Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is an obscure 1970′s Vietnamese book which purports to be a previously unpublished record of a trip Baird T Spalding took to India. The pseudonymous author Nguyên Phong claims to have found a Spalding book titled Journey to the East in a San Diego library during the 1970′s and published Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong as a Vietnamese translation. Prior to the 1980′s, there was a large number of unauthorized translations of English works in Vietnam, and Nguyên Phong is listed as translator of works by Lobsang Rampa, Myodo Satomi and Mika Waltari.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong however, is entirely different from Phong’s earlier translations, as it is actually a work of fiction created by Nguyên Phong. Spalding never wrote a book entitled Journey to the East, and his first book was only published in the US in 1924. Hanh Trinh Ve Phoung Dong also contains numerous historical anomalies that speak to its fictional nature, as outlined in the blog post Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong – A Vietnamese prelude to Spalding’s Life and Teachings? It is likely that Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is an artifact of the renewed interest in Spalding during the 1970′s, and Nguyên Phong was certainly not the only author who claimed a connection with Spalding during this time. However, he certainly was the most inventive, as no other author to my knowledge has created a prequel to Spalding’s work.

Regardless of its fictional origins, Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is a fascinating book for those of us interested in Baird T Spalding and the genre of magical autobiographies which Spalding pioneered. The thought that Spalding’s imaginary journey to India in 1894 could inspire a Vietnamese prequel eight decades later that is translated back to English after another three decades adds to the attraction for lovers of the obscure.

I conducted a brief interview with Poven Leace to understand his impressions of the book and motivations in translating it to English.

Q. Thanks for agreeing to the interview, Poven. Can you tell us how you first encountered Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong?

A. I came across “Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong” (HTVPD) by Nguyen Phong through a number of friends who worked with me in the same company in the Philippines.  They all commented, “The book has changed my perception in life.”  With that in mind, I bought a copy of HTVPD that was first published in the U.S. in 1987 by the “Nguoi Viet” Publishing House.  This edition clearly stated that HTVPD was a Vietnamese translation of “Journey to the East” (JTE) by Baird Spalding published in 1924 by the Adyar Publishing House in India, and Nguyen Phong was the translator.

Personally, HTVPD has indeed exerted a great effect on my spiritual and intellectual life.  Given this remarkable influence, I have tried to search for the original English version hoping to introduce it to my American fellows.  Unfortunately, I hitherto have not detected any trace that may lead to the original English edition.  As a Vietnamese translator, Nguyen Phong may be the only person who would have the original “Journey to the East”.  Regrettably, we do not have any luck with contacting him up until now.  Despite extensive searches for “Journey to the East”, I did not succeed.

A few years later, a new 2005-edition of HTVPD has been widely disseminated in Asian public markets in the U.S., U.K., France and Canada.  This edition discloses no publisher, but it unveils itself by a Buddhist calendar year of 2549 and reveals that Nguyen Phong derived HTVPD from a six-volume set of books entitled “Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East”.  After purchasing this six-volume set, it occurred to me that HTVPD had very little in common with Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East.  In another edition printed by ABC Printing in Costa Mesa, California, U.S.A., a short biography of Nguyen Phong on the back cover has divulged that Nguyen Phong is the penname of Vu Van Du.

It comes to our realization that the direct English re-establishment from HTVPD is the only vehicle to disseminate Spalding’s wisdom to a larger group of audience.  It is certainly not escaped our notice that HTVPD only serves people who are able to read and understand Vietnamese.  Given our intention and the unavailability of the original “Journey to the East” in the public domain, Bien Giang and I decided to re-instate it.

Q. There are some names in the Vietnamese text that don’t translate well to English. How did you deal with these words and what do you think Nguyen Phong meant by them? Any other difficulties in translating the text?

A. Regarding the translation, we do not have any problem because it is simply just a normal translation from Vietnamese to English.  In terms of proper nouns, we kept them as they were written.

Q. We’ve posted a fair amount of information on this blog that indicates HTVPD is a fictional work created by Nguyen Phong, because of the many historical discrepancies. While you were translating it, did you consider it to be a fictional work, or a record of a journey which occurred in real life? How do you account for so many discrepancies, and the lack of any record of the original 1924 book that HTVPD was allegedly translated from?

A. In our opinion, Journey to the East could be considered as a fiction book.  As you notice, the last sentence of the book suggests that another journey was about to begin.  As to the various discrepancies that are posted on your blog, we have coincidently addressed some of them in our book.

For the rest of your discrepancies, we are afraid that we cannot make any comments because they are not parts of our translation.  Regardless of whether the remaining of your discrepancies is substantiated by any source or by anyone or not, the entire contents of the English re-translation entitled “Journey to the East” remain consistent with the Vietnamese translation entitled “Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong”.

Q. Any other thoughts?

A. From our perspective, it really does not matter who composed the book; what really matters is the wisdoms from the contents of this book are disseminated widely to a larger group of audience.  Honestly speaking, the notion that is far more noteworthy is what subject matters were written than who wrote them at this point.

Thanks for the interview Poven. The English translation of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong, titled Journey to the East, can be purchased at Amazon.com. Readers are invited to post their comments here.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is listed in Google Books, and can be found in libraries via Worldcat.  Jean Luc reports it was translated in Vietnamese in 1975 from a 1924 Indian book titled Journey to the East. The first publication date shown online is 1987, with Spalding listed as author and Nguyên Phong as the translator into Vietnamese. According to Google Books, Nguyên Phong has translated similar books in the mystic and occult genre, including works by Lobsang Rampa, Myodo Satomi and Mika Waltari.

Most of this book is available online, and despite the imperfect translation of Google Translate it is quite fascinating. All of the facts point to this book being a derivative fictional work written by Phong, rather than a translation of Spalding.

As visitors to this blog may have guessed, the key item that indicates this is a work of fiction is that my research has established beyond a doubt that Spalding never visited India in 1894 as he claimed in Life and Teaching. I’ll be publishing more on this topic later, including evidence which shows where Spalding spent most of the 1890′s. Logic would suggest that any prelude or sequel to the fictional 1894 visit is also fictional.

There are no references to Spalding ever having written a book titled Journey to the East published in India. The four volumes of Life and Teaching were Spalding’s only books published prior to his death in 1953.  Life and Teaching volume one was first published in San Francisco in serial form in 1922, then as a book in 1924 by the California Press.

The translation of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong contains no mention of dates on which this journey occurred. As a reasonably detailed timeline exists for Spalding’s life from 1898 onwards, as Jean Luc suggested and the text hints, we must assume that Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong took place prior to the 1894 India mission described in Life and Teaching. Given that Spalding was born in 1872, he would have been barely 21 years old at best. It is unlikely a 21 year old would be a University professor leading a mission to India.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong states that Spalding was born in 1857 in England, and indicates that the mission to India departed from England. As outlined in previous posts on Spalding’s biography, this was simply a story propagated by Spalding and DeVorss, and not factual. Spalding was born in 1872 in upstate New York, but an author working in 1975 is unlikely to have known this fact, and would have assumed the 1857 date was correct.

Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong mentions many universities and professors. There are many similar claims in promotional material surrounding Spalding but these are simply not accurate. Spalding was not a professor or a doctor and according to University registrars there is no record of Spalding studying at Cornell, Stanford or Berkeley. Regardless, granting a 21 year old Spalding the title of Professor is clearly a literary invention. If there had been a mission to India funded by these universities as described in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong, records of it would still exist today.

There are a number of errors and anachronisms in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong which confirm that it is fictional. The most obvious error is that at least two of the people mentioned in the text either could not have accompanied Spalding on this trip, or were not alive at the time indicated.

Paul Brunton, author of A Search in Secret India, is mentioned in the book. Brunton did travel to India, but not with Spalding, and he dismissed Spalding in his notebooks which are widely available today. Most importantly, Brunton was born in 1898, and did not meet Spalding until early 1936 during Spalding’s India tour.

Another person that appears repeatedly in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong is Professor Walter Evans-Wentz, a Stanford professor world famous for his expertise on Buddhism. According to his biography, Evans-Wentz was born in 1878 in New Jersey, and completed elementary school in June, 1892. He worked as a journalist before enrolling at Stanford in 1901. The earliest record of Evans-Wentz visiting India is 1910. Evans-Wentz’s papers are available at Oxford, Stanford and there is a published biography  (Pilgrim of the clear light, by Ken Winkler). There are no references to Spalding in Evans-Wentz’s biography at Google Books and no record of the claimed trip described in Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong.

Finally, Chapter 1 of Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong makes reference to an infamous Time magazine cover proclaiming God is Dead, which was published in April 1966. This would be impossible for a book written in 1924, or indeed any book written by Spalding, who died in 1953.

The 1970′s was a time of broad excitement in the New Age and a renewal of interest in Baird T Spalding. Several other mystics claimed a connection with Spalding around this time, and many of their claims have since proven to be inspired more by the desire for publicity rather than accuracy. Since Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong was published in Vietnamese only, it probably flew under the radar of Spalding’s publisher DeVorss & Co. A long article in a Vietnamese online forum gives some background to the book, and claims that Nguyên Phong is the alias of a Boeing software engineer who wrote the book after emigrating from Vietnam to the US. It would be interesting to find out from Nguyên Phong what inspired him to write this book and expand on the Spalding mythos.

Readers with more information on Hanh Trinh Ve Phuong Dong are invited to comment below.