Gendun Chophel

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Gendun Chophel

school

foundation

headmaster

teacher

tibetan

Gendun Chophel
His Early Life
Gendun Chophel was born in 1903 in Sholphang in Rebkong, Amdo. At the age of
fourteen, after having learnt to read and write from his father, he entered the local Drisha
Monastery. Three years later, he enrolled into the 2,500 monk-strong Labrang Tashi Kyil
Monastery. Since a small child, GC had proven himself to be something of a prodigy, reciting
long and complex liturgical texts after hearing them only once.
By the time Gendun Chophel was in Labrang he had earned for himself the reputation of
a master debater; his specialty was in defending positions that in traditional parlance would
have resulted in sure and ruinous defeat: once he took up the Jain position, rejected by
Buddhists, that plants have consciousness and not one monk in the courtyard could prove
him wrong. In the lm, his friend recounts how GC unfailingly beat his opponents through
such tradition-bending eloquence and wit that his every religious baTle inevitably ended
with the witnessing monks erupting in rambunctious laughter: Ho, ho, ho!
Gendun Chophels unorthodoxy was revealed early on even in such benign act as
reading from a scripture. Once, during a routine recitation in the monasterys chamber where some hundreds of monks were
reading from portions of the Buddhas 108-volume cannon, their individual incantations riding, crashing and disappearing in the
over-arching deafening boom, GC was to be observed in a corner reading his text silently, intently.
If he was known for his brilliance, he stood out also for his searing criticisms of the time-honored monastic curriculum. And so
in 1926, GC was forced to leave the Labrang Monastery; in one version Lopez cites the reason to be GCs fondness for making
mechanical toys. Of his expulsion, he writes biTerly in one poem:
Alas! After I had gone elsewhere
Some lamas who can explain nothing
Said that Nechung, king of deeds
Did not permit me to stay due to my excessive pride
Rather than expelling to distant mountain passes, valleys, And towns One who takes pride in studying the textbooks of Rva
and Bse Would it not be beTer to expel to another place Those who take pride in selling meat, beer, and smoke?
In 1927, after a four month-long journey across vast steppes and salt lakes in the company of a large caravan, Gendun Chophel
arrived in Lhasa. There he joined Drepung Monasterys Gomang College and was put under the charge of Geshe Sherab Gyatso, a
leading Gelug scholar of the day. The teacher-disciple relation was to soon become strained; as he had done before, GC showed
liTle restraint in shredding the doctrines inherent in the monastic texts and he was not the one to shy away from arguing with his
teacher even. Frequently the two were interlocked in shouting matches; exasperated, Sherab Gyatso refused to address his student
by name, calling him instead the madman. (The title of Lopezs book derives its cue from this exchange)
GC soon dropped out from the classes. But he was frequently to be seen in the debating courtyard, confounding his opponents,
challenging the best minds, sometimes in disguises, like for instance that of an illiterate Dobdob, that subgroup of burly monks
who in the Western Hip Hop culture would have translated into club bouncers: big of biceps, sparse of words, generous with jabs.
It is incredible for a wiry man whose nickname it was Drisha Skinny, while at his st monastery, that he could take on such a
formidable appearance; a testament to his chameleon streak indeed.
Around that time, Gendun Chophel pursued his another interest: painting. Not long after, he was making a comfortable living
drawing thankgas, boasting of, among his patrons, such stellar names as Phabonga, a leading Gelug lama. Among few of his
illustrations that survive today are portraitures of photographic realism, a far cry from the conventional painting style, which
capture in black and white shades this aristocrat and that lama, a selected few who could aord to be immortalized on paper by the

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brushstrokes of this most unique monk-artist.

Just months shy from obtaining his Geshe Lharampa degree, GC left Drepung.
Gendun Chophels wanderlust had been fueled early on during his encounters at Labrang with an American missionary,
Marion Griebenow, and his family, from whom he may have learnt some English, and about steam engines and airplanes. But it
was in 1934, after he had met Rahula Sankrityanan, a forty year-old Indian scholar and freedom ghter, which GC was nally to
realize his dreams of journeys into distant India and Ceylon, where he was to remain for the next twelve years. While in Tibet, the
two worked on an ambitious project to salvage rare Sanskrit scriptures from monasteries of southern Tibet, an experience that led
GC to lament the disastrous face of Tibetan superstition as observed in the ways in which local believers pocketed away such text
leafs to stu their amulets and adorn their altars.
Tibetan Buddhisms traditional school curriculums made of its students wonderful debaters of copious memory, at times good
investigators into truths adept at Samadhi, but it instilled in them liTle inspiration to write, to contribute in a literary sense. That
impetus, lacking in the certainty of his traditional seTing, GC was to nd in the shifting sea of his physical wandering; his being
equally seized by languages, words, leTers, native as well as foreign, as by what his eyes saw and his mind perceived: about self as
well as about others.

His Literature
Apart from his occasional dabbling in poetry, Gendun Chophel wrote liTle in Tibet. By the time he returned from India twelve
years later, he had authored a staggering number of works: a travelogue, an unnished history book, an erotica literature, a
pilgrimage guidebook; also an English translation of a Tibetan tome on history of Buddhism, Tibetan translations of Indian classics
like Shakuntala, Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, and the Pali Theravadin cannon, Dhammapada; numerous Tibetan newspaper
articles and essays in English for one Mahabodhi Society Journal. His muse, in short, hit him bad when he was on the road.
It could be that in the cosmopolitan Rahul Sankrityayan, who looked to Indias tradition
as a source for the revitalization of Indian national consciousness, Gendun Chophel had
found a brethren; and in the new country he set foot in, with its classical tradition which had
newly aTracted a Western scholastic aTention and which had become a subject of robust
reinvention by local nationalists, GC found the creative grounds which had eluded him thus
far. As Tsering Shakya writes, (Gendun Chophels) own growing interest in the sources of
Tibetan Buddhist tradition and history would have led him to nd the India of that period
exciting and inspiring.
In coming from Tibet to India in 1937, which the Tibetans looked to as Aryabhumi, land
of the Buddha, Gendun Chophel had exchanged one milieu for another, both tied together by
a history of spiritual and cultural intercourse, but one that had liTle bearing on real
contemporary terms. And so midway into learning Sanskrit in Lhasa thinking it to be the
spoken language in India, GC had to quickly switch to struggling with English when told by
Rahul that Sanskrit had long ago disappeared from regular conversations.
Gendun Chophels most important work by his own estimation is his travel journal, The
Golden Surface, the story of a Cosmopolitans Pilgrimage, his longest too, which in the course of some 611 pages, only half of them
now surviving, dwells upon such subjects as geographical description of India; the origin of its name; customs of its peoples;
identication of owers and trees and how to recognize them; the edicts of King Ashoka as found on stone inscriptions; a general
history of India with emphasis on the Gupta and the Pala dynasties; as well as history of Sri Lanka and the religions of
non-Buddhists: Hindu, Muslim Islam and Theosophy.
In India, Gendun Chophel took up with Maha Bodhi Society, an international Buddhist missionary organization, which made it
possible for him to later visit Ceylon, to learn there about Theravada monks and their philosophy, to write for their journal in
English, and to author a Guide to Holy Places in India, which many describe as the rst example of modern Tibetan literature and
which the society rst helped publish. As could be expected, this book, both in style and in content, diverged sharply from the
traditional pilgrimage guides: Lamyig, a genre in itself in Tibetan literature associated mostly with reincarnated lamas.
If anything, GCs book, sprinkled with ndings by British archeologists, its narrative more conversational than didactic,
dispelled much of the erroneous facts that had shaped the Tibetan view of India and its many pilgrimage sites; In the Portrait of the
Dalai lama, Charles Bell, then British Political ocer who became a close friend of the Great Thirteenth, remembers: The most
striking admission of ignorance came when he asked me, Where is Bengal? We read this and other such names in our books but
we do not know where these countries are.
While earlier chroniclers had made their guide books a stage for displays of miraculous sightings and fantastical stories,

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Gendun Chophel kept it simple and practical: the book, while being a truthful account of a curious mind, carries such useful details
as railway network, train connection points, breakdown of costs; complete with instructions on procuring maps and deciding on
what to eat and where to sleep.

The Earth is Round

GC also wrote articles and essays for The Tibet Mirror, the only newspaper for Tibetan-speaking world produced from
Kalimpong by Tharchin Babu, another Tibetan exposed to Western values and knowledge. He wrote about events that were
unfolding in the greater world, about Hitler and the rise of Nazis, about Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle, about airplanes,
steam engine and modern science.
And when in 1938, as Lopez writes, Hitler annexed Austria; OTo Hahn produced the rst nuclear ssion of uranium; Howard
Hughes, ying a twin-engine Lockheed, set a new record for the circumvention of the globe; color television was rst
demonstrated; the rst Xerox image was produced, when the rst Superman episode appeared in Action Comics, in that same
year, GC was aTempting to prove to his countrymen that the world was not at.
He wrote detailed articles to that eect, complete with globe illustrations, latitude and longitude and all. Once, GCs former
teacher Geshe Sherab Gyatso passed through CalcuTa on his way to China, and found himself exposed to his former students
critical questioning: Is the earth at or round? When the Geshe defended traditional cosmology according to Buddhist scriptures,
GC dismissed him with these words: Not even a dog, let alone a man will visit you in China if you talk like that! On this score at
least, GC was wrong: the Geshe later went on to assume important positions in Chinese-occupied Tibet.
In one of his articles, GC put forth an argument that U med, or cursive Tibetan script, had evolved from U chen, or block script,
challenging a widely-held belief that the two systems had been founded separately on another ancient Indian script and Sanskrit
respectively. And so he lived out a role that, as Tsering Shayka notes, was also a burden assumed by modern literary innovations in
most societies, whether the new form has emerged as the organic product of changes in a society or as a result of the impact of
colonial rule. In one poem, GC writes:
I have wriTen facts
Unheard of in the Land of Snows.
Because of my poor and ragged appearance
No one is there to heed my words.
By 1938, much had happened inside Tibet. The 13 th Dalai Lama, who had ushered in a period of de facto independence having
wrested it from the inept Qing dynasty and which triggered o events that while placing his country on the cusp of modernity
rendered it vulnerable to internal intrigues and open struggles at the highest echelon, had passed away. In his place had been
enthroned a 14 th Dalai Lama, now three years old, who was siTing over a nation that was drawing further back into its insularity,
making it liTle prepared for the coming Communist Chinese onslaught. Around that time, in his travel book and his articles, GC
was to forewarn about the horrors of colonialism:
It is generally the case that in every kind of worldly custom, the intelligence of Europeans is superior to ours in a thousand
ways. They could easily spin the heads of the peoples of the East and the South, who, honest but nave, had no experience of
anything other than their own countries. And thus they came to many lands, large and small, accompanied by their armies. Their
hearts were lled with only self-interest. The timid peopleswere caught like sheep and taken to the (foreigners) own countries.
With feet and hands shackled in irons and given only enough food to wet their mouths, they were made to perform the most
dicult work until they died. From Africa alone the people thus captured numbered more than one million, and uncountable
numbers of the unusable were put in huge boats and abandoned at sea.

An Unnished History
GCs most famous work is probably his White Annals, an unnished history of Tibet that for once relied more on documented
evidences culled from archival chambers than on half-myths and half-truths of the Tibetan Buddhist version that all but blurred the
real picture of the countrys past. As Hugh Richardson, British Indias political ocer during the 14 th Dalai Lamas time, notes, the
book was the direct result of his discovery during travels abroad that Western scholars possessed evidence about the early history
of Tibet which was unknown to his contemporaries.
GCs White Annals was, in that sense, a more accomplished history book than the later History of Tibet by Shakabpa, which in
its predictable discourse, in the rigidity of its worldview, diered liTle from biographies of earlier important lamas. And it formed
the impetus for the modern sensibility which contemporary exile scholars like Dawa Norbu, Tsering Shakya and Jamyang Norbu
employ in reconstructing our past, in dening our present. So much so that in GCs use of Tibetan manuscripts salvaged from
Dunhuang caves in China some twenty years earlier, which described the might of Tibets imperial dynasties, one can see the seeds

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for the excellent doctorate thesis Dawa Norbu wrote and which he reproduced toward the end of his book Tibet: The Road Ahead.
In the poem that opens his historical work, GC wrote: Through compiling the available ancient writings That set forth dates in a
manner certain and clear I have generated a small degree of courage To measure the dominion and power of the rst Tibetan
Kingdom. The Tibetan army of red-faced bloodthirsty demons, Who pledged their lives with growing courage to The command of
the wrathful Hayagriva Are said to have conquered two thirds of the circle of the Earth.
Around that time GC struck a friendship with Russian Tibetologist, George Roerich, the son of famed artist and poet, Nicholas
Roerich, who had taken up residence in Manali in India; and with him the Tibetan monk collaborated on an English translation of
the monumental history on Buddhism in Tibet, wriTen some ve centuries earlier, called the Blue Annals. It is also likely that
around then GC came into contact with modern styles and tempo in paintings, which he incorporated into the skilled strokes of his
own paintbrush, thus stretching the expanse of his genius, making him as much of an artist as a scholar and a poet.
The poet in GC had been at work from very early days. But while his poetry wriTen in the Labrang followed formalistic
conventions and exaggerated tones, his later works were to reect a sentiment more personalized than practiced, a way of
expressing both subtle and sophisticated, its narrative venturing so far as to incorporate the use of colloquial language. He also
wrote poems in English; Heather Stoddard in her biography comments that in his English poems the inuence of nineteenth
century English Romantics is noticeable in the vocabulary and style. In his essays and his poetry, GC championed social reforms
and criticized his peoples blind superstition, as evident in a poem widely quoted even today:
All that is old is proclaimed as the work of gods All that is new conjured by the devil Wonders are thought to be bad omens
This is the tradition of the land of the Dharma.
Like in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, particularly his Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of My Melancholic
Whores, in which his protagonists straddle the deceptive grounds of lust and love, seeking a life with which to reect their art, the
sex more often than not paid for, so too it seems GC spent his CalcuTa days in uTer lasciviousness, a part of him looking for that
experience with which to esh out his Treatise on Passion, a book inspired by Kamasutra.
In lyrical prose, his erotic manual, translated by Jerey Hopkins into English as Tibetan Arts of Love: Sex, Orgasm and Spiritual
Healings, details the subtle nuances and multifarious aspects of kissing, biting, touching, scratching, penetrating, the types of
foreplays and after, with such knowingness that it would have left bewildered even the most notorious layman out on his nightly
expedition of climbing onto a rooftop and slipping into an unsuspecting womans sheepskin blanket, missionary style. As GC
writes:
With small shame for myself and great faith in women I am the kind who chooses evil and abandons good. For some time I
have not had the vows in my head But recently I stopped the pretense in my bowels.
The books instructions on heightened sexual pleasure nds its subtext in the spiritual aspirations of Tantric Buddhisms
sixty-four arts of love, which seek to generate through orgasm a more subtle and powerful level of consciousness; in the mad rush
of orgasm, in its nality, one is revealed, subconsciously, the dynamism of spiritual path. Treatise was the only second such
manual to appear in the history of Tibetan literature, the rst having been composed by the famous Nyingma scholar, MiPham.
Making a point of dierence between the two works, GC continues:
The venerable Mipham wrote from what he studied The promiscuous Chophel wrote from what he experienced The dierence
in the power of their blessings Will be understood when a passionate man and woman put Them into practice.

Going Back to the Roots

Gendun Chophels writings, as most commentators observe, are marked by two recurring elements: biTerness and poignancy.
In describing the land of Aryans to his audience back home, much of his breath was wasted in undoing misconceptions bordering
on fanaticism; in talking about the roundness of the earth, he was charged with rebelling against Buddhas words; in reclaiming the
militaristic glory of his nations past, before Tibetan Buddhism mind-shepherded an entire populace to eschew its defense instincts,
he risked humiliating his very history. For a writer, he was in a worst place possible. For the community of his readers, disapproval
came more naturally than praise, ridicule than respect.
But then paradoxically, as Tsering Shakya says, What is noteworthy about Gendun Chophels work is that his interests were
primarily conned to the examination and exploration of his own cultural tradition. Despite the fact that he had acquired a good
knowledge of English and was able to compose poems and write articles in that language, there is no evidence that he showed
much interest in Western literature. Gendun Chophels interest lay in the sources of his own tradition rather than in a search for
new elds, just as his studies of Sanskrit and Pali were a part of his research into the original sources of the Tibetan canon. His
focus on authenticity and on the roots of Tibetan culture to some degree shows an element of nationalist thought, of an eort to

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construct a new understanding of the past.

And so it is Ting that his last known work, also most explosive, was his most elemental, a journey to the very beginning: a
treatise about that most authoritative tenet of Tibetan Buddhism, Nagarjunas philosophy of Middle Way. It is said Gendun
Chophel wrote a core part of this text and the rest he dictated to one of his disciples, a Nyingma monk, which added another
dimension to the resulting controversy. Some accounts say GC dictated parts of this book in a series of drunken slur; one anecdote
has it that GC, while completely inebriated once, laid out with incredible lucidity the interpretation of Madhyamaka.
The Adornment was wriTen either before Gendun Chophel was put in prison in 1946, or after he was released three years later
in 1949. It immediately sparked a controversy that is yet to subside even to this day, provoking refutations from the best minds of
Gelug scholasticism, among them a close Geshe colleague of Trijang Rinpoche: their aTacks targeting not only GCs philosophy,
but his intelligence, his integrity even.
The man, if anything, was a true man of the leTers. When he returned to Tibet, after his twelve years abroad, a bulk of his
belongings comprised of several boxes of notes, some scribbled on cigareTe wrappers. As GCs monk companion remarks in the
lm, Angry Monk, he would always be writing something. Even at a train station, surrounded by the bustle and chaos of all that
went by, he would be looking at things, people, and then joTing something down on a paper. The boxes had disappeared from his
house when Gendun Chophel was released; some say the Lhasa government had handed them over to the British counterpart,
perhaps as a token of thanks for turning in a man suspected of involvement with Russian Communist expansionists.

Books by Gendun Chophel

UGG
By Gendun Chophel
Translation by Toni Huber

The creative and controversial Tibetan intellectual Amdo Gendun Chophel (1903-1951) composed his guide to India during the 1930's
while visitting many of the ancient sites of Indian Buddhism, which had only recently been the object of archaeological rediscovery and
modern religious revival.

His work offered traditionally minded pilgrims from the remote Tibetan highlands clear instructions on the correct identification of

vaporizer

authentic Buddhist sites, as well as unique practical guide for using the Indian rail system. The Guide to India is one of the first works of

Modern Tibetan Literature and was to become the most used manual contemporary Tibetan pilgrimage.

Tibetan Arts of Love

Sex, Orgasm and Spiritual Healing

Author(s) :

Gedun Chopel and Hopkins, Jeffrey and Dorje Yuthok

Synopsis:
A Karma Sutra in the Tibetan tradition, containing the classic Indian 64 arts of love and the sexual methods for attaining bliss, harmony,
love and joy. It also gives the methods of increasing the experience of bliss and emptiness for yogis who are meditating according to the
two highest tantras.

The book includes a complete translation of the Treatise on Passion by the highly controversial Gedun Chopel, as well as an account of

his fascinating life story. An over-arching focus is placed on sexual ecstasy as a door to spiritual experience of fundamental mind; the
sky experience of the mind of clear light pervades the scintillating descriptions of erotic acts.

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Author(s) : Gedun Chopel

Synopsis:
An English translation of the classic verses on the Dharma set side by side with the Tibetan text. The outstanding Tibetan scholar Gedun
Chophel translated this classic work from the Pali into Tibetan, and here it has been translated into English by the staff of Dharma
Publishing with the Tibetan text alongside.

Poems by Gedun Choephel

Manasarovar
By Gendun Choephel
In the times now long forgoTen
In the night of other ages,
When things were not as they now are
Lay the earth a lifeless body,
Cold and hard and all unyielding,
Like a maid in dreamless slumber,
Untouched by lifes budding springmood,
Ere the glow of sun light calls her.
And the sky looked down and saw her.
Gently then in stealth descending,
In the rose of early twilight
Stooped and kissed her in her slumber.
And behold her young heart heaving,
Throbbed her pulse, her eyelids opened
And those eyes, all lled with wonder
Shed the hot tears of her being.
Thus was born this lake Himalayan,
Mother of the holy Ganga.
II
Mountain-wave, mystic and dreamy,
By thy shore does stand a maiden
And the rhythm of thy water
Blends into her burning bosom,
Stands she motionless and gazing,
Knows not where her ocks are staying.
The young hunter aims his arrow,
And, behold, he sees thy water,
And no more sees he the roebuck
Slacks the bowstring, ees the quarry.
When the sun is golden glory
Sheds his aureole oer thy surface, -
Standst thou like the shrine Campaca
But the white dreamrays of moon-light

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Veils thee in a garb of silver,

In the rope of Milarepa.

Rebkong
By Gendun Choephel
My feet are wandering neath the alien star,
My native land, - the road is far and long.
Yet the same light of Venus and Mars
Falls on the small green valley of Rebkong.
Rebkong, - I left thee and my heart behind,
My boyhoods dusty plays, - in far Tibet.
Karma, that restless stallion made of wind,
In tossing me; where will it land me yet?
Like autumn cloud I oat, soon, there, soon here,
I know not what the eeting moons may bring.
Here in this land of roses, fair Kashmir,
My years are closing around me like a ring.
Fate sternly sits at Destinys hard loom
And irrevoked her tangled paTern weaves
The winds are blowing around my fathers tomb
And I but dream of those still summer eves,
When - child - I listened to my mothers voice,
Whose stories made my youthful heart rejoice.
So far, so far I may not see those graves.
Ah, friend, these separation pangs are sore.
My heart is thrown upon the ocean waves
Where shall at last reach a peaceful shore?
Ive drunk of holy Gangas glistening wave,
Ive sat beneath the sacred Bodhi tree,
Whose leaves the wanderers weary spirit lave.
Thou sacred land of Ind, I honour thee,
But, oh, that like valley of Rebkong,
The sylvan brook which ows that vale along.

Milarepas Reply
By Gendun Choephel
The earth and sky held counsel one night,
And called their messengers from northern height.
And came they, the storm ends, the bleak and the cold,
They, who the stormwinds in grim ngers hold.
They swept oer the earth, and then they called forth
That glistning maid from the far Polar North
In white trailing robe, the Queen of the Snow
And she sent her uTring plumed children below.

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And downward they ew in wile, whirling showers,

While in black masses hung threatning the sky.
Some were large cruel sharp-stinging owers
Some pierced his chest with a erce-cuTing eye.
Thus stormends, snow and icy frost blending
Came cold and sharply upon him descending.
On his half nude form these shapes did alight.
And tried with his single thin garments to tight.
But Milarepa, the Snow-mountains child
Feared no their onslaughts, so cruel and wild.
Though they aTacked him most ercely and grim,
He only smiled - they had no power over him.

Oh Where?
By Gendun Choephel
A city there is which lone does stand
In ruins mid bamboo trees
Hot blows the burning desert sand
Where dry shrubs sigh on thirsting land,
Where monkeys cry, and with these
Joins the shrill cry of the jungle cock
Where a maiden drives her scaTered ock
To the tunes of the ancient lay.
Where an ox cart moves on its lazy way
Ad the halts for shade bneath a juTing rock;
Oh, City, where is the day,
When on thy golden Throne sat Kings
Who held the Sceptre high in this place?
Hark, heareth thou Times eet wings?

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