The Seba library treats Himalaya in 8 passages, across 5 authors (including Zimmer, Heinrich, Jung, Carl Gustav, Eliade, Mircea).
Out of this Earth arise the holy, towering mountains, saturated with the life-sap of the lotus: the Himalaya, the mountain Sumeru, Mount Kailāsa, the Vindhya mountain.
Zimmer establishes the Himalaya as one of four sacred peaks arising from the cosmic lotus-earth, embedding it within the Hindu cosmographic hierarchy alongside Meru and Kailasa as axes of divine emanation.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946thesis
Shiva is the Divine Yogī, the model and arch-ascetic of the gods. He sits in splendid isolation on a solitary summit of the Himalayas, unconcerned with the worries of the world, steeped in pure and perfect meditation.
Zimmer reads the Himalaya as the archetypal site of supreme ascetic withdrawal, where Shiva’s yogic isolation on its summit constitutes the paradigm of divine self-concentration and world-renunciation.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946thesis
On an upper level of the Himalaya mountain range, a lion and lioness, recumbent, watch the miracle. Celestial couples walk nimbly through the air to greet the downpour of the water.
Zimmer interprets the Himalaya as a cosmic witness-stage in Indian sacred art, populated by divine and animal beings whose presence confirms the monistic life-unity underlying Hindu myth.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
The fish then swam up to him, and to its horn he tied the rope of the ship and by that means he passed swiftly up to yonder northern mountain Himalaya.
Jung cites the Shatapatha-Brahmana’s flood narrative to place the Himalaya within universal deluge symbolism, functioning as the northern mountain of salvation to which Manu’s vessel is moored.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
Himavat/Himalaya, 431
Jung’s index entry equates Himavat and Himalaya, signalling that the range is treated within the alchemical and comparative mythological framework of Mysterium Coniunctionis as a recognized symbolic locus.
, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 1955supporting
D. L. Snellgrove, Buddhist Himalaya, p. 265.
Eliade references Snellgrove’s Buddhist Himalaya as a scholarly authority contextualising Tibetan shamanic and Lamaist ritual practices, treating the Himalayan region as a transmission zone for archaic ecstatic techniques.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside
He had scholarly command of ten languages, English, Tibetan, Hindustani, Kyathi, Bengali, Nepalese, Lepcha, and other Himalayan tongues.
Evans-Wentz invokes ‘Himalayan tongues’ to characterise his collaborator’s linguistic reach, marking the Himalaya as a multilingual cultural zone essential to the transmission of Tibetan Buddhist texts.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954aside
the system of recognising successive generations of tulkus became commonly established throughout Tibet and the Himalayan region.
Coleman situates the Himalayan region as the broader geographic matrix within which the tulku tradition of reincarnate recognition institutionalised itself beyond Tibet proper.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005aside