I sometimes wonder where people come up with language that is at once enticing and also really, really far fetched. “Bedeviled by wanderlust” is an example, which sounds really cool and makes no sense when applied to a young child running away from home or a teenager trying to prove her independence (by biking alone through Spain, in 1886, no less.) “Stricken by lust for adventure” is equally annoying, when applied to that same traveler in her late seventies.

I am talking here about comments made about Alexandra David-Neel, who was neither bedeviled nor stricken, but just an all around feisty personality drawn to exploring the world. And then some. Never heard of her? Even though she spent 101 years on this planet, born in 1868, a celebrated opera singer, a writer and expert on Tibetan culture, an anarchist and learned Buddhist, no one seems to remember her, while they are all reminiscing about Gertrude Bell….

Well, a few people do. Here is some of her story in more detail.

Born to a French journalist father and a Belgian mother, she grew up in Paris. (Thus today’s photographs of neighborhoods she might have wandered.) David-Neel spent much of her middle life in Asia, after blowing through her inheritance and some of her (distant) husband’s fortune. She almost died of starvation in the Gobi desert (it is rumored the 5 feet tall adventuress boiled and ate the leather of her boots to survive,) escaped part of WWI in Japan and Korea (only to witness the brutality of Imperial Japan two decades later during WWII in China) and later met the Dalai Lama. She became passionately involved with Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal, the spiritual leader of Sikkim, who later died of poisoning while she was traveling.

Unable to return to Europe due to the outbreak of World War I, she fled and traveled over 5,000 miles by yak, mule and horse to Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and China, together with a young Lama, Aphur Yongden, whom she adopted in 1929 and who taught her Tibetan and traveled and lived with her for the rest of his life. Arrived at Kumbum Monastery, they immersed themselves in the study of rare manuscripts for three years, painstakingly translating Prajnaparamita (Sanskrit doctrines dating from the 2nd to the 6th centuries AD), the famous Heart Sutra, into French.

Through it all she became one of the foremost early experts on Tibetan culture in the world. Her 25 books on Eastern religion, culture, and travel included several that highly influenced the Beat poets, such as, “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” and the still amazing, “My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City.”

Here is a source where you can read a few preserved letters.

She walked through parts of China into India when she was in her late seventies before she returned to France, with enough funds from her book revenues to buy a house in Provence where she lived until age 101. It is noticeable, how the few who keep up the memory of this extraordinary woman focus on the adventure aspects of her life, or the independence shown by a woman in an era where it was rare. Here is the exception, written in Tricycle, a Buddhist Review:

“A woman who spent years in a mountain hermitage, who sat in meditation halls with thousands of lamas, who studied languages and scoured libraries for original teachings, who traveled for many years and for thousands of miles to immerse herself in a culture which few people had ever even heard of, writes with far more insight than someone who has only read about such experiences. It is her devotion to Buddhism and her willingness to trace it to its source that are finally most impressive about her life.”

David-Neel’s cutting-edge scholarship, her exploration of and dedication to the practice of Buddhism almost come as an afterthought for most of us. Do we focus on her daring rather than her spirituality because the former is newsworthy, the other old-hat with women? Or is there something similar going on to what I offered yesterday (in that case that there was a gender-based interaction between the reader or viewer and the writer or critic?) Even when learning about people outside of politics or other salient areas of controversy, we hone in on the information that suits us best, conforms to our schemas, plays to our desires or fits with our ideas of how the world should be. I’m the first to admit to it.

And what else struck me as admirable, fitting into my own preoccupations? Through all of her travels and adventures she insisted on a daily bath and a cook, the two remnants of her bourgeois upbringing that she could not, would not shed. My kind of woman! Just wondering if cook prepared the leather boots meal for her too….

Music today is from an opera about her by Zack Settel and Yan Muckle, 2 short excerpts and then a clip about the making of the opera.