"The Tibetan Book of the Dead"
"The Tibetan Book of the Dead": A Biography
Donald S. Lopez
Series: Lives of Great Religious Books
Copyright Date: 2011
Published by: Princeton University Press
Pages: 192
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7pfc7
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Book Info
"The Tibetan Book of the Dead"
Book Description:

The Tibetan Book of the Deadis 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 quoted 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 Deadis 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 namedThe 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.

eISBN: 978-1-4008-3804-2
Subjects: Religion
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-xii)
  4. INTRODUCTION
    INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-12)

    In 2005, I received a telephone call from a newspaper in New Jersey. The journalist had seen a press release about a new translation ofThe Tibetan Book of the Deadand thought he might write a story about it. I referred him to a recently published scholarly study of the Tibetan text, but he wondered whether I could answer a few questions. “IsThe Tibetan Book of the Deadthe most important work in Tibetan Buddhism?” “No,” I said. “Do all Tibetans own a copy?” “No,” I said. “Have all Tibetans read it?” “No,” I said. “Is it a...

  5. CHAPTER 1 America
    CHAPTER 1 America (pp. 13-29)

    1816 was known in New England as the Year With No Summer. Temperatures plunged below freezing on June 5, July 6, August 13, 20, and 28. Eighteen inches of snow fell in Cabot, Vermont on June 7. Leaves froze, turned black, and fell from the trees. Crops failed, livestock died, people starved. Meteorologists now speculate that the terrible weather was caused by a cataclysm a world away, when Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago erupted the year before, sending one hundred cubic kilometers of ash and pumice into the atmosphere. But many in New England...

  6. CHAPTER 2 India
    CHAPTER 2 India (pp. 30-48)

    In ancient India, we cannot provide a standard chronology of an author’s life and works. We encounter a different kind of evidence. The Buddha lived two and a half millennia ago, he wrote nothing during his life, his teachings were not committed to writing until some four centuries after his death, and biographies of the Buddha did not appear until after that. Scholars disagree about the dates of the Buddha’s life, diverging in their opinions by a century. Even the length of the Buddha’s life (eighty years) is mentioned in only one canonical text, theGreat Sūtra of the Final...

  7. CHAPTER 3 Tibet
    CHAPTER 3 Tibet (pp. 49-70)

    According to a well-known myth, the first Tibetan kings descended from heaven by means of a rope. When the king’s firstborn son had reached maturity (measured by the ability to master a horse), the king would return to heaven via the rope, never to be seen again. The departed king disappeared like a rainbow, leaving no corpse behind. The first seven kings of Tibet descended and ascended in this way. The eighth king bore the ominous name Ti-gum (Gri gum), “Killed by the Sword.” Knowing his fate, the king challenged his groom to a duel, and sent a spy to...

  8. CHAPTER 4 The World
    CHAPTER 4 The World (pp. 71-127)

    From Egypt, Walter Evans-Wentz traveled to Sri Lanka and then on to India, where he visited the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar in Madras. He met Annie Besant, who had become president of the society after the death of Henry Steel Olcott in 1907. In the subsequent decade, Besant had turned the focus of the Theosophical Society away from Buddhism and toward Hinduism. From Madras, Evans-Wentz continued up the east coast of India to Puri in Orissa, where he studied with various Hindu gurus, including Swami Satyananda (1896–1971). In 1919, he arrived in Darjeeling in the Himalayas of West...

  9. CONCLUSION
    CONCLUSION (pp. 128-152)

    When Evans-Wentz chose to name his workThe Tibetan Book of the Dead, he had in mindThe Egyptian Book of the Dead, convinced that both derived from a single source of ancient wisdom. The Old English wordbocis connected to the word for beech tree. It thus may have meant “beech wood tablet,” the supposed medium on which the ancient Germanic alphabets, the runes, were carved (Madame Blavatsky wrote at length about the runes and their symbolism). Bybook, Evans-Wentz did not simply mean printed pages bound together. He likely had something more venerable in mind,bookin...

  10. CODA
    CODA (pp. 153-156)

    Sometime between 1817 and 1821, Antonio Lebolo, a former soldier in Napoleon’s army, excavated mummies from the necropolis of Thebes. Eleven of those mummies (and their accompanying papyri) were shipped to Trieste and then eventually to New York, where they were purchased by Michael H. Chandler in 1833. Chandler put together a traveling exhibition that toured the eastern United States, selling seven of the mummies in the process. In July 1835, he brought the four remaining mummies and some rolls of papyri to Kirtland, Ohio, having apparently heard of Joseph Smith’s skills as a translator of ancient documents in Reformed...

  11. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 157-170)
  12. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 171-173)
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