Theos Bernard | |
|---|---|
 Bernard practisingBaddhapadmasana, in his 1943Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience | |
| Born | December 10, 1908 Pasadena, California, U.S. |
| Died | 1947 (aged 38–39) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Explorer, author, expert onTibetan Buddhism, experiencing old-stylehatha yoga |
| Spouses | |
| Relatives | Pierre Bernard (uncle) |
Theos Casimir Hamati Bernard[1] (1908–1947) was an American explorer and author known for his work onyoga and religious studies (particularly inTibetan Buddhism). He was the nephew ofPierre Arnold Bernard, "Oom the Omnipotent",[2] and like him became a yoga celebrity.[3]
His account of old-stylehatha yoga as a spiritual path,Hatha Yoga: The Report of A Personal Experience, is a rare insight into the way these practices, known from medieval documents like theHatha Yoga Pradipika, actually worked.[4]
His biographer, Paul Hackett, states that many of the travel experiences Bernard relates in his books are exaggerated or fabricated. There is no doubt, however, that Bernard became fluent in theTibetan language, travelled inTibet, met senior figures, and gathered an extensive collection of photographs, field notes, manuscripts, and ritual objects.
Theos Casimir Bernard was born on 10 December 1908 inPasadena, the son of Glen Agassiz Bernard and Aura Georgina Crable.[5] The name Theos is Greek for God.[1] His father's interest in the spiritual philosophy of the East and subsequent travel to India soon caused the marriage to fail. Aura and Theos, still a baby, went to live in her home town ofTombstone, Arizona.[6]
As a student of liberal arts at the newUniversity of Arizona from 1926, Bernard became seriously ill with rheumatic pneumonia after being thrown into a fountain during ahazing ritual on a cold day early in 1927, and was taken home to recuperate.[5] There, he read his mother's extensive library of books onyoga, and was intrigued by the claim inL. Adams Beck'sThe Story of Oriental Philosophy that it could provide "infinite energy", but none of the books gave any details on how to achieve any such results.[6][7]
From 1929 he trained in law at the University of Arizona, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1931 and beginning an internship in 1932.[8][9] During the summer holiday he worked as a court clerk in Los Angeles and by luck met his father, who introduced him to Indian philosophy and a variety of yogic practices.[2][5] His father had been trained in yoga by Sylvais Hamati, a Syrian-Bengali Hindu yogin, accounting for one of Bernard's middle names. His father's trip to India after Theos's birth was probably to visit Hamati.[5][10] His father had the knowledge Theos had been seeking, and as his guru instructed him systematically inhatha yoga, Theos kept it entirely secret. His father also persuaded him to go back to Arizona to study philosophy, and from February 1932 he spent another two years there reading philosophy and psychology. Theos never felt able to admit who his yoga guru was, and in his books such as his 1939Heaven Lies Within Us, he invented a guru "In Arizona .., who had just arrived from India". His biographer Douglas Veenhof notes that while as was customary inTantra, he claimed to have been sworn to secrecy, he wrote "at great length" about his tantric practices, refusing only to speak about "the first thing that teachers of Buddhism or Yoga philosophy tell their students: thelineage of their teachers."[11]
Running into debt, he discovered through a chance reading ofFortune magazine that he had a rich uncle in New York,Pierre Arnold Bernard, who had also trained under Hamati.[5][12] Pierre was known as "the father of Tantra in America",[13] but he was also, inAlan Watts's words, "a phenomenal rascal-master ... as well-versed in the ways of the world as of the spirit",[14] Theos went to meet his uncle, who had made his money by a variety of activities, including working as amatchmaker for the rich and using his yogic skills as entertainment, something which caused a serious rift between his father and his uncle.[5] He fell in love with one of his uncle's acquaintances, Viola Wertheim, a doctor from a wealthy family; she was the half-sister of the investment bankerMaurice Wertheim. They married on 3 August 1934.[6][2][15] With the financial support of his uncle, Theos was able to study atColumbia University (in Upper Manhattan, New York). He gained his Master of Arts degree at Columbia in 1936.[2][5]
In 1936, he toured India with his wife and father; both went home after a few months.[5][2][16] He travelled all over India, from Ceylon to Kashmir, meeting religious and yoga gurus. In Calcutta he arranged a meeting with Lama Tharchin ofKalimpong, and studied the Tibetan language. After nearly a year, he obtained permission inSikkim from theBritish political officer to visitTibet. He met several high officials of the government of Tibet, studiedTantric Yoga and collected many books onTibetan Buddhism.[2][17]
Bernard was an accomplished and energetic photographer, shooting "an astounding 326rolls of film (11,736 exposures) as well as 20,000 feet ofmotion picture film"[18] during his three months in Tibet in a "near obsessive documentation"[18] of what he saw. In the view of Namiko Kunimoto, Bernard's photographs taken in the East served to authenticate the travel narrative and to construct Tibet "as a site of personal transformation."[18] Back in America, Bernard's photographs of himself, whether in Tibetan dress or performing yoga poses such asBaddhapadmasana in the studio (a photo that also appears as plate XX in hisHatha Yoga[a]), appeared frequently inThe Family Circle magazine from 1938, "reveal[ing] his willingness to commodify spirituality and assumptions of exoticism".[18]
On his return to the United States in 1937, he claimed to be alama,[6] "the first white man ever to live in the lamaseries and cities of Tibet",[19] and "initiated into the age-old religious rites of Tibetan Buddhism".[19] His descriptions of his supposed experiences were published across the country over several weeks by theNorth American Newspaper Alliance andBell Syndicate.[20] Viola divorced him soon afterwards.[2] This was followed by a series of lectures and radio appearances in 1939 and by the publication the same year of hismemoirPenthouse of the Gods.[21] The book was released in Britain asLand of a Thousand Buddhas, attracting "sensationalistic reports" from thetabloid press about the "white lama", and the status of "a fraud and imposter" fromBritish intelligence, who had been tracking him in Tibet.[2]
Bernard was featured in popular magazines, including five cover stories inFamily Circle in 1938 and 1939, followed shortly by his second book,Heaven Lies Within Us, which exploredHatha Yoga under the guise of an autobiography.[22][18] According to Paul Hackett's 2008Barbarian Lands, many of the experiences Bernard describes in these books were exaggerated or fabricated, based on the experiences of his father.[23][24][25]
However, he had indeed learnt fluent Tibetan, travelled in Tibet, met senior lamas and government officials, and returned with an unmatched collection of photographs, film, field notes, and manuscripts, from essentially the only moment when Tibet had allowed foreigners in, and from its final years as an independent country with a vibrant spiritual culture. His Tibetan collection included 22 bronze statues of Buddhist gods, 40thangka paintings, 23 rugs, 25mandalas, over 100 cloth wood-block prints, 79 books, and many textiles, robes, hats, ritual implements, and household objects. The collection is stored at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[26]
From a different point of view, Bernard certainly pioneered the spiritual approach of a generation of Westerners interested in Buddhism, Yoga, and other religious traditions of India.[27] His seeking adventure and a lost or hidden spiritual tradition, too, could be seen as perpetuating the Western myth of the East exemplified byJames Hilton's popular 1933 novelLost Horizon and the 1937 film based on it; these portray a hidden kingdom of happy immortals atShangri-la, high in Tibet's mountains.[28]
In 1939, Bernard opened the American Institute of Yoga and Pierre Health Studios.[29][30]
During the 1940s Bernard completed hisPh.D. atColumbia University under the supervision ofHerbert Schneider.[2][31] It describes his experiences as ascholar-practitioner withasanas and the reason he was "prescribed" them, purifications (shatkarmas),pranayama, andmudras, and gives a more theoretical account ofsamadhi. He had learnt these around 1932-1933, while studying at the University of Arizona.[32] He published his dissertation in 1943 as the bookHatha Yoga: The Report of A Personal Experience.[33] It was illustrated with high-qualitystudio photographs of Bernard in the yoga practices he had mastered. It was one of the earliest references in the West, possibly the first in English,[b] on the asanas and other practices of hatha yoga, as described in texts such asHatha Yoga Pradipika.[34] It represents, in the yoga scholar-practitionerNorman Sjoman's words "virtually the only documentation of a [hatha yoga] practice tradition", the actual use of hatha yoga to achieve successive stages on a spiritual path towardsmoksha, liberation,[4] whatever may be thought of the genuineness of his accounts and experiences.[25]
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While working onHatha Yoga, he met and in 1942 married the Polish opera starGanna Walska, becoming her sixth and last husband. They purchased the historic 37-acre (15 ha) "Cuesta Linda" estate inMontecito, California, naming itTibetland as they hoped to invite Tibetan monks to come and stay. This proved impossible during the war. In 1946 they divorced and Walska renamed it toLotusland.[2]
In 1947, Bernard, with his third wife, Helen,[2] again visited northern India, on an expedition to theKi monastery inHimachal Pradesh in an attempt to discover special manuscripts. In October, while in the hills ofPunjab in what is now Pakistan, inter-communal violence associated with thePartition of India broke out. He and his Tibetan companion were shot, and their bodies thrown in a river.[c][35] He was declared dead several months later, though his body was never found.[36][37]
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