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The News site for Linguists |
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12-01-2007
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
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 London, UK (NS): WH Auden claimed that bad books wither and vanish like dead leaves, and critics shouldn't waste their energies on them. The strangely enduring role in western culture of the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests that he was wrong. The book has been around since 1927, when a rich wandering American called W Y Evans-Wentz published a translation by a melancholy Tibetan schoolteacher of the Bardo Thodol ("The Great Liberation by Hearing"), a manuscript Evans-Wentz had acquired on his travels in the Indian Himalayas. A shrewd self-publicist, he named it after the voguish Egyptian Book of the Dead. It has never lacked disciples.
For more information, please visit:
www.newstatesman.com/200701150041
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