Inventing the Mystic East

A famous English title for a fourteenth-century Tibetan text was coined in 1927 purely by analogy with an Egyptian one, and the invented name stuck permanently. A major nineteenth-century translation series built much of the modern Western idea of 'the East' from a small, curated selection of texts.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz's 1927 title for the Bardo Thödol; Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East series (1879–1910)

The way Western scholars and translators packaged Asian religious texts for European readers, often reshaping them in the process.

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