At The Magonia Blog (which I am adding to my blogroll), a review about W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s well-known translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Only it was not his translation nor even, precisely, the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”:

Walter Yelling Wentz – it was only as an adult that he adopted in addition his mother’s maiden name of Evans – was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1878, and later moved to southern California with his family, where he would receive a diploma from the Raja-Yoga School and Theosophical University at Point Loma. He later obtained an M.A. in English from Stanford University, travelled to Europe, and was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology at Oxford. Having spent most of the First World War in Egypt, he travelled to India, where he became “a great collector of texts in languages he never learned to read”.

In Darjeeling he purchased some Tibetan block prints, and had them translated by Kazi Dawa Samdup, an English teacher at a boy’s boarding school in Gangtok, the capital of the small Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, who worked on them every morning before lessons for two months. These provided Evans-Wentz with the material for three books, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927, the title an imitation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead published in England by Wallis Budge). Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954). One point that was not made clear in the first of these was that it was only a small portion of a large corpus of similar works, and did not include the part most commonly used in Tibet.

Princeton University Press is doing a series about the “lives” of famous religious texts, of which this is one: “the bible of the hippie movement,” as the reviewer calls it.