Hounded around the world, the first ‘man-made man’ took refuge in India

On May 15, 1962, a Buddhist monk named Lobsang Jivaka passed away in the Civil Hospital in Dalhousie. He was 47 and his health had been poor for years, a consequence of inadequate nutrition and the rigours of the hard life he had been leading in the hills with little money. His body was cremated according to Buddhist rites and there seems no marker of him left in India.

We know of Jivaka’s death because a Buddhist nun named Sister Vajira sent a short note about it to his British publisher. That same year, Jivaka’s book Life of Milarepa came out, a more accessible version of an earlier academic translation of the life of one of the most famous Tibetan yogis. Weeks before his death, another book of his, Imji Getsul, was published, whose subtitle “An English Buddhist in a Tibetan Monastery” made his identity clear.

Or did it? The death notice in The Times London referred to him as “formerly Dr. Laurence M. Dillon, of Britain, who became a Buddhist,” but anyone searching for him under that name would not have gone far. Before becoming Jivaka he went by Michael Dillon, a medical doctor who had been working on boats carrying pilgrims from Malaysia to Mecca, and then cargo...

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