If you will be anywhere near Ann Arbor tomorrow evening, be sure to stop by Crazy Wisdom Bookstore & Tea Room to see Donald Lopez, author of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As Crazy Wisdom points out, this is a rare opportunity (unless you’re his student) to listen to the University of Michigan’s foremost Buddhist scholar as he talks about his new book and interacts with the Salon audience on Buddhist topics!

Location: Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 South Main Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Date: Thursday, May 12th

Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

More Info: Here.

Hope to see you all there!

Fred Appel, editor of the new religious series, The Lives of Great Religious Books, wrote a piece for The Front Table this week:

“Lives of Great Religious Books” was born in the faculty lounge of the NYU Law School in the early spring of 2005, in a conversation over tea with the eminent Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. I had come to NYU to meet with Margalit, then a visiting scholar in the Law School, to ask him about his current research and writing, and talk more generally about trends in the humanities. This is one of the great privileges and joys of being an acquisitions editor at a distinguished scholarly publishing house: being able to engage smart and imaginative people in conversation on topics that preoccupy them. After talking about his own work – including a book he had begun that we eventually published in 2009 – the topic of conversation turned for some reason to memoirs. Margalit was of the opinion that too many were being published – or more precisely, that too few were worth reading. Then he tossed his head back and said dreamily, “you know what I’d like to read? A biography of an important book – the story of its reception across time. That’s the sort of memoir we need more of.”

Read on…

Our new series, the Lives of Great Religious Books is based on the idea that books, like people, are born and live fascinating lives worthy of biographical treatment. Now to get truly meta — can we then extend it out to say that series are like books are like people in the same way?

That is one way to look at this Q&A between religion editor Fred Appel and Ruth Braunstein at The Immanent Frame in which Fred reveals how the idea behind the series was actually born of a discussion with Avishai Margalit many years ago in a faculty lounge at NYU Law School.

If we accept that series are like books are like people — perhaps this closing paragraph in which Fred reveals his “wish list” of future biographical subjects can be viewed as the series version of a personal ad (“Established series seeks unattached authors for fun and stimulating conversation, must like dogs.“).

I would love to commission an accessible, lively biography of the Daodejing, and I’m also looking for a biography of the Talmud. I’ve been talking to one or two people about that. It is a tremendously important book in the Jewish tradition, and one that has had a fascinating history, not just within Jewish communities in Europe, in the Sephardic world, and in this country, but also in the Christian and Islamic worlds. I would love to commission a biography of Exodus as well. The liberationist story has been so very important. Michael Walzer, as I mentioned, wrote an important book about Exodus from the perspective of political theory and the history of political thought, but I think it’s time for a new book, and perhaps one written from a different perspective. The Koran is of course something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as well. There are a lot of fine Koranic scholars out there, but the state of that field, or subfield, is such that most people are writing in very specialized modes, for other specialists. So finding someone who can write engagingly and accessibly for the general educated public is something of a challenge. But that’s what keeps me busy, and that’s what makes it fun.

Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz

Visit the Berfrois web site to read Donald S. Lopez, Jr.”s explanation of why this photograph and the book these two men created aren’t quite what they seem.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus seems to entail multiple layers of dissimulation, beginning with the photograph of its translator and editor, and extending back to the ancient Tibetan text—how ancient remains a question—that lies buried under the prefaces, notes, and appendices of the American Theosophist Walter Evans-Wentz. And yet, it has been reprinted many times since 1927 and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The Tibetan text itself has been retranslated repeatedly, most recently in 2005 in “the first complete translation”, with various Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama himself, offering their commentary.

More from the article here.

And read the first chapter of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Read a sample chapter

Publishers Weekly’s Religion Bookline has a great feature about our new book series The Lives of Great Religious Books.

Calling the series ambitious, G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes “If it’s true that a book takes on a life of its own, then each has a life story waiting to be told. So let the telling begin–starting with books that have sought the divine and rocked history, one soul at a time.”

He continues to praise Princeton University Press for aiming “to fill a void on the publishing landscape.”

MacDonald is not the only person praising the ambitiousness of this project. In the Chronicle of Higher Education’s PageView blog last week, Carlin Romano noted:

With three marquee scholar-experts like [Wills, Marty, and Lopez], it’s clear that Princeton isn’t fooling around, isn’t simply launching a series of low-profile secondary works. Forthcoming volumes are also impressive in conception, including Annping Chin and Jonathan Spence on The Analects of Confucius, and John J. Collins on The Dead Sea Scrolls. Someone up in New Jersey plainly wants to launch a distinctive, powerful genre.

And with that, Romano’s hit the nail on the head. This new series is the brain-child of religion editor Fred Appel who tells me that this series is designed around the idea of exploring why religious books exert such power on culture and history.

“What we need to know—and what a book of reasonable length could realistically impart to us—is how and why countless numbers of our fellows have been inspired, moved, galvanized, driven to despair or ecstasy by religious books,” concludes Appel.

Learn more about the Lives of Great Religious Books series here and become a fan of the series on Facebook to receive updates about current and forthcoming titles and authors in the series.

Chris Faatz works in the religion section of Powells Books in Portland, Oregon. He contacted us a while back about a Q&A with Donald S. Lopez, Jr. about the surprising origins of The Tibetan Book of the Dead among other things. Pasted below is but one of many questions, so click over to read the complete interview on their site.

Faatz: There’s no other word for it: Your book is fascinating. It concerns the classic Tibetan — or perhaps I should say Tibetan-English — translation of all time, Evans-Wentz’s 1927 publication The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Your book demonstrates that Evans-Wentz’s text is mostly a fabrication of a fertile mind, and that it in fact does not even exist in Tibetan. Can you briefly tell this story?

Lopez: Walter Evans-Wentz, an American Theosophist from New Jersey, was on a kind of spiritual vacation in Asia in 1919, spending most of his time studying yoga with Hindu teachers. He traveled to Darjeeling in northern India (the source of Darjeeling tea), an area with a strong Tibetan presence; the name Darjeeling is Tibetan, meaning “Land of the Thunderbolt.” There he bought a Tibetan text from a British army officer. Evans-Wentz could not read Tibetan, so he took it to the English teacher at a local school who was a Tibetan Buddhist.

The work was called the Bardo Todol in Tibetan, which means, “Liberation in the Intermediate State through Hearing.” It was a large collection of mortuary and meditation texts centered around the idea of the bardo, or intermediate state, the period between death and rebirth, which can last from one instant to 49 days. The “hearing” in the title refers to the fact that such texts were sometimes read to a corpse so that the departed consciousness could hear the teachings and be liberated before taking rebirth again.

Evans-Wentz had only part of the text translated. He then gave it a new name based on his interest in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and surrounded it with all manner of prefaces, footnotes, and appendices. So, the selected chapters that were translated do exist in Tibetan, but Evans-Wentz presents them in ways that are quite alien to, and sometimes directly at odds with, the way those chapters were understood in Tibet.