Poems of a Renegade Monk

Reviewed by Roger Jackson

Donald Lopez’s pioneering translation of 104 poems by Gendun Chopel (1903–51) is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of works devoted to the “angry monk,” as a recent documentary film describes him.

Gendun Chopel was perhaps the most colorful, controversial, and compelling Tibetan intellectual figure of the early twentieth century. He was a brilliant thinker and writer and a complex personality whose sojourns in India and Sri Lanka, study of South Asian and Western languages and culture, embrace of progressive political and social ideas, and imprisonment and eventual death upon his return to Tibet have served, in the decades since his death, to elevate him in the eyes of many to the status of cultural hero. He has become emblematic of both the promise and peril of Tibet’s encounter with modernity, which he was among the first from his nation to experience and articulate.

Gendun Chopel was born in Amdo in the Tibetan northeast to a family steeped in the practices of the “old,” or Nyingma, tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He learned much about literature, art, and religion from his father, an accomplished scholar and expert in the Great Perfection (Dzogchen) teachings. After his father’s death, his quest for further education led him to a series of monasteries affiliated with the dominant Gelukpa school, culminating in his joining the great monastic university of Drepung in Lhasa in 1927.

Everywhere he went, Gendun Chopel distinguished himself by his wide array of talents and interests, which included painting, literary analysis, poetic composition, and above all the philosophical debates that were central to Gelukpa monastic education. He also gained notoriety as an iconoclast, who challenged the interpretations found in the standard textbooks, and in debate could―and would―argue for any position, including those deemed “extremist.” Branded a sophist, distrusted by many classmates, and frequently in conflict with his teachers, he left Drepung and monastic life forever in 1934 when invited to accompany the Indian pandit Rahul Sankrityayana to southern Tibet to search for Sanskrit manuscripts.

At the end of the expedition, Gendun Chopel returned with Sankrityayana to India. He spent most of the next twelve years traveling the subcontinent, visiting Buddhist holy sites and modern cities, as well as living for a year in Sri Lanka and spending considerable time in the hill station of Kalimpong, a center for Western–Tibetan interchange and the fermentation of Tibetan modernism. He met sadhus and scholars, learned first-hand about women and wine, and produced an array of writings that included a lengthy account of his travels. He translated Sanskrit classics like Shakuntala and the Ramayana into Tibetan, wrote a pilgrim’s guidebook to South Asia as well as scores of poems in Tibetan and at least four in English. His history of early Tibet, White Annals, was derived in part from texts that had been recently discovered in the Dunhuang caves in China. He also compiled a manual of the erotic arts that was written in verse, and drawn from Indian treatises and personal experience.

Excerpted from the Spring 2010 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, available on newsstands February 23rd.

ROGER R. JACKSON is a professor of religion and South Asian studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Tantric Treasures: Three Collections of Mystical Verse from Buddhist India and the editor of The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems: A Tibetan Study of Asian Religious Thought.