Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/130

80 no doubt, be interesting to all who read this book. The late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup—the honorific term Kazi indicating his superior social standing as a member of a landholding family of Tibetan origin settled in Sikkim—was born on the seventeenth day of June, 1868.

From December of the year 1887 and until October, 1893, as a young man whose learning the British authorities of India had already recognized, he was stationed at Buxaduar, in Bhutan, as Interpreter to the British Government. (In later years he also acted as Interpreter to the Government of Tibet.) It was at Buxaduar that he first met his guru, commonly known there as The Hermit Guru Norbu (Slob-dpon-mtshams-pa-Norbu—pronounced Lob-on-tsham-pa-Norbu), a man of vast knowledge and of strict ascetical habits of life; and from him, afterwards, received the mystic initiation.

The late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup once confided to me that at that time he had made all necessary preparations, as a shiṣḥya on probation, to renounce the world completely; but his father, then an old man, called him home and requested him to perform the usual duties of an eldest son and marry, to perpetuate the family. The son had no option, and he married; two sons and one daughter being born to him.

In the year 1906 the Maharāja of Sikkim appointed him Head Master of the Gangtok School, where, in the early part of the year 1919, I first met him, through a letter of introduction from Mr. S. W. Laden La, Sardar Bahadur, Chief of Police, Darjeeling, who is a well-known Buddhist Scholar of Tibetan ancestry. About a year later, in 1920, after our work together was finished, the Lāma was appointed Lecturer in Tibetan to the University of Calcutta; but, very unfortunately, as is usual with peoples habituated to the high Himalayan regions, he lost his health completely in the tropical climate of Calcutta, and departed from this world on the twenty-second day of March, 1922.

As records of the Lāma’s ripe scholarship, there are his English-Tibetan Dictionary, published by the University of Calcutta in 1919, and his edition of the Shrīchakrasambhāra