The Tulpa

The word entered Western vocabulary through a French traveller's 1929 account of supposedly materialising a monk-figure that turned hostile. It renders the Tibetan sprul pa, an emanation or magical creation, related to sprul sku, a buddha's emanation body; the Western concept drifted far from that meaning through Theosophy and, decades on, an online community.

Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (French edn 1929); Robert E. Buswell & Donald S. Lopez, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2014)