The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise by Ian Baker

The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise by Ian Baker
online talk hosted by The Buddhist Society during lockdown 13th May 2020

The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise tells the story of Ian Baker's decades-long quest for the literary and geographical sources of Shangri-la, a mythical paradise in the remotest regions of the Himalayas. His research led him on multiple journeys in Tibet as well as into esoteric Tibetan texts describing beyul, or hidden-lands.

Tibetan prophecies proclaim that the greatest of these legendary hidden-lands lies in the world’s deepest gorge, at the eastern edge of the Himalayan range, veiled by a colossal waterfall in the depths of the forbidding Tsangpo gorge. After years of research and investigation, Buddhist scholar and world-class climber Ian Baker and his team made worldwide news by reaching the bottom of the Tsangpo gorge and finding a magnificent 108-foot-high waterfall – the legendary grail of both Western explorers and Tibetan seekers and the prophesied door to the innermost hidden-land of Beyul Pemakö, the Hidden Land Arrayed Like a Lotus.

The Heart of the World recounts one of the most captivating stories of exploration and discovery ever told – an extraordinary journey into one of the wildest and most inaccessible places on earth, a meditation on humankind's place in nature, and a pilgrimage to the heart of Tibetan Buddhism.

About the Speaker
Ian Baker is an anthropologist, author, and scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and Tantric yoga. He was recognised by The National Geographic Society as one of seven ‘Explorers for the Millennium’ for his fieldwork connected with the Tibetan tradition of hidden-lands (beyul) and the discovery of the lost 'Falls of the Tsangpo', the subject of his newly reissued book, The Heart of the World: A Journey to Tibet’s Lost Paradise, which explores the geographical and literary sources of the legend of Shangri-la in the remotest regions of the Himalayas.