Читать книгу The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922 онлайн

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As a matter of fact, I really think that the Rongbuk Lama had a friendly feeling for me personally, as he told the interpreter, Karma Paul, that he had discovered that in a previous incarnation I had been a Tibetan Lama. I do not know exactly how to take this. According to the life you lead during any particular incarnation, so are you ranked for the next incarnation; that is to say, if your life has been terrible, down you go to the lowest depths, and as you acquire merit in any particular existence, so in the next birth you get one step nearer to Nirvana. I am perfectly certain that he would consider a Tibetan Lama a good bit nearer the right thing than a Britisher could ever be, and so possibly he may have meant that I had not degenerated so very far anyhow. I should have liked to know, however, what the previous incarnations of the rest of the party had been!

I think in my present incarnation the passion that I have for taking Turkish baths may be some slight reaction from my life in the previous and superior conditions as a Tibetan Lama.