page_title: Theos Casimir Bernard
section_title: India and Tibet
hierarchical_section_title: Theos Casimir Bernard / Biography / India and Tibet
caption_attribution_description: English: Theos Bernard, ‘Headdress Worn by Noblewomen of Central Tibet’, 1936-37, from his 1939 book Penthouse of the Gods. Bernard spent 3 months in Tibet, taking over 10,000 photographs.
context_page_description: Theos Casimir Hamati Bernard was an explorer and author, known for his work on yoga and religious studies, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism. He was the nephew of Pierre Arnold Bernard, "Oom the Omnipotent", like him becoming a yoga celebrity.
  His account of old-style hatha 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 the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, actually worked.
  His biographer Paul Hackett states that many of the travel experiences that Bernard relates in his books are exaggerated or fabricated. There is however no doubt that he became fluent in the Tibetan language, travelled in Tibet, met senior figures and gathered an unmatched collection of photographs, field notes, manuscripts and ritual objects.
context_section_description: In 1936, he toured India with his wife and father; both went home after a few months. He travelled all over India, from Ceylon to Kashmir, meeting religious and yoga gurus. In Calcutta he arranged a meeting with Lama Tharchin of Kalimpong, and studied the Tibetan language. After nearly a year, he obtained permission in Sikkim from the British political officer to visit Tibet. He met several high officials of the government of Tibet, studied Tantric Yoga and collected many books on Tibetan Buddhism.
  Bernard was an accomplished and energetic photographer, shooting "an astounding 326 rolls of film (11,736 exposures) as well as 20,000 feet of motion picture film" during his three months in Tibet in a "near obsessive documentation" 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." Back in America, Bernard's photographs of himself, whether in Tibetan dress or performing yoga poses such as Baddhapadmasana in the studio (a photo that also appears as plate XX in his Hatha Yoga), appeared frequently in The Family Circle magazine from 1938, "reveal[ing] his willingness to commodify spirituality and assumptions of exoticism".
  On his return to the United States in 1937, claiming to be a lama, his experiences were published across the country over several weeks by the North American Newspaper Alliance and Bell Syndicate. Viola divorced him soon afterwards. This was followed by a series of lectures and radio appearances in 1939 and by the publication the same year of the memoir Penthouse of the Gods. The book was released in Britain as Land of a Thousand Buddhas, attracting "sensationalistic reports" from the tabloid press about the "white lama", and the status of "a fraud and imposter" from British intelligence, who had been tracking him in Tibet.
  Bernard was also featured in popular magazines, including five cover stories in Family Circle in 1938 and 1939, followed shortly by his second book, Heaven Lies Within Us, which explored Hatha Yoga under the guise of an autobiography. According to Paul Hackett's 2008 Barbarian Lands, many of the experiences Bernard describes in these books were exaggerated or fabricated, based on the experiences of his father. 
  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, 40 thangka paintings, 23 rugs, 25 mandalas, over 100 cloth wood-block prints, 79 books, and many textiles, robes, hats, ritual implements, and household objects. The collection is stored at the University of California, Berkeley.
  In 1939, Bernard opened the American Institute of Yoga and Pierre Health Studios.
caption: 'Headdress Worn by Noblewomen of Central Tibet' from Penthouse of the Gods
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