This book is my third encounter with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The first occurred in 1998, when I devoted a chapter to it in Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (University of Chicago Press, 1998). The second occurred in 2000, when Oxford University Press republished the tetralogy of W. Y. Evans-Wentz, the first volume of which is The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was invited to provide a new foreword for each of the four volumes, as well as an afterword for The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Although I provide a different perspective on the text here, much of the biographical information about Evans-Wentz presented in the following pages appears in these previous studies. The close reading of Evans-Wentz’s text that occurs in chapter 4 is drawn largely from Prisoners of Shangri-La.
Acknowledgments, however, are typically a place to recognize the work of others. Here, I would like to direct readers interested in the history of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead in Tibet to the excellent study by Bryan J. Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford, 2003). In the course of writing this book, I have made consistent use of Bryan’s study and pestered him with questions, all of which he has patiently answered.