“An outstanding lama of the West taught...” – M. Pallis and his treatise warning Tibet about the consequences of Kali Yuga

Abstract

The crisis of Tibetan statehood in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s accompanied by the relaxation of restrictions for foreigners to enter the country and by the next round of interest in Tibetan culture in general allowed many European explorers and travelers to reach Tibet and other inaccessible places of the Indo-Tibetan frontier. Their expeditions have resulted not only in the increase of the number of scientific publications on Tibet, which have defined the basic trends in modern Buddhist and Tibetan studies, but also in the increase of literary and artistic works, which have shaped “the image of Tibet” in the Western culture. A treatise prepared and written by the British researcher of Tibet and the Himalayas M. Pallis (1895–1989), which is the subject of this article, takes a special place in Tibetology, since it is a text not only about Tibet, but also for Tibet. The text was published in Tibetan as a detailed commentary on the political testament of Dalai Lama XIII (1876–1933), and its potential readers, first of all, were supposed to be Tibetans. At the same time, the text allows us to notice the intersection of the ideas of European philosophy of traditionalism and Indo-Buddhist ideas about Kali Yuga, and the appearance of the treatise can be regarded as a result of various transcultural communications between the Tibetan culture and representatives of Western philosophical thought in the mid-20th century.