Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines Ed. by W.Y. Evens-Wentz
Walter Evans-Wentz published a number of important early works on Tibetan Buddhism. This foreword gives an insight into the man himself who was willing to step outside of his own beliefs in order to better understand the beliefs of others.
Now there is a certain point at which most of us, however dispassionately scientific in intention, are apt to draw a line beyond which, consciously or unconsciously, we refuse to take the other man seriously when he talks what seems to us to be nonsense. Thus, disparaging terms, such as ‘primitive credulity’, ‘confusion of categories’, ‘prelogical mentality’, and so on, come to invade accounts of the unsophisticated mind that to a corresponding extent are falsified; because science has no business to say ‘wrong’ when it merely means ‘different’. Likewise, in dealing with the beliefs of our own peasantry, we may be hardly aware of the implication of relative worthlessness attaching to our use of such a word as ‘survival’; though its Latin equivalent superstitio might warn us of the danger. Be this as it may, Mr. Evens-Wentz, as he was then - though it was not long before Rennes, the University of that great Breton scholar Anatole Le Braz conferred on him his first doctorate - insisted on taking the so-called folklore of Europe not at the educated man’s valuation, but, so to speak at its own. He proposed to consider the Celtic faith in fairies, not as a relic of old-world irrationality, but as if there might be some kind of vital truth in it, at least for the Celt…
From 1911, when the Oxford University Press published The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Dr. Evans-Wentz became a sort of scholar-gypsy, who for the next half-dozen years might be found ranging anywhere between Oxford and the Nearer East, ever bent on gathering impressions of human nature in all its varieties and vagaries. Then in 1917, from Egypt, he repaired to India, the military authorities consenting to admit him on the recommendation of Colonel Lawrence, once his fellow student at Oxford, and always one might venture to say, a kindred spirit; and in India, that hotbed of religions, he at length had his chance of getting into touch with all that intense mysticism which pervades every section and grade of the most diversified of the major provinces of humanity…
Already, then, he was being initiated into the science of yoga; but his discipleship was not to reap its full reward until he was permitted to enter that carefully protected dependency of the British Empire, Sikkim, whither he afterwards proceeded on an invitation of some years’ standing from the ruler Sidkyong Tulku, whom he had known in Oxford, only to find that he had died after a brief reign. A close friend of the late MahÄrÄja, however, was there to welcome him in the person of the learned LÄma Kazi Dawa-Samdup; and behold our scholar-gypsy transformed into a second Kim, a chela sitting at the feet of his guru in order that he might partake of this wisdom. This association lasted for some three years - in fact, up to the death of the LÄma, which took place in March 1922. Its fruit is the trilogy of substantial works, based on translations from the Tibetan, and accompanied by an interpretation from within such as demands something even rarer with Western scholars than the ordinary scholarly equipment, namely, a sympathetic insight transcending the prejudices which render the average man antipathetic to any type of unfamiliar experience.
(Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines Ed. by W.Y. Evens-Wentz from the Foreword by Dr. R. R. Marrett, pub. OUP 1935, 2nd Ed. 1958)
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Walter Evans-Wentz and Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup photographed circa 1919... By Unknown - http://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pep-web.org/document.php%3Fid%3Djoap.048.0448.fig001.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pep-web.org/document.php%3Fid%3Djoap.048.0447a&usg=__DkgNuX7fTqEs61aUtN9-6E-VH6M=&h=793&w=628&sz=122&hl=fr&start=3&zoom=1&tbnid=BY_PXnNeUXPp_M:&tbnh=143&tbnw=113&ei=sotJTYKTHIuHswbD0ZiyDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3DWentz%2BKazi%2BDawa%2BSamdup%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dfr%26sa%3DN%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12884996
From 1911, when the Oxford University Press published The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Dr. Evans-Wentz became a sort of scholar-gypsy, who for the next half-dozen years might be found ranging anywhere between Oxford and the Nearer East, ever bent on gathering impressions of human nature in all its varieties and vagaries. Then in 1917, from Egypt, he repaired to India, the military authorities consenting to admit him on the recommendation of Colonel Lawrence, once his fellow student at Oxford, and always one might venture to say, a kindred spirit; and in India, that hotbed of religions, he at length had his chance of getting into touch with all that intense mysticism which pervades every section and grade of the most diversified of the major provinces of humanity…
Already, then, he was being initiated into the science of yoga; but his discipleship was not to reap its full reward until he was permitted to enter that carefully protected dependency of the British Empire, Sikkim, whither he afterwards proceeded on an invitation of some years’ standing from the ruler Sidkyong Tulku, whom he had known in Oxford, only to find that he had died after a brief reign. A close friend of the late MahÄrÄja, however, was there to welcome him in the person of the learned LÄma Kazi Dawa-Samdup; and behold our scholar-gypsy transformed into a second Kim, a chela sitting at the feet of his guru in order that he might partake of this wisdom. This association lasted for some three years - in fact, up to the death of the LÄma, which took place in March 1922. Its fruit is the trilogy of substantial works, based on translations from the Tibetan, and accompanied by an interpretation from within such as demands something even rarer with Western scholars than the ordinary scholarly equipment, namely, a sympathetic insight transcending the prejudices which render the average man antipathetic to any type of unfamiliar experience.
(Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines Ed. by W.Y. Evens-Wentz from the Foreword by Dr. R. R. Marrett, pub. OUP 1935, 2nd Ed. 1958)
………………………………
You will find previous Book Extracts here.
All Rights Reserved
Image:
Walter Evans-Wentz and Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup photographed circa 1919... By Unknown - http://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=http://www.pep-web.org/document.php%3Fid%3Djoap.048.0448.fig001.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.pep-web.org/document.php%3Fid%3Djoap.048.0447a&usg=__DkgNuX7fTqEs61aUtN9-6E-VH6M=&h=793&w=628&sz=122&hl=fr&start=3&zoom=1&tbnid=BY_PXnNeUXPp_M:&tbnh=143&tbnw=113&ei=sotJTYKTHIuHswbD0ZiyDw&prev=/images%3Fq%3DWentz%2BKazi%2BDawa%2BSamdup%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dfr%26sa%3DN%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12884996