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Table of Contents: America --
India --
Tibet --
The world.
FY2018 /
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Carl Jung wrote a commentary on it, Timothy Leary redesigned it as a guidebook for an acid trip, and the Beatles "ed Leary's version in their song "Tomorrow Never Knows." More recently, the book has been adopted by the hospice movement, enshrined by Penguin Classics, and made into an audiobook read by Richard Gere. Yet, as acclaimed writer and scholar of Buddhism Donald Lopez writes, "The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death." In this compelling introduction and short history, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered--and so misunderstood--in the West. The central character in this story is Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965), an eccentric scholar and spiritual seeker from Trenton, New Jersey, who, despite not knowing the Tibetan language and never visiting the country, crafted and named The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, Lopez argues, Evans-Wentz's book is much more American than Tibetan, owing a greater debt to Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky than to the lamas of the Land of Snows. Indeed, Lopez suggests that the book's perennial appeal stems not only from its origins in magical and mysterious Tibet, but also from the way Evans-Wentz translated the text into the language of a very American spirituality.… (more)
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The irony, in the event that another was needed, is that Evans-Wentz selected two texts for [living Tantra practitioners] and called them the Book of the Dead. . . . [He] selected the wrong texts for translation, and then he dwarfed the translations with various introductions, forwards, commentaries, appendices, and footnotes. The translation became a code to be broken, using the ciphers of another text that is somehow more authentic. For Evans-Wentz, the ur-text is Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, itself her decoding of the The Stanzas of Dzyan in the secret Senzar language, a work she claimed to have received from the mahatmas in Tibet.
(Book of the Dead, pp. 117-18.)
Lopez muses that if Evan-Wentz had stumbled across some other text, whether Indian, Tamil, or Pali, it would have revealed similar "secrets."
He does, however, recommend the 2005 Penguin edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is more an anthology of the cycle of texts than a single work. Also, it is introduced by Lhamo Dondrub, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who accurately outlines the theory and practice of the texts. Unfortunately, as Lopez points out, the Dalai Lama does this not because of the importance of the text to Tibetan Buddhist canon, but rather due to the popularity and influence of the Evans-Wentz version in the West.
For Lopez's part, his introduction could use editing. There were several typographical errors one might expect in a galley copy, and one factual error, albeit outside Lopez's field of study. ("...while Freud wrote Thoughts for the Times on War and Death in 1915 as two of his sons served in the German army.")
Finally, the reader is surprised that Lopez spends approximately a quarter of the text discussing the origins of Mormonism and other American new religious movements of the early nineteenth century. As the reader progresses, it becomes clear that Lopez seeks to draw an unfavorable analogy to the Tibetan practice of terma, the tradition that ancient Buddhists (in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Padmasambhava) hid textual treasures in mountains, caves, and temples to be discovered through dreams or meditation in the distant future when they would be needed. (Unlike the "pious fraud" of Deuteronomy, where the holy book was "discovered" in the recently renovated Temple at Jerusalem, the idea of terma is similar to Joseph Smith unearthing the plates Moroni buried in upstate New York, except Moroni was unknown before Joseph Smith, unless one refers back to the Nephites, whom Smith also (re)introduced to the world.) This treatment of the terma tradition may betoken an academician's rationalist anti-mystic bias toward primary sources (at the best) or a Mahayana Buddhist's anti-Tibetan leanings (at the worst).