The Rozabal Line Read online

In 1935, the Regent of Tibet travelled to a sacred lake near Lhasa. The regent looked into the waters and saw a vision of a monastery with a jade-green and gilded roof and a house with turquoise tiles.

  Soon, search parties were sent out to all parts of Tibet to search for a place that resembled the vision. One of the search parties went east to the Tibetan village of Amdo, where they found a house with turquoise tiles sitting dwarfed by the hilltop Karma monastery. The monastery had a jade-green and gilded roof.

  The leader of the search went into the house and found the child, Tenzin Gyatso, playing inside. He had been born to his parents on 6 July 1935.

  ‘Hello. How are you?’ asked the leader of the search party to little Tenzin Gyatso in Tibetan. Tenzin looked up innocently and replied, ‘I am fine.’ Then the little boy immediately and authoritatively demanded the rosary that the leader of the search was wearing. It was a rosary that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama.

  Born to a peasant family, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso was recognised at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his pre-decessor the thirteenth Dalai Lama. The tradition of wise elders seeking out the reincarnation of their spiritual leaders had continued through the ages. In fact, a similar search had been carried out in Bethlehem in 7 B.C. by three wise men.

  Bethlehem, Judea, 7 B.C.

  A triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in a given year was very rare indeed. This conjunction, in which the two planets seemed to almost touch one another, occurred on 29 May, 3 October and finally on 5 December in the year 7 B.C..37 The three Buddhist wise men observing this astronomical miracle were convinced. A reincarnation had indeed arrived on earth and it was finally time to meet Him. They would then need to convince themselves that He was indeed the one they were looking for. They would then embark on the task of preparing Him for His mission in this life.They needed to visit Jerusalem.

  Jerusalem, Judea, 5 B.C.

  King Herod was livid; Judea was impossible to rule.To add fuel to the fire, there were these three strangers who claimed they had seen Jupiter and Saturn kiss each other in the heavens and thought it was some idiotic celestial signal. Damn them!

  They now wanted to find a two-year-old boy who was supposedly an incarnate of some spiritual leader or the other from India. They wanted to take him back so that he could be schooled by them. Damn them!

  He hated the fact that he was forced to be a friend and ally of the Roman Empire. He hated being looked down upon by the Jews because of his Arab mother. At times, he even hated Octavian and Mark Antony for putting him in charge of Judea in the first place, even though he had wanted so desperately to be king. Damn them all! 38

  And then it struck him! Kill all the two-year-olds that he could find. At least it would give him something to do. Damn them all!

  ‘Kill them,’ said Herod to his generals.

  Cairo, Egypt, 5 B.C.

  ‘Kill him,’ said the governor of Cairo. He had heard that the little boy had entered the temple of Bastet, the lion goddess, and that the idols had just crumbled to the ground before him. He was quite certainly evil.

  After Herod’s decision to kill all two-year-olds, the boy’s parents had realised that the only way to save his life was to flee from Bethlehem to Egypt. They had made their way from Bethlehem to Rafah, on to Al-Arish, further on to Farama and then on to Tel Basta.39 This was the city of the lion goddess Bastet. When the child had entered the temple of the lion goddess, the ground had shaken and the idols of the temple had crumbled in submission before him.

  The family had then proceeded to old Cairo where they took refuge in a cave. When the governor of the region heard the stories of crumbling idols in Tel Basta, he started planning the boy’s murder and this prompted the family’s premature departure to Maadi.

  They went on board a sailboat that took them to Deir Al-Garnous. From here the family moved on to Gabal Al-Kaf and rested in a cave before heading towards Qussqam, home to the Al-Moharraq monastery.

  This was one among many monasteries in Egypt that would play a role in the boy’s education.

  Egypt, A.D. 4

  The little boy who had fled with his parents from Judea did not know that he owed his education to developments that had taken place 200 years earlier.

  A mystical revolution had happened among the Jews of Egypt and Palestine about two centuries before. In Egypt, these mystics called themselves ‘Therapeuts’ and their spiritual counterparts in Palestine called themselves ‘Nazarenes’ and ‘Essenes’.

  The Therapeuts, Nazarenes and Essenes had remarkable similarities to Buddhists. For example, they were vegetarians; they abstained from wine; they chose to remain celibate; they lived monastic lives in caves; they opposed animal sacrifice; they considered poverty to be a virtue; they worked towards attaining knowledge through fasting and extended periods of silence; they wore simple white robes; and they initiated novices through baptism in water.

  The origins of ritual immersion in water were Indian. Two millennia later, one would still see millions of Hindus practising this ancient rite each day on the banks of their sacred river, the Ganges.40

  The boy’s teachers were experts. Many of them had extraordinary powers, such as those of levitation, clairvoyance, teleportation and healing. The fruits of their labours were similar to the results achieved by exponents of yoga in ancient India.The boy was made to study various ancient texts in preparation for his future studies in India.

  Many of the teachings in those texts had arrived in Egypt because of a brutal murder that had taken place in India in 265 B.C.

  Kalinga, Northeast India, 265 B.C.

  ‘Murderer! Killer of innocents! You are the devil incarnate!’ the crazy old woman cried while sobbing uncontrollably. She was old and haggard; dried tears caked her face and her hair was strewn across her features like that of a witch. In her lap was the body of a young boy, probably her grandson, who had been killed by Emperor Ashoka’s army.

  Ashoka, the emperor of Maghada, had killed 1,00,000 people in a massive show of strength when he invaded and overran the neighbouring kingdom of Kalinga in eastern India.41

  War over, Ashoka had ventured out into the city. Corpses littered the streets. Once happy homes lay completely destroyed. ‘What have I done?’ thought Ashoka. This was far too high a price to pay for victory. Enough of war; his future conquests would be those in quest of love and peace.

  The great king converted to Buddhism and decided to spread its message of peace, compassion, non-violence and love to every person in his kingdom, and beyond.

  Among the recipients of Ashoka’s missionaries of love and peace would be King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt.

  Egypt, 258 B.C.

  Ptolemy II Philadelphus sat on the throne. Next to him sat his wife and sister. In fact, his wife was his sister.

  He was listening to missionaries who had been sent by the Indian King Ashoka to spread the word of some man who called himself the Buddha.42

  They called themselves Theravada monks. Curiously, Egypt would soon become home to a set of monks with a name that was suspiciously similar—they would be known as the Therapeutae. These were the famous reclusive monks of Egypt, devoted to poverty, celibacy, good deeds and compassion; everything that the Buddha, who was also known as Muni Sakya, stood for.

  Ptolemy II could not have possibly known that 500 years later, the great Egyptian port of Alexandria would have its own Muni Sakya—Ammonius Saccas.

  Alexandria, Egypt, A.D. 240

  Ammonius Saccas was dying. After many years of study and meditation, he had opened his school of philosophy in Alexandria. The school lived on but he was fading. History would record his name as Ammonius Saccas. His name was derived, in fact, from Muni Sakya, the Buddha’s commonly accepted name.

  His most famous pupil would be Origen, one of the earliest fathers of the Christian Church. Origen’s writings on reincarnation would be considered heresy by the Church three centuries later.

&nbs
p; Ammonius Saccas was a follower of Pythagoras. Pythagoreans were philosophers, mathematicians and geometricians. They were famous for their belief in the transmigration of souls. They would perform purification rituals and would follow ascetic, dietary and moral rules, which would allow their souls to improve their ranking.

  Of course, Ammonius Saccas could not possibly have considered the fact that Pythagoras had derived a great deal of his knowledge from an Indian sage who had lived in 800 B.C.

  India, 800 B.C.

  Baudhayana, the great Indian sage, was sitting in the forest attempting to figure out the right dimensions for the holy fire. The fire would burn inside a specially constructed square altar. Into this fire would be poured milk, curds, honey, clarified butter, flowers, grain, and holy water as offerings to the gods. He was attempting to figure out the resultant effect on the area of the altar as a result of changes in the dimensions of the square. His mind was calm, but one could almost hear the humming of the machinery inside his head. Yes! He had it. He wrote carefully, ‘The rope which is stretched along the length of the diagonal of a rectangle produces an area which the vertical and horizontal sides make together.’43

  Around 250 years later, a mathematician and philosopher from the Greek island of Samos would further revise the theory propounded by Baudhayana. He would write the Pythagorean Theorem as: ‘The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the sides.’44

  Five hundred years later, a Gnostic school in Aegea would be solely focused on teaching Pythagorean theories. A branch of the Essenes, the Koinobi, would teach the philosophy of Pythagoras in Egypt. A Gnostic college in Ephesus would be flourishing where the principles and secrets of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and the Chaldean system of mystical numerology would be taught along with Platonic philosophy. While in Alexandria, the Therapeutae would spend lifetimes in meditation and contemplation; the Essenes and Nazarenes would be perpetuating many of these schools of thought back home in Palestine.

  By the time the boy who had fled Judea was ready for school, Gnosis, or the ancient wisdom of self-knowledge, would be flourishing in Gnostic groups and mystery schools all over Egypt. The boy would be able receive his education in some of the best Gnostic schools of the time. It wouldn’t matter whether they followed Pythagorean, Chaldean, Platonic, Essene, Therapeut, or Nazarene teachings, or anything else. The fundamental knowledge would be derived from the same source: Buddhism.45

  It would remain buried thereafter till 1947.

  Qumran, Israel, 1947

  ‘Stupid goat!’ muttered Muhammed. The damned goat had wandered inside the cave and Muhammed picked up a stone to pelt it in order to bring the dumb animal running out. This stone was about to make him famous.

  In 1947, a young shepherd by the name of Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cave in an effort to coax a wandering goat out of it. His stone flew inside and ended up striking a ceramic vessel. This vessel was just one among many earthen clay jars that contained ancient scrolls that would later come to be known as the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’. Subsequent efforts by the local Bedouins and archaeologists would recover 900 documents during the period between 1947 and 1956. Based on carbon dating, it would soon be established that the scrolls had been written between the first century B.C. and second century A.D.46

  The scrolls were quite obviously from the library of a Jewish sect and may have been hidden away during the Jewish–Roman war in A.D. 66. It is believed that this sect was that of the Essenes. Christian theologians would be quite perplexed to discover that most of the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, which were attributed to Jesus, were already present in the Dead Sea Scrolls, many of which had been written several years before Jesus lived.47

  This seemed to indicate that much of the knowledge imparted by Jesus to his disciples had emerged from earlier works of the Essenes; who themselves had derived significant spiritual wisdom from Buddhism.

  It was this spiritual wisdom that had been reflected in the Gnostic gospels discovered in Egypt in 1945.

  Nag Hammadi, Egypt, 1945

  ‘Shukran li-l-láh! Thanks be to Allah!’ cried Muhammad as he saw the jar that was buried in the ground.

  His brother Khalifa-Ali watched curiously. ‘Tawakkaltu `ala-l-lláh! But what if this contains an evil genie that pops out and destroys us?’ he asked.

  It was a hot December day in Upper Egypt. The two peasants, Muhammad and Khalifa-Ali, had been digging for fertiliser and had stumbled upon an old but large earthenware jar. They were hoping to find hidden treasure but were scared that the jar would contain a bad spirit!

  ‘In shá’ Alláh, it will be all right!’ said Muhammad as he eagerly opened the jar, only to be disappointed as well as relieved. While he was disappointed that the jar did not contain treasure, he was also relieved that it did not contain any form of magic. The jar contained around a dozen old papyrus books bound in golden-brown leather. These had been placed there hundreds of years before. The fifty-two sacred texts contained in the jar were the long-lost Gnostic texts that had been written several hundred years previously in the earliest days of Christianity.48

  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Judas. The Gospel of Philip. Gospels that would be shut out by the Church fathers, in the same way that they had tried to shut out Dmitriy Novikov.

  Paris, France, 1899

  Dmitriy Novikov just couldn’t believe it! He was finally being accepted into the Societé d’Histoire Diplomatique, the most exclusive and famous association of celebrated historians, writers, and diplomats. He could not believe that he was here among them all; he was both proud and relieved. He couldn’t but help think back a dozen years to 1887 when he had discovered the ancient Issa manuscripts in Ladakh.

  After his discovery, his intention had been to immediately publish the manuscripts. The archbishop of Paris had tried desperately to dissuade Dmitriy from doing so. Dmitriy had then gone to Italy to seek the opinion of a high-ranking cardinal, who had been equally and vehemently opposed to any such publication.

  Dmitriy had, however, remained steadfast, and succeeded in getting a French publisher for his book, Les Années Secrètes de Jésus, The Secret Years of Jesus, which had eventually rolled off the press in 1896.

  After publication, Dmitriy made a trip to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested by the Tsar’s government for literary activity that was ‘dangerous to the state and to society’. He remained exiled, without trial, for the next several years.

  His book had stirred a hornet’s nest of criticism. The renowned German expert, Max Müller, had led the critics who protested against any notion that Buddhism had influenced Christianity. Some critics had argued that Dmitriy Novikov had never visited the Hemis monastery in Ladakh and that the Issa manuscripts were a figment of his imagination.

  Dmitriy Novikov had become a pariah and an untouchable. For a pariah to be accommodated into the Societé d’Histoire Diplomatique just a few years later was a rare honour indeed. Probably the Societé knew something that Max Müller didn’t. Possibly, they had read the works of Hippolytus.

  Rome, Italy, A.D. 225

  Hippolytus, a Greek-speaking Roman Christian, wrote: ‘Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians in southern India . . . who philosophise among the Brahmins, who live a self-sufficient life, abstaining from eating living creatures and all cooked food . . . they say that God is light . . . God is discourse.’49

  Trade routes between the Graeco-Roman world and the Far East were flourishing during the age of Gnosticism, and Buddhist missionaries had been active in Alexandria for several generations after Ashoka had first sent his emissaries to Ptolemy II.

  The Thomas Christians of ancient India were named after Thomas Didymus, one of the twelve apostles of Christ. He had been speared to death in A.D. 72. No, he wasn’t killed in Palestine or Egypt. He was killed near Mylapore, in southern India.

  Before reaching the south, he had visited King Gondophares, whose kingdom lay in the northwes
t regions of India. He had even written about it in his Acta Thomae or The Acts of Judas Thomas.50

  Historians and Church authorities alike had dismissed the very existence of any king called Gondophares. There was no record of any such king having ruled the northwest of India around that time. By 1854 all of them would have to eat their words.

  Calcutta, India, 1854

  Sir Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the Archaeological Survey of India, would report that King Gondophares could no longer be dismissed as fictitious.

  Cunningham would report that, since the commencement of a British presence in Afghanistan, more than 30,000 coins had been discovered. Some of these coins had been minted by King Gondophares, who was now miraculously transformed from myth to reality.51 Suddenly, the Acta Thomae was no longer a work of imagination and copies of the book had necessarily to be moved from the fiction to the non-fiction shelves. In which case, one would also have to believe the rest of the book, right up to A.D. 72.

  Mylapore, south India, A.D. 72

  Thomas Didymus was praying in the woods outside his hermitage when a hunter, who belonged to the Govi clan, carefully aimed his poisoned dart and hit him. The wound was critical and St Thomas died on 21 December, A.D. 72.52

  Thomas had arrived in Cranganore, just thirty-eight kilometres away from Cochin, India, in A.D. 52. He had begun preaching the gospel to inhabitants of the Malabar Coast and had soon established seven churches in the region. Sometime before his arrival in southern India, he had been at the court of King Gondophares. The court had been celebrating the wedding of the king’s daughter. Besides the wedding, there had been another celebration in the king’s court. The apostle, Thomas, according to his own words in the Acta Thomae, had been able to meet and reunite with his master, Jesus, who was also present at the wedding,53 looking quite well and surprisingly relaxed for a man who had been crucified!