(cover: Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup and Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz.)

(Edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, TIBETAN YOGA and Secret Doctrines, pp. 51-56, 1935.)

"Almost imperceptibly for about a century, and more especially within the last fifty years, the higher thought of the Occident has been profoundly modified by influences distinctly Oriental. The Christianity of the so-called orthodox tradition itself has felt these fresh spiritual impulses, and as a result of them, no less than of the revolutionizing effects of Science, has now come to the most serious crisis in its history. As the Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries overwhelmed the Scholastic Philosophy and restored to Europe the great literature and art of ancient Greece and prepared the way for the Reformation and the new age of untrammelled scientific development, so to-day there are deeply influential ideas, likewise born of the East, which give promise of a Reformation far more sweeping and thorough than that which was set in motion by Martin Luther.

It was the feebly reflected Light from the East transmitted by means of the Platonic and Arab philosophers which initiated the Rebirth of the Medieval Occident. To-day it is the strong direct Light of the Orient which is now reshaping the religious life of Europe and of both Americas, and affecting, in some not unimportant manner, even the thought of men of science in all Occidental centres of research.

At the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1933, consideration was given to the scientific probability of the existence of intelligent beings more highly evolved than man; or, in other words, as we set forth in the Introduction to Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa in 1928, to the theory that man does not necessarily represent the end of organic evolution. In similar vein the thought was thrown out to the assembled scientists that there may be unknown states of being wherein transcendent consciousness exists independently of all physical or bodily organisms. Surmises of this character by men of science in the Occident are, of course, rapidly tending to give scientific sanction to the same theories which underlie the whole of our present treatise. It is more than likely that within a few more generations of scientific advance the British Association will welcome to its membership the Wise Men of the East.

Then, in such a glorious New Age of re-established mutual understanding and respect between Orient and Occident, in no small degree will the carefully guarded learning of the master minds of Tibet be found to amplify that of the master minds of India, and help to guide the Western World to a clearer understanding of the old, yet ever new, truths concerning man and man's place in the Universal Scheme, which have constituted since immemorial time the imperishable Light of the East.

It was in like spirit of helpfulness and of personally disinterested desire to be of service to the world that the late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup placed his superior learning and marvellous powers of interpretation at the disposal of the editor and thus made possible the bequeathing of these translations to the peoples of the Occident. Thus, in complement of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and of Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, and in fulfilment of the editor's promise given to the translator, his guru, many of the most essential and hitherto secret doctrines appertaining to the Great Path of the Bodhisattvas are placed on record in this volume and so made available in English form to all who reverence, as the translator and the editor do, the Great Teachers of the Way to Nirvana.

It is owing to These Great Ones, Who, like the Buddha, have renounced and conquered the World and the worldly personality, that the life of humanity on Earth has been lifted up out of the Darkness of Ignorance into the Light of Reality and Divine Bliss, and the Path to the Higher Evolution of Man revealed. Indeed, without Them, mankind would be hopelessly imprisoned in the Sensuous, and there would be no avenue of escape from the transitoriness of the Sangsara, with its accompanying sorrow."