Posts Tagged → philosophy

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

OR The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering

by W. Y. Evans-Wentz

First Edition | Oxford University Press | 1927

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This Oxford University edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, though published less than a century ago, has a publication history that spans a millennium. The book’s original content is credited to Padma Sambhava, a Buddhist teacher, mystic, and prophet, who dictated the text to the Tibetan princess Yeshe Tsogyal in the 8th century. These writings that would become The Book of the Dead were called Bardo Thodol in Tibetan, and discussed Buddhist ideas of the cyclical nature of life, death, and rebirth, as well as states of existence between death and rebirth called bardos. If this story is true, Bardo Thodol pre-dates even the writing of Beowulf.

As the story goes, Padma Sambhava prophesied that the book was not right for the current time, but would be discovered some 500 years later when it was most needed by Tibet and the wider world. Indeed, in the midst of the bubonic plague’s devastation of the 1300s, a boy named Karma Lingpa came across the place where Yeshe Tsogyal had hidden the text. He disseminated Bardo Thodol across Tibet and other Buddhist nations, and it quickly became a staple text in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.

Bardo Thodol‘s English title comes from Walter Evans-Wentz, an anthropologist, writer, and spiritualist known for his work bringing the philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism to prominence in the western world. While Evans-Wentz’s name graces the cover of the first English translation (which you see here), published by Oxford University in 1927, his involvement with The Tibetan Book of the Dead are controversial for many reasons. For one, Evans-Wentz himself did not do the actual translation work, which was performed by Kazi Dawa Samdup. While Bardo Thodol literally translates to “Liberation through Hearing during the Intermediate State,” Evans-Wentz chose to make reference to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which was popular among spiritualists — one of many ways in which he imposed his own views and spiritualist philosophy on the text. This first translation, as a result, strays so far from Padma Sambhava’s original ideas that it no longer resembles true tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.

Despite — or maybe because of — Evans-Wentz’s departures, The Tibetan Book of the Dead developed a following and significance of its own. The book’s spiritual notions lent themselves well to the American counterculture movement of the 1960s, which popularized the use of psychedelics to achieve states of consciousness that ascended earthly existence, much like the bardos of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1964, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book that linked Evans-Wentz’s version of Buddhist principles to the use of psychedelics to achieve ego death, among other subjects.

Later translations of Bardo Thodol have stayed truer to the original text, adding another layer of significance and uniqueness to this first edition copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is both a work of literature and an artifact of history, with seeds of influence that have proliferated and will continue to proliferate in spiritual, philosophical, and cultural corners of thought in years to come. In all its years of complex publication history, this book has made its way to the Dawn Treader’s shelves — come by the store to see for yourself!

On Liberty

by John Stuart Mill

First American Edition | Ticknor and Fields | 1863

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This edition of John Stuart Mill’s foundational essay, On Liberty, holds historical significance as both a physical object and a record of social philosophy that has shaped political thought for over one hundred and fifty years. On Liberty was first conceived of as a short essay, then revised and expanded into a book-length treatise by Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, which was published in England in 1859. Four years later, the text came to America, published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields. At the Dawn Treader, you’ll find one of these first editions of a book that, since it’s initial publication, has never gone out of print.

The principles Mill outlines in On Liberty center around the rights of the individual, especially in relation to systems of authority. At a simplified level, Mill argues that individual sovereignty is the backbone of society, and intervention by any government or system of power should only occur to prevent harm to others. He applies this principle to patterns he sees emerging in modern democracies. Among other concerns, Mill warns against the “tyranny of the majority,” outlining the dangers of democratic systems’ reliance on upholding whatever rules are most popular, when what is popular could also be unjust or wrong.

Mill’s philosophy was and is received well and widely by many, and heavily critiqued by others, but there is no doubt that the majority of the world has in some way been touched by the aftereffects of the ideas he outlines in On Liberty. The text was critical in shaping British liberalism, especially England’s Liberal Democratic Party. Libertarianism in the U.S. also draws heavily from it’s suggested precepts. Even as these systems have evolved away from the exact specifications of Mill’s ideas, and even as critics have noted his self-contradictions on subjects such as utilitarianism, On Liberty has maintained a presence in philosophical discourse to this day, cementing its place in history.

The Red Book (Liber Novus)

by Carl Jung

First Edition | W. W. Norton | 2009

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Jung wrote the contents of the Red Book over the course of a sixteen-year period starting in 1913, following a rocky split from his mentor and collaborator Sigmund Freud, and leading into the dark and devastating era of WWI. This period of Jung’s life was characterized by intense nocturnal activity in which he filled journals full of “visions,” “fantasies,” and “imaginations” — his attempts to turn off his own consciousness and confront the self as it is presented in the unconscious mind. It was described by some as psychosis or creative illness, and Jung himself reflected that “to the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.”

Though Jung began transcribing these periods of altered consciousness, adding commentary and analysis, into a manuscript bound by red leather, he never completed the work of Liber Novus (“The New Book” — referred to casually by Jung and others as the “Red Book”). The partial manuscript, written in Jung’s own hand, as well as additional writings that were intended as part of the project, were locked away in a bank vault in Zurich. Few people read this strange psychological work, as Jung feared they would label him insane, and his estate feared he would lose his credibility as a scholar. After decades of keeping the material under wraps, Jung’s estate approved the translation and production of this W. W. Norton 2009 edition of the Red Book, which compiles all of these materials together for the first and only time. (A “Reader’s Edition” was published in 2012, but it does not include facsimiles of the art and calligraphy from Jung’s original manuscripts.)

Even in all its strangeness and mystery, Jung referred to the time he spent writing the Red Book as the most important in his life, and the foundation for much of his most celebrated work. Jungian philosophy splits from Freud in significant ways, building upon the ideas he explored within his own mind and the pages of his Red Book to create a model of psychotherapy that focuses on the wisdom and guidance that can be found in the unconscious. His legacy continued in the work of his famous disciples, such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, planting the seeds for a whole new psychological perspective on the unconscious . In the pages of the Red Book, we get a glimpse into Jung’s mind, confusing and psychedelic as it can become, unclouded by the gloss of traditional scholarship. Come by the Dawn Treader to see this record of philosophical history for yourself!