S. K. Jinorasa and Gendun Chopel
GENDUN CHOPEL was born in the village of Shopong in the valley of Sermojong in the district of Rebkong in Amdo, the northeast province of the Tibetan cultural domain. Recent consensus has placed his birth on August 14, 1903. His father, Alak Gyalpo (also known as Alak Belden) was an incarnate lama and māntrika4 of the Nyingma or “ancient” sect of Tibetan Buddhism. He was an accomplished scholar of a genre of texts called the Heart Essence of the Great Expanse (Longchen Nyingtik). His mother was named Pema Kyi.
Some years prior to his birth, his parents were visited by a prominent Nyingma lama known as Dodrak Tulku or “the tulku of Dorje Drak,” an abbot of Dorje Drak monastery in Lhasa (his name was Rigdzin Jigmé Sonam Namgyal). Before he departed, he told them that he would be reborn as their son, leaving behind his ceremonial hat as an omen. His parents and their toddler daughter later made the long pilgrimage from Rebkong to Lhasa. Gendun Chopel was conceived during the journey. Upon reaching Lhasa, his parents visited Dorje Drak monastery, where they learned not only that the tulku who had visited them had died, but that the monks believed that the child Pema Kyi carried was his next incarnation; the abbot had left a letter predicting that his incarnation would arrive at the monastery after his death. Although the monks urged the future parents to remain in Lhasa until the child was born, they decided to begin the journey back to Amdo. They knew that if the child was a girl it would be considered inauspicious, and if it was a boy, the monastery would insist that the child remain there for his education. Before they reached their home village, Gendun Chopel was born, near the birthplace of Tsong kha pa (1357–1419), the famous “founder” of the Geluk sect. His double affiliation to Nyingma and Geluk would continue throughout his life.
His birth name was Rigdzin Namgyal. Although he was never formally invested with the title, Gendun Chopel was regarded as the incarnation of Dodrak Tulku and was known by that name. Indeed, his identity as the incarnation of the abbot was confirmed by two prominent lamas who visited Rebkong when he was a young child, the renowned “treasure discoverer”5 Sogyal Lerap Lingpa (1856–1926) and the Third Dodrupchen Jigmé Tenpé Nyima (1865–1926).
Gendun Chopel’s father taught him spelling, grammar, and poetry, beginning at the age of three. He also learned many prayers by heart. At the age of eight, he studied (in Tibetan translation) the standard handbook on Sanskrit poetry, the Mirror of Poetry (Kāvyādarśa), composed in the seventh century by the Indian poet Daṇḍin, a work that he would return to throughout his life. Some time during this period, his father died. After his death, he continued to study at the nearby Nyingma hermitage of Yama Tashikhyil, founded by the renowned Amdo lama Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol (1781–1851), which had some fifty resident monks and lamas. Around the age of fourteen he entered a local Geluk monastery of some six hundred monks, called Ditsa, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk with the ordination name Gendun Chopel. Gendun is the Tibetan translation of saṃgha, the community of monks; chopel means “spreading the dharma.” According to some accounts, he was ordained by the great Amdo scholar Gendun Tenzin Gyatso. However, he died in 1912 and thus would have been dead if Gendun Chopel was born in 1903 and came to Ditsa at the age of fourteen. At Ditsa, he studied Buddhist logic for three or four years, developing a reputation as an excellent debater. It was from his time at this monastery that he came to be known as “Ditsa Slim,” a nickname by which he was known among his fellow Amdo countrymen throughout his life. Despite his ordination as a monk of the Geluk sect, he returned to Yama Tashikhyil on several occasions to receive instructions in the Heart Essence of the Great Expanse.
Some time around 1923, he moved to Labrang Tashikhyil, one of the six great Geluk monasteries of Tibet, with some four thousand monks, where he completed his studies of logic and epistemology and began studying the taxonomy of the Buddhist path, known as “perfection” because it is said to be the hidden teaching of the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtras.
During his subsequent studies in Lhasa, Gendun Chopel was notorious among his fellow monks for never seeming to study. But it is clear that he read widely and deeply throughout his life, a habit that he seemed to have developed at an early age. A common ceremony for generating merit in a Tibetan monastery is to have the entire canon of the words of the Buddha recited. The one hundred eight volumes are taken from their place in the temple and distributed among the monks in the assembly hall. They all then begin to read aloud, not in chorus but in cacophony; each monk takes a different portion of a volume and reads it at the top of his lungs until every page of canon has been spoken. During one such ceremony, Gendun Chopel was observed quietly reading the text that had been given to him to recite.
Indeed, his prodigious knowledge of Buddhist literature was noted throughout his life, from the time of his childhood. When he was later asked how he acquired the remarkable capacity to remember whatever he read, he said that when he was a small child, he had a dream in which a shower of the syllable DHĪḤ—the root syllable of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom—fell from the sky and covered his entire body. From that point on, he had the ability to remember whatever he read after a single reading.6
Status in the Geluk academy, however, was not gained by study but by debate, using the choreographed gestures for which the Geluk is so famous. Gendun Chopel’s fame as a skilled debater, gained at Ditsa, continued at Labrang. It was considered particularly impressive if a monk was able to successfully defend a position that is traditionally refuted by what is regarded as the orthodox position. Gendun Chopel was once able to defend the Jain position, rejected by Buddhists, that plants have consciousness, a topic that he would return to in his essay on science (see this page). At Labrang he met an American missionary, Marion Griebenow (1899–1972), whose remarkable photographs provide some sense of monastic life during Gendun Chopel’s time there.7 His mother and sister apparently warned him about spending too much time with the American and his family, fearing that Gendun Chopel’s hair would turn blond and his eyes would turn blue.
Although the ability to hold unorthodox positions on the debating courtyard is revered by Geluk monks, this is not to say that there is no demand for orthodoxy. Each of the monastic colleges has its own set of textbooks, which present what is regarded as the correct position on myriad points of Buddhist doctrine. At Labrang, the monastic textbooks had been composed by Jamyang Shepa (1648–1721), one of the luminaries of the Geluk sect and the founder of the monastery. Gendun Chopel is said to have criticized some of his positions, earning him the opprobrium of a number of influential monks, who labeled him a thanyepa,8 a term that he would come to use to refer to himself. The term has a range of meanings, from “lover of words” to “rhetorician” to “sophist.” In this last sense, it refers to someone who is skilled in words but has little appreciation or interest in their deeper meaning. This latter term of abuse was directed at Gendun Chopel.
His time at Labrang was brief, some four years. The reason for his departure, probably in 1927, is unclear. As with many key moments in his life, multiple explanations have been provided. Some say he was expelled from the monastery for his critical remarks about the positions set forth in the monastic textbooks. Other sources say that he was expelled for making mechanical toys, often identified as some kind of boat. Still others say that he insulted some senior monks by pointing his feet at them (a profound insult) during an assembly. After his return from India, Gendun Chopel provided yet another reason. The monks were performing an elaborate fire ceremony to propitiate the wrathful protector deity of the monastery, the Lord of Death Yama, known as Damchen Chogyal. At one point in the ceremony, the officiating monk tied a black ribbon around his forehead. He looked to Gendun Chopel like a Hui Hui, that is, a local Chinese Muslim, causing him to laugh uncontrollably, considered poor form during a tantric ceremony. That night he had a dream that a wild yak was chasing him. He took this as a sign from Damchen Chogyal that he should leave the monastery.9
Although it was not mentioned by Gendun Chopel, his time at Labrang was a turbulent period for the region, with almost constant warfare between Tibetan tribes and Muslim Hui militias between 1922 and 1928. The monastery itself and the neighboring town came under repeated attack by Hui armies. The main incarnate lama of the monastery, the Fifth Jamyang Shepa, was forced to flee in 1925, not returning until 1927; during one offensive in 1926, Hui soldiers turned their machine guns on fleeing monks.10
Regardless of the reason for his departure, Gendun Chopel left Labrang Tashikhyil, later writing a poem in which he bitterly criticized the monastery for banishing a studious monk while corrupt monks were allowed to stay (see this page for the complete poem):
Rather than banishing to distant mountain passes, valleys, and towns
Those who take pride in studying the books of Ra and Se,
Would it not be better to banish to another place
Those proudly selling meat, beer, and tobacco?
After leaving Labrang he returned to his home village. Some months later he bid farewell to his mother, his sister, and his village, never to return. Accompanied by an uncle and a cousin, he joined a caravan of two hundred travelers for a four-month trek to Lhasa. On the sixth day of the month of the dragon (the third month of the Tibetan calendar) in the year of the Earth Dragon (1928), the caravan set out from Kumbum, about seventy-five miles east of Rebkong, the great Geluk monastery built at Tsong kha pa’s birthplace.11 Some seventeen miles farther east is the village of Taktser, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would be born in 1935.
Upon his arrival in Lhasa, Gendun Chopel initially stayed at the home of a merchant named Gonchok Norbu before entering Drepung, one of the “three seats” of the Geluk sect in Lhasa and the largest monastery in the world, having at that time some eleven thousand monks. There, he became a member of Gomang college. Not long after his arrival, his cousin was killed in an accident. Gendun Chopel wrote a poignant poem lamenting the death of his childhood companion (see this page).
The monastic colleges of the Geluk monasteries were divided into houses, which provided living quarters, meals, and instruction to monks from a particular geographical region. Gendun Chopel joined one of the Amdo houses, called Lubum. There, he studied with the most famous scholar of the house, and one of the most prominent Geluk intellectuals of the day, Dobi Sherab Gyatso (1884–1968), a man of wide interests and progressive political views. Their relationship apparently began well, but deteriorated when Gendun Chopel once again criticized the positions taken by Jamyang Shepa in the monastic textbooks of the college that Gomang used, the same ones that Gendun Chopel had criticized at Labrang. When he attended Sherab Gyatso’s lectures, the two would fall into heated arguments, so heated that he eventually refused to address Gendun Chopel by name, calling him only “the madman.” Gendun Chopel would later declare that he learned nothing from Sherab Gyatso; other times he would speak of him with great respect. Although he stopped attending lectures, Gendun Chopel would still frequent the debating courtyard to confound his fellows, often challenging the best students while disguised as one of the illiterate dop-dop; these were the “monk police,” something of a cross between an American college fraternity and the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. Nonetheless, while at Drepung, he seems to have completed the curriculum on the “five texts” of the Geluk academy, the curriculum he had begun years ago at Ditsa: the Adornment of Realization (Abhisamayālaṃkāra) of Maitreya, the Commentary on Valid Knowledge (Pramāṇavārttika) of Dharmakīrti, the Entrance to the Middle Way (Madhyamakāvatāra) of Candrakīrti, the Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakośa) of Vasubandhu, and the Discourse on Discipline (Vinaya Sūtra) of Guṇaprabha.
Unless monks came from wealthy families or had a local patron, they needed to support themselves during their years of study. Gendun Chopel supported himself by working as an artist, painting murals in the homes of aristocrats and portraits of their children. He soon came to the attention of Pabongkha (1878–1941), the most powerful Geluk lama of the day. He had seen a black and white photo of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that Gendun Chopel had hand-painted and asked that he make a painting of himself. Gendun Chopel wrote a poem on the back that incorporated Pabongkha’s name:
Your sphere of kindness is perfect,
Upholder of the teaching, source of joy, crown ornament.
The light of your deeds shines upon the golden realm.
Lord of the all-pervading ocean of Victors.12
On May 19, 1934, the Indian scholar Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963), who was making his second visit to Tibet, arrived in Lhasa. Although only forty at the time, he was already a distinguished Sanskritist and an active figure in the independence movement, having served a six-month term in a British prison. He was a member of the Communist Party of India. In 1936 he would help to found the All India Kisan Sabha, the peasant movement of the Communist Party. He had first come to Tibet in 1929, making his way to Lhasa, disguised as a pilgrim from Khunnu. Once in Lhasa, he stayed at the home of a Nepalese merchant Dasaratan Sahu, moving eventually to Drepung, spending a total fourteen months in Tibet.13 He then traveled to Sri Lanka, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1930. In 1934, Rahul Sankrityayan returned to Lhasa, seeking to photograph or copy the many Sanskrit manuscripts preserved there. However, he needed a guide to lead him through the great libraries of the monasteries of southern Tibet and to negotiate with the abbots for permission to explore their often musty contents. He first went to Sherab Gyatso for help. Sherab Gyatso himself was too exalted a figure to accompany the foreigner on his expedition, but he recommended two younger scholars for the task, the Mongolian monk Geshé Chodrak of Sera monastery and Gendun Chopel.
Despite his apparently desultory participation in the monastic curriculum, it seems that by 1934, Gendun Chopel was just completing the courses needed to participate in the examinations for the rank of lharampa geshé, the highest academic title among the Geluk. In a letter to Sankrityayan, he asked that their departure be delayed long enough for him to complete the examinations on Vasubhandhu’s Treasury of Knowledge and Guṇaprabha’s Discourse on Discipline, the final two of the “five texts” of the Geluk curriculum. He apparently completed the examinations but did not remain in Lhasa to sit for the geshé examination. Nonetheless, in India, he would refer to himself as a geshé; several of his essays in The Maha-Bodhi are signed “Lama Geshe Chömpell.” Translating the second part of Gendun Chopel’s name (“spreading the dharma”) into Sanskrit, in his own writings Rahul Sankrityayan often referred to him as “Geshe Dharmavardhana.”
In his autobiography My Journey Through Life (Meri Jeevan Yatra), Rahul Sankrityayan described their first meeting:
On June 20, I met the Amdo artist for the first time at Drepung. Geshe Dharmavardhan was introduced to me by this name. At that time I was unaware that this slightly built, slender, simple person was a formidable scholar of Tibetan literature and philosophy, a gifted artist, a poet of a high order, and a generous-hearted idealistic man. Since then over many years I got to know Dharmavardhan closely and became his great admirer. […]
On that first day we only conversed. There was no indication then that Dharmavardhan will accompany us. I have written in my diary: “He has a great knowledge of literature and dialectics, has made a study of the Pramāṇavārttika. He also remembers many sutras of the Sārasvat [the Sanskrit grammar Sārasvatavyākaraṇa by Anubhūti Svarūpācārya]. Thus, he is not merely a painter. He wishes to come to India. Why not take him along on the trip to Samye?”14
Here is how Gendun Chopel explained what happened: “From the time I was a child I have wondered again and again whether I would be able to go to India just once. Having been at Drepung monastery for about seven years after arriving in central Tibet, I met a paṇḍita by the name of Rāhula who had come to Tibet. He encouraged me to go [with him]. This was a wish come true, and we set out. First, the paṇḍita and I went on a pilgrimage to places such as the Phenpo region and Radreng. In our spare time, I began to study a little Sanskrit with the paṇḍita. He had a lot of money and knew about as much Tibetan as a seven-year-old child. He was under the protection of some Lhasa aristocrats, so we were able to examine closely the sacred objects of the various monasteries, such as Radreng.”15
They visited a number of important monasteries, including Shalu, Ngor, and Sakya. The first chapter of Gendun Chopel’s Grains of Gold offers a detailed account of their travels, listing the scores of Sanskrit manuscripts they discovered.16 In the course of his account, he laments the fate of many of the manuscripts:
Some religious-minded sentient beings said that keeping mixed up scriptures brings bad luck so they threw them in the rubbish heap in the cellar, causing all the texts to be wasted. Even in India, it is extremely difficult to find even a few pages of ancient texts written on palm leaves; how sad that there is so little regard for this kind of precious treasure [in Tibet]. Similarly, some of the faithful have stolen pages from a text that is complete to make a protection amulet. They have torn the page of a book into little pieces and eaten it, saying that this is a blessing. They have offered them as texts to be placed inside statues and reliquaries. Thus [these ancient texts] are nowhere to be seen today. These people damage the continuity of the Buddha’s teaching and still boast about this to others.17
At some point during their travels, Rahul Sankrityayan invited Gendun Chopel to join him as he returned to India. Gendun Chopel agreed. They crossed the border from Tibet into Nepal on November 10, 1934. Arriving in Kathmandu, they began going through the manuscripts they had collected and showing them to the great Sanskrit scholar Hemaraja Sharma, royal preceptor at the Nepalese court. Both Sankrityayan and Gendun Chopel describe showing him a fragment of Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Valid Knowledge, checking the Sanskrit manuscript against the Tibetan text to determine what portions were missing. They remained in Kathmandu for almost a month before proceeding to India. Gendun Chopel wrote in Grains of Gold, “From Nepal, going southwest and crossing the pass called Chandragiri, we soon encountered the Indian railway line. So on the eighteenth day of the winter month of rawa of my thirty-second year, I drank the water of the Ganges. During the entire winter of that year I stayed in Pāṭaliputra [Patna], with a sense of sadness, like that of an insect who has fallen into the middle of a lake.”18 In the traditional Tibetan calendar, rawa is the first of the three winter months, the tenth month of the lunar calendar. The date that Gendun Chopel gave would be December 5, 1934. He was now in India.
S. K. Jinorasa and Gendun Chopel