Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

On his book The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography

Cover Interview of May 10, 2011

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“What happens when religious texts move across time and across cultures.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“I wanted to try to understand The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an odd appropriation of a Tibetan text, which it certainly is, but rather as an important work in the history of American spiritualism.”

On the second:

“I am sometimes saddened to see that people who are interested in Buddhism think that they must renounce their historical consciousness in order to appreciate Buddhist texts.”

history / religion / buddhism / occultism / spiritualism / padmasambhava / blavatsky madame / evans-wentz walter /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009