{"id":2657,"date":"2011-05-16T15:48:42","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T21:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2657"},"modified":"2011-05-16T14:19:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T20:19:17","slug":"the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead%e2%80%94a-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2657","title":{"rendered":"The Tibetan Book of the Dead\u2014A Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Magonia Blog <\/em>(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<\/em>.<\/a> Only it was not his translation nor even, precisely, the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”:<\/p>\n

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”.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> published in England by Wallis Budge). Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines<\/em> (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation<\/em> (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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,4,144],"class_list":["post-2657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-publishing","tag-scholarship","tag-tibet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-GR","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1668,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1668","url_meta":{"origin":2657,"position":0},"title":"Video Gaming and Lucid Dreaming","author":"Chas S. 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Everywhere you looked (and still look, in some cases), was \"Alpen-this\" or the \"Something Haus\" or \"Hof.\" For the full flower of the bogus-Bavarian 1960s,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1003,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1003","url_meta":{"origin":2657,"position":2},"title":"The God with Many Eyes","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 6, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"The new issue of The Entheogen Review carries a piece by David Luke on cross-cultural encounters with a godlike being covered with a multitude of eyes. (Yes, Ezekiel's cherubim are one of the references.)His article, \"Disembodied Eyes Revisited: An Investigation into the Ontology of Entheogenic Entity Encounters,\" describes such encounters\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8270,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8270","url_meta":{"origin":2657,"position":3},"title":"Got Ghosts with Your Historic House?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 5, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was handling the sale of my mother's Arizona home after her death, the real estate agent and I were perched on the kitchen counters doing the paperwork, because the furniture had already been moved out. Working through a long sale-listing questionnaire, I came to a question asking if\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ghosts\"","block_context":{"text":"ghosts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ghosts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13168,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13168","url_meta":{"origin":2657,"position":4},"title":"The Passing of Jim Lewis, Noted Scholar of New Religious Movements","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 24, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"When I was new to Pagan studies \u2014 actually, \"Pagan studies\" had not even coalesced as a field of study \u2014 Jim Lewis's edited volume Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (SUNY Press, 1996) was one of my go-to volumes. I had an essay in it, not something I am proud\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/magical-religion-modern-witchcraft.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/magical-religion-modern-witchcraft.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/magical-religion-modern-witchcraft.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2405,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2405","url_meta":{"origin":2657,"position":5},"title":"The Pomegranate 12:1","author":"Chas S. 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