GENDUN CHOPEL’S twelve years in South Asia would prove to be the most important and productive in his life. All but one of his most famous works (the notorious Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought) would be written there, including the work that he considered his magnum opus, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler. In this and his other prose works of the period, his autobiographical comments are occasional; from these—and from various letters that have survived—we gain some sense of where he went and what he thought about the world that he encountered in South Asia, a world with both a classical past and a colonial present. A better sense comes from the many poems that he wrote during this period. In this chapter, we will consider where he went, what he saw, and whom he met. Those encounters, and the meaning he found in them, were made possible in many ways from his mastery of two languages: Sanskrit and English. He would esteem one and disparage the other. In a poem for his friends at Labrang, his monastery in Amdo, he wrote:
With the years of my youth passing away
I have wandered all across the land of India, east and west.
I have studied Sanskrit, most useful,
And the useless language of the foreigners.19
Both, however, would prove essential.
In Buddhist literature, it is said that there are “five sciences” that a bodhisattva must master: grammar, logic, medicine, the arts, and the “inner science” of Buddhist doctrine. These were studied in the great monasteries of all the major sects of Tibet. Here “grammar” means Sanskrit grammar; there was a long tradition of the study of Sanskrit in Tibet, beginning especially with the great translators of the “later dissemination” of the dharma that began in the eleventh century. The extent to which Tibetan scholars of the early twentieth century could read, and especially compose, Sanskrit is not clear. In Grains of Gold, Gendun Chopel, having learned Sanskrit properly in India, repeatedly mocked the linguistic skills of his compatriots. Nonetheless, even before he began receiving Sanskrit lessons from Rahul Sankrityayan during their expedition, Gendun Chopel had gained some knowledge of the language, its grammar, and its poetic conventions. As noted in the previous chapter, Pandit Rahul was impressed to learn upon meeting Gendun Chopel that he had memorized several passages from Anubhūti Svarūpācārya’s Sārasvatavyākaraṇa, a simplified version of Pāṇini’s grammar composed in the thirteenth century that had been translated into Tibetan by Tāranātha. Gendun Chopel’s knowledge of Sanskrit would improve markedly during his time in India. English would prove more difficult. But as his notebooks and letters attest, he learned to read and write quickly.
As Gendun Chopel reports, the first city that he visited in India was Patna, built on the site of the ancient city of Pāṭaliputra, the old capital of Magadha and capital of the emperor Aśoka. Rahul Sankrityayan apparently went there in order to deposit the materials he had collected during the expedition at the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, which had been founded in 1915. Patna is the capital of the state of Bihar, which derives its name from the Sanskrit vihāra, or “monastery.” The region is so named because there were once many Buddhist monasteries there; Bodh Gayā, Vulture Peak, Nālandā, and Vaiśālī are all located in Bihar. Rahul Sankrityayan took Gendun Chopel on a tour of these sites, the first of several visits during his time in India; the notes that he took would become the basis for his Guide to the Sacred Sites of India, published in 1939, with an expanded edition in 1945.20
The travel guide21 was a well-established genre of Tibetan literature, and Gendun Chopel knew many of its more famous works.22 His, however, was different, strongly influenced by the Maha Bodhi Society (discussed below) in both its inspiration and its content.23 For example, he made use of English-language sources, including translations of the accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian (337–422) and Xuanzang (602–664). He recommends that Tibetan pilgrims visit modern museums. Among the museums he recommends is the Lahore Museum, the site of the scene in Kipling’s Kim where the British curator (based on the author’s father, Lockwood Kipling) instructs the Teshoo Lama (that is, the Tashi Lama or Paṇchen Lama) in Buddhist art. Gendun Chopel provides modern maps that he himself drew. He also provides railway and bus routes with instructions on where to get off and how much to pay, noting that he is giving fares for the least expensive seats and that fares are subject to change. Tibetans would not recognize the Hindi names of the sacred sites that they knew from Buddhist texts, so he provides phonetic renderings of them, underlined in his text to make them easy to find. He also provides the names in English with capital letters, which could be compared with station signs. Thus, for those who wished to make a pilgrimage to Dhānyakaṭaka (Drepung in Tibetan), where the Buddha is said to have taught the Kālacakra Tantra, he writes, “From Calcutta to Kha-rag pur (KHARAGPUR), Be-za-wa-da (BEZWADA), and then Gun-tur (GUNTUR) [by rail], and then 1 rupee by motorcar from there, one reaches Dhanakoṭa (Drepung). However, those hoping for great things will not see anything there.”24
Elsewhere in the text he clearly sets forth his methodology, one that would be familiar to a modern scholar. He writes, “Thus, with regard to those sacred places that were determined and identified above, in writing about this I have put questions to scholars who have fully examined the annals of the past, I have carefully compared those to the unmistakably ancient histories of Tibet, and I have identified what is being referred to. I have never boasted, ‘I think it is and so it is.’ Thus, there is no need to have even the slightest doubt.”25
Yet he is writing for an audience familiar with a different kind of travel journal, derived from different kinds of sources. Traditional Tibetan travel guides regaled the reader with all manner of wonders, wonders that Gendun Chopel knew about from his reading but did not encounter in his travels. They also included information about distances and locations that he found to be demonstrably false. For example, he notes that Tibetan sources state that the distance between Gayā and Bodh Gayā is a five-month journey when in fact it is a seven-mile walk or, as he says, “the time it takes [before stopping] for a hot cup of tea.”26 Yet these guides were often the works of great saints who were regarded as enlightened masters. How could they be wrong? In both his Guide to the Sacred Sites of India and Grains of Gold, he resorted to a standard element of tantric discourse, “pure vision,” to explain them. Thus, in the travel guide he writes, “Some adepts went there in pure visions, serving as the source of a few stories that describe many wondrous sights; it is most inauspicious to wonder whether these sacred sites are real or not. Because pure visions are seen when one’s karma is pure, we must only pray to have them; how could our ordinary perceptions be a source for correcting visions? When one attains an apparitional body, one is able to travel to buddha fields through the eye of a needle. In that case, we who bear the burden of never being free, day and night, from this corporeal mass of flesh and blood are not worthy to even seek it, much less condemn it.”27
At the same time, he is often highly critical of his gullible compatriots. He writes, “When some other pilgrims arrive at an unfamiliar site and see an amazing temple, they identify it as this or that place of the Buddha. That talk spreads from one to another and a famous place arises. This is happening many times every year.”28 Later in the text, he again admonishes Tibetan pilgrims, arguing for his own veracity while remaining doubtful that anyone will believe him:
Thus, apart from the difficulty of identifying these sacred sites, because one can rely on modern railroads, motorcars, and so forth, there is no difficulty at all in the actual mode of travel. Those who only have unreliable histories of India in their ears have doubts about everything because of the difference between the crash of thunder heard with the ears and the small drum seen with the eyes. This is the starting point of nothing other than incessantly deceptive stories about things like the real and false Bodh Gayā and the large and small Vārāṇasī. This India of today is certainly the real India; one need not doubt that these sacred sites are the real ones. Furthermore, I am not some gullible fool who believes everything he hears. I am a discerning beggar who is naturally intelligent and who has spent this human life in learning. Thus, one need not have any of the three qualms about anything that I say here: that is it mistaken, that it has no textual source, or that it is confused. For the majority of the human race, if you explain something that is difficult in an easy way, they do not believe you and are dismissive. If you explain something easy in a difficult way, you are counted as a scholar and they believe you. Thus, nothing can be done.”29
After their brief tour of the sacred Buddhist sites of Bihar, Rahul Sankrityayan departed for an extended trip abroad that would take him to Japan, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union. Left alone in the Land of the Noble Ones, Gendun Chopel went north toward Tibet. Their route from Tibet to India in 1934 had taken them through Nepal. However, the traditional route to India for Tibetans—whether pilgrims, merchants, or exiles—was south through Sikkim down to Darjeeling or Kalimpong, both in West Bengal. Prosperous merchants in the wool trade and a number of Tibetan aristocrats had estates there. The Sikkimese practiced Tibetan Buddhism and spoke a dialect of Tibetan called “the language of the Rice Valley.”30 Gendun Chopel, having learned upon his arrival that Sanskrit was not the spoken language of India, decided to travel to a region where there were many who spoke his native tongue. During his time in India, it seems that, following a longstanding practice of the British, he often escaped the heat of the Indian plains by retreating north to Darjeeling and Kalimpong in the summer and venturing south for his various travels around the subcontinent during the winter months.
He seems to have gone first to Darjeeling, where he befriended a Sikkimese named S. K. Jinorasa. Despite the prevalence of Tibetan Buddhism in his homeland, he had been ordained as a Theravāda monk in Sri Lanka. He was not unique in this regard. Another Sikkimese, the half-brother of Kazi Dawa Samdup—the translator of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and someone esteemed by W. Y. Evans-Wentz while pitied by Alexandra David-Neel—was also ordained as a Theravāda monk and spent his life in Sri Lanka, where he became a renowned poet, known as S. Mahinda (for Sikkimese Mahinda).
Jinorasa had founded the local branch of the YMBA, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association. Gendun Chopel was in need of both financial support and knowledge of English. Jinorasa was able to provide both, hiring him to teach at the YMBA and offering him lessons in English. Eventually, together they would translate Śāntideva’s Introduction to the Practice of Enlightenment (Bodhicaryāvatāra) (whether the entire text or just the ninth chapter is not clear) into English. Also during this period, he is said to have collaborated with a Roman Catholic nun on the translation of Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Valid Knowledge. These titles appear in the long list of lost works of Gendun Chopel.
Indeed, translation would be one of Gendun Chopel’s primary preoccupations during his time in South Asia, making translations from Tibetan into English (which he seems to have done to support himself in most cases), but far more important in his mind, making translations from Sanskrit into Tibetan, just as the great translators—the lotsāwas—of the earlier and later disseminations of the dharma had done a millennium before. Thus, from the time of his arrival he seems to have devoted a great deal of energy to the study of Sanskrit, not to translate or retranslate Indian Buddhist works but to translate the jewels of classical Indian literature, both religious and secular. From his earliest letters in India he expresses his desire to translate Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa, a poet he esteemed above all others. For example, in a letter written in English to Rahul Sankrityayan from Sikkim on February 7, 1936, he writes, “And still I long most to translate Śakuntalā with the help of your honor, and I can promise to make it as beautiful a line as a great Tibetan poet has done, and never defile your bright fame.” He would make an abridged translation of the Indian epic the Rāmāyaṇa31 and would translate four chapters of the famous Bhagavad Gītā.32 In his Treatise on Passion (discussed below), he says that he consulted over thirty works of Sanskrit erotica, listing eight by name, including the Kāma Sūtra. He would also compile a Sanskrit-Tibetan lexicon that he called Treasury of Sanskrit.33 During his sojourn in Sri Lanka, he would translate the Dhammapada from Pāli into Tibetan. He would come to take special pride in his skills as a Sanskrit translator, as is clear in this poem:
Recognizing my own home, familiar from so long ago,
And finding the remnants of my deeds from former lives,
How can I show my joy in translating anew, at long last,
This scripture of the perfect Buddha?
They say that today there is in Magadha
After a gap of eight hundred years in India
A late-coming translator [from Tibet]
Who can actually read the Sanskrit treatises.34
We do not know how he selected these works for translation. We know, however, that he had been preceded by other translators, not from Sanskrit into Tibetan but from Sanskrit into English. One notes that each of the works that Gendun Chopel selected for translation into Tibetan was already something of an Orientalist classic, certainly famous within the Indian tradition in its own right, but exalted further by having been translated into English by a British scholar decades before: Charles Wilkins’s Gīta (1785), Sir William Jones’s Śakuntalā (1789), Ralph T. H. Griffith’s Rāmāyaṇa (1870–1874), and Sir Richard Burton’s Kāma Sūtra (1883).
The Dhammapada also fell into this category, having been translated by F. Max Müller and published in 1881 in the tenth volume of his Sacred Books of the East series. Despite its modern fame, the Dhammapada was unknown in Tibet (although a similar work, the Udānavarga, was well known). During Gendun Chopel’s time in India, Buddhist modernists of the Maha Bodhi Society were seeking to promote the Dhammapada as the representative book of Buddhism just as the Bhagavad Gītā was being promoted by Hindu modernists.35 Thus, Gendun Chopel’s decision to translate the text into Tibetan, following in the wake of Rahul Sankrityayan’s translation of the text into Hindi in 1938, should be understood as motivated by this movement.36
From the time of his arrival in India, Gendun Chopel had money troubles; his lack of funds and his lack of a steady source of income would be a consistent theme in his letters during his time in South Asia. Apparently because he lacked the necessary funds to remain in Darjeeling, Jinorasa took him to his hometown of Chakung in Sikkim, about eight miles north of Darjeeling. In a letter written from there to Rahul Sankrityayan on December 15, 1935, in the capital Tibetan script,37 he said, “I would like to go to Magadha but I have not been able to go this year. Why? [Here, he switches into English.] A poor man cannot do anything.” Writing to him again on January 14, 1936, again in Tibetan, he seems in despair. Jinorasa has gone to Calcutta and he is alone. He has no reason to remain in India. He would like to visit places like Ajanta, Mathurā, and Sanchi, but he does not have any money. He has no wish to return to Tibet (by which he means central Tibet), but he has a strong wish to return to his homeland (by which he means Amdo). However, he has no money and, he says, “Only money is the GOD of the world.” He writes “GOD” in English.
It appears that Gendun Chopel did not receive a response from his friend. In January 1936, Rahul Sankrityayan was recovering from typhoid fever while planning another expedition to Tibet in search of more Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts. He set out for Nepal on February 16. Gendun Chopel was apparently unaware of Pandit Rahul’s plans; he likely would have accepted an invitation to join the expedition. Rahul Sankrityayan remained in Tibet for almost a year, crossing the border into Sikkim on November 4. Shortly after his return to India, he traveled to the Soviet Union to teach Sanskrit at Leningrad University. With time on his hands, Gendun Chopel began working on his translation of the Rāmāyaṇa from Sanskrit into Tibetan in 1936.
His fortunes and spirits would improve when he moved to Kalimpong, some thirteen miles to the east of Darjeeling. There he met the Tibetan Christian, Dorje Tharchin (1890–1976), better known as Tharchin Babu, who would remain Gendun Chopel’s devoted friend for the rest of his life. He was the founder and editor of Mirror of the News from Various Regions,38 known simply as Melong (“mirror”), the only Tibetan-language newspaper of the day (apart from one published by Christian missionaries in Ladakh);39 it was published between 1925 and 1963. Gendun Chopel would first appear in the pages of Melong in a brief news item in the April–May 1935 issue: “The Indian paṇḍita named Rahula who went to Tibet last year has recently gone to Japan. The Amdo geshé who came with him from Drepung, who is very skilled in such things as grammar as well as painting, has now gone to Darjeeling. We have heard he is living at Dotsug.”40 In the years ahead, Gendun Chopel would publish a number of essays and poems in Melong; his first poem to appear there was called “Alphabetical Poem Expressed Sincerely in the Common Language,” published in the October 16, 1936, issue (see this page). A heartfelt obituary of Gendun Chopel, written by Tharchin, would appear on the front page of the December 1, 1951, issue.
Perhaps in 1937, Gendun Chopel shifted his base to Kalimpong, working with Tharchin on a Tibetan dictionary. It was during this period that Gendun Chopel first learned of the Tibetan manuscripts from the dynastic period that had been discovered in 1908 in the Library Cave at Dunhuang by the French scholar Paul Pelliot (1878–1945). In 1931, his colleague, Jacques Bacot (1877–1965), brought photographs of some of the manuscripts to Kalimpong and requested the assistance of Tharchin in reading them. In 1937, Tharchin in turn showed them to Gendun Chopel, who was able to provide assistance.41 Years later, Gendun Chopel would make use of these manuscripts when writing his unfinished history of the Tibetan dynastic period, the White Annals.42
Kalimpong and Darjeeling were the first stops in India on the trade routes from Tibet, and the caravans would carry mail. Gendun Chopel seems to have remained in touch with his family in Amdo and with his friends at Labrang and Drepung. In 1937, he learned that his erstwhile teacher Sherab Gyatso would be sailing to China from Calcutta and arranged to meet him there. In Sherab Gyatso’s hotel room they again got into a heated debate, this time over the shape of the earth. According to traditional Buddhist cosmology, the world is a disk floating in space, with a rim of iron mountains enclosing a vast ocean. In the center of that ocean is Mount Meru, surrounded by four continents, each of a different shape, in the cardinal directions. To the south is a triangular island called Jambudvīpa, the abode of humans. Gendun Chopel, having learned something of astronomy, tried to explain to him that the world is round. (A similar debate had occurred in Sri Lanka in 1873 between a Buddhist monk and a Christian cleric.) However, Sherab Gyatso would not relent, slapping the table and saying, “I will make it flat.” Gendun Chopel warned his teacher that if he said such things in China, not even a dog would approach him. At that point, Sherab Gyatso slapped Gendun Chopel in the head. Seeing that the other people in the room were becoming alarmed, the teacher and student explained that they always acted that way when they were together. The next year, Gendun Chopel would publish an essay in the June 28, 1938, issue of Melong entitled “The World Is Round or Spherical,” complete with a map of the round world that he had drawn himself (see this page).
In September 1936, Gendun Chopel had made the acquaintance of an American, leading to perhaps the greatest case of “what if” in the history of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. His name was Theos Bernard (1908–1947). He was the nephew of Pierre Bernard (1875–1955), a rather notorious yoga teacher and head of the Tantrik Order of America, referred to in the tabloid press as “Oom the Magnificent.” Theos shared his uncle’s interest in yoga and tantra, traveling to India in September 1936. Proceeding from Calcutta to Darjeeling, he met Jinorasa and Gendun Chopel at the YMBA. Bernard seems to have been immediately impressed by Gendun Chopel. In Calcutta the following February, he invited him to a dinner that included Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Francis Younghusband (who had led the British invasion of Tibet in 1903), David McDonald (the long-serving British Trade Agent for Tibet), and Sherab Gyatso, who was on his way to China.43 Someone should write a play about that evening.
Bernard studied Tibetan in Kalimpong with Tharchin Babu (and briefly Geshé Wangyal, who would found the Lamaist Buddhist Monastery of America in Freewood Acres, New Jersey, in 1958) but was particularly impressed with Gendun Chopel, hoping to invite him to America to work with him on his studies of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. With the assistance of Tharchin and the approval of British officials, Bernard was given permission to visit Tibet, arriving in Lhasa on June 24, 1937. His time there, and the many Tibetan texts he collected, made him all the more convinced of the need to bring Gendun Chopel to America. He returned to the US, where he completed a PhD at Columbia University (with a dissertation on yoga) and, referring to himself as “the White Lama,” published an account of his time in Tibet, Penthouse of the Gods. With the assistance of his lover, the Polish opera star Ganna Walska (he would become her fifth husband in 1942), Bernard acquired property in Santa Barbara, California, where he planned to establish Tibetland, a translation and study center. Gendun Chopel was to be the resident lama.
While Gendun Chopel was in Sri Lanka (as discussed in the next chapter), Theos Bernard, with the assistance of Walska’s attorneys, began the difficult process of procuring a visa; Bernard was sufficiently hopeful that he booked passage for Gendun Chopel on a ship scheduled to depart from Calcutta on August 3, 1941, bound for San Francisco. However, the visa was denied. Gendun Chopel, waiting in Darjeeling, had decided to return to Amdo if he was not able to go to America. However, he agreed to stay in Darjeeling for another year, with support from Bernard, in the event that the visa would be approved. Jinorasa wrote to Bernard:
In conclusion I must write to you again something about Geshe Chho-phel La. I must tell you that he is the greatest Tibetan scholar I have ever met with in my life and he is one of the few rare best scholars in Tibet so you must not miss him by all means to help you in your Great Work if you really want to do real research works in Mahayana Buddhism. If you do miss him I doubt very much whether you will again get another man like him. So do not miss him by all means. I shall do my best to keep him here till the war ends.44
With America’s entry into the war in December 1941, Gendun Chopel was never able to accept Theos Bernard’s invitation to come to America. However, in 1942, he would receive an invitation from another foreigner.
Although based in Kalimpong, Gendun Chopel seems to have traveled often. Thus, at some point during this period, he spent six months studying Sanskrit at Kashi Vidyapith (today called Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith) in Vārāṇasī; founded by Gandhi in 1921, it was the first modern university established in India and was one of the first that was not under the administration of the British.
In 1936, Rahul Sankrityayan organized another, and larger, expedition to Tibet, to Shalu, Sakya, and Ngor; a number of Indian monks had visited the area during the thirteenth century and he knew from his trip in 1934 that there were many Sanskrit manuscripts there.45 In May 1938, he made another trip, his fourth. This time, Gendun Chopel returned to Tibet with him. Before their departure, however, Sankrityayan took him to Shantiniketan, the college that had been founded by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) in 1921, funded in part by the Nobel Prize in Literature that he had won in 1913. There, they met the aged Tagore himself, who offered Gendun Chopel a teaching position at Shantiniketan. He declined.
During the four-month expedition to western Tibet, the party stopped in Shigatsé, where they encountered Jamyang Shepa (1916–1947), the fifth incarnation of the founder of Labrang Tashikhyil monastery and the most important incarnate lama of the monastery. He had been a child during Gendun Chopel’s years there and knew of his reputation. Jamyang Shepa invited Gendun Chopel to a private audience, where he invited him to return to Amdo. He declined.
In addition to the various figures who played important roles in Gendun Chopel’s life during his years in South Asia, there was also an important organization: the Maha Bodhi Society.
In 1886, the British journalist Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), who in 1879 had published his best-selling verse biography of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, visited Sri Lanka. He had recently been to Bodh Gayā, which was under the control of Hindu priests, as it had been for centuries. Shocked by the sad state of what he called “the Buddhist Jerusalem,” he recounted his experience in the Daily Telegraph, noting that when he had asked a Hindu priest whether he might pick a few leaves from the sacred Bodhi tree, the priest replied, “Pluck as many as ever you like, sahib, it is nought to us.”46
During a meeting with a group of Sri Lankan Buddhists, Arnold called for two of the most sacred sites of Buddhism—Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and Sarnath, the site of his first sermon—to be placed under Buddhist administration. Among those present at the meeting was Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933). He would go on to be the most famous Buddhist of the fin de siècle. Educated in the Roman Catholic academies of Colombo, in 1880, he met the founders of the Theosophical Society—Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott—when they visited Sri Lanka to help revive Buddhism (or Buddhism as they understood it). He would join the Theosophical Society in 1884. In 1882, he read The Light of Asia and decided to become a Buddhist renunciant. Prevented by a childhood leg injury from becoming a Buddhist monk, he wore robes and called himself an anagārika, or “wanderer.”
Dharmapāla was able to visit Bodh Gayā himself in 1891, where he was shocked to see the state of decay of the most sacred Buddhist site of India. That same year, he founded the Maha Bodhi Society, which called on Buddhists from around the world to work, among a host of other aims, for the restoration of the four great sites of the life of the Buddha (the sites of his birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and his passage into nirvāṇa) to Buddhist control, a goal that was only achieved in the case of Bodh Gayā in 1949, long after Dharmapāla’s death.47 Nonetheless, with the financial support of Dharmapāla’s family and a headquarters in Calcutta, the Maha Bodhi Society was the major Buddhist institution in India during Gendun Chopel’s years there. He would become a devoted member. Between 1939 and 1941, he published five short essays and four poems, all in English, in the society’s journal, The Maha-Bodhi, where he was called Lama Gedun Chompell, Lama Geshe Chompell, and Lama Geshe Chompell of Tibet.48 Both his Guide to the Sacred Sites of India and his translation of the Dhammapada were published by the Maha Bodhi Society. His trip to Sri Lanka was likely facilitated and supported by the society. His last appearance in the journal of the Maha Bodhi Society was in the August 1941 issue, where there is an article called “Lama Geshe Chompell.” It begins:
Lama Geshe Chompell, with whom our readers are already acquainted, has returned from his sojourn in Ceylon. He gives us a very pleasing account of the landscape beauty of the “Pearl of the Southern Seas” as well as of the hospitality with which the Sinhalese people treat strangers. He has an invitation from an American Tibetan Scholar to visit New York, which journey, though not without danger, he seems willing to undertake. During his stay in Calcutta he has given us a glimpse into the inner life of the strange land of snow, as well as of its ancient literature….49
Gendun Chopel’s time in Sri Lanka is the subject of the next chapter.
It was upon his return from Sri Lanka that Gendun Chopel learned that Theos Bernard’s attempt to bring him to America had failed. Unable to travel to Tibetland, Gendun Chopel decided not to return to Tibet, accepting an invitation from the Russian Tibetologist George Roerich (1902–1960) to come to his family’s center in the Kulu Valley in Himachal Pradesh, not far from Dharamsala, where the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would reside after he came into exile in 1959. Roerich, who had been trained in London, Harvard, and Paris, was the son of Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) and Helena Shaposhnikova (1879–1955). Both parents were remarkable figures.
Prior to the Russian Revolution, Nicholas Roerich was a well-known painter as well as a set designer, designing the sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky, which premiered in Paris in 1913 and drew jeers from the audience on opening night. Helena Roerich had translated Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine into Russian and claimed to be in constant communication (often through séance and automatic writing) with Master Morya. Along with Master Koot Hoomi, Morya was one of the “mahatmas” with whom Madame Blavatsky was in psychic communication. It was likely during his time at the Roerich’s Himalayan Research Institute at Urusvati, as they called their estate in Kulu, that Gendun Chopel learned about Blavatsky, whom he describes at some length in Grains of Gold (see this page) and whose books he requested from George Roerich in his 1945 letter from Lhasa.
After the Russian Revolution, the family traveled widely, with extended stays in London and New York, where Nicholas Roerich was feted as an artist and where the couple promoted what they called Agni Yoga (also called “Living Ethics”), a philosophy that they said had been transmitted to them by Master Morya; the Master Building at 310 Riverside Drive in Manhattan is named after Master Morya and was built to serve as an international center for the arts and for teaching Living Ethics.
In the years between the wars, Nicholas led an expedition to Central Asia from 1925 to 1928 (which attempted but failed to reach Lhasa) and an expedition to Manchuria and Mongolia in 1934–1935. Although the expeditions included both scientific and artistic projects, their ultimate destination was Shambhala, the utopian Buddhist kingdom described in the Kālacakra Tantra. The true goal of the expeditions—apparently announced by Master Morya—was to establish a Theosophical-Buddhist theocracy in Central Asia, with Nicholas Roerich in the role of potentate. The second expedition was sponsored by Henry Wallace, a supporter of Roerich who was then Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt; he would also serve as Vice President during his last term. Wallace’s presidential aspirations in 1948 would be derailed when his letters to Roerich, which began “Dear Guru,” became public.
Perhaps Nicholas Roerich’s greatest public success was the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments—known to history as “the Roerich Pact”—signed in a ceremony in the Oval Office on April 15, 1935. The treaty was meant to protect important cultural and artistic works in times of war; buildings that housed such works would fly the “Banner of Peace,” designed by Roerich.
In 1929, the family had established the Himalayan Research Institute in what is today Himachal Pradesh. This became their primary residence during the Second World War and until Nicholas Roerich’s death in 1947. After that, Helena and George Roerich moved to Kalimpong, where they remained until Helena’s death in 1955, after which George returned to Russia where he died suddenly in 1960.
In 1942, his plans to go to America thwarted, Gendun Chopel accepted George Roerich’s invitation to Urusvati. Roerich was seeking his assistance in translating the Blue Annals,50 a massive history of Tibetan Buddhism composed by Gö Lotsāwa (1392–1481). It is primarily a lineage history, setting forth the lines of transmission—who received which teachings from whom—for the numerous sects and subsects of Tibetan Buddhism as they existed in the fifteenth century, with capsule biographies and vignettes about hundreds of Indian and Tibetan figures; it contains over five thousand Tibetan personal names, in addition to all manner of place names and book titles. In the 1940s, it would have been impossible for a European scholar to translate it. Yet the translation of the Blue Annals would be completed in 1946 and published in Calcutta in 1949. Near the end of the introduction, George Roerich writes, “It has been a source of much satisfaction to me that I was able to discuss the entire translation with the Rev. dGe-’dun Chos-’phel, the well-known Tibetan scholar, and I gratefully acknowledge here his very helpful guidance.” Only the name “George N. Roerich” appears on the title page. It is likely, however, that Gendun Chopel did much more than “discuss the entire translation” with Roerich, and there is some evidence that he resented his treatment in Kulu. His close friend Rakra Tethong (1925–2012) reports that a particularly pungent passage in one of Gendun Chopel’s most famous poems is a reference to Roerich:
The talents of a humble scholar seeking only knowledge
Are crushed by the tyranny of a fool, bent by the weight of his wealth.
The proper order is upside down.
How sad, the lion made servant to the dog.51
Whatever hard feelings Gendun Chopel may have harbored, quite justifiably, against George Roerich, their friendship does not seem to have been irreparably damaged. Gendun Chopel’s letter to Roerich from August 1945 makes it clear that their collaboration had continued and that they were on good terms. Indeed, Gendun Chopel seems to have won the admiration of a range of foreign scholars, beginning with Rahul Sankrityayan, who was immediately impressed with the young monk he met in 1934. Once in India, he would win the respect of Jinorasa and the staff of the Maha Bodhi Society. He assisted the great French scholar Jacques Bacot (although it seems that he never met him in person). Theos Bernard wanted to bring him to America. It is noteworthy that the list of Gendun Chopel’s known foreign friends and collaborators does not include British names. His father had been involved in the aftermath of the incursion of British troops into Tibet in 1888, which left many Tibetans dead on the battlefield, and his friend and mentor Rahul Sankrityayan was imprisoned by the British on several occasions, the first time in 1922. He certainly shared his views of the British with Gendun Chopel, who presents a scathing critique of colonialism in the final chapter of Grains of Gold (reproduced in full in part 2). His views of the British also appear in a poem:
Lacking the oil of compassion that benefits others,
Those skilled in the arts, with the sorcery of electricity,
Show the crooked path to honest humans.
Beware the race of golden-haired monkeys.52
Let us return to an earlier period in Gendun Chopel’s time in India and to a different collaboration. In January 1936, Gendun Chopel had written to Rahul Sankrityayan in despair. Because he was destitute, he was unable to visit places mentioned in the ancient texts, such as Ajanta, Mathurā, and Sanchi. Three years later, in January 1939, he would compose the colophon of one of his most famous works. It reads:
This Kāmaśāstra by Gendun Chopel—who traveled across the ocean of our own and others’ sciences, eliminating misconceptions about the passion of desire through hearing, thinking, and experience—was completed in the latter part of the middle month of winter in the Tiger Year [January 1939] in the great city of Mathurā in Magadha near the banks of the glorious Yamuna River, while the radiance of a summer dawn was descending in the house of Gaṅgādeva from Pañcāla, a companion in the same practice.53
Gendun Chopel’s years in India were not a time of unremitting deprivation, melancholy, and loneliness.
When the lives of Tibetan lamas are written, whether by themselves or by others, there is generally little about their erotic lives apart from often formulaic references to the practice of sexual yoga and the use of the tantric consort (sangyum, literally “secret mother”), a practice said to be essential, for example, for the discovery of treasure texts (terma).54 This is not the case with Gendun Chopel, in part because, as a figure of the twentieth century, we have reports of those who knew him. The more important reason, however, is that he was one of only two figures in the history of Tibetan Buddhism to write a book about sex. The other author was the great Nyingma master, and monk, Jamgön Mi pham (1846–1912).
As we have seen, apart from where he studied when and praise for his skills as a poet and debater, we know relatively little about his life before he came to Lhasa in 1927. However, we can assume that he maintained his monastic vows; in the bitter poem written after he left Labrang cited above, he contrasts himself with “impure monks.”55
He clearly gave up his monastic vows, including the vow of celibacy, prior to the composition of his Treatise on Passion, which he completed in 1939. A friend who saw him in Lhasa shortly before his departure for India reports that he was not wearing his monk’s robes.56 This could suggest that he had renounced his monkhood before he left Tibet. The photograph of him taken in India in 1936 (which he sent to his mother in Amdo) also shows him in lay dress, as do the photos taken on a brief expedition back to Tibet in 1938, the year that he completed his treatise. There is a photograph of him wearing the robes of a Theravāda monk, perhaps taken during his visit to Sri Lanka in 1940–41, but a poem from his time there suggests he had given up his monastic vows years before.
Although the dress of a monk has long disappeared
And the practice of monastic discipline has left no trace,
This meeting with the assembly of elder monks
Must be the fruit of a deed in a former life.57
Elsewhere, he writes that “the unwanted tax of the monk’s robe is left in the ashes.”58
During his time in South Asia, he seems to have had an active erotic life, based both on what he says himself in his Treatise on Passion and what his friends reported in the many stories that are told about him.59 He had a series of lovers and frequented the brothels of Calcutta. In a poem written about his time in India, he alludes to a love affair:
Wandering like a deer from the realm of six ranges
To arrive in a distant kingdom of unfamiliar humans,
There I lost my heart to a glamorous fickle woman.
A wretched son who has forgotten his kind parents, I am sad.60
However, it is the Treatise on Passion that provides the clearest insight into his erotic life and his attitudes on sexuality. Here we find the exuberance of a man in his mid-thirties discovering the joys of sex, joys that had been forbidden to him for so long during his years as a monk. He writes, “As for me, I have little shame and great faith in women.” In his treatise, women are not sources of male pleasure (or tantric realization); they are full partners in the play of passion. As he writes:
This passion that arises so naturally
In all men and women without effort,
Is covered by a thin veil of shame.
With just a little effort, it shows its true face, naked.
The second section of this book includes a number of passages from the Treatise on Passion. We will quote only the final passage, what would be the dedication of merit in a traditional Buddhist text. Here, he offers prayers not to the Buddha and to the lineage of his lamas, but prayers for three of his lovers, a Tibetan, an Indian Hindu, and an Indian Muslim. He also offers a prayer for all people, not that they achieve buddhahood, but that they find sexual pleasure. Although the Treatise on Passion is often called Gendun Chopel’s “sex manual,” it is much more than that. It does offer detailed and explicit instructions for lovemaking. However, it has two other aims. First, as a student of classical Indian literature, Gendun Chopel knew that one of its genres that had not been studied in Tibet was erotica. He therefore made a careful study of a number of Sanskrit works on the subject and then composed his own in Tibetan, drawing heavily on those works, and composing his text in some of his most beautiful poetry. His other aim might be called political. Having lived so long as a monk, Gendun Chopel had witnessed firsthand the hypocrisy of the vow of celibacy; in the Treatise on Passion he often mocks it. As a tantric practitioner, he understood the importance of sexual yoga and the role of bliss in the path to buddhahood. He knew, however, that such states were available only to the spiritual elite. The bliss available to the rest of us is achieved through orgasm. He thus presents sexual pleasure as a human right, one that no institution—whether church or state—should restrict. As he writes at the end of the Treatise on Passion:
May all humble people who live on this broad earth
Be delivered from the pit of merciless laws
And be able to indulge, with freedom,
In common enjoyments, so needed and right.
Among Gendun Chopel’s writings from his time in India, the Treatise on Passion was the most notorious. A manuscript copy that he sent back to Lhasa is said to have at once aroused and scandalized the aristocrats who read it. However, his greatest work from his time in India, indeed, the greatest work of his life—in terms of size, in terms of scope, and in terms of the brilliance of his scholarship—is Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler. It has not achieved the fame of works like Guide to the Sacred Sites of India, Treatise on Passion, or Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought because it is so long, because it was not published in Tibetan until 1990, and because it was not translated into English until 2014. Gendun Chopel states in the colophon that he is sending it back to Tibet from Sri Lanka, which he left in 1941. However, there are references in the text to dates subsequent to that, suggesting that the version he sent in 1941 was not the final version. The titles of the seventeen chapters provide only a hint of the remarkable contents of the text:
First, How I Set Out from Lhasa
General Formation of the Land of India and How It Acquired Its Name
How the Lands Were Given Their Names
The Snow Mountains of the North and Analysis of Related Issues
What the Famous Places of the Past Are Like
On Men, Women, Food, Drink, and Various Apparel
Identification of Various Species of Flowers and Trees and How to Recognize Them
Writing Systems of Various Regions of Past and Present
On the Linguistic Rules of the Tibetan Language
The Inscriptions of the Dharma King Aśoka Carved on the Rock Face of Mount Girnar
The Gupta Dynasty
The Pāla Dynasty
From 1,600 Years after the Passing of the Buddha to the Present
On the History of Siṅghala
On the Conditions and the Customs of the Tibetan People in Ancient Times
The Religion of the Tīrthikas
Conclusion
Grains of Gold is often described as Gendun Chopel’s “travel journals.” This is a great disservice to this carefully crafted and meticulously researched work of scholarship. It may be that it is often referred to with that term because it begins that way. The first chapter describes the expedition of Gendun Chopel and Rahul Sankrityayan to the monasteries of central Tibet in search of Sanskrit manuscripts. Because Gendun Chopel provides lists of scores of texts they discovered, this chapter is one that has been most read by scholars who are seeking to supplement Sankrityayan’s own lists in the articles he published in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society. However, Grains of Gold contains so much more, with the chapter titles sometimes masking the content. Thus, chapter 3 includes a discussion of Indian Buddhist art and iconography, with Gendun Chopel noting the apparent “aniconism” of early Indian Buddhism in which images of monks and deities are common but the Buddha himself is not depicted. chapter 5 includes a discussion and condemnation of the caste system. chapter 6 includes what is likely the first discussion in the Tibetan language of nineteenth-century race theory. In this same chapter he also recounts the life of the Buddha drawn from the sources employed by European Indologists, sources largely unknown in Tibet (especially from Pāli), noting points of divergence from Tibetan versions on several key scenes in the traditional biography. chapter 8 and chapter 9 deal with linguistics, ranging from a discussion of the origins of writing to the exploration of a number of questions about the Tibetan language itself, including the development of the writing system based on an ancient Indian script, the modern gap between spoken and written Tibetan, and the relationship between Sanskrit and Tibetan. In chapter 10, he translates some of the famous rock edits of the emperor Aśoka. Although the story of Aśoka was known in Tibet, the rock edicts were not; they had only been deciphered by James Prinsep of the East India Company in 1837.
Gendun Chopel explains that one of his purposes in writing Grains of Gold is to recount what has happened in South Asia since the thirteenth century, the last period of sustained Tibetan contact with India. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 form a continuous history from the Gupta Dynasty to the present; chapter 12 contains the most extensive discussion of Islam available in the Tibetan language at that time. The lengthy chapter 14, on Sri Lanka, is discussed in the next chapter of the present volume. chapter 15 deals with ancient Tibetan history, serving as a kind of prolegomenon for the White Annals. chapter 16, another long chapter, includes a range of Hindu myths drawn largely from Gendun Chopel’s study of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. The final chapter, simply called “Conclusion” (included in its entirety in part 2) contains a scathing critique of European (and especially British) colonialism, a lengthy discussion of the compatibility of Buddhism and science, and Gendun Chopel’s considered opinions of such “new religions” of India as Theosophy and the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna.
In addition to writing what would be published as over six hundred printed pages, Gendun Chopel also painted over two hundred watercolors that he intended as illustrations. During the Cultural Revolution, all but twenty-seven were lost.61
Grains of Gold concludes with this poem:
Walking with weary feet to the plains of the sandy south,
Traversing the boundary of a land surrounded by the pit of dark seas,
Pulling the thread of my life—precious and cherished—across a sword’s sharp blade,
Consuming long years and months of hardship, I have somehow finished this book.
Although there is no one to beseech me
With mandates from on high or maṇḍalas of gold,
I have taken on the burden of hardship alone and written this,
Concerned that the treasury of knowledge will be lost.
Though terrified by the orange eye of envy
In the burning flame of those bloodthirsty for power,
Accustomed to the habit of gathering what I have learned,
My mind is attached to reasonable talk.
If it somehow enters the door of a wise person intent on learning,
Then the fruit of my labor will have been achieved.
For the smiles of the stupid and the approval of the rich,
I have never yearned even in my dreams.
When this ink-stained body’s need for food and drink is finished,
When this collection of bones—its thread of hope for gain and honor snapped—is scattered,
Then may the forms of these letters, a pile of much learning amassed through hardship,
Reveal the path of vast benefit in the presence of my unseen friends.62
In 1945, after almost twelve years of wandering, his weary feet would take him back to Tibet, where he would be greeted by the friends he had not seen for so long. And he would encounter those bloodthirsty for power, their orange eyes burning with envy.