The 'Tibetan' Book of the Dead
By Mark Vernon on Friday, June 17 2011, 09:17 - Journalism - Permalink
I've a review of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, A Biography by Donald S. Lopez, Jr in the TLS this week. It's part of a promising new series, Lives Of Great Religious Books - in that growing and attractive format of books that are well turned and produced essays. A taster, of the review:
It is the product of the creative editing of Walter Evans-Wentz, a Victorian Theosophist. His literary assembly owes as much to the doctrines of Madame Blavatsky as the purported author, Padmasambhava, the eight century Buddhist saint who is said to have buried a series of ‘treasures’ in the form of teachings to aid future, troubled generations...
Evans-Wentz was able to use the book to vest his version of Theosophy with all the authority of ancient wisdom, newly discovered. Interestingly, Lopez argues, the same pattern of scriptural recovery is manifest in Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon. So, although it is undoubtedly the combination of Tibetan esotericism and mortal anxiety that has led to the tremendous success of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is better placed within the American millenarian tradition that includes Theosophy, Mormonism and Spiritualism too.
Comments
I find Theosophy interesting because it represents one response to the "crisis" that occurs when people comprehend a number of different belief systems and religions. Nietzsche and the materialists were the first and are still very much alive and kicking. Show me the antecedents and setting, and I will undermine the whole system. Pragmatism is also current: let's not look at truth values, just explore what works on its own terms. Fundamentalism we know about, but we don't do. Mysticism is the other type of solution, which attempts to resolve differing claims in some form of higher reality. I see Theosophy as a particularly strenuous and sweaty form of mysticism, as it tries to include virtually everything in some big meta-narrative which resolves all the apparent conflicts. Unlike other forms of mysticism, it says that things are in principle explicable, but we need to be well-read and prepared to knock ideas about to make them fit.