Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/128

78 awakening to a New Age, freed, in large measure, from the incrustations of medievalism, and eager to garner wisdom from all the Sacred Books of mankind, be they of one Faith or of another.

Although the translating of this manuscript was done wholly in the presence of the editor in Gangtok, Sikkim, the chief credit should be given to the late Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup, the translator. The Lāma himself aptly summarized the editor’s part in the work by saying that the editor was his living English dictionary. Indeed the editor could have been little more than this, for his knowledge of Tibetan was almost as nothing.

The aim of both the translator and the editor has been to keep as closely to the sense of the text as the idiomatic structures of the Tibetan and English tongues permit. Sometimes the translator, preferring to render into English the real meaning which a lāma would derive from certain more or less technically-worded phrases, has departed from a strictly literal translation.

The Tibetan of Tantric texts, such as ours, is especially difficult to turn into good English; and owing to the terseness of many passages it has been necessary to interpolate words and phrases, which are bracketed.

In years to come, it is quite probable that our rendering—as has been the case with the pioneer translations of the Bible—may be subject to revision. A strictly literal rendering of a work so abstruse in its real meanings as this, and written in symbolical language as well, if attempted by Europeans—who, finding it difficult to get out of their Western mentality, too often are Christians first and scholars second when working with non-Christian sacred texts—would, perhaps, be as misleading as some of their renderings of the ancient Sanskrit Vedas. Even to a Tibetan, unless he be a lāma and well versed in Tantricism, as the translator was, the Bardo Thödol is almost a sealed book.

His profound lāmaic training, his fervent faith in the higher yogīc teachings of The Great Perfectionist School of Guru