Walter Evans-Wentz

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.

Contents

Biography

He was born as Walter Yeeling Wentz 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[1] (1907); there he added his mother's Welsh surname Evans to his name, being known henceforth as Evans-Wentz. He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt. He later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India, reaching Darjeeling in 1919; there he encountered Tibetan religious texts firsthand.

Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan, especially The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Evans-Wentz credited himself only as the compiler and editor of these volumes. The actual translation of the texts was performed by Tibetan Buddhists, primarily Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup (1868–1922), a teacher of English at the Maharaja's Boys' School in Gangtok, Sikkim who had also done translations for Alexandra David-Neel and Sir John Woodroffe. Evans-Wentz's interpretations and organization of this Tibetan material is frequently unreliable, being influenced by wholly extraneous preconceptions he brought to the subject from theosophy.[2]

Evans-Wentz was a practitioner of the religions he studied. He became Dawa-Samdup's "disciple" (E-W's term), wore robes and ate a simple vegetarian diet.[3] He met Ramana Maharshi 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.[4]

The Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University has hosted The Evans-Wentz Lectureship in Asian Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics since 1969, funded by a bequest from Evans-Wentz.[5]

Evans-Wentz died in 1965.

Partial bibliography

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Sutin 2006, pg. 262
  2. ^ Donald S. Lopez, Jr. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography, Princeton University Press, 2011.
  3. ^ Sutin 2006, pg. 263
  4. ^ Sutin 2006, pg. 267
  5. ^ Stanford Evans-Wentz Lectureship
  6. ^ The Fairy-faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz (1911): Parts of this book are available online on Google Books.

References

External links