I have wandered all across the land of India, east and west.
I have studied Sanskrit, most useful,
And the useless language of the foreigners.
This is the opening stanza of a long poem that Gendun Chopel (1903–1951), regarded as the foremost Tibetan writer of the twentieth century, wrote in India and addressed to his old monastery in northeastern Tibet. In 1934, as he was completing his monastic education, Gendun Chopel had been asked to serve as the guide for a visiting Indian scholar, Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963). A Marxist who had already spent three years in a British prison, Sankrityayan had crossed the Himalayas in search of Sanskrit manuscripts that centuries earlier had been brought to Tibet from India and preserved in Buddhist monasteries. He was particularly interested in works on Buddhist logic, translated by teams of Indians and Tibetans in what is referred to as the gsar ma (new translation) period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As a foreigner who spoke little Tibetan, Pandit Rahul, as Sankrityayan was called, needed a monk to convince the abbots to show him their treasures. After several months of travel on foot and horseback, and the discovery of some two hundred manuscripts, he decided to return to India and invited his guide to go with him. Gendun Chopel would spend the next decade in South Asia, a period of remarkable literary and artistic creation that was made possible by his study of Sanskrit and “the useless language of the foreigners”: English.
During his years in India, Gendun Chopel produced his best poems, composed a pilgrimage guide (in Tibetan) to India, and wrote the most famous work of Tibetan erotica. He also completed what he considered his magnum opus, Rgyal khams rig pas bskor ba’i gtam rgyud gser gyi thang ma (Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler), which was illustrated with scores of watercolors that he painted in a style previously unknown in the long history of Tibetan art. He would return triumphantly to Tibet in 1945, only to be arrested for treason a year later. Upon his release after three years in prison, he said he had been betrayed by the British, who, knowing of his skills as a translator from Tibetan to English, sought to punish him for refusing to work in their employ. He died a broken man, likely from cirrhosis of the liver, just two years after his release.
When Gendun Chopel crossed the border into India, he was entering the Buddhist holy land, known in Tibetan as the rgya gar (white expanse) and the 'phags yul (land of the noble ones). Throughout the centuries, Buddhists from across Asia had made the pilgrimage, by land and by sea, to visit four sites: the places of the Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment, his first sermon, and his passage into nirvana. Yet reverence for India was particularly strong among Tibetans. At the end of the eighth century, an Indian monk and an Indian tantric master came to Tibet to found the first Buddhist monastery, and over the next four hundred years Indian teachers would travel to Tibet and Tibetan students would travel to India. Both brought Sanskrit scriptures to Tibet, where they were translated into Classical Tibetan, a language said to have been invented in order to bring the Buddhist dharma to the Land of Snows. Whether this is fact or fiction, the Tibetan script and Tibetan grammar are borrowed directly from Sanskrit, which, for Tibetans, was the sacred language of the sacred land.
They had a different opinion about English. The first British subject to visit Tibet was an officer of the East India Company who traveled there in 1774 seeking trade relations. Although George Bogle befriended the Panchen Lama, the leading cleric in Tibet at the time, future relations proved to be less amicable. More than a century later, concerned about Russian influence in the Himalayas, the British again sought to establish trade with Tibet. When the Thirteenth Dalai Lama refused, Britain sent troops into Tibet in 1903 under the command of Colonel Francis Younghusband. They made their way to the capital by killing hundreds of Tibetans, who were armed with matchlocks, swords, and spears. What Gendun Chopel knew of the British, both from his father—a noted lama who had performed funeral rituals for the Tibetan dead after the British “Sikkim Expedition” in 1888—and from Pandit Rahul, would thus have been largely negative. Even so, English would be essential to the works of his South Asia sojourn.
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In Tibetan Buddhism, few are as revered as the translator, or lotsawa. The precise origins of this Tibetan word are unclear, although some say that it renders the Sanskrit lokacakṣu, “eye of the world.” Renowned for their bravery, beginning in earnest in the late tenth century, translators made the perilous journey from the pristine mountains of Tibet to the humid plains of India—fraught with poisonous snakes, fatal fevers, and fearsome bandits—in order to retrieve sacred Sanskrit texts (Buddhist sūtras, śāstras, and tantras) before returning to Tibet and translating them for the benefit of all sentient beings. These journeys came to an end by the early thirteenth century, after several of the most important monasteries of North India had been sacked by Muslim armies. Gendun Chopel saw himself as following in the footsteps of those great translators some eight hundred years later (by his calculation).
He had already studied Sanskrit in Tibet, in the traditional Tibetan way, and later improved his skills with lessons from Pandit Rahul during their travels. His increasing fluency soon allowed him to consult some thirty works of Sanskrit erotica (including the Kāma Sūtra) while researching his famous ’Dod pa’i bstan bcos (Treatise on Passion, a work . . ) (a work also based on what anthropologists call “participant observation”). He also learned Pali—the canonical language of Theravada Buddhism—during a sixteen-month stay in Sri Lanka. In a Buddhist country at long last, and finally free from the constraints of India (with “the Hindus as the wife and the British as the husband,” as he put it), Gendun Chopel felt that he had returned to his home of a previous lifetime. And he was duly proud of his linguistic abilities. Referring to his translation of the Dhammapada, a famous Theravada text then unknown in Tibetan, he wrote:
Recognizing my own home, familiar from so long ago
And finding the remnants of my deeds from former lives,
How can I show my joy in translating anew, at long last,
This scripture of the perfect Buddha?
They say that today there is in Magadha
After a gap of eight hundred years in India,
A late-coming translator [from Tibet]
Who can actually read the Sanskrit treatises.
But Tibet’s reverence for Sanskrit was not limited to Buddhist works. About a year after arriving in India, Gendun Chopel wrote to Pandit Rahul (in English) declaring his desire to translate the famous fourth-century Sanskrit drama Śakuntalā by Kālidāsa, whom Gendun Chopel would come to esteem above all Sanskrit poets. He writes, “And still I long most to translate Śakuntalā with the help of your honour, and I can promise to make it as beautiful line [sic] as a great Tibetan poet has done, and never defile your bright fame.” He would go on to translate the play, as well as four chapters of the Bhagavad Gītā; he also produced an abridged translation of the Rāmāyaṇa, the other great Sanskrit epic along with the Mahābhārata.
We don’t know with any certainty why Gendun Chopel chose these texts; each is considered a masterpiece of Sanskrit literature. We can note, however, that by the time he arrived in India, these four works—Śakuntalā, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Dhammapāda—were known not only to the literati of South Asia but also to the wider world because they had all been translated into English, joining a growing library of what were then deemed “Oriental classics.” Charles Wilkins, an officer of the East India Company, published his Bhagavat-Geeta in 1785; the Śakuntalā of Sir William Jones, the famous jurist of Kolkata, appeared four years later; Ralph T. H. Griffith began publishing his translation of the Rāmāyaṇa in 1870; and, in the tenth volume of his “Sacred Books of the East” series published in 1881, Friedrich Max Müller included his translation of the Dhammapada. Two of these works had also been singled out by modernist Hindus and Buddhists, who felt compelled to identify just one book as their Bible in an effort to counter the condemnation of their religions as benighted forms of idolatry. Hindus chose the Bhagavad Gītā and Buddhists chose the Dhammapada.
When he arrived in India in 1934, Gendun Chopel did not know any of the Indian vernaculars, nor did he speak the language of the colonizer: English. As a result, he soon went to live among Tibetan-speaking communities in the foothills of the Himalayas in West Bengal, where the towns of Darjeeling and Kalimpong had long been stops on Tibetan trade routes. (Darjeeling is a corruption of the Tibetan Dorje Ling, “garden of the thunderbolt.”) There he met a Sikkimese monk named S. K. Jinorasa, who ran the local YMBA (Young Men’s Buddhist Association, yet another Buddhist response to Christian missionaries) and who was happy to host a highly trained Tibetan scholar from the renowned Drepung Monastery. Jinorosa not only secured Gendun Chopel a job teaching at the YMBA, but also gave him English lessons.
Always with a collaborator and, apparently, always in order to support himself, Gendun Chopel began rendering Buddhist texts into English. He and Jinorasa translated from Tibetan Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra (Introduction to the Deeds of the Bodhisattva), and he is also said to have worked with a British Roman Catholic nun to translate from Tibetan Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika (Commentary on Valid Knowledge). This important text was an improbable choice: a notoriously difficult and technical work on logic and epistemology, it is still not yet translated in its entirety into English almost a century later. How exactly Gendun Chopel grappled with these works will remain unknown, for neither translation has survived.
Attempting difficult translations from the start, Gendun Chopel’s English seems to have improved quickly. In 1936, an American seeker named Theos Bernard met Gendun Chopel in Darjeeling and was sufficiently impressed to invite him to be the lama-in-residence at Tibetland, a center that Bernard planned to build in Santa Barbara, California. Gendun Chopel was ready to make the voyage in 1941 but was prevented by the outbreak of war. (Bernard would be murdered in 1947, while trying to return to Tibet.) With his plans to travel to America thwarted, Gendun Chopel accepted an invitation from George Roerich, a Russian scholar and son of the famous artist Nicholas Roerich, to assist him with the translation into English of a fifteenth-century history of Tibetan Buddhism called Deb ther sngon po (the Blue Annals). In the introduction to the 1275-page translation published in 1949, Roerich writes, “It has been a source of much satisfaction to me that I was able to discuss the entire translation with the Rev. dGe-’dun Chos-’phel, the well-known Tibetan scholar, and I gratefully acknowledge here his very helpful guidance.” Gendun Chopel’s name does not appear on the title page, although he surely did much more than discuss the translation, since this lengthy and difficult text was filled with personal and place names that no European of the time would have been able to decipher. A close friend would later report that a bitter stanza in one of Gendun Chopel’s poems refers to Roerich:
The talents of a humble scholar, seeking only knowledge
Are crushed by the tyranny of a fool, bent by the weight of his wealth.
The proper order is upside down.
How sad, the lion made servant to the dog.
Gendun Chopel seems to have had more satisfying English experiences in Kolkata, where he came to know fellow Buddhists at the Maha Bodhi Society, founded in 1891 by Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933), a Sri Lankan activist who sought to restore the four holy sites of Buddhist India to Buddhist control. One of the society’s strategies was to promote international pilgrimage to the sites by releasing vernacular travel guides; Gendun Chopel’s Tibetan-language guide was published by the society and his translation of the Dhammapada from Pali into Tibetan was published by the Anagarika Dharmapala Trust. The society also had its own English-language monthly magazine, The Maha-Bodhi, where five essays and four poems by Gendun Chopel appeared. Comparing the English of these works with his surviving letters from the period, it seems that he had substantial editorial assistance. Still, his references to Western writers such as Darwin and his use of English-language histories of India and China both suggest that he read English well.
Gendun Chopel’s final English translation would play a role—at least in his own telling—in his sad fate. In the years before the Second World War, Sir Charles Bell, a former British political officer to Sikkim, wrote Portrait of the Dalai Lama, a life of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died in 1933. To assist Bell in his research, the Maharaja of Sikkim provided him with English translations of portions of the Dalai Lama’s lengthy Tibetan-language biography. In January 1946, not long after his return to Tibet, Gendun Chopel met Heinrich Harrer—of Seven Years in Tibet fame—at a party in Lhasa. Harrer writes in his diary that Gendun Chopel told him that “he translated for money the book about the last [Dalai] Lama for Bell.” In a diary entry one month later, Harrer reports that Gendun Chopel has been arrested and flogged. After his release from the prison at the foot of the Potala, the Dalai Lama’s palace, Gendun Chopel told a friend:
When I went to British [India], I translated a book [into English]. It was a very good translation. At that time, because they knew that my English was very good, the British government repeatedly asked me to stay, saying they would give me a big salary. Because I did not stay, from that point, the British developed a strong dislike for me. Richardson [Hugh Richardson, a diplomat in Lhasa] is British. When he was asking me questions earlier, I was certain that as soon as he saw me he did not like me. Based on that, he talked to Kashopa and Surkhang [two prominent government ministers]. Kashopa and Surkhang talked to the Kashak [the cabinet]. They made strange charges against me and I was arrested.
Although the reason for Gendun Chopel’s arrest remains a topic of debate among scholars of Tibet, there is little doubt that his time in prison led to his early death at age forty-seven. A man who was born in the year that His Majesty’s Army marched into Tibet died in the year that the Peoples’ Liberation Army marched through the streets of Lhasa. At the time of his death, he was writing a history of the Tibetan Empire. In his Indian travel journal, he had written:
The naked truth, terrifying to behold,
Is not to be covered with robes of self-deception.
This is the first vow of the scholar.
Please keep it though it costs you your life.
It cost him his.
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Gendun Chopel’s works are known and read in the anglophone world because of the work of English-speaking translators, including members of what he deemed “the race of golden-haired monkeys,” those pitiless and greedy deceivers who “show the crooked path to honest humans.” I am one of those translators, having produced four volumes of translations of his writings. The first was his posthumously published and controversial work on Buddhist philosophy, Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan, which I called The Madman’s Middle Way. What drew me to this treatise was not the author but the content, for it offers a trenchant critique of the technical Buddhist philosophy that had been the focus of my graduate training. Still, his prose was powerful enough to lead me to his poetry, which I compiled and translated in a bilingual edition—Tibetan and English on facing pages—called In the Forest of Faded Wisdom. For the two other volumes, I collaborated with the eminent Tibetan scholar Thupten Jinpa, who, like Gendun Chopel, is a former Buddhist monk. Together we translated Gtam rgyud gser gyi thang ma (Grains of Gold), his most respected work among Tibetans, as well as the long erotic poem ’Dod pa’i bstan bcos that we called The Passion Book (certainly his most notorious work).
What would Gendun Chopel thought of having his works translated by a golden-haired monkey? The fact that I am an American, like Theos Bernard, and not British, like Hugh Richardson, would likely be in my favor. And, unlike George Roerich, I have shared the title page of my translations with my Tibetan friend, thus avoiding Gendun Chopel’s contempt. Given his appreciation of the English language (if not the English), I hope he would be pleased.
Gendun Chopel often lamented his fate as a master without disciples, as a teacher without students, as someone deeply learned in a culture that exalts learning and yet unrecognized by his compatriots. Describing his life, he wrote:
In my youth, I did not take a delightful bride;
In old age, I did not amass the needed wealth.
That the life of this beggar ends with his pen,
This is what makes me feel so sad.
Perhaps dying with pen in hand is the fate of the poet, the essayist, the translator. Still, the patterns on the page—what Nabokov called “decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits”—seem somehow to live on. In the case of Gendun Chopel, his manuscripts, which were often written in his cursive, survived the devastation of Tibet: invasion, rebellion, and Cultural Revolution. The three volumes that were published in 1990—not in exile but in Tibet—revived the memory of a writer who feared he would be forgotten. Today, the annual prize in Tibetan letters bestowed by the Dalai Lama is called the Gendun Chopel Prize. In Lhasa, there is the Gendun Chopel Artists’ Guild. And in the United States, there is the Gendun Chopel Professorship. As we approach the seventieth anniversary of his death, we remain inspired by his story and his words, allowing us to understand how important it is to translate the translator.
