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Date Posted: 02:33:37 10/28/03 Tue
Author: ketch - 3 Sept 2003
Subject: Yogananda, Notovitch and nonsense

P. Yogananda in his writings refers to a document found in a Tibetan monastery which proves Jesus spent much of his life in India. This is probably a reference to the claims of Nicolas Notovitch, a Russian war correspondent, which enjoyed some popularity in the early part of the twentieth century.

Nicolas Notovitch


The claim is that Notovitch was traveling to Leh,the capital of Ladakh in 1887 when he hear rumours of the life of a Grand Lama called Issa. It was said that a document detailing the life of Issa existed at the Convent of Himis.

Intrigued Notovitch visited the convent where he was informed that they did indeed have such a document, a Tibetan translation from the Pali language. The original was said to be kept in a library in Lhasa.

Notovitch persuaded someone to translate the scroll for him, and decided that Issa was in fact Jesus and the scroll told the story of Jesus’s early years. According to Notovitch Issa/Jesus had secretly left his parents house at the age of 13 and wandered to India. There he had studied with the Brahmins at Juggernaut, Rajagriha, Benares, and other Indian holy cities. They had "taught him to read and understand the Vedas, to cure by aid of prayer, to teach, to explain the holy scriptures to the people, and to drive out evil spirits from the bodies of men, restoring unto them their sanity."

Issa had then wandered around India, Nepal and Persia before returning to Palestine at the age of 29. An account of his execution was also given in the scroll, closely resembling the Gospel account.

Notovitch wrote a book, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ now in print again which detailed his theories.

Notovitch’s claims were enthusiastically seized upon by The Theosophical Society whose founder Madame Helena Blatvasky liked to present the Himalayas as the abode of a secret brotherhood of enlightened masters guiding the world. Blatvasky herself had been exposed as a fraud by the English Society for Psychical Research who caught her writing letters which she claimed came from Himalayan Mahatma’s. The Theosophical Society may have helped to get Notovitch’s claims widely accepted in some circles.

Unfortunately however, there is little evidence in support of Notovitch. The documents he refers to have never been found by any credible researcher, and may never have existed.

F. Max Muller a distinguished Orientalist at Oxford University published a refutation of Notovitch’s claims saying in short that they were rubbish. He backed up his argument with a letter from a woman who had visited the convent and made enquiries about Notovitch: ”there is not a single word of truth in the whole story! There has been no Russian here. There is no life of Christ there at all!"

J. Archibald Douglas, Professor at Government College in Agra, India, took the trouble to retrace Notovitch’s steps and published his findings. This included an interview with the Chief Lama of Himis monastery. The Lama stated that no European with a broken leg (part of Notovitch’s account) had visited the monastery and that he knew nothing of the alleged document. "I have never heard of [a manuscript] which mentions the name of Issa, and it is my firm and honest belief that none such exists. I have inquired of our principal Lamas in other monasteries of Tibet, and they are not acquainted with any books or manuscripts which mention the name of Issa." When portions of Notovitch's book were read to the lama, he responded, "Lies, lies, lies, nothing but lies!"

One supporter of Notovitch’s claims was the famous traveler Nicholas Roerich who traveled across central Asia between 1924 and 1928 and claimed to have heard many stories concerning Issa. Roerich claimed to have seen writings about Issa, but again these documents have not been discovered by subsequent researchers.

So what shall we make of P Yogananda’s apparent belief in the existence of the Notovitch document. Was this something added by later editors of his work, perhaps influenced by the Theosophists? Did Yogananda have some insight that Notovitch’s claims were true? Was Yogananda simply unaware of the fact that Notovitch’s claims had been refuted quite conclusively, or was Yogananda perhaps referring to another document?

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