How an eccentric spiritualist from Trenton, New Jersey, helped create
the most famous text of Tibetan Buddhism
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 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 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.
