This book will fill you with love, compassion, warmth and dreams.It will take you on an unforgettable journey through Tibet and this in turn will urge you to follow your dreams and not just your ambitions.Its written from the heart and written beauifully.I will be reading it again and again.Having been on a 21 day journey through Ladakh, I could almost relate to the author's experience.Its a truly wonderful and I urge all of you to partake in it.Tholing and Tsaparang, here I come..

"The Way of the White Clouds" is a truly wonderful piece of art. On my own path this has been the most significant book to open my mind and heart to what is beyond the obvious.

Govinda writes from the heart with an openness and clarity which is rare in this world. Combine this with a description of a journey of Tibet just prior to it's invasion, and you can nearly grasp the Heart of tibetan spiritual culture.

Highly recommended, I truly hope Rider/Random House get enough requests for this literary gem to be printed again.

You'll need your reading glasses, for sure, when you pick up Lama Govinda's The Way of the White Clouds because you won't want to miss one word of this marvelous text. Travel log, personal diary, and spiritual pilgrimage - I have read this book twice and will read it again. I have only loaned it out once - and only to a family member. It is that previous to me. Govinda's images of Tibet of the 40's are vivid - he takes you there. Another - much more modern - book that shares a similar place of importance on my shelf is The Blessings Already Are by John Morton. You may have to ask for it at your favorite book store as it was just recently published this year. Peace, fellow travelers.

This superbly written exposition into the Abhidhamma tradition, leaves one thinking once again, that the scope and depth of Buddhist thought is boundless. Complete with illustrations & charts, Lama Govinda proceeds to draw the structure and development of consciousness with psychological processes met in meditation. These insights into the mind are rarely drawn with as much enthusiasm and understanding that the author has given here.

Lama Govinda visited Tibet in times pre-chinese. His tale is of a personal character - and wonderfully so. It feels as if the author is present, when reading.
I have the book in German, purchased thru Amazon.de, and can highly recommend this to anyone who is able to read German fluently. It is, as said in the title of my review, a wonderfully poetic tale.

I stumbled across this quote outside of the book: Only he who, while fully reconginzing and understanding his Western heritage, penetrates and absorbs the heritage of the East, can gain the highest values of both worlds and do justice to them. East and West are the two halves of our human consciousness, comparable to the two poles of a magnet, which condition and correspond to each other and cannot be separated. Only if man realizes this fact will he become a complete human being.

This book offers a few pleasing surprises, but many more disappointments. It is another one those books that is essentially a reworking of a series of lectures, and one gets the impression that the reworking was rather cursory. While the subject matter is sublime and the information at times interesting, it is so difficult to follow the author's thought processes that I came away with little understanding of the subject matter. It often seemed just thrown together. The author tries to present the history and the architectural significance of the Buddhist Stupa, and some interesting points are made about the role of the historical context and the Hindu influences on the evolution of the design. But the points are not made clearly. The book is even less clear when it comes to its stated theme of the "Psycho-cosmic Symbolism" of the stupa. Perhaps a Hienrich Zimmer or a Joseph Campbell would have been able to rise to the profound task of rendering this subject intelligible, but this author fails. I came away from the reading of this book not at all sure that I really now clearly knew anything more about the subject than when I started.