Green Lama - Buddhist Element

Buddhist Element

The Green Lama stories display a sympathetic and relatively knowledgeable portrayal of Buddhism, both in the text of the stories and in numerous footnotes. From Crossen's own comments, in his foreword to Robert Weinberg's 1976 reprint of the first Green Lama story, it is clear that this was not proselytism on his part, but simply because he wanted to create a Tibetan Buddhist character and then read everything he could find on the subject.

The most frequent reference to Buddhism in the stories is the use of the Sanskrit mantra "Om mani padme hum" (roughly "Hail, the jewel on the lotus", though the actual phrase defies exact translation), which would indeed be used by Tibetan monks. However, the majority of other references to Buddhism in the stories, while accurate, relate to the Theravada form of Buddhism rather than the Tibetan form, with frequent use of Pali words such as "Magga", "Nibbana", and "Dhamma", rather than the Sanskrit equivalents "Marga", "Nirvana", and "Dharma" used in Northern Buddhism.