The Tibetan Book of the Dead
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead

A Biography

Donald S. Lopez

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The Tibetan Book of the Dead

A Biography

Donald S. Lopez

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About This Book

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.

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Information

Year
2011
ISBN
9781400838042

America

CHAPTER 1

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 saw the perversion of the season as a heavenly portent of a different sort; a mass migration occurred out of New England, with tens of thousands leaving their homes and farms for upstate New York, Ohio, and Michigan. Among them were Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith, who left Norwich, Vermont with their eight children and moved to Palmyra, New York, where they opened a cake and beer shop. One of their children was Joseph Jr., born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont.1
On the night of September 21, 1823, Joseph Smith, not yet eighteen, received a visitation from the angel Moroni in his family’s farmhouse south of Palmyra, New York. Prior to his apotheosis as an angel, Moroni had been a mortal, a prophet, and a general of the Nephites, an Israelite tribe that had left Jerusalem and immigrated to the Americas in the sixth century BCE. After a devastating defeat by the Lamanites on the hill Cumorah in the fifth century CE (in what is today Ontario County, New York), Moroni fulfilled his father’s instruction to complete the Record of the Nephites, which he inscribed on plates of ore and buried in a stone box on that hill. The angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith and told him where the plates could be found. He said, however, that Smith would only be able to take possession of the plates if he followed a number of commandments, including that he not use the plates for financial gain, that he inform his father of his vision of the angel, that he not let the plates touch the ground, and that he not show the plates to any unauthorized person.
Smith went to the hill Cumorah the next day and discovered the box, opening it to find the plates, as well as several artifacts, including two crystals, called the Urim and Thummim, set into a pair of spectacles. He removed the plates and set them on the ground beside him, but when he turned to look, they had disappeared and returned to the box. He tried to retrieve them, but was hurled to the ground by the angel. On the instructions of Moroni, he returned in consecutive years, on September 22, 1824 and 1825 but was unable to retrieve the plates. He returned yet again on September 27, 1827, this time with his bride Emma. He extracted the plates and the spectacles, and eventually brought them to the family farm. Smith did not permit others to see the plates, although he allowed selected family members and friends to hold them, wrapped in cloth. He described them as golden in color. Each plate was six inches wide and eight inches long, and was about the thickness of a sheet of tin. They were bound together by three rings into a book about six inches thick.
In October 1827, Smith and his wife moved to Harmony, Pennsylvania. They took the golden plates with them, in a glass box hidden in a barrel of beans. The angel Moroni had instructed Smith to translate the plates, and he began the process after settling in Harmony. Initially, he sat behind a curtain wearing the Urim and Thummim, which he called “the interpreters,” and transcribed the characters he discerned on the plates. He soon began to translate them into English. His method was to put on the crystal spectacles and then place a stovepipe hat over his face; in some cases, he did not use the crystals but instead put a polished stone called a “seer stone” inside the hat. From the darkness, the text would appear in English, which he would read aloud for dictation. It appears that Smith was able to translate the inscriptions without placing the plates inside the hat; during much of the translation process, the plates remained hidden in the woods outside his house. Smith dictated the translation (the language of the inscriptions was later identified by Smith as “Reformed Egyptian”) to his friend and benefactor, William Harris. After a substantial amount of translation (116 pages) had been completed, Harris convinced Smith to let him take the translation back to Palmyra, New York, where Harris apparently lost it.
Smith was distraught, and the angel briefly took away both the crystal spectacles and the plates. They were eventually returned on September 22, 1828 (the fifth anniversary of their discovery), and the translation project resumed at the point in the text where he had stopped with Harris, this time with Smith’s wife Emma serving as the scribe (later replaced by Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher from Poultney, Vermont), and Smith using only the seer stone.
The translation was completed in Fayette, New York, where on June 11, 1829, Smith registered the title page for copyright at the local courthouse. The title was: The Book of Mormon: An account written by the hand of Mormon, upon plates taken from the Plates of Nephi. After showing the plates to eleven witnesses, Joseph Smith returned them to the angel.
Joseph Smith was not the only person to unearth ancient texts from American soil. On September 13, 1845, James Jesse Strang discovered the Record of Rajah Manchou of Vorito near Burlington, Wisconsin. Like Smith, he had been informed of its existence and location by an angel. He found a clay box buried under an oak tree, and opened it to reveal three tiny brass plates, only two and a half inches long and one and half inches wide, connected in a corner by a single ring. Two of the six sides had drawings, the other four were inscribed in an unknown script. Five days later, James Strang produced a translation, making use of crystal spectacles like those Smith had used. It read in part, “Record my words, and bury it in the Hill of Promise.”2
Joseph Smith died in 1844. Almost four years later, on March 31, 1848, two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox (ages ten and twelve), reported hearing rapping sounds coming from under the kitchen table in their family farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, only about ten miles east of where Joseph Smith had discovered the golden plates twenty years earlier. The girls soon developed a code by which they could communicate with the source of the raps, whom they first addressed as “Mr. Split-foot” (the Devil) and later identified as the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered in the house. With the support of a Quaker family in Rochester, the girls developed a following in the area and began communicating with the dead through sĂ©ances in which they translated rapping sounds into the voices of the departed family members of their clients. With their older sister Leah acting as their manager, they became famous, attracting the attention of many of the leading figures of the day (with Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper, and Sojourner Truth attending sĂ©ances).
This interest in communicating with the dead, sparked by the Fox sisters, would come to be called “Spiritualism.” It would continue throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In 1874, Henry Steel Olcott—a former journalist for Greeley’s New York Tribune, a Civil War veteran, and attorney—went to Chittenden, Vermont to investigate paranormal events occurring in a farmhouse belonging to the Eddy brothers, who were said to be able to summon several spirits, including that of a Native American chief named Santum. There he met the Russian Ă©migrĂ© and medium, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Their shared interest in Spiritualism, psychic phenomena, and esoteric wisdom led them to found the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. The goals of the society included the formation of a universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; the encouragement of studies in comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and the investigation of unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man. For Blavatsky and Olcott, Theosophy was an ancient wisdom that was the root and foundation of the mystical traditions of the world. This wisdom had been dispensed over the millennia by a group of Atlantean masters called mahatmas, or “great souls.” In the modern period, these masters, seeking to escape the increasing levels of magnetism elsewhere in the world, had congregated in a secret location in Tibet. As Madame Blavatsky’s disciple, A. P. Sinnett explained in Esoteric Buddhism:
From time immemorial there had been a certain secret region in Tibet, which to this day is quite unknown to and unapproachable by any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to the ordinary people of the country as to any others, in which adepts have always congregated. But the country generally was not in the Buddha’s time, as it has since become, the chosen habitation of the great brotherhood. Much more than they are at present were the Mahatmas in former times distributed about the world. The progress of civilization, engendering the magnetism they find so trying, had, however, by the date with which we are now dealing—the fourteenth century—already given rise to a very general movement towards Tibet on the part of the previously dissociated occultists.3
Madame Blavatsky—who during her youth had spent summers in the Kalmyk region of Russia between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, a region which had a large Mongolian Buddhist community—claimed that prior to coming to America she had studied under the tutelage of the mahatmas in Tibet over the course of seven years and that she remained in psychic communication with them—especially the masters Koot Hoomi and Morya—sometimes through dreams and visions, but most commonly through letters that either materialized in a cabinet in her room or which she transcribed through automatic writing. The mahatmas’ literary output was prodigious, conveying instructions on the most mundane matters of the Theosophical Society’s functions, as well as providing the content of the canonical texts of the society, such as A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and Madame Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine.4
The Theosophical Society enjoyed great popularity in America, Europe, and India, playing an important but ambiguous role for Hindu nationalism in India and Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka. Its popularity continued after the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891 and into the twentieth century, when her heir, Annie Besant, selected a young Hindu boy in 1909 as the messiah, the World Teacher, Krishnamurti. (Krishnamurti would renounce his divine status and break with the society in 1930.)
We will return to Joseph Smith, the Fox sisters, and Madame Blavatsky in the conclusion. But the stage for our exotic story is now set, and it is set in a very small, and decidedly unexotic, area of New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. Onto that stage enters the protagonist, Walter Evans-Wentz. He was born in Trenton, New Jersey on February 2, 1878, two hundred miles and fifty years from the place and time that the Angel Moroni restored the golden plates and crystal spectacles to Joseph Smith so that he could continue his work of translation; thirty years after the Fox sisters first heard the rappings; three years after Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York City.
He was born simply Walter Yeeling Wentz. His parents were members of the Baptist Church of Trenton, but would break with the organized church to turn to Freethinking and Spiritualism. Young Walter also took an interest in Spiritualism, reading as a teen both Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky. In 1894, he left high school after two years and began working as a journalist, after first taking courses in business in Trenton and in Jacksonville, Florida (where his family owned property). He eventually followed his family to southern California, where he joined the American Section of the Theosophical Society in 1901 at its headquarters in Point Loma, headed by Katherine Tingley, known as “the Purple Mother.” He received a diploma from the Raja-Yoga School and Theosophical University in 1903. At Tingley’s urging, he enrolled at Stanford, where he majored in English. In 1903, William Butler Yeats visited Stanford as part of his American tour. Inspired by Yeats’s lecture on Irish fairies, Wentz became interested in the influence of Celtic folklore on English literature. (Yeats had joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society in 1888, the same year he published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. He was expelled by Madame Blavatsky two years later.) In the spring of Wentz’s senior year, 1906, William James was a visiting professor at Stanford. Wentz attended his lectures, perhaps finding in them confirmation of the Theosophical belief in a common core to religious experience. After earning an M.A. in English in 1907, Wentz went to Europe, studying Celtic folklore in the British Isles and in Brittany. He received the degree of Docteur-ùslettres from the University of Rennes in 1909, and a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from Oxford in 1910; one of his examiners was Andrew Lang. It was during this period that Walter Wentz, perhaps seeking to sound more British, began using his mother’s family name and became Walter Evans-Wentz.
In 1911, Oxford University Press published Evans-Wentz’s work on folklore, entitled The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. It was dedicated to two Irish authors, each of whom had deep interests in Theosophy and the occult world. The first was George William Russell, a poet, painter, and Irish nationalist who published under the pseudonym Æ. The other was Yeats, “who brought to me at my alma mater in California the first message from Fairyland, and who afterwards in his own country led me through the haunts of fairy kings and queens.” (One should not surmise from these dedications that all Irish writers of the period were devotees of Theosophy.5)
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries is a substantial work, containing two hundred pages of testimony: stories about fairies, trolls, and leprechauns recorded by Evans-Wentz during travels through Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany. This is followed by an “anthropological examination of the evidence,” in which he identifies disembodied beings analogous to fairies in other cultures and religions. Here is an example of a story from Wales:
A farmer went to Llangefni to fetch a woman to nurse his wife about to become a mother, and he found one of the Tylwyth Teg, who came with him on the back of his horse. Arrived at the farm-house, the fairy woman looked at the wife, and giving the farmer some oil told him to wash the baby in it as soon as it was born. Then the fairy woman disappeared. The farmer followed the advice, and what did he do in washing the baby but get some oil on one of his own eyes. Suddenly he could see the Tylwyth Teg, for the oil had given him the second-sight. Some time later the farmer was in Llangefni again, and saw the same fairy woman who had given him the oil. “How is your wife getting on?” she asked him. “She is getting on very well,” he replied. Then the fairy woman asked, “Tell me with which eye you see me best.” “With this one,” he said, pointing to the eye he had rubbed with the oil. And the fairy woman put her stick in the eye, and the farmer never saw again.6
The second section reconstructs the religion of the Celts, describing the pantheon of divinities as well as the underworld. Presaging the topic of his more famous work, Evans-Wentz focuses particularly on what he calls the doctrine of rebirth, which he finds not only among the Celts, but the Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians, as well as among the Druids, the Alexandrian Jews, and the early Church Fathers (then suppressed in the Middle Ages to be upheld only in secret by mystical philosophers and alchemists). For Evans-Wentz, the Celtic doctrine of rebirth represented an ancient form of Darwinism, yet one that surpasses Darwin because it provides “a comprehensive theory of man’s evolution as a spiritual being both apart from and in a physical body, on his road to perfection which comes from knowing completely the earth-plane of existence.”7 Indeed, Evans-Wentz predicts that, “our own science through psychical research may work back to the old mystery teachings and declare them scientific.”8
At the end of the book, Evans-Wentz considers various theories that might be put forward to explain away the exis...

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