ROMANCING THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography (Lives of Great Religious Books) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) ("This book tells the strange story of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It argues that the persistence of its popularity drives from three factors.... The first is the human obsession with death. The second is the Western romance with Tibet. The third is Evans-Wentz's way of making the Tibetan text into something that is somehow American." "T]he work by Walter Evans-Wentz entitled The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death. It is about rebirth: the rebirth of souls and the resurrection of texts. Evan-Wentz's classic is not so much Tibetan as it is American, a product of American Spiritualism. Indeed, it might be counted among its classics.... The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remarkable case of what can happen when American Spiritualism goes abroad." Id. at 11. "It seems, then, that Evans-Wentz knew what he would find in the Tibetan text before a single word was translated for him. it almost seems that Evans-Wentz's spiritual vacation could have taken him to any Asian country and that he would have produced some version of the book published in 1927. But he chose Tibet, and so the book is The Tibetan Book of the Dead." Id. at 118.).