Prisoners of Shangri-La

by Donald S Lopez, Jr

  From time immemorial there had been a certain secret region in Tibet, which to this day is quite unknown to and unapproachable by any but initiated persons, and inaccessible to the ordinary people of the country as to any others, in which adepts have always congregated. But the country generally was not in the Buddha’s time, as it has since become, the chosen habitation of the great brotherhood. Much more than they are at present were the Mahatmas in former times distributed about the world. The progress of civilization, engendering the magnetism they find so trying, had, however, by the date with which we are now dealing—the fourteenth century—already given rise to a general movement towards Tibet on the part of the previously dissociated occultist. Far more widely than was held to be consistent with the safety of mankind was occult knowledge and power then found to be disseminated. To the task of putting it under the control of a rigid system of rule and law did Tsong-ka-pa address himself.10

  Under the tutelage of the Mahatmas, Madame Blavatsky studied the Stanzas of Dzyan, which were to form the basis of her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. In volume five she writes:

  The BOOK OF DZYAN—from the Sanskrit word “Dhyâna” (mystic meditation)—is the first volume of the Commentaries upon the seven secret folios of Kiu-te, and a Glossary of the public works of the same name. Thirty-five volumes of Kiu-te for exoteric purposes and the use of laymen may be found in the possession of the Tibetan Gelugpa Lamas, in the library of any monastery; and also fourteen books of Commentaries and Annotations on the same by the initiated Teachers.

  Strictly speaking, those thirty-five books ought to be termed “The Popularised Version” of THE SECRET DOCTRINE, full of myths, blinds and errors; the fourteen volumes of Commentaries, on the other hand—with their translations, annotations, and an ample glossary of Occult terms, worked out from one small archaic folio, the BOOK OF SECRET WISDOM OF THE WORLD—contain a digest of all the Occult Sciences. These, it appears, are kept secret and apart, in the charge of the Teshu Lama of Tji-gad-je. The Books of Kiu-te are comparatively modern, having been edited within the last millennium, whereas, the earliest volumes of the Commentaries are of untold antiquity, some fragments of the original cylinders having been preserved.11

  Throughout her career she (and, later, other members of the society) claimed to be in esoteric communication with the Mahatmas, sometimes through dreams and visions but most often through letters that either materialized in a cabinet in Madame Blavatsky’s room or that she transcribed through automatic writing. The Mahatmas’ literary output was prodigious, conveying instructions on the most mundane matters of the society’s functions as well as providing the content of its canonical texts, which included A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, and, more recently, the works of Alice Bailey, dictated to her by the master Djwaul Khul, whom she referred to simply as “the Tibetan.”12

  The Theosophical Society enjoyed great popularity in America, Europe, and India (despite repeated scandals and a report by the Society for Psychical Research that denounced Madame Blavatsky as a fraud), playing an important but ambiguous role in the Hindu renaissance in India and the Buddhist renaissance in Sri Lanka. Its popularity continued after the death of its founders and into the present century, when in 1909 Blavatsky’s heir, Annie Besant, chose a young Hindu boy as the messiah, the World Teacher Krishnamurti. He renounced his divine status and broke with the society in 1930. The death of Besant and other leaders followed soon after and the society fell into decline. Nonetheless, the Theosophical Society has had a profound effect on the reception of Buddhism in Europe and America during the twentieth century. Of The Voice of the Silence, a work Madame Blavatsky claimed to have translated from the secret Senzar language, D. T. Suzuki wrote, “Here is the real Mahayana Buddhism.”13 Christmas Humphrey’s 1960 anthology The Wisdom of Buddhism included only five works from Tibet. One was actually of Indian origin, but the last and longest was an extended extract from The Voice of the Silence. The scholar of Perfection of Wisdom literature, Edward Conze, remained a Theosophist throughout his life, telling Mircea Eliade that he considered Madame Blavatsky the reincarnation of Tsong kha pa.14 The Dalai Lama’s first book, The Opening of the Wisdom Eye, was published by the Theosophical Society.

  At the turn of the century Walter Wentz moved to California, where in 1901 he joined the American Section of the Theosophical Society. Headquartered in Point Loma, it was headed by Katherine Tingley, known as the “Purple Mother.”15 At Tingley’s urging, he enrolled at Stanford, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats. (Yeats had joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society in 1888 only to be expelled by Madame Blavatsky two years later.) After graduating from Stanford, Wentz went to Jesus College Oxford to study Celtic folklore. It was there that he added a family name from his mother’s side to his surname and became Walter Evans-Wentz. After completing his thesis, later published as The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), he began a world tour financed by income he received from rental properties in Florida. He was in Greece when the First World War broke out, and spent most of the war in Egypt.

  From Egypt, he traveled to Sri Lanka and then on to India, where he visited the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar and met with Annie Besant. In north India he studied with various Hindu gurus, especially Swami Satyananda. In 1919 he arrived in Darjeeling, on the southern slope of the Himalayas in India. A great collector of texts in languages he never learned to read (he amassed a collection of Pali palm leaf manuscripts in Sri Lanka), he acquired some Tibetan texts from a British army officer who had recently returned from Tibet. These were portions of the Profound Doctrine of Self-Liberation of the Mind [through Encountering] the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities (Zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol), by Karma gling pa, also known as the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities according to Karmalingpa (Kar gling zhi khro). (One wonders how the course of Western history might have changed had Major Campbell, the British officer, given Evans-Wentz a monastic textbook on Buddhist logic, for example.) With a letter of introduction from the local superintendent of police, Evans-Wentz took these texts to the English teacher at the Maharaja’s Boy’s School in Gangtok, one Kazi Dawa-Samdup. He was already acquainted with Western enthusiasts of Buddhism, having served as a translator for Alexandra David-Neel (who had received her Theosophical Society diploma in 1892).16 She described him in Magic and Mystery in Tibet:

  Dawasandup was an occultist and even, in a certain way, a mystic. He sought for secret intercourse with the Dâkinîs and the dreadful gods hoping to gain supernormal powers. Everything that concerned the mysterious world of beings generally invisible strongly attracted him, but the necessity of earning his living made it impossible for him to devote much time to his favourite study. . . .

  Drink, a failing frequent among his countrymen, had been the curse of his life. This increased his natural tendency to anger and led him, one day, within an ace of murder. I had some influence over him while I lived in Gangtok. I persuaded him to promise the total abstinence from fermented beverages that is enjoined on all Buddhists. But it needed more energy than he possessed to persevere. . . .

  I could tell many other amusing stories about my good interpreter, some quite amusing, in the style of Boccaccio. He played other parts than those of occultist, schoolmaster, writer. But, peace to his memory. I do not wish to belittle him. Having acquired real erudition by persevering efforts, he was sympathetic and interesting. I congratulate myself on having met him and gratefully acknowledge my debt to him.17

  Evans-Wentz took his texts to Kazi Dawa-Samdup and during the next two months met with him each morning before the school day began. The translation that Kazi Dawa-Samdup did for Evans-Wentz was the germ of what would become The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Their time together was brief. Evans-Wentz soon returned to the ashram of Swami Satyananda to practice yoga, where he learned to sit motionless for four hours and forty minutes each day. Though a student of several prominent neo-Vedantin teachers
of the day, including Sri Yuketswar and Ramana Maharshi, Evans-Wentz seems never to have been a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism. Of his relationship with Kazi Dawa-Samdup, Evans-Wentz’s biographer writes: “The few letters that have survived that they exchanged show a surprisingly distant and formal tone. Even in Dawa-Samdup’s diaries there is no word to suggest otherwise. There is nothing at all foreshadowing the later declarations that the Lama was the guru of Walter Evans-Wentz, nothing about the ‘teachings’ the American was supposed to have received.”18

  Evans-Wentz returned to Darjeeling in 1935, after Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s death, and employed three Sikkimese of Tibetan descent to translate another text for him, later published in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. He remained a Theosophist and wrote for various Theosophical publications for the rest of his life, the last twenty-three years of which were spent in the Keystone Hotel in San Diego. He spent his final months at the Self-Realization Fellowship of Swami Yogananda in Encinitas, California.

  Evans-Wentz subscribed to a version of reincarnation that was first put forth in 1885 in A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and elaborated (and “corrected”) in Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888). Having claimed to have studied the ancient Book of Dzyan, written in the secret language of Senzar, Blavatsky describes a system of seven rounds, seven root races, and seven subraces. The Earth has passed through three rounds during which it has evolved from a spiritual to a material form. We are now in the fourth round. During the final three rounds it will slowly return to its spiritual form. The universe is populated by individual souls, or monads, themselves ultimately identical to the universal oversoul. Monads are reincarnated according to the law of karma. During the fourth round, the monads inhabit the Earth in the form of seven successive races. The first was a race of spiritual essences called the “Self-born,” who had no physical form; they inhabited the Imperishable Sacred Land until it sank into the ocean. The second race, the Hyperboreans, lived at the North Pole. They, too, had no physical form. The Lemurians, the third root race, were the first humans, although they had no sense of taste or smell. Their homeland, the vast continent of Lemuria, stretched across the Pacific to include Africa before being destroyed by fire, although remnants of it, Australia and Easter Island, still exist. The fourth root race inhabited the continent of Atlantis. An advanced race, they used electricity and flew in airplanes. Their civilization ended in the great flood.19 The last subrace of Atlanteans was absorbed into the early subraces of the fifth root race, the Aryans. These early subraces included the Greeks, Egyptians, and Phoenicians. The Aryans later defeated the remaining Atlanteans, the “yellow and red, brown and black,” and drove them into Africa and Asia.20 As the Mahatma explained in Esoteric Buddhism:

  I told you before that the highest people now on earth (spiritually) belong to the first subrace of the fifth root race, and those are the Aryan Asiatics, the highest race (physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of the fifth—yourselves, the white conquerors. The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the fourth root race—the above-mentioned Chinamen and their offshoots and branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Javanese, &c., &c.)—with remnants of other sub-races of the fourth and the seventh sub-race of the third race.21

  In 1888 Madame Blavatsky found the seeds of the sixth subrace of the fifth root race already evident in the Americans, “the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present Europeans.”22 Other Theosophists identified California as the center of this civilization. After twenty-five thousand years, the seventh subrace will appear. Eventually Europe and the Americas will be destroyed in a cataclysm, heralding the dawn of the sixth root-race of the Earth’s fourth round.23

  Since the midpoint of the Atlantean race a finite number of monads have reincarnated again and again, and will continue to do so throughout the entire cycle of evolution.24 Only rebirth as a human is possible; animals may reincarnate as higher species, but never vice versa.25 Those who evolve from the animal stage first take human form as what the Stanzas of Dzyan call the “narrow-brained,” which includes South Sea islanders, Africans, and Australians. “Those tribes of savages, whose reasoning powers are very little above the level of animals, are not the unjustly disinherited, or the unfavoured, as some may think—nothing of the kind. They were simply those latest arrivals among the human Monads, which were not ready: which have to evolve during the present Round . . . so as to arrive at the level of the average class when they reach the Fifth Round.”26

  The 1927 preface to the first edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead must be read with Evans-Wentz’s commitment to Theosophy in mind. He begins, “In this book I am seeking—so far as possible—to suppress my own views and to act simply as the mouthpiece of a Tibetan sage, of whom I am a recognized disciple.” This is precisely the kind of claim that Madame Blavatsky made so often. He goes on to report that he spent more than five years “wandering from the palm-wreathed shores of Ceylon, and thence through the wonder-lands of the Hindus, to the glacier-clad heights of the Himalayan Ranges, seeking out the Wise Men of the East” (p. xix). In his travels he encountered philosophers and holy men who believed that there were parallels between their own beliefs and practices (“some preserved by oral tradition alone”) and those of the Occident and that these parallels were the result of some historical connection (p. xix).

  In the 1948 preface to the second edition Evans-Wentz emphasizes what is a consistent theme in his annotations to the translation, that the West has largely lost its own tradition on the art of dying, an art well-known to the Egyptians, to the initiates of the “Mysteries of Antiquity,” and to Christians of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was a pre-Christian tradition (as, Evans-Wentz claims in his addendum to the translation, the Tibetan art of dying was a pre-Buddhist tradition) that had been wisely incorporated into the rituals of “various primitive Churches of Christendom, notably the Roman, Greek, Anglican, Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic” (p. xiv), whose traditions have been ignored by modern medical science. The late lama and other learned lamas shared the hope, he says, that their rendering of The Tibetan Book of the Dead would inspire the West to rediscover and to once again practice an art of dying, in which they would find the inner light of wisdom taught by the Buddha “and all the Supreme Guides of Humanity” (pp. xvi–xvii).

  In the 1955 preface to the third edition there is no further mention of the rediscovery of an Occidental tradition. Instead, “To each member of the One Human Family, now incarnate on the planet Earth, this book bears the greatest of all great messages. It reveals to the peoples of the Occident a science of death and rebirth such as only the peoples of the Orient have heretofore known” (p. vii). This was the edition in which the commentaries of Jung and Govinda were first incorporated, and Evans-Wentz’s preface takes due notice of their insights. Beyond that, the references to Hindu works, especially the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, already evident in the notes and epigraphs, seem to outweigh the references to Buddhism and Tibet. Jung’s commentary, he says, demonstrates that Western psychologists have moved beyond Freud; they will “advance much further when they no longer allow the Freudian fear of metaphysics to bar their entrance into the realm of the occult” (p. ix). He repeats the view found in much of the spiritualist and Theosophical literature of the nineteenth century (which is held as well by the present Dalai Lama): that Western science will eventually evolve to the point at which it can confirm the insights of the East, most importantly, the existence of rebirth:

  Thus it is of far-reaching historical importance that the profound doctrine of pre-existence and rebirth, which many of the most enlightened men in all epochs have taught as being realizable, is now under investigation by our own scientists of the West. And some of these scientists seem to be approaching that place, on the path of scientific progress, where, as with respect also to other findings by the Sages of Asia long before the rise of Western Science, East and West appear to be destined to meet in mutual understanding. (P. ix
)

  It is when the current “heretical” psychologists adopt the methods of meditation and self-analysis taught by master yogins that “Western Science and Eastern Science will, at last, attain at-one-ment” (p. x). This leads him to a pronouncement worthy of Madame Blavatsky:

  Then, too, not only will Pythagoras and Plato and Plotinus, and the Gnostic Christians, and Krishna and the Buddha be vindicated in their advocacy of the doctrine, but, equally, the Hierophants of the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt and Greece and Rome, and the Druids of the Celtic World. And Western man will awaken from that slumber of Ignorance which has been hypnotically induced by a mistaken Orthodoxy. He will greet wide-opened his long unheeded brethren, the Wise Men of the East. (P. x)

  In his 1935 “Psychological Commentary,” C. G. Jung (who had read widely in the work of Madame Blavatsky’s former secretary, G. R. S. Mead) says that The Tibetan Book of the Dead (which he consistently refers to as the Bardo Thödol) has been his constant companion ever since its publication in 1927 and “to it I owe not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights” (p. xxxvi). He thus sets for himself the modest task of making “the magnificent world of ideas and the problems contained in this treatise a little more intelligible to the Western mind” (p. xxxvi). He declares the Tibetan work to be psychological in its outlook, and begins to compare its insights to the more limited views of Freud. He makes extensive use of the three Tibetan terms used to describe the stages of death and rebirth. The first is Chikhai Bardo (’chi kha’i bar do), literally, the intermediate state of the moment of death, in which the various dissolutions that end in the dawning of the clear light occur. The second is the Chönyid Bardo (chos nyid bar do), literally, the intermediate state of reality, the actual period between death and the next rebirth during which the visions so vividly described in the text appear. The third is the Sidpa Bardo (srid pa’i bar do), literally, the intermediate state of existence, which occurs with the entry of the wandering consciousness into the womb, which is itself preceded by the witnessing of the primal scene of parental intercourse.