Career
Evans-Wentz is best known for four texts translated from the Tibetan and published by Oxford University Press, namely The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation: or the Method of Realizing Nirvana through Knowing the Mind, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines: or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, and Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa: a Biography from the Tibetan being the Jetsun-Kabbum or Biographical History of Jetsun-Milarepa.
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. Nonetheless, ethnocentrism aside, he remains a pioneer central to the transmission of Buddhism to the West.
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. 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.
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