DR. W.Y. EVANS-WENTZ AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (February 2, 1878 – July 17, 1965) was an anthropologist and writer who was a pioneer in the study of Tibetan Buddhism.  He was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and as a teenager read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy.  

He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats.  He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford.  There he adopted the form “Evans-Wentz” for his name.  He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East.  He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt and later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India.  He reached Darjeeling in 1919 where he had first-hand access to Tibetan religious texts.

Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  He credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes, the actual translation of the texts performed by Tibetan Buddhists.  The principal translator was Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (1868–1922), a teacher of English at the Maharaja's Boy's School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe. 

Evans-Wentz was a practitioner of the religions he studied.  He became Dawa-Samdup's “disciple,” his own term for it, and wore robes and ate a simple vegetarian diet.  He met Ramana Maharshi, the notable Hindu sage, in 1935, and meant to settle permanently in India, but returned to the U.S. when World War II compelled him to do so.  He passed his final twenty-three years in San Diego, and provided financial support to the Maha Bodhi Society, Self-Realization Fellowship, and the Theosophical Society.  His Tibetan Book of the Dead was read at his funeral.