“Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines”

Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup´s English Rendering

Books, audiotapes, and classes about yoga are today as familiar as they are widespread, but Westerners have only recently, in the last seventy or eighty years, become engaged in the meditative doctrines of the East. In the early part of the twentieth century, the pioneering efforts of scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz triggered our ongoing occidental fascination with such phenomena as yoga, Zen, and meditation. In this work – a companion to the highly popular “Tibetan Book of the Dead” – Evans-Wentz presents seven authentic Tibetan yoga texts that first appeared in English in 1935.

Amid useful photographs and reproductions of yoga paintings and manuscripts, readers will encounter some of the principal meditations used by Hindu and Tibetan gurus and philosophers throughout the ages in the attainment of Right Knowledge and Enlightenment. Special commentaries preccede each translated text, and a comprehensive introduction contrasts the tenets of Buddhism with European notions of religion, philosophy, and science.

These seven distinct but intimately related texts will grant any reader a full and complete view of the spiritual teachings that still inform the culture of the East. In this new edition, Donald S. Lopez, Jr. offers a meticulous foreward that not only examines these seven texts in illuminating detail, but also the life and scholarship of Evans-Wentz.

The late Dr. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, formerly of Jesus College, Oxford, studied occult doctrines intensively in India and Sikkim, during the early years of the twentieth century. His tetralogy of works on yoga are pioneering achievements that contributed to the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan and author of “Prisoners fo Shangri-La”.

Oxford University Press, 2000 389lk