CONCLUSION

When Evans-Wentz chose to name his work The Tibetan Book of the Dead, he had in mind The Egyptian Book of the Dead, convinced that both derived from a single source of ancient wisdom. The Old English word boc is connected to the word for beech tree. It thus may have meant “beech wood tablet,” the supposed medium on which the ancient Germanic alphabets, the runes, were carved (Madame Blavatsky wrote at length about the runes and their symbolism). By book, Evans-Wentz did not simply mean printed pages bound together. He likely had something more venerable in mind, book in the sense of sacred book, Bible, biblia, a Greek word that comes from byblos, the name for the Phoenician port from which the Greeks imported Egyptian papyrus. For Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead was something ancient, something sacred. It was a scripture. But how does a book (in the common sense of the term) become a scripture?

The sacred books of the Hindu tradition are the Vedas, “the knowledge,” a collection of texts that date from 1500–1000 BCE. But according to the tradition, this date is far too late. The Vedas are described in Sanskrit as apaurueya, a term that literally means “not deriving from persons.” One might assume that this means that the Vedas are not of human origin, but are rather divine. But the term “person” here includes both humans and gods. The Vedas are uncreated and eternal. It is even misleading to call them texts; they have existed forever in the form of sound, only becoming known when they were heard by the ancient sages (i) long ago. It is also misleading to call them books. The Vedas were preserved orally for centuries by priests trained in sophisticated mnemonics. They were not written down for more than a millennium, and only then as the root text for commentaries; sound remains the preferred medium.

The Buddha rejected the authority of the Vedas by claiming that they had authors. And over the long history of Buddhism in India, Buddhist logicians debated with Hindu logicians over the nature of sound. One of the first syllogisms that a young Tibetan monk will learn is “Sound is impermanent because of being produced.” This seems so obvious as to hardly warrant expression. The sound of a gong is produced by striking it with a hammer and then fades away until the gong is struck again and another sound is produced. Few young monks who memorize this syllogism understand that it arises from Buddhist debates against Hindus. If sound is impermanent, the Vedas cannot be eternal, and the claim that they are therefore preexistent truth is proven false.

But in order for the Buddha to establish his own authority it was not enough that he challenge the authority of his opponents, the Brahmin priests with whom he competed for prestige and patronage. It was not enough for him to claim that he had discovered a reality unknown to them, that he had found a truth that had never been known before.

We do not know what the Buddha told his monks about his own path to enlightenment. As noted in chapter 2, he wrote nothing, and nothing of what he said was committed to writing until some four centuries after his death. But the texts that scholars consider to be the oldest do not describe the four famous chariot rides and the confrontation with aging, sickness, death, and the possibility of escaping them. Instead, the Buddha recounts, “While still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, though my mother and father wished otherwise and wept with tearful faces, I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and went forth from the home life into homelessness.”¹

Yet as biographies of the Buddha began to appear in the centuries after his death, it was not so much the events of his life that were retold but the events of his past lives, and especially his encounters with the buddhas of the past. For Śākyamuni was not the first person to become a buddha. Other buddhas had preceded him. The numbers vary; some texts say there were three previous buddhas, some say there were six, some say there were twenty-four. In each case, however, Śākyamuni Buddha met each of them in a previous life, over the course of many trillions of years.

Each of those buddhas had understood the same truth. And they had each done the same things. According to the Tibetan tradition, twelve deeds are done by all buddhas: (1) they all descend from the Tusita heaven, (2) they all enter into their mother’s womb, (3) they all take birth, (4) as young men they all gain proficiency in the arts, (5) as young men they all enjoy the company of consorts, (6) they all renounce the world, (7) they all practice asceticism for a period of time, (8) they all seek enlightenment in Bodhgayā, (9) they all achieve buddhahood, (10) they all turn the wheel of the dharma, (11) they all perform miracles, and (12) they all pass into final nirvāa. After their passing, their bodies are cremated and their relics are enshrined in stūpas. Their teachings, and their relics, remain in the world for a certain period of time, but eventually the relics disappear and the teachings are forgotten. Only then does another bodhisattva, who has been perfecting himself over the previous eons, achieve enlightenment under a tree in Bodhgayā, realizing precisely the same truth that the previous buddhas had realized before him. He then teaches the dharma, the same dharma that the previous buddhas had taught and that the world has once again forgotten, at its peril. And so the same truth is taught again and again across the eons. And what is that truth? One of his first disciples famously summarized the Buddha’s teaching in this way: “Of those things that have causes, he set forth their causes, and he also set forth their cessation.”

We see, then, that even though the Buddha taught that all is impermanent, that truth of impermanence is itself eternal, being discovered and then taught, by buddha after buddha in age after age. Although dismissing the claim that the Vedas are an eternal truth that only later was heard by the sages, the Buddhists have their own obsession with the past and its authority, as a series of buddhas stretches back into an infinite past, each awakening to the same truth.

This obsession with the past, and suspicion of the present, manifests itself in Tibetan Buddhism in the form of terma, the treasure texts. As discussed in chapter 3, with the second wave of Buddhism in Tibet, the so-called “later spreading of the dharma,” Tibetans—some monks, some laymen—went to India to procure texts and tantric initiations and bring them back to Tibet. Others even brought Indian masters back with them; Atiśa arrived in 1042. Whether Tibetan aspirants went to India or Indian masters came to Tibet, direct contact with the Indian tradition was established, short circuiting the break in transmission caused by the dark age that followed the assassination of the evil king Lang Darma in 842. This transmission was oral. Although many texts were carried across the Himalayas and into Tibet, those with the books on their back also transported something intangible. Just as the Vedas could be traced back in time without beginning, the Tibetan pilgrims had heard the dharma from their teacher, who had heard it from his teacher, who had heard it from his teacher, going back to the primordial source, the Buddha himself.

But what about those who had continued to practice Buddhism during the dark age? Journeys to India were perilous, descending from the Himalayan peaks to the Bengal plain, arriving as a foreigner confronted with strange languages, poisonous snakes, and unknown foods. And the pilgrims required resources; accounts of their sojourns in India commonly express concerns about gathering enough gold to exchange for the precious dharma. Yet without direct contact with Indian masters, how could the authority of one’s practice be proclaimed?

Rather than making the long and harrowing journey to India, or inviting an Indian teacher to Tibet, a different form of authority appeared in the form of terma, the treasure texts composed by the Indian master Padmasambhava more than two centuries earlier and buried in the ground. This was a different form of connection to the past. Instead of traveling to India in order to hear what had been heard, traveling across dangerous distances in space in order to go back to a primordial time, those who discovered the treasures remained in Tibet. Instead of traveling across the surface of the earth, they dug beneath it to unearth the teachings of a second Buddha. These were not texts that were already known in India, but teachings intended especially for Tibet and secreted beneath its soil. And these were not texts that were foreign in origin, requiring first the laborious study of Sanskrit, then the meticulous translation from an Indian script into Tibetan, then oral commentary to render them relevant to the present. They were instead teachings that Padmasambhava had given in Tibet, teachings that had been transcribed by a Tibetan queen; they were time-release revelations, designed for a particular place, Tibet, and for a particular time, the present. Padmasambhava had placed the treasure texts in rocks, at the bottom of lakes, inside pillars of ancient temples, and in the minds of disciples yet unborn. He would often include a prophecy in the text about the circumstances of its future discovery. And at the appropriate time, he would instruct a future disciple about where to find the text. The medium of that message was a dream. The texts were not written in Sanskrit, but rather in a secret code, the language of the ākinīs, tantric goddesses. To read this text, one did not need to study Sanskrit in Kathmandu, as did those who traveled to India to retrieve the dharma. With the revelation of the text to its prophesied revealer came the spontaneous ability to translate the coded language into Tibetan.

Hidden texts, and their discovery, were not a Tibetan innovation. They had their own venerable history in Indian Buddhism. The Mahāyāna sūtras did not appear, at least to common sight, until several centuries after the Buddha passed into nirvāa. According to some accounts, the Buddha felt that the world was not yet prepared to receive these profound teachings and thus entrusted them to the safekeeping of various deities. Thus, after setting forth the Perfection of Wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtras on Vulture Peak, the Buddha entrusted the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines (Aasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) to the king of the yakas (a kind of nature spirit) named Kubera. He entrusted the Perfection of Wisdom in Eighteen Thousand Lines (Aādaśasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) to the gods. He entrusted the Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines (Daśasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) to the demigods. And he entrusted the Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Lines (Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) to the nāgas, serpentine creatures who kept it in a jeweled casket at the bottom of the sea. It was retrieved by Nāgārjuna, the great master of Madhyamaka philosophy and expositor of emptiness (śūnyatā). And to certify the authority of Nāgārjuna, the Buddha made a prophecy that in the future it would be Nāgārjuna who would explain the Mahāyāna to the world.

In this way, the Buddha, who had long ago passed into the nirvāa without remainder, was able to extend his authority into the future; first by secreting his teachings among various gods and demigods in order that they could be revealed in the realm of humans at the appropriate time, and second, by making prophecies that established the credibility of those, yet unborn, who someday would reveal them, making what he had taught long ago newly known, ushering in a renaissance.

One of the earliest uses of the word “authority” in English is from 1230, where it refers to a book that provides conclusive testimony. As we have seen in the case of Hinduism and Buddhism, the weight of authority derives in large part from its origin in the past, whether there is an author or not. For the present needs the past. The present is a degenerate age, unable to solve the problems that afflict it; the solution lies in the past. And so long ago the Buddha gave teachings for the future and hid them in a jeweled casket at the bottom of the sea. Long ago, Padmasambhava dictated teachings for the Tibetans of the future and buried the scrolls of yellow paper beneath their soil. Long ago, the angel Moroni inscribed The Book of Mormon on golden plates and buried them on the hill Cumorah.

Yet we know that the Buddha did not teach the Mahāyāna sūtras; they began to appear four centuries after his death. We know that Padmasambhava did not compose the thousands of treasure texts that continued to be discovered into the twentieth century; assuming that he was a historical figure, his time in Tibet was brief. But in order for religions to survive into the future, they require deep truths, and so they project the present into the past. Their truths are deep because they provide the foundation for the present, they are deep because their origin is distant from the present time, they are deep because they remain below the surface. Such truths must be located at a certain depth, a certain remove in time or space. That depth may be measured in eons of time or in feet beneath the surface. To retrieve those truths, one must go back in time or one must dig down in space.

But the truths that are retrieved are never unambiguous, they are always historical, if one can only know their history. And thus sometimes the retrojected text gains the authority of canon; sometimes it remains the musings of an eccentric. The fate of the text rests not on its content, but on the degree to which the circumstances of its composition remain shrouded from the light of history. How much do we know about the time when the newly composed text was backdated? In the case of the Mahāyāna sūtras, we know very little. In the case of the Tibetan treasures, we know something. In the case of Joseph Smith, perhaps we know too much.

The story of Joseph Smith holds many elements in common with the founding of a great religion. There is a visitation from an angel; the revelation of scriptures—indeed, scriptures inscribed on tablets in an ancient language; there are believers and unbelievers; there are prophecies fulfilled. Yet for many there is also a dissonance, one that resounds in part from the place and the time. The story does not take place in a distant land and ancient time, but in upstate New York in 1827. Perhaps there is too much that is familiar.

In chapter 1, I recounted the events of Smith’s early life, up to publication of the Book of Mormon, as they might be recorded in a sacred history. Here, I will recount some of those same events, and the events leading to his early death, providing more historical detail. For, unlike so many founders, Smith lived in a time from which much survives.

Smith was born and raised in the “Burned Over District” at the time of the Second Great Awakening, a place and time of religious ferment that saw a diminution of the denominations of the colonial period—the Anglicans and Congregationalists—and the growth of the Baptists and Methodists. The period also saw the rise of a number of religious movements collectively categorized as “Restorationist,” who called for a return to the original Christianity of Jesus and the apostles, a Christianity from which the established denominations had deviated as a result of the Great Apostasy, which the various movements dated to various moments in the early history of the Church. According to Mormon theology, the period of the Great Apostasy began after Jesus’s ascent into heaven and continued until Joseph Smith’s first vision in 1820 (although not reported until 1832) in which Smith saw God and Jesus in the woods (now known as the Sacred Grove) near the family farmhouse. Other Restorationist churches that arose during this time and that continue to the present include the Disciples of Christ and the Seventh-Day Adventists.

Smith’s father was known to use a divining rod in an effort to find buried treasure. Prior to his discovery of the golden tablets buried in the hill Cumorah in 1823, Joseph Smith had supported himself as a “scryer,” earning up to fourteen dollars a month to look into a crystal and see what could not be seen by the naked eye, most often lost objects or buried treasure. In Smith’s case, he would put his “seer stone” into a white stovepipe hat, which he then put over his face. It was through his reputation for scrying that Smith met his future wife. In 1825, Smith was hired by Josiah Stowell and William Hale to aid them in finding buried Spanish treasure near Harmony, Pennsylvania, where he met Emma Hale, a relative of William Hale. In 1826, Smith was arrested on a misdemeanor charge in Bainbridge, New York; court records identify him as a “Glass Looker.” Scholars would thus identify Smith’s discovery and translation of the tablets as an instance of the “folk religion” (what was once called “magic”) that characterized many of the movements that emerged during the Great Awakening in the mid-Atlantic states.

On April 6, 1830, Smith formally established the Church of Christ, based upon his translations and revelations. A small congregation developed in the neighboring towns, but local opposition forced Smith and his followers to move to Kirtland, Ohio in the following year. In Kirtland in 1836, the Mormon leadership sought to establish a bank. When their request for a bank charter was denied by the Ohio state legislature, they formed the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company on January 2, 1837, with Joseph Smith as cashier. It quickly failed, along with hundreds of state-chartered and private banks during the Panic of 1837, leaving debts of approximately $100,000. The failure of the bank, and Smith’s role in it, led to great vexation within the Mormon community, with many leaving the church and others being excommunicated.

Joseph Smith next moved the congregation to Far West, Missouri, which he declared the New Zion. Part of his motivation for moving from Ohio to Missouri was to avoid the group of armed men seeking to arrest him on the charge of illegal banking. Yet dissent within the church and the often violent opposition from neighboring communities caused Smith to move once again, this time to Illinois, where the church purchased land in Hancock County and established a town that Smith called Nauvoo.

A number of Smith’s supporters became disaffected during this period, due in part to rumors of his practice of polygamy or “plural marriage,” something that he publicly denounced throughout his life. But his scribe reported that in 1843, the year before his death, Smith received a revelation in which Jesus commanded the practice and threatened damnation to all who condemned it. The historical origins of the practice are difficult to trace; some historians speculate that it may derive from Jacob Cochran, a number of whose Maine followers joined Smith’s church in 1832. Cochran had preached the doctrine of “spiritual wifery,” according to which each man could have seven wives. (Cochran was convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior and spent four years in prison.) Regardless of when Joseph Smith received his revelation, his promiscuity can be traced to at least 1831, when he narrowly avoided castration by a mob after it became known that he had had intercourse with the sixteen-year-old daughter of a family with whom Smith and his wife were living as boarders. Smith would marry many other women until the time of his death, often in secret ceremonies that sealed the union for eternity. Estimates range (not counting Emma Smith) from twenty-seven to eighty-four, although the higher numbers include many who were married or “sealed” to Smith after his death.

A church newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor published its one and only issue on June 7, 1844. It denounced Smith, saying that he had fallen from his status as a true prophet through his profession of such doctrines as polygamy. Smith and the city council responded by declaring the newspaper to be a public nuisance and ordering that its printing press be destroyed. He was eventually charged with libel for the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor. While awaiting trial in Carthage, Illinois, Joseph Smith was shot to death on June 27, 1844.

James Strang, another discoverer of ancient plates, also met an untimely death. He declared himself the rightful and chosen successor of Joseph Smith, and produced a letter of appointment from Smith, designating Strang as his heir. The letter carried a Nauvoo, Illinois postmark of June 19, 1844, just a week before Smith’s death. In further support of his destiny, the following year he discovered his own set of plates, the Record of the Rajah Manchou of Vorito. His translation of them revealed a prophecy that read, “The forerunner men shall kill, but a mighty prophet there shall dwell. I will be his strength, and he shall bring forth thy record.” This, together with the letter, seemed to support his position as prophet. Yet his claim was rejected, leading him to form a rival church called the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite). He attracted a large number of supporters, over two thousand of whom moved with him to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan in 1848. Strang assumed both ecclesiastical and temporal leadership of his church, and was crowned king in a ceremony on the island on July 8, 1850. He was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives and wrote a highly regarded natural history of Beaver Island. He was assassinated in 1857.

On October 21, 1888, forty years after the first rappings were heard in her family farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, Margaret Fox appeared on the stage of the New York Academy of Music to confess that she and her sisters had not been in contact with the spirits of the dead. The rappings had been produced by a skillful cracking of the joints of their hands and feet. An article published that day in the New York World entitled, “Spiritualism Exposed: Margaret Fox Kane Confesses Fraud,” declared:

But the severest blow that Spiritualism has ever received is delivered to-day through the solemn declarations of the greatest medium of the world that it is all a fraud, a deception, a lie. This statement is made by Mrs. Margaret Fox Kane, who has been able, through long training and early muscular development, to produce peculiar rappings and knocks which were affirmed to be spiritual manifestations, and which were so skillfully done as to baffle all attempts at discovery.

The article continued, “As the first and greatest of all mediums the weight of their evidence can not fail to sound the death knell of the abominable business which they, at an age when they knew not what they did, began and have seen flourish into one gigantic world-wide fraud.”

In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London by a group of prominent British spiritualists and scientists. Its purpose was to carry out scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena. In 1884, it conducted an investigation of Madame Blavatsky. One of its researchers, Richard Hodgson, was sent to India, where he examined many of the letters received from the mahatmas. The report issued by the society found:

That there is consequently a very strong general presumption that all the marvellous narratives put forward as evidence of the existence and occult power of the Mahatmas are to be explained as due either (a) to deliberate deception carried out by or at the instigation of Madame Blavatsky, or (b) to spontaneous illusion, or hallucination, or unconscious misrepresentation or invention on the part of the witnesses.²

The report concluded, “For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”³

Those who sought to dispense ancient wisdom on American soil in the nineteenth century suffered a variety of fates; some were murdered, some were simply denounced. Although Joseph Smith’s followers went on to establish what some regard as the most American of Christian denominations, his own legacy remains controversial. Madame Blavatsky, who inspired many of the greatest poets and painters of the turn of the century, is but vaguely remembered a century later.

This is not to suggest a direct lineage from Joseph Smith, to the Fox sisters, to Madame Blavatsky, to Evans-Wentz. Joseph Smith was not a spiritualist, in the sense of someone who communicates with the spirits of the dead, as the Fox sisters and Madame Blavatsky claimed to do. Yet they all belong to a larger lineage, the lineage that Catherine Albanese has called American Metaphysical Religion. Here, Smith was but one of many visionaries, visionaries like Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and Ellen White, a founder of the Sabbatarian Adventists. But one of the things that sets Smith apart from these other founders is that his vision bore a physical form; he dug it from the earth in upstate New York. It is this element of Smith’s revelation that connects him, in one of the uncanny parallels so beloved by Evans-Wentz, to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. For this Latter Day Saint was also a latter day treasure discoverer (gter ston in Tibetan), a latter day Karma Lingpa for America. Like Karma Lingpa, he unearthed texts from the soil of his native land. Like Karma Lingpa, he died an early and violent death. Like Karma Lingpa, he left a long and complicated legacy. But Joseph Smith’s teachings (as well as those of Madame Blavatsky) have been discredited, at least by some, regardless of their importance. And they have been discredited not for reasons of intrinsic value, regardless of how that might be measured, but, at least in part, because they lived in a chronologically recent and geographically proximate past.

But what of Walter Wentz? His Tibetan Book of the Dead has mystified and inspired readers around the world for almost a century. When Tibetan Buddhism was little known or understood, his was a groundbreaking work, the first to bring the translation of Tibetan Buddhist texts to the English-speaking public. Evans-Wentz was equally avant-garde in his method, collaborating with a Tibetan scholar, a practice that would not become common for another four decades, after the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959. And unlike so many scholars of the colonial period, Evans-Wentz does not hesitate to credit his collaborator, going so far as to include his name in the extended title of the book.

But Evans-Wentz was another kind of colonizer. Just as the mahatmas had colonized a secret region of Tibet, so Evans-Wentz colonized a Tibetan text, turning it into a tome of his American version of Theosophy. Indeed, there is a certain audacity about the book; Evans-Wentz thought that he understood what he read, reading, as he did, through the lenses of Theosophy and Hindu Yoga. What is particularly troubling in his case is that, in an effort to add authority to his beliefs, he seemed compelled to represent his own eccentric interpretation of the Tibetan text as originating not from him, but from his Tibetan teacher. Evans-Wentz duly acknowledges the crucial role of Kazi Dawa Samdup in the creation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet he also exploits that collaboration in an effort to represent his own Theosophical reading as somehow authentic, attributing to the Tibetan, after his death, a position that he almost certainly did not hold. In Dawa Samdup’s silence, Evans-Wentz speaks in the Tibetan’s voice, in a language he never learned.

So, donning the Urim and Thummim of the scholar, we see that Walter Wentz did something wrong. His crime was to pretend that his text originated from a time and place, where in fact it did not. And he got away with it. Evans-Wentz did not receive the condemnation suffered by Madame Blavatsky and the Fox sisters and Joseph Smith, because he did not claim that his authority derived from himself or his automatic writing, it did not derive from his ability to contact the dead or to converse with angels. It came, he claimed, from an ancient text unearthed in faraway Tibet. That is, Evans-Wentz fabricated his lineage, claiming that his strange views were those of “his lāma.” In so doing, he was able to derive authority for himself by projecting it back to a distant and largely unknowable past. If we were to trace the lineage of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it would not be Walter Evans-Wentz back to Kazi Dawa Samdup to Karma Lingpa to Padmasambhava. It would be Walter Evans-Wentz to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to Colonel Olcott to the Fox sisters. Evans-Wentz took American Metaphysical Religion and gave it a Tibetan Buddhist pedigree.

But the fabrication of lineage is what, from the perspective of historical scholarship, Tibetans had done for centuries. The fabrication of lineage is what, from the perspective of historical scholarship, Joseph Smith had done. In each case, the bodily resurrection of texts from native soil provides a connection to a sacred past. America is no longer merely the destination of immigrants whose scriptures came from a distant Holy Land; sacred scriptures of the Christian faith are buried in American soil; Carthage, Illinois is a place where martyrs died; Kirtland, Ohio is a place of pilgrimage. Tibet is no longer the distant borderland beyond the Snowy Range, dismissed as a “yak pen” by Indian abbots. Sacred Buddhist texts are buried there.

In the cycle of texts called the Bardo Tödöl unearthed by Karma Lingpa, Padmasambhava—the enlightened master who came from India to Tibet—makes prophecies about Tibetan lamas yet unborn, prophecies that came true. And Joseph Smith found these words of Lehi—the Israelite prophet who led his family from Jerusalem to America—inscribed on the buried plates, “But, said he, notwithstanding our afflictions, we have obtained a land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands; a land which the Lord God hath covenanted with me should be a land for the inheritance of my seed. Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.” (Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 1:5)

Tibet became a place of prophecy, and its fulfillment, as did America. And all because something was buried beneath a mountain—whether it be Mount Tambora in Indonesia, Mount Gambodar in Tibet, or the hill Cumorah in upstate New York.