3. Sojourn in Ceylon, Gendun Chopel

AMONG GENDUN CHOPEL’S twelve years abroad, one of the most fascinating periods is his time in Sri Lanka. He devotes a lengthy chapter to Sri Lanka in his Grains of Gold, a chapter that is highly regarded by Tibetan readers, so much so that it has been published as a freestanding work. Many of Gendun Chopel’s surviving watercolors derive from his time there. According to his own account, he spent almost sixteen months there. As with so many events in his life, exactly when those sixteen months occurred requires some triangulation.

In a letter from Gendun Chopel to Sankrityayan, dated December 29, 1943, he says, “I have been touring Ceylon for the last two years. I was invited to visit America but could not undertake the journey because of the war.”⁶³ As noted in the previous chapter, Gendun Chopel published some of his English-language poetry in The Maha-Bodhi in August 1941. The editor’s preface states, “Lama Geshe Chompell, with whom our readers are already acquainted, has returned from his sojourn in Ceylon.” In his account of his visit, he describes what is clearly the dedication of the Ruwanwelisaya stūpa in the ancient capital of Anuradhapura. He writes:

Then, the Buddhists of Burma collectively sent as a gift a top ornament [for the stūpa], a piece of crystal one cubit long adorned with many large pieces of diamond and ornamented with gold, altogether worth 200,000 rupees. Beginning on the fifteenth day of the fifth [lunar] month, a festival was held [for installing] the top ornament, which lasted for a month. Most of the laypeople from the entire island as well as all of the monks gathered for this. It was said that such a great festival had not taken place for many generations. Many people even came for the event from faraway Buddhist kingdoms like Burma, Siam, and Cambodia. I was also there by chance, and it became known that even people in the land of Tibet had heard about it and someone had come. If at the time people [in Tibet] had not even heard of the stūpa itself, how could they have heard about its festival?

On this occasion the stūpa was covered up to its peak with a rainbow of electric lights of five different colors. In the four directions, there were [lights] in the appearance of the Buddha in the four postures. Out of the empty sky resounded stanzas from the sūtras and various melodies, and from out of the clouds, airplanes flew and, circling it clockwise, rained white flowers down upon the stūpa as they circled. Various modern miracles as these were displayed. I think that the Buddha himself would have been astonished if he saw all of this.⁶⁴

The dedication of the stūpa took place on June 17, 1940. Thus, if we assume that he was back in India by July 1941, a month before the announcement of his return in The Maha-Bodhi in August, and we accept his rather precise calculation that “I stayed for one year and a few days less than four months,” he would have arrived in Sri Lanka as late as May 1940, about a month before the dedication of the Ruwanwelisaya stūpa.

Regardless of how long he stayed, by his own reckoning, he was one of the first Tibetans ever to visit the island. Or, as he writes, “Thus, although there had been a few visits to this island by Tibetan lamas in the past through their magical power, among those who have not attained the power of magical emanation, I think I am one of the earliest [Tibetans] to arrive here.”⁶⁵ There is much to say about his time in Sri Lanka. Here we will focus on his reports and reflections on Buddhism. We must recall that Gendun Chopel had recently been a monk and a Tibetan Buddhist monk, meaning that he would have held not only the prātimokṣa vows of a monk—shared, with slight variations, with monks of the Hīnayāna—but also Mahāyāna bodhisattva vows and Vajrayāna tantric vows. His time in Sri Lanka allows us to witness what happens when vehicles collide.

Every day for centuries Tibetan monks have recited the so-called coarse infractions⁶⁶ of the tantric vows, some of which include “relying upon an unqualified consort and entering into union without the three perceptions; showing secret substances to the unqualified and arguing in the offering assembly (gaṇacakra); giving a wrong answer to a question from the faithful and staying seven days in the abode of a śrāvaka.”⁶⁷ These vows are kept by a great many Buddhist monks in Tibet and are vows that Gendun Chopel himself would have taken. The infractions of the tantric vows listed here all fall within the stereotypical view of tantric practice as being concerned above all with sex and secrecy, except for the last: “staying seven days in the abode of a śrāvaka.”

A śrāvaka is literally a “listener” in Sanskrit; it is a common term for a disciple of the Buddha, deriving from an Indian culture in which religious truths were heard rather than read. The term took on a more specific meaning in the Mahāyāna, coming to mean a monk who follows the Buddhist path in order to become an arhat. Thus the path of the śrāvaka (together with the path of the pratyekabuddha) constitute for Tibetans the Hīnayāna, the polemical term often euphemistically rendered as “lesser vehicle” but which in fact means the “base vehicle” or the “vile vehicle.” The vehicle of the śrāvaka and the vehicle of the pratyekabuddha are the first two of the three vehicles (the third being the bodhisattva vehicle) that the Buddha describes in a number of Mahāyāna sūtras. In the Lotus Sūtra, for example, he declares that there is only one vehicle, the buddha vehicle, and that his teaching of the three vehicles was but an expedient device (upāya).

Thus, the vehicle of the śrāvaka is not a path that a Mahāyāna monk would be encouraged to follow. But why would tantric practitioners in India take a vow not to stay with a śrāvaka for seven days? Over the many centuries of the history of Buddhism in India, śrāvakas constituted the majority of Buddhist monks. In the polemics of the Mahāyāna schools, śrāvakas were those who denied that the Mahāyāna sūtras—and, of course, the Buddhist tantras—are the word of the Buddha. Furthermore, they saw the bodhisattva as a being who appears but rarely in cosmic history, rather than as the destiny of all sentient beings. To stay with a śrāvaka would be to risk conversion; Mahāyāna texts speak of bodhisattvas of “indefinite lineage” who abandon the bodhisattva path to follow the much shorter and easier śrāvaka path.

The Tibetan scholar and translator Chak Lotsāwa (1197–1264) reports that when he walked through the gates of the monastery at Bodh Gayā with a copy of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas on his back, he was stopped by a Sinhalese monk who asked him what text he was carrying. Chak Lotsāwa replied, “It is the Perfection of Wisdom.” The monk replied, “You are a good monk; the Mahāyāna text you are carrying on your back is not good. Throw it in the river. This so-called Mahāyāna was not spoken by the Buddha. It was fabricated by a clever man named Nāgārjuna.”⁶⁸ Thus there may have been good reason for tantric practitioners in India to limit their contact with śrāvakas.

But what would the prohibition against seven days with a śrāvaka have meant in Tibet? For students of doxography,⁶⁹ Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika were the two Hīnayāna schools. However, they were scholastic categories and had never been established in Tibet. Among the “five texts” that Gendun Chopel had studied as part of the geshé curriculum, the last two were Hīnayāna: the Treasury of Knowledge, which set forth Sautrāntika positions and critiqued Vaibhāṣika positions, and the Discourse on Discipline, which set forth the monastic code of the Mūlasarvāstivāda, a Hīnayāna school whose rules governed Tibetan monastic life.

At the same time, all Tibetan monks professed to follow the path of the bodhisattva. There were, in short, no official śrāvakas in Tibet, and with the demise of Buddhism in India, the possibility of Tibetan contact with śrāvakas there was significantly curtailed. Yet the path of the śrāvaka was studied assiduously in the monastic curriculum, not only in the Treasury of Knowledge and the Discourse on Discipline but in the “perfection”⁷⁰ curriculum based on the Adornment of Realization, where the structure of the Hinayāna path was studied in a number of contexts, including that of the “twenty members of the saṃgha.”⁷¹

During his South Asian sojourn, Gendun Chopel would spend many more than seven days with a śrāvaka. We thus might try to imagine what his knowledge of Sri Lanka might have been prior to his arrival on the island in 1940. From his own monastic training in Tibet, he would have regarded the monks of the island as followers of the Hīnayāna. This would mean, in turn, that they did not accept the Mahāyāna sūtras (and certainly not the Buddhist tantras) as the word of the Buddha. The monks would be śrāvakas, each seeking to achieve the nirvāṇa of the arhat for himself, each lacking bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain buddhahood for the welfare of others. They would furthermore deny the existence of such fundamental constituents of the Mahāyāna path as the ten bodhisattva stages (the bhūmis) and the three bodies of a buddha (the kāyas), as well as buddha fields or “pure lands.” They would hold that there is not ultimately one vehicle to enlightenment but three, each culminating in a nirvāṇa that is the cessation of mind and body. Gendun Chopel would have studied all of these doctrines during his years at Labrang and Drepung, and he would have studied their Mahāyāna refutation. He would find these doctrines embodied in the Theravāda monks of Sri Lanka.

However, for Gendun Chopel, Sri Lanka would not simply be an abode of the Hīnayāna; it was also a powerful place of tantra. The island of Lanka, at least in its mythological form, is well known in Tibet. In ancient India, Lanka and its inhabitants evoked images of demons and mythic subjugation, most famously in the Rāmāyaṇa, and these same associations continued in the Tibetan imagination. Southern India in general (depicted most famously in the Karaṇḍavyūha Sūtra), and Lanka in particular (as depicted, for example, in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra), was a land filled with dangers. Lanka also came to be associated with the teachings of the Buddhist tantras. In the influential account of the subjugation of Maheśvara by Vajrapāṇi, the island had become so evil and threatening to the welfare of the world that it was necessary to reveal the teachings of the tantras in order to subjugate its demons; the Buddha, in the form of Vajrapāṇi, taught the tantras atop Mount Malaya.⁷² In some accounts, Padmasambhava’s Copper-Colored Mountain is located in Lanka.⁷³ Thus Gendun Chopel arrived in Sri Lanka expecting to meet both śrāvakas and mahāsiddhas. He would meet many of the former and would express his dismay at not finding any of the latter.

His view of the Hīnayāna and of Sri Lanka would become complicated after his arrival in India, where, for the first time, textual passages read in Tibet would somehow come to life in Sri Lanka. As we have seen, one of his first friends and supporters in Darjeeling was the Theravāda monk Jinorasa. Rahul Sankrityayan would have told him about his own time in Sri Lanka, where he had taught in 1927–28 and where he was ordained as a Theravāda monk in 1930; he had translated the Dhammapada into Hindi for the Maha Bodhi Society in 1938. By the time of Gendun Chopel’s arrival in Sri Lanka, he had already published the first edition of his Guide to the Sacred Sites of India and had learned of the work of the Sinhalese activist Anagārika Dharmapāla, whom he praises for his efforts to wrest Bodh Gayā from the Hindus and restore it to Buddhist control. Indeed, after having spent almost six years in British India, he welcomed the chance to leave it. As he wrote in the chapter on Sri Lanka, “Today, Magadha, the home of our forefathers, is under the control of the Hindus as the wife and the British as the husband; it is not a pleasant place and has been made uninspiring.”

Gendun Chopel was now in another British colony, but one where the majority of the people were Buddhist, and he clearly felt the solidarity of the co-religionists. His allegiance to the Buddhist cause is evident in his description of the famous Pānadure Debate in 1873 between the Buddhist monk Guṇānanda (whom Gendun Chopel mistakenly calls Guṇaratna) and the Christian clergyman Rev. David de Silva. We note that at the end of the passage below, he alludes, as he does so often, to the provincialism of his fellow Tibetans, who, he says, would have difficulty participating in such a debate. He writes:

After that, due to the influence of the people of the hinterlands, different religions arrived as well. The Christian or the tradition of Mashika [Jesus] spread widely, and during this period the position of Buddhism became greatly weakened. At that point, an articulate monk named Guṇaratna, who had studied all the religious systems and was skilled in debate, made a wager with the Christian teachers and their religion and debated with them for many days.⁷⁴ He defeated them completely, and many thousands returned to the Buddhist side. There is a teacher, an elder named Dharmānanda, who is very advanced in years. He told me that when he was a child he had met this monk; the monk had rough arms and piercing eyes, such that if he looked at you, you felt frightened. There is also a record of the debate that they had at that time, which is quite amazing. Although there do not appear to have been debates on the essential points of the view [of no-self and emptiness], the arguments of the opponents are presented on the basis of a knowledge of modern science. Thus, I think it would have been extremely difficult for people like us [Tibetans] to make a response.⁷⁵

The first publication to appear from Gendun Chopel’s time in Sri Lanka was his translation of the Dhammapada from Pāli into Tibetan, a project in which he collaborated with his teacher, the monk Dhammānanda of Asgiriya monastery in Kandy. It would be published in Gangtok in 1946 (after his return to Tibet) as part of the Anagarika Dharmapala Trust Publication Series. In his colophon to the translation, Gendun Chopel writes:

A Sthaviran of Siṅghala,

A Sarvāstivādin of the Snowy Range;

Disciples protected by the same Teacher,

Sole remnants of the vanished eighteen schools.

Sugata’s word, endowed with four seals,

Sthaviran scripture, passed down by stages,

I made this epistle, a pleasing pearl-handled cane,

Arrive in the realm of snowy mountains.⁷⁶

The non-Mahāyāna schools of Indian Buddhism are often referred to, following Bhāviveka, as “the eighteen schools” (although there were certainly more). One of these was the Sthavira Nikāya, the “school of the elders,” which the Sinhalese regard as the Indian antecedent of the Theravāda (Pāli for Sthaviravāda, a term that does not seem to appear in Indian sources). Thus, Gendun Chopel’s teacher Dhammānanda, from the Tibetan perspective, was a member of the Sthavira school. The monastic code of another of the eighteen schools, the Sarvāstivāda, the “school [that asserts that] everything exists,” (in fact, a branch of that school, called the Mūlasarvāstivāda), was adopted in Tibet. Thus, although he had given up his monk’s vows by the time he arrived in Sri Lanka, Gendun Chopel called himself “a Sarvāstivādin of the Snowy Range.”

But nothing is simple in the life and works of Gendun Chopel. We should not, therefore, be surprised to learn that his relations with the Theravāda monks of Sri Lanka evoked a range of reactions from him, from heartfelt admiration, to frustration, to disdain. In the chapter on Sri Lanka in Grains of Gold and in reminiscences recorded by his friends, Gendun Chopel provides a number of vignettes from the days he spent with the Sinhalese monks. These vignettes offer some sense of his complicated relations with his hosts. When he followed the monks on their daily alms rounds, he felt as if he had been transported back in time and was in the presence of the first disciples of the Buddha. “Every day the monks went on their alms round, and I would go along to watch. Standing at the door of a layman’s house, the older ones would recite the essence of dependent origination, saying, ye dharma. Not long after that, the laymen offered them hot and flavorful food that was ready to be eaten. As they left, walking in order, I thought, ‘They are the sthavira Mahākāśyapa and the āryan Upāli. I alone am seeing this legacy of our compassionate teacher.’ On many occasions, my eyes filled with tears, and I had to sit on the ground for a moment.”⁷⁷ Indeed, he concludes the chapter on Sri Lanka with this poem about himself:

Although the dress of a monk has long ago disappeared

And the practice of monastic discipline has left no trace,

This meeting with the assembly of sthavira monks

Must be the fruit of a deed in a former life.⁷⁸

But, as Gendun Chopel knew well from his study of the scriptures, even at the time of the Buddha, there had been good monks—such as the “group of five” who were the first to become arhats—and there were bad monks, such as the “group of six” who are credited with a wide range of violations of the vinaya, the code of monastic conduct. Gendun Chopel evokes the first group in the passage above; he evokes the second group here, in which he describes a different encounter:

Once a good monk was walking through the middle of a field, and with an attitude of faith, I bought some fruit and offered it to him. He saw that there were still two pana [coins] in my hand and said, “You can still buy more.” Having bought them, he made me carry them and we went on a little way. He received chickpeas from the farmers and obtained a large amount. Then, as we went he saw coconut bark and saying, “This is good for sweeping,” made me carry a big bundle on my back, and we returned to the temple. I thought that all these monks live by the same dharma and the same path of [disciplinary] actions, yet when it comes to the way they display their greed, they are similar to that “group of six” in ancient times. Reflecting on this, I felt like laughing as well as a tinge of sadness.⁷⁹

Gendun Chopel thus expresses a profound ambivalence toward the Theravāda monks; he develops warm friendships with several monks and a sincere admiration for the purity of their practice. Yet he is dismayed by their conservatism, saying at one point that the minds of the Sinhalese monks are “narrower than the eye of a needle” and notes, “In general, all these Siṅghala monks tend to hold only their own system to be supreme. With respect to the systems of others, regardless of how good or bad it may be, they tend to reject it completely without making distinctions.”⁸⁰

One way to avoid conflict would be to limit the topic of conversation to the monastic code; despite the large number of such codes in ancient India, they share much in common, such that a Sthaviran of Siṅghala and a Sarvāstivādin of the Snowy Range would have many topics to discuss. For example, as is well known, monks are not permitted to eat solid food after noon each day, although a “medicinal meal” is permitted in the evening; exactly what may constitute this medicinal meal is widely interpreted across the Buddhist world. While the rule against an evening meal is strictly observed in Sri Lanka, in Tibet it is generally ignored. Gendun Chopel reports a conversation on the topic:

One time, I was having a conversation with another monk about eating in the evening. I explained that in Tibet there were no restrictions about that, and that it depended on the season and the locale; if one did not have some thukpa [Tibetan noodle soup] in the evening during the winter, it is harmful to the health. The monk said, “Oh, I know the rules about what is permitted and what is prohibited. Not being allowed to eat in the evening is very difficult. It is especially difficult for the new monks; some of them even eat cookies in secret.” He then took some cookies out of his trunk and we had a nice time eating them together.⁸¹

Yet, the Buddhist solidarity he had hoped to find in Sri Lanka was constantly challenged by doctrinal and cultural differences, differences that became personal when the Sinhalese monks disparaged Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhism. In a poem that he sent back to the monks at Labrang, Gendun Chopel describes the views of the Theravāda monks about Tibet:

They say that the Vajrayāna

Is like the system of the tīrthikas.

If they read a tantra, they would be hostile;

If they saw a statue, they would be ashamed.

In this assembly of monks of little learning,

The majority say this:

In Tibet, Śāntarakṣita

First established the Vinaya Piṭaka.

When they had to sit without chattering,

The Tibetans did not like the sūtras.

Then Padmasambhava

Arranged the offering and beat the horse [text missing],

He made burnt offerings, and did the dance.

And so, they say, Tibetans had faith in mantra.

They also say that though the Tibetan vinaya

Forbids killing, lying, stealing,

And doing harm to others,

When it comes to beer, women, and evening meals,

Doing whatever one likes is allowed.

They also say that a fox-fur cloak

Is the Mahāyāna monk’s robe,

That a wooden bowl lined with silver

Is the Mahāyāna begging bowl.

There is much of this confused talk,

Saying that Tibetans and Tibetan pilgrims

Behave in crazy ways.

I say this to them:

“The vinaya scriptures in Tibet

Are all of the Śrāvaka Piṭaka.”

I say this, but they do not think it’s true.⁸²

The immediate source for the monks’ views of Tibetan Buddhism here are not immediately clear. One can imagine that Gendun Chopel’s Sinhalese interlocutors had read some of the English-language works on Lamaism, which they seemed to trust over the testimony of a Tibetan scholar who had lived as a monk in several of the great monasteries of Tibet for some twenty years. One of the works that the Sinhalese monks might have known was W. Y. Evans-Wentz’s Tibet’s Great Yogī Milarepa, first published in 1928. Apart from the Dalai Lama, Milarepa would likely have been the only Tibetan that a Sinhalese monk had ever heard of. They took the opportunity to ask their Tibetan guest about him:

One time a monk said, “I have seen the biography of Milarepa, and he is an incredible practitioner of the dharma.” I explained many things to him about Milarepa, and at one point the way in which the venerable Mila was a mantric yogin came out. The face of that monk immediately turned very dark. Then he said, “If that’s the case, my faith in Mila has been damaged.” I thought, “Alas! If I hadn’t explained that to him, it would have been fine.” I felt a tinge of regret that I was so talkative.⁸³

Dismayed by the Sinhalese monk’s rejection of Mahāyāna and of tantra, Gendun Chopel seems to have set out in search of them, or at least their remnants, on the island. Despite persistent efforts, he met with little success:

Similarly, there are not even stories of the Mahāyāna masters who came to this land in the past, such as Āryadeva, Śāntipa [Ratnākaraśānti], and so on. Hoping to find the direct disciple of Śāntipa whom Buddhaguptanātha [a teacher of Tāranātha] said that he met in Kandy in Sri Lanka, I wandered around that region for more than a fortnight, but no one had even heard of him. At that time, he was said to have been about seven hundred years old; now he would be more than nine hundred years old. Or he must have passed away. Otherwise, I wondered why he would not grant an audience to the one Mahāyāna person who had come from Tibet. Similarly, no one seems to know the place where the sthavira Vajriputra resides, so if someone happens to travel here in the future, please look for him in the region of Mount Masdenatala [?]….Nevertheless, everyone is familiar with the fact that in the past the Mahāyāna did spread here; this is even described at length in their annals. There is also a history of the Bodhi tree composed in the past by a layman named Guruḷugōmī who was a follower of the Mahāyāna. He is also said to have composed some commentaries on Mahāyāna sūtras.⁸⁴

In the end, Gendun Chopel seems to have come to the conclusion, and one quite contrary to the Buddhist modernism of the day—both his day and ours—that cultural identity ultimately outweighs religious identity, that even though he and his Theravāda friends were both “sole remnants of the vanished eighteen schools,” it was not necessarily in their mutual interests to spend a great deal of time together. He seems to have found a certain respite in Sri Lanka, despite the British colonial presence, from the oppression he felt in India, constrained on one side by the British husband and on the other by the Hindu wife. However, as we see in the concluding passage of his lengthy chapter on Sri Lanka in Grains of Gold, a chapter that he describes as a long conversation, he offers his view on the best way for Buddhists of different lands—in this case Sri Lankans and Tibetans—to proceed in the future, one that we might call friendship from a distance, celebrating their kinship as Buddhists without delving too deeply into their many points of contention: During that time, I did not stay in one place, but wearing a cloak-like robe, I masqueraded as an upāsaka. Since I traveled constantly, I almost made a circuit of the entire island. I met with all the important monastic elders. Many times I felt a faith that brought tears to my eyes, mixed with deep sadness at having fallen to the ends of the earth. Walking through the forests without traveling companions, I was frightened by elephants, and once I even had to go for two days without finding food and water. For the most part, I wandered along the shores of the ocean, and because I stayed in fishing villages, I learned how to swim well, something that I did not learn to do until I was forty years old. I acquired many skills that I did not have before, like sucking the red legs of a crab and swallowing tadpoles. When I arrived at each monastery, the monks provided boundless help and support. In the towns, as the news spread that a new creature had arrived from the land of Tibet, the road became impassable because of all the people who came to see the sight. In brief, whatever kind of Buddhist pilgrim arrives on this island, they will not need to have the slightest hardship in finding food, clothing, and shelter.

Today, Magadha, the home of our forefathers, is under the control of the Hindus as the wife and the British as the husband; it not a pleasant place and has been made uninspiring. But now the time has come for us to ask Siṅghala, an island in the southern ocean, to take the place [of Magadha]. Thus we need to establish a relationship of identity between Vajradhara and Śākyamuni, a relationship of interdependence between the Sarvāstivāda and the Sthavira, and furthermore, a connection between the Mahāyāna of the north and the Hīnayāna of the south on the basis of the four seals that define a view as being that of the Buddha. Everyone needs to respect these sacred and profound connections. Yet those of the black begging bowl [the Sinhalese] are suspicious of everything, while those of the human leg-bone flute [the Tibetans] trample on everything. Regardless of who it is, each of the two [sides] has reached the peak of hardheaded stubbornness. Thus, for the time being, it is vitally important for both sides to live in a state of appreciation and affection for each other from our respective lands so that at least the recognition of our kinship in having the same Teacher and teaching will not be lost. Thus I have engaged in this long conversation [on the history of Sri Lanka].

CHAPTER 3

Sojourn in Ceylon