Ekai Kawaguchi

In fact, unknown to Kawaguchi, Japanese religious scholars had spent most of the 1890s trying to enter Tibet to find rare Buddhist sutras with the backing of large institutions and scholarships, but had invariably failed.

Instead, he made several fishmonger and butcher friends pledge to give up their professions forever and become vegetarian, he claimed that the good karma would ensure his success.

He had the good fortune to befriend every wanderer he met in the countryside, including monks, shepherds, and even bandits, but he still took almost four years to reach Lhasa after stopovers at a number of monasteries and a pilgrimage around the sacred Mount Kailash, in western Tibet.

[10] Samding Dorje Phagmo Kawaguchi spent his time in Lhasa in disguise and, following a tip that his cover had been blown, had to flee the country hurriedly.

[11] Kawaguchi was deeply concerned for his friends, and despite his ill health and lack of funds, he used all of his connections after he had left the country to petition Nepalese Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher Rana for help.

[13] Ironically given Kawaguchi's faithful background, newspapers criticized his lectures to the public about Tibetan hygiene and sexual practices as being a hodge-podge of lowbrow humor and dirty stories unbecoming of a monk.

[15] In fact, internal documents show that Narita himself had never reached Tibet on his expensive spy mission, which made Kawaguchi the first person who had actually arrived there.

While his more mature narrative of that trip was mainly occupied with Japanese poems about the beauty of the land, he could not resist some final criticisms of the monks' lax attitude towards monastic rules.

[17] He brought back to Japan a large collection of Tibetan scriptures, but he had a lengthy and public dispute with the other pilgrims about the Dalai Lama's intentions for them, which caused him to lose some face in the Buddhist world.

[21] Kawaguchi was disturbed by the confusing messages of the main objects of veneration based on a pantheon of deities, spirits, historical and mythological figures.