A sketch of the Buddha by Gendun Chopel, July 7, 1938
GENDUN CHOPEL seemed always to be floating between worlds. He was born when the British invaded Tibet; he died when the Chinese invaded Tibet. He floated between Nyingma and Geluk, monk and layman, Tibet and India, Tibetan and Sanskrit, positivist historian and philosophical skeptic. Gendun Chopel’s critics, of whom there were many, condemned him as a Communist, an atheist, a traitor, an apostate, even an enemy of Buddhism. To those who have read what he wrote, these charges are clearly false. He remained a Tibetan patriot and a devout Buddhist until his last days, requesting that prayers by Mi pham and Tsong kha pa be read to him on his deathbed. Yet, he was unlike other Buddhist masters. Although identified as a tulku, he never had a labrang, monastic disciples, or wealthy patrons. His collected writings are unlike those of the masters of previous generations, or even his own. As he writes in a poem:
Not acting as a real cause of heaven or liberation,
Not serving as a gateway for gathering gold and silver,
These points that abide in the in between,
Cast aside by everyone, these I have analyzed in detail.117
Some have sought to see him as a mahāsiddha, his sometimes unconventional behavior proof that he was a practitioner of “crazy wisdom.” Yet to see him in that way is to simplify him. This was a man who blew cigarette smoke on a statue of Tārā, but recited her prayer a hundred thousand times when he was in prison; who asked a friend who was filling the morning offering bowls with water why he didn’t fill them with shit instead but wrote heartfelt prayers to the Buddha; who put out a cigarette in the forehead of a statue of the Buddha then defeated monks in debate on the question of whether the Buddha feels physical pain; who mocked his compatriots for their credulity but reported that a statue of Avalokiteśvara spoke to him in a dream. This was a man who developed a sophisticated scholarly method for the writing of accurate histories yet wrote a long poem with the refrain, “I am uncomfortable about positing conventional validity.”
That Gendun Chopel was a Buddhist is beyond question. Exactly what his Buddhism was is a more complicated question. One way to eventually arrive at its answer is to begin by looking at what he had to say about other religions. In Grains of Gold, he writes extensively about Hinduism and Islam, to a lesser extent about Christianity, finding fault with each. Let us begin with Hinduism.
Like the “Hīnayāna” discussed in chapter 3, Gendun Chopel’s encounter with Hinduism prior to his arrival in India would have been entirely textual. Apart from the occasional merchant, there were few Hindus in Tibet. In the standard study of doxography in the Tibetan Buddhist academy, there was usually a brief section on the Hindu philosophical schools, especially Sāṃkhyā, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta, all referred to as chirol mutegpa118 in Tibetan, “outsider tīrthika,” using the Sanskrit word that refers in Buddhist and Jain contexts to someone who does not belong to one’s own religious system. The Hindu schools would be seen only as opponents to be defeated, the classic examples of those who have fallen to the extreme of permanence in their belief in a permanent self, the eternal Veda, and a creator God, all concepts refuted at length in the works of the great Indian masters like Bhāviveka, Dharmakīrti, and Śāntarakṣita. The other literary context in which Hinduism would be encountered was in the tantras, where various Hindu gods, notably Śiva (called Maheśvara in Buddhist texts), would be defeated and humiliated by various buddhas and bodhisattvas.
A sketch of the Buddha by Gendun Chopel, July 7, 1938
Arriving in India, Gendun Chopel would come to worship the works of the great Hindu poets, marvel at the great Hindu temples, and praise the beauty of Hindu women. But his admiration did not extend to the Brahmins, the traditional rivals of the Buddhists. Following in a long line of Indian Buddhist thinkers, including Dharmakīrti, whose critique of caste would have been well known to him, Gendun Chopel has nothing good to say about Brahmins:
They place rice and flowers in front of them, and with their pigtail thrown around their neck, they think, “We are the objects of the world’s offerings,” and they chant in Sanskrit. Sometimes, this kind of feeling about Hindu [Brahmins] arises in us [Buddhists] as well. It is not only non-Buddhists; even Buddhist [texts] say, “A thousand people of the common caste / Are equal to one pure Brahmin.” With the phrase śramaṇabrāhmaṇa they are treated with importance [in Buddhist texts]. However, the Brahmins are of bad character, ill intentioned, and crave wealth much more than others. They view all others as unclean and they always turn up their nose in scorn. Apart from being worthy of prostrations with folded palms, they are not worthy of being treated kindly or being a friend. They say that if a non-Brahmin reads the Vedas or learns Sanskrit, he will go to the lowest hell. However, since we live in the degenerate age these days, this [rule] too has come to be gradually violated.119
His contempt for the caste system in general and for the arrogance of Brahmins in particular did not stop him, however, from occasionally assuming their identity, at least for the sake of appearances. He writes:
Although this caste law is so strict, one interesting thing is that when a new person is asked what caste he is from, the answer he gives is taken to be true without any investigation at all. Because I wanted to see things, I could not resist smearing white dirt on my forehead and covering my head in cloth, thus disguising myself as a Brahmin. I went into all the Hindu temples that others are not allowed to enter. Then, my arrogance grew and I told some that I was a Brahmin from Mount Kailash, which made them respect me even more. Otherwise, there is no means to even place your foot inside the walls of an Indian temple. The low caste groups who seek refuge in Śiva and Brahmā never have the fortune in their entire life to enter the temples of their own gods. This is what the so-called religion of the heartless Brahmins is like.120
Prior to his arrival in India, Gendun Chopel was unaware of the great Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1896). However, in Darjeeling, he visited the Ramakrishna ashram and later collaborated with one its teachers, Swami Prabuddhananda, in translating several chapters of the Bhagavad Gītā from Sanskrit into Tibetan; as noted earlier, one of the chapters was published by the Ramakrishna Vedanta Ashram in Darjeeling. Ramakrishna had famously declared, based on his own mystical experience, that all religions lead to the same ultimate reality, that all water is the same, it is simply known by different names. Gendun Chopel was clearly intrigued by this ecumenical view, providing a lengthy description of Ramakrishna and his disciples, before offering his own scathing judgment. “Because he did not offend any of the religions, today is a period in which his teachings are flourishing like the lambs of a rich man. In general, when there are many scholars upholding different religious traditions, they regard each other as enemies, even on subtle philosophical points. Once these scholars are no more, and after their subtle and refined reasoning has disappeared, all boundaries will become mixed into a single flavor, giving rise to something that is easy for anyone to follow. This seems to be the unsurpassed quality of fools.”121
Gendun Chopel was not a pedant or a polemicist, and he was too sophisticated a thinker to be attracted to the claim that “all religions are one,” seeing in it an unreasoned abandonment of philosophical subtlety. That his view derives not from some Buddhist partisanship but from a deeper commitment to the analysis and critique of doctrine, whatever its source, is found in a lengthy discussion of the difference between Madhyamaka and Advaita Vedānta. Arriving in India, he was exposed to Sanskrit texts and Hindu paṇḍitas that were unknown in Tibet, finding there a more nuanced view of Vedānta than the rather two-dimensional presentation available in Tibet. In the passage below, after noting that the Madhyamaka view is so irresistible that it has crept into modern Vedānta thought, he wonders aloud whether the difference between the two might be much smaller than Buddhists would like to believe:
In general, with respect to the view of the mode of being taught by the father Nāgārjuna and his son [Āryadeva], there is no intelligent person whose mind would not be captivated by it. Therefore, later, when even the Hindu masters teach, they mix it into their final positions in whatever way they can. In a way, it seems that when the vase containing the teaching of the Buddha was broken, its contents were absorbed by the very ground [it broke on], leaving a swirl of oil that somehow cannot be sucked up or licked up. And so it still remains….For today’s Hindus, however, “emptiness,” “lack of true existence,” “non-dependence,” and so forth are well-known philosophical terms. They speak of the entire [world of] appearance and existence as being the play of the “I” or the self, and say that this “I” is the great emptiness, mahāśūnyaṃ, beyond the eight extremes of existence and nonexistence. There is not one who says that this ordinary conception of “I” is an unmistaken awareness or that a golden-colored self exists inside us. They assert that the conception of self is the root of all faults, just as we do….
Of course, for those learned ones [in Tibet] who have difficulty even counting the Jonang and dzokchen [views] among Buddhists, faulting them with having the conception of self, how could these [Hindu views] be confused with Buddhist views? However, for those like me with cruder intelligence, sometimes we have to stand with our mouth agape. Yet, if they were to meet a Hindu who belongs to the Advaita school, I wonder what those [Tibetan] scholars might say. Would they say, “This is not your view, it is a copy of ours.” Or would they say, “This is excellent; continue to meditate on it.” Or would they say, “You are not allowed to [practice] my religion.”…Thus, [regarding the modern Hindu view], when it comes to something like this, other than resolving disputes [peacefully] in the spirit of dharma, what other suitable option remains? Alternatively, just as latter day Tibetans insist that it is not correct to make a difference of superiority and inferiority between Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna and between sūtra and tantra in terms of the view [of no-self], I wonder if someone might not say that Buddhists and Hindus are not differentiated in terms of their view but are differentiated in terms of their conduct. As for me, since I haven’t given any weight to the dispute, the statement, “If one denigrates the tīrthikas, / Vairocana will remain distant from you” seems to be true. Having simply cited this statement, I remain content at heart.122
Gendun Chopel is far less forgiving when it comes to what he calls “the religions of the foreigners,” that is, Christianity and Islam. He often speaks of them together, with thinly veiled contempt, in passages like this:
Regarding other stories of origin of the human race, there is one told both by the followers of Moses and by those who practice the religion of Muhammad. They say that Adam was the first human and so on. The Hindus are of the type that loves immensity. Therefore, when they set forth history, they say things like, “King so and so ruled for a hundred thousand years. He had eight hundred million queens.” In contrast, the non-Buddhists who tell the story of Moses pride themselves in specificity and detail. Therefore, they tell great lies in the guise of accuracy, saying things like, “[Moses] reached that land on this day of such and such month. On the first day he became ill, and the next day at noon he died.” Between these two [approaches], it is the latter alone that can easily deceive people’s minds. Thus, their followers include those who have such strong and irreversible convictions. Even when they speak of heaven, which is the fruit of one’s virtuous deeds, they describe it in such terms as, “The pillars in the divine mansions are this many spans high and this many finger-widths wide, and there are seventy-three angels as brides,” and so on, as if they had gone there yesterday and are giving you the figures. Thus, they are capable of making people drunk on faith.123
Gendun Chopel fills many pages of Grains of Gold describing the rulers of India who preceded the British, presenting the tenets of Islam, a biography of Muhammad, and the history of India under Muslim rule. It is not a dispassionate history. Drawing a connection between the tenets of the Christianity and Islam and their manifestation in the conquest of India, he does not hesitate to express his disdain:
In the scriptures of the Muslims it is definitively stated that if someone mercilessly kills people who will not enter the Muslim faith, kafirs, that is, someone like us, the killer will attain a rank higher than that of anyone else and will be given many exceptional goddesses by Allah. Therefore, for Muslims, the roots of compassion for people of other religions are severed. There is not even an iota of a reason that can be shown for how benefit could come from such killing. But they say, “Bring me the book adorned with gold from atop the high altar.” Opening it, the end of the third line of the tenth page shows what bliss is attained as a reward for killing kafirs. If they do not believe in what has been spoken from the mouth of Allah himself, [then they assert that] they should be burned alive. This is the approach of those who believe only in scripture.124
This leads him to conclude, “Thus, the religion of the Muslims was brought by armies wielding weapons. Making pools of blood, it spread through the world. In the same way, the Christians sent out great forces in the name of ‘just wars’ and expanded their religion just as [the Muslims] had in the past. However, the teaching of our compassionate elder was carried by monks who would not even kill an insect, across the great oceans in the east and west. One should understand this difference in the history of these religions.”125
Gendun Chopel, who had spent most of his life to that point as a Buddhist monk in the great Geluk monasteries of Tibet, recoils at the bloodshed wrought by Muslims and Christians; he ascribes this violence above all to what he regards as blind faith in their sacred scripture. His implied point, which he makes more explicitly in another passage, is that whereas the Abrahamic religions have only scripture, āgama, Buddhism has both scripture and reasoning, yukti, and it is the combination of these two that accounts for Buddhism’s more sophisticated ways of interpreting its scriptures. Furthermore, it is the Buddhist approach to scripture that has prevented the excesses he sees in Christianity and Islam from being committed in the name of Buddhism. Yet, there is something else, something less reasoned, something more emotional, behind Gendun Chopel’s criticism of Islam.
Among all the Buddhist monasteries in India, none was more famous in Tibet than Nālandā, the great monastic university in the modern state of Bihar. According to Tibetan histories, many of the most significant figures in the history of Indian Mahāyāna, including Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, Candrakīrti and Śāntideva, were monks at Nālandā. Each of these figures is of towering importance for Tibetan Buddhism. Indeed, in recent years the current Dalai Lama has described Tibetan Buddhism as the Nālandā tradition of Buddhism. In Grains of Gold, Gendun Chopel describes the monastery in almost rhapsodic terms, drawing on the work of what he calls “the Chinese monk,” that is, Xuanzang, who spent at least two years studying at Nālandā, probably beginning in 637. After describing the monastery as it was in its glory during the visits of Xuanzang and Yijing, he mentions the visit of the Tibetan pilgrim Chak Lotsāwa, who studied there in 1235 and 1236. He then goes on to provide his own eyewitness description of the state of the monastery when he visited the site in the 1930s. Referring to the thirteenth century, Gendun Chopel writes:
By that time, in our country, many chapters of history had been completed: the establishment of the teaching of the Buddha, its dissemination, destruction, and its restoration. During this period, although so many great scholars and adepts of the new translation schools had gone at earlier and later points to this monastery and to Vikramaśīla, when it is divided into periods of time, almost all of these [Tibetans] visited during one generation. It appears to be quite close to the time when the [Buddha’s] teaching was in its final stage of survival in India. Shortly after the time of the mendicant, the great Kashmiri paṇḍita [Śākyaśrībhadra], both monasteries were completely destroyed by Muslim armies. In our country, it has been long known from former times that Nālandā was destroyed. Yet due to intense affection for this monastery, and the fact that no one wants bad news, [people] trusted the lies of some Indian wanderers who came seeking musk, and wrote many falsehoods about the vihāra of Nālandā still existing, thus consoling themselves. In fact, it has been around seven hundred and thirty years since the Muslim Qutb-ud-din destroyed it in 1205. Over this period, even the ruins of the walls gradually crumbled almost down to the level of the ground and a forest of mango trees grew over them. Then, in recent years, the Indian government spent immeasurable funds and excavated most of the site over a period of two years. Thus far, two stories of the monks’ quarters have emerged from under the ground. Today if someone were to look at it without knowing its history, one might think that it has been only about fifty years since it was destroyed. In the past, there were four stories; the top two have crumbled.
Thus, first, there was the Nālandā of the monk Xuanzang, adorned with the dharma and with wealth rivaling Tuṣita, the abode of gods. Then, there was the Nālandā of Chak Lotsāwa, fraught with danger from the Turkic army. Then, there is the Nālandā of humans whose merit has been depleted, a naked ruin of crumbled walls. These can be called the fulfillment of its three periods of rise, decline, and emptiness.126
It is clear from all of this that Gendun Chopel does not like Islam. But, as noted above, he also does not like Christianity. Although Chinese Muslim armies repeatedly sacked Tibetan monasteries in Amdo during his youth, his particular antipathy for Islam seems to derive from an earlier moment in history, or at least from how he understands that history.
Nostalgia, despite its Greek sound, is a term of relatively recent coinage, first occurring in 1688. It literally means, “aching to return home.” Gendun Chopel was a Tibetan and from a region of Tibet far away from India. And in Grains of Gold, and especially in his poetry, he longs to return to the mountains of Tibet, to his home, to his friends, to his family. But nostalgia is not always geographical; it can also be chronological. And though very few Tibetans, and almost no Tibetan scholars, had traveled to India during the previous seven centuries before the time Gendun Chopel arrived in 1934, for them India, what they called phagyul, the Land of the Noble Ones, was home, not just because it was the birthplace of the Buddha, not just because it was a place of pilgrimage, but because the works that Tibetan monks had memorized and debated for centuries had all come from India. And so many of these works had come from Nālandā.
In a sense, then, Gendun Chopel had left his homeland to return home. Like so many Tibetan scholars, he had an idea of what India must be like and he somehow expected to find it. Yet when he arrived, it was very different. Thus, his antipathy for Islam does not stem from the fact that, in his view, it is charitable only to its own; he says the same thing about Christianity. Furthermore, it is clear from Grains of Gold that Gendun Chopel had read Xuanzang’s account of India carefully, and there he must have seen that even in the first half of the seventh century, Buddhism was in decline, often serious decline, in many regions of South Asia. So it is not so much that Buddhism vanished from India, but that the place that Tibetan scholars revered most, even more than Bodh Gayā, the vihāra that their own massive monasteries took as their model, had been destroyed. Gendun Chopel arrived in India to find Nālandā in ruins and its library in ashes. And he blamed the destruction on Islam. This, for him, was an unforgivable sin.
One key to Gendun Chopel’s Buddhism, then, is that in his discussions of Hinduism, of Christianity, and of Islam, he measures each against Buddhism and finds them lacking. In each case, and for specific reasons, Buddhism is the superior religion. We gain further insight into Gendun Chopel’s Buddhism when we examine his attitude toward his fellow Buddhists.
As we saw in chapter 3, he had an ambivalent attitude toward the Theravāda monks of Sri Lanka, deeply admiring their strict adherence to the vinaya but disappointed by what he saw as their narrow-minded dismissal of the Mahāyāna. He writes:
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. However, there are many who have some interest in the philosophical aspects of Mahāyāna; there were a few who have even memorized the verses of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamakakārikā. Regarding the other presentations [of the Mahāyāna] related to the aspect of the vast practice, such as the sambhogakāya (enjoyment body), they say that these are explanations copied from the Great Brahman [concept] of the Hindus. On the question of the cessation of the continuum of matter and consciousness in the nirvāṇa without residue, their understanding of it has something that is both profound and confused. They assert that the statement that a bodhisattva is superior to an arhat is the talk of Hindu kṣatriyas.127
As we noted, Gendun Chopel suggests that Tibetans and Sinhalese should celebrate their kinship as co-religionists, but that those celebrations should take place in separate locations, specifically Tibetans in Tibet and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.
Thus, by a certain process of elimination, we can say with certainty what Gendun Chopel was not: he was not a Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or a Theravāda Buddhist. In his discussion of Buddhism and science (included in part 2), he criticizes those whose devotion to science causes them to renounce Buddhism. Thus, he also was not an atheist. Knowing with some certainty what he was not, we must turn now to the question of what he was.
We can say with certainty that he was a Buddhist, and a devout Buddhist. This is clear from his writings—both prose and poetry—and from the many reminiscences of those who knew him. His was not a modernist Buddhism that focused only on philosophy and ignored the magical. We have alluded to his recitation of the Tārā prayer one hundred thousand times while he was in prison. He was often heard loudly singing the “Praise of the Twenty-One Tārās.” Tārā is renowned for her power to free those who call upon her from the “eight fears”: lions, elephants, fire, snakes, bandits, prison, water, and demons. Gendun Chopel would credit her with his release from prison. He also composed his own prayer to her:
Your form, the deeds of all the victors of the three times;
Friend to the host of beings seeking liberation;
Mother who loves all miserable migrators.
I pray at the feet of lady Tārā.
Your beautiful body, the color of turquoise, restores health;
Your sweet speech dispels the longing for existence and peace;
Your compassionate mind purifies the stains of the two obstructions.
I pray at the feet of lady Tārā.
You serve as a guide, showing me the path in an unknown land;
You serve as an escort, protecting me on a frightening precipice;
You grant the resources I need when I’m impoverished.
I pray at the feet of lady Tārā.128
After he was released from prison, he continued to ponder the reason for his arrest, considering possibilities beyond the mundane machinations of British colonial officers and Tibetan aristocrats. In a conversation with a friend, he recalled the famous story of Sakya Paṇḍita’s debate with the Hindu scholar Harinanda. Around 1240, Harinanda and five other Hindu masters made their way to Kyirong in western Tibet to debate with Sakya Paṇḍita on logic. With assistance from Mañjuśrī, Sakya Paṇḍita defeated them and converted them to Buddhism. Gendun Chopel explains that after the debate, Sakya Paṇḍita instructed the twelve denma goddesses—fierce local deities converted to protectors of Buddhism by Padmasambhava—to thereafter punish anyone who brought a single page of a non-Buddhist scripture into Tibet. Gendun Chopel said, “I translated a portion of the Bhagavad Gītā from Sanskrit and brought it to Tibet. I must have been punished by the twelve denma goddesses for that.”129
The question, then, is not whether Gendun Chopel was a Buddhist. The question is: What was the Buddhism of Gendun Chopel? Although the Madhyamaka doctrine of the two truths—conventional truths and ultimate truths—has been used in modern writings about Buddhism to the point of cliché, it provides a useful structure here. Gendun Chopel himself explored the categories and their boundaries in his Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought. Before turning to that, however, we can begin with what we might call his historical method, which he lays out clearly in Grains of Gold.
As we saw in chapter 3, Gendun Chopel does not dismiss the storied supernormal powers of Buddhist masters. He spent two weeks during his time in Sri Lanka looking for an Indian yogin who would have been nine hundred years old. Yet with his encyclopedic knowledge of Tibetan Buddhist texts, Gendun Chopel was skeptical of the knowledge that could be derived from them for the writing of history. Therefore, in order to write history—both of ancient India and of ancient Tibet—he developed a historical method that was not previously known in Tibet. In chapter 6 of Grains of Gold (p. 153), he describes his method for writing a history of ancient India:
What I shall explain in the following is based on compiling these sources: [a] The fragments of histories that have been discovered, written by some of the scholars who were contemporaneous to particular kings and so on, [b] the important events of their lives and legal systems inscribed on some of the kings’ own rock edicts and copper plates that survive to the present day, [c] the clear identification of the years from the few kārṣāpaṇa coins discovered from individual reigns, [d] what was written by envoys from other kingdoms during that time, describing what they saw in India, compared with what was translated from the languages of different countries, and [e] comparing as much as possible the events in the ancient histories with what can be reconstructed from the remains and ruins of towns, palaces, monasteries, and stūpas mentioned in the histories.
Here, Gendun Chopel describes what might be called a critical historiography, even a scientific method, one that makes extensive use of archives and of archaeology, relying whenever possible on material culture—inscriptions, coins, and ruins. When texts are consulted, he seeks contemporaneous sources and is always skeptical of mythologized accounts. In his Guide to the Sacred Sites of India, he had discussed a similar method for accurately locating the events in the life of the Buddha, making use of modern geography.130
It is therefore fascinating to see Gendun Chopel express a profound skepticism for conventional knowledge in his more overtly Buddhist works, especially in Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought. We should note, however, that Gendun Chopel’s position on the standard topics of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is often difficult to discern. There are a number of reasons for this. First, his collected works are unlike any other, delving into topics that few Tibetan scholars have explored. Second, many of his more overtly religious works appear to be lost; in addition to the book on emptiness that he wrote in English with George Roerich, we find references to such titles as A Presentation of Cittamātra Tenets,131 Difficult Points in Madhyamaka and Pramāṇa,132 and The Very Difficult Path of Reasoning,133 none of which have yet been located.134 Third, Gendun Chopel was exceedingly well read, even by the high standards of the day, not only in his natal Nyingma tradition and the Geluk tradition of his monastic life, but in the other sects as well. People remarked on his chameleon-like quality of seeming to be a Kagyu when speaking to a Kagyu and a Sakya while speaking to a Sakya. We can ascribe this to his remarkable mind and memory, but also to the place and time of his birth, in Amdo at the turn of the century, away from the often rabid sectarianism that would plague Kham and Lhasa, a sectarianism that would lead many to condemn him after his death. In the biography of the great Sakya lama Dezhung Rinpoche (1906–1987), we learn that he wanted to meet with Gendun Chopel in Lhasa but was warned against doing so:
Gendun Chöphel had traveled widely and had lived for years in India and Ceylon. He was famed for his excellent knowledge of Sanskrit, which made Dezhung Rinpoche want to meet him all the more.
But already at Sakya, Dezhung Rinpoche’s Minyak friend and student Trulku Kunzang (himself an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit grammar by Tibetan standards) had discouraged him from contacting Gendun Chöphel, saying, “Yes, the Amdo scholar is learned. But he is living a dissolute life, drinking spirits, smoking cigarettes, and so on.” An acquaintance in Lhasa had also warned Dezhung Rinpoche not to contact him, as the Amdo renegade was under suspicion for political reasons, so in the end he decided not to attempt to see him. Dezhung Rinpoche was disappointed by this turn of events, for he considered Gendun Chöphel to be a “realized master” (rtogs ldan) and had also heard about his unusual Madhyamaka views.135
In 1955, those Madhyamaka views prompted a young Geluk tulku to publish a refutation of Gendun Chopel entitled The Magical Wheel of Slashing Swords Mincing to Dust the Evil Adversary with Words to Delight Mañjuśrī, where he writes, “Those who are enemies of the teachings of the Buddha are not to escape arrest by the government.”136
The work that led to that condemnation was the Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought. The full title of his text might be translated literally as Eloquent Explanation That Combines the Profound Key Points of the Middle Way into Their Essence, An Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought.137 There, he offers a scathing critique of the Geluk presentation of the two truths. In discussing the category of the conventional, he offers example after example of the inability of benighted beings to make statements that are even conventionally true, seeing the conventional instead simply as opinion, with the beliefs of the majority, no matter how parochial, being elevated to the level of truth. He tells the story of an Indian king who is able to save himself from a poison rain; drinking its waters leads to madness. Eventually, everyone else in his kingdom drinks the water and goes mad. When the people declare that they are sane and the king is insane, he decides to drink the poison water and lives happily ever after as their ruler. This section of the text ends with a long poem with the refrain, “I am uncomfortable about positing conventional validity.”
Thus, despite his strong commitment to what might be called the historical method and his mockery of Tibetans who gullibly believe, and worship, all manner of factual mistakes, when he considers the status of the conventional from a philosophical perspective, he sees it merely as the majority view of the ignorant, with no ontological basis whatsoever. He extends his critique into the realm of the sacred, noting that the descriptions of the enlightened are simply the fantasies of the unenlightened. Furthermore, they are not universal; they are culturally specific. The accounts of the pure lands clearly reflect an Indian sensibility. As he writes, “For example, if the Buddha had been born in China, it would certainly be the case that the saṃbhogakāya of Akaniṣṭha would have a long shiny beard and would wear a golden dragon robe. Similarly, if he had been born in Tibet, there is no doubt that in Akaniṣṭha there would be fresh butter from wish-granting cows in a golden tea churn five hundred yojanas high, and there would be tea made from the leaves of the wish-granting tree. Therefore, all of this is merely the way that we common beings think.” He explains that the buddhas appear to us in this way out of their compassion for sentient beings; “they are merely set forth with skillful methods so that the qualities of the buddha level, which in reality cannot appear to our mind, can appear to our mind in order to create admiration and delight within us.”138
To declare that the qualities of the Buddha cannot appear to our minds seems a radical statement, but it is central to Gendun Chopel’s middle way. Again and again in his writings—and not simply in his philosophical works—we encounter the term “inconceivable” (literally, “not encompassed by thought”).139 For example, in what was likely one of his earliest essays, the opening chapter of Grains of Gold, he describes his visit with Rahul Sankrityayan to the famous monastery of Radreng, founded by Atiśa’s disciple Dromton (1005–1064) in 1057. Gendun Chopel writes, “The caretakers of Radreng monastery gave explanations of the sacred images. Pointing to two juniper trees on the circumambulation path, they said, ‘This is a white sandalwood tree and that is a red sandalwood tree.’ The paṇḍita [Rahul] laughed derisively and said, ‘Sandalwood requires very warm soil. They do not exist even in central India, only in the south. How could they grow here?’ However, because those like the paṇḍita have little familiarity with the inconceivable—things that do not need to depend on our [ordinary conceptions] of place, time, causes, and conditions—he made such a statement.”140 Gendun Chopel considers the question of the status of the two truths at length in his Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought, especially in the first section of the text (presented in its entirety in part 2). There he mocks those who seek to domesticate reality (dharmatā) by seeing it as somehow accessible to reason, and who dilute the potency of such statements by the Buddha as, “Kāśyapa, ‘existence’ is one extreme; ‘nonexistence’ is the second extreme. That which is in the center of those two is the inexpressible and inconceivable middle path.” As he writes:
When many hundreds of thousands of common beings to whose minds [things] appear similarly gather together, then the thing that they decide upon becomes firmly grounded and unchangeable, and those who speak in disagreement are proclaimed to be denigrators, nihilists, and so on. Therefore, our statements about what does and does not exist are in fact classifications of what appears before our mind. Our statements that something does not exist or is impossible are classifications of what cannot appear before our mind. The reality (dharmatā) that is neither existent nor nonexistent does not belong to the former class, it belongs to the latter.141
Knowledge of conventional truths, what can be known by what he calls “the fiction-making mind” cannot in itself bring knowledge of the ultimate. The purpose of the Buddhist path is to create an understanding of what the mind has never previously known. When we concede that all of our thoughts are fabrications that have no objective foundation, with no basis whatsoever, we feel great fear. Gendun Chopel calls this the fear of emptiness and regards it as the essential first step toward the ultimate. Reality must be feared before it can be comprehended.
Gendun Chopel wants to radically discredit any conventional knowledge that may be claimed about the state of enlightenment, while constantly recalling those wondrous abilities ascribed to the Buddha that are logically impossible. He lampoons the monks who are willing to sacrifice the rhetorical and philosophical impact of such miracles on the altar of dogmatic consistency. He sees in their obsession with consistency a domestication of the rhetoric of enlightenment, until the sūtras serve no other purpose than to validate their plodding logic and the operations of ignorance. This is suggested, however subtly, in the famous poem that opens the Adornment, where one must note not only that he praises the Buddha, but how he does so:
To the sharp weapons of the demons, you offered delicate flowers in return.
When the enraged Devadatta pushed down a boulder, you practiced silence.
Son of the Śākyas, incapable of casting even an angry glance at your enemy,
What intelligent person would honor you as a friend for protection from the great enemy, fearful saṃsāra?
The first line refers to the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment when Māra and his minions attacked the Buddha with a hail of weapons. The Buddha transformed their hail of spears and arrows into a gentle rain of flowers. The second line refers to the Buddha’s evil cousin, Devadatta, who tried to assassinate the Buddha by pushing a boulder down Vulture Peak to crush him. The Buddha did not retaliate. The third line says, “Son of the Śākyas, incapable of casting even an angry glance at your enemy, what intelligent person would honor you as protector from fearful saṃsāra?” When reading this line, one wonders if it is right. One would expect a Buddhist prayer to say, “what intelligent person would not honor you as protector from fearful saṃsāra?” Yet Gendun Chopel meant what he wrote: if this is how the Buddha responded to attacks on his own person, what intelligent person—the Tibetan word is loden,142 perhaps better translated as “what person in their right mind”—would look to the Buddha, who would not even protect himself, for protection from the sufferings of saṃsāra? Gendun Chopel’s suggestion is that the purpose of the Buddhist path is to overturn the ordinary; his implication is that being in one’s right mind has been the problem all along. As he writes,
Thus, in general, in the Mahāyāna and also, especially, in all of the Vajrayāna, from the point when it is suitable to view the lama as a buddha through to meditating on yourself as Vajradhara and believing that you have a fully established body maṇḍala—these are only for the purpose of turning upside down this present valid knowledge. All of this, such as offering the five meats [beef, elephant flesh, horse flesh, dog flesh, human flesh] and the five ambrosias [feces, urine, semen, blood, brains] to the Buddha, are set forth for the purpose of smashing to dust the conceptions of the ordinary together with the reasoning of logicians.143
Gendun Chopel thus exalts the ultimate, praising it as inconceivable, impossible to be encompassed by the thoughts of the unenlightened and their fallacious canons of reason. Beyond this exaltation, however, he says little about how to reach the inconceivable. He does suggest that it is reached by the tantric path, explaining that “one should know that the union which non-dualistically mixes as one such things as object and subject, desire and hatred, hot and cold, pure and polluted, is the body of great wisdom or the body of union, the mixture of body and mind in one entity.”144 Yet, he offers few hints of how this is achieved in Adornment. Hints, and only hints, are found in an unlikely place, in his Treatise on Passion, where the power of pleasure is depicted as leading to the bliss of union:
In this saṃsāra, thick with the mirages of appearance,
Which [even] the Tathāgata’s hand cannot stop,
The mind is placed in the nature of emptiness of all things.
Who can let go of belief in existence and nonexistence?
The child of awareness swoons in the sphere of passion;
The fickle intellect falls into a wormhole,
Being dragged down by lustful thoughts;
Behold, O being, the true nature of pleasure.
This wave of illusion, where the non-two appears as two,
Dividing into subject and object,
Wishing to merge the ground of being with the ocean of bliss,
Do you not feel the motion and rising of the desire for sex?
Why would this reality, unsupported by magic, move about?
Where does this mind, with nothing pursuing it, run away to?
Because, abandoning their true nature, they are unable to stand still,
This couple, appearance and mind, move in the direction of bliss.145
In my first book about Gendun Chopel, The Madman’s Middle Way, I described him as “a philosopher, a poet, an essayist, an artist, a linguist, a translator, a geographer, an historian, a social critic, a sexologist, a botanist, a journalist, an ethnographer, and a sometime tantric yogin.” But was this man—who described himself as a “discerning beggar” and a “cosmopolitan traveler”—also a Buddhist master, deserving of a volume in this series?
He had many of the conventional qualities: he was a tulku and a monk, he had profound knowledge of a vast array of texts, he was endowed with a prodigious memory and a powerful intellect. He was a consummate stylist of Tibetan poetry and prose, as is evident across the pages of this volume. He excelled at each of three traditional activities of the Tibetan scholar: explication, disputation, and composition. Yet there have been many such figures in Tibetan history. Is this enough to make Gendun Chopel a khedrup, a paṇḍita-siddha, a scholar-adept, a master?
Like the greatest of those masters, he was a denizen of multiple worlds, both real and imaginary, visible and invisible, worlds that he described in a voice that is unmistakably his. He moved dexterously through a maze of concepts yet was devoted to the inconceivable, seeing the apparently unbridgeable divide between ignorance and enlightenment not as a cause for skepticism but as an inspiration for deep faith in the Buddha. That he maintained this faith under the harsh light of modernity, even as he was destroyed by the country that he loved so much, would seem to be enough to merit our admiration.