himalayan Pilgrim. During the later part of his life, the Lama and Li lived on the Evans-Wentz estate in the Kumaon Himalaya and finally in a small house in Marin County, California.