Tibetan Yoga and its Secret Doctrines

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Sin The Tibetan Book of the Dead and in Tibet's Great A Yogi Milarepa so in this book, the third in a threefold series, my aim has been to place on record not early a catena of carefully made translations of texts which are as yet almost unknown in Occidental countries, but also a body of orally transmitted traditions and teachings relating to the texts which I received from the late Lima Kazi Dawa-Samdup who was my Tibetan gara.

The present work thus contains much that is new to Western thought, and much that, apart from its value for philosophy and religion, is interesting anthropologically. It should prove to be of the same quality and public appeal as the two volumes of the series which have already been published. Perhaps it may be found to be the most valuable member of the trilogy, inasmuch as it gives the very texts of some of the principal jogas and meditations which many of the most illustrious Tibetan and Indian philosophers, including Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa, and Milarepa, employed in attaining Right Knowledge.

This volume is meant at once for the exact scholar and for the general reader. The former will note that the original textual sources, which are sevenfold, are authentic, and that nothing has been incorporated into the texts or presented in the introductions and annotations which has not doctrinal sanction.

FROM THE CELTIC FAITH IN FAIRIES TO THE TIBETAN SCIENCE OF YOGA

M Y friendship with the author of this work goes back a long way, namely, to the year 1907, when he first came up to Oxford as a post-graduate student from Stanford University in California. It was as a fellow-anthropologist that I came thus to know him; for his interest lay in exploring the religious experience of mankind in such various forms as may afford the most significant contrasts. His was, moreover, a thoroughly scientific attitude towards his subject, in that he was resolved to find out and set down what others thought and felt to be true without allowing his statement of the facts to be coloured by his private opinions as to what they ought to think and feel. He meant to do his best to look through the window without being baffled by his own reflection in the glass.

Now there is a certain point at which most of us, however dispassionately scientific in intention, are apt to draw a line beyond which, consciously or unconsciously, we refuse to take the other man seriously when he talks what seems to us to be nonsense. Thus, disparaging terms, such as primitive credulity', 'confusion of categories', 'prelogical mentality', and so on, come to invade accounts of the unsophisticated mind that to a corresponding extent are falsified; because science has no business to say wrong' when it merely means 'different'. Likewise, in dealing with the beliefs of our own peasantry, we may be hardly aware of the implication of relative worthlessness attaching to our use of such a word as 'survival'; though its Latin equivalent superstition might warn us of the danger. Be this as it may, Mr. Evans-Wentz, as he was then-though it was not long before Rennes, the University of that great Breton scholar Anatole Le Braz, conferred on him his first Doctorate-insisted on taking the so-called folk- lore of Europe not at the educated man's valuation, but, so to speak, at its own. He proposed to consider the Celtic faith in fairies, not as a relic of old-world irrationality, but as if there might be some kind of vital truth in it, at least for the Celt. It is to the credit, I think, of the Universities of Rennes and of Oxford that, in due course, they rewarded with degrees one whose judicial impartiality sent him forth to wander up and down Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, in the hope of tracking down and interviewing the authentic fairy-seer. I believe that such gentry turned out to be few and far between; nor could any of them help Mr. Evans- Wentz to see a fairy with his own eyes. But fruitful or not, the method at least was sound, and was presently to be tried out in a richer field with substantial gain to positive knowledge. In the West he could but study in the Irish or Breton rustic a bare substratum of primeval paganism, overlaid by a Christianity itself in partial subjection to secular influences; but in the East there was to be found many an example of the devotee whose religion amounts to a complete philosophy of life, which he does not hesitate as whole-heartedly to put into.