The madman's middle way : reflections on reality of the Tibetan monk Gendun Chopel PDF
Preview The madman's middle way : reflections on reality of the Tibetan monk Gendun Chopel
THE MADMAN's MIDDLE WAY BUDDHISM AND MODERNITY A series edited by DonaldS. Lopez Jr. DONALDS. LOPEZ JR. REFLECTIONS ON REALITY 0 F THE TIBETAN MONK GENDUN CHOPEL THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO AND LONDON DonaldS. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism; Curators of the Buddha: The Study ofB uddhism under Colonialism; and PrisonersofShangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. He is editor of the series Buddhism and Modernity. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 o8 07 o6 2 3 4 5 ISBN: o-226-49316-4 (cloth} The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Institute for the Study of Buddhist Traditions at the University of Michigan toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lopez, Donald S., 1952- The madman's middle way: reflections on reality of the Tibetan monk Gendun Chopel/ DonaldS. Lopez, Jr. p. em- (Buddhism and modernity) Includes English translation of Tibetan text. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-226-49316-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Dge-'dun-chos-'phel, A-mdo, 1905?-1951? Dbu ma'i zab guad sfiiti por dril ba'i legs bSad klu sgrub dgofts rgyan. 2. Madhyamika (Buddhism}. I. Dge-'dun-chos-'phel, A-mdo, 1905?- 1951? Dbu ma'i zab gnad sfiift por dril ba'i legs bsad klu sgrub dgofts rgyan. English. II. Title. III. Series. BQ7455.D483L67 2006 2005011087 @ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. PREFACE vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii I THE LIFE 1 ,Z T H E T EX T 47 J THE COMMENTARY 121 j THE AUTHOR 220 J THE CRITICS 230 ~THE QUESTION OF MODERNITY 245 INDEX OF PROPER NAMES 255 v In January 1979, I was visiting Sarnath in northern India, the site of the Buddha's first teaching, the place where he first "turned the wheel of the dharma:' The Buddha is said to have encountered his five fellow ascetics in the Deer Park at Sarnath, and to have taught them the four noble truths. Today the area is still a park, with the ruins of a large stupa and the remnants of a monastery. There was a dense morning fog, and as I walked into the park the huge stupa loomed suddenly out of the mist. The fog began to burn off after several clockwise circumambulations of the stupa, and the monastery came into view. There is archaeological evidence of a monastery from the third century BCE; the visible ruins date for the most part from the twelfth century. As I walked through the ruins, I stopped in front of what appeared to be the remains of a door, framed in white stone, with the lintel missing. A young Tibetan monk was standing nearby, and we exchanged greetings. He then said, in Tibetan, "This is the place where the Buddha stood when he first turned the wheel of the dharma:' I was skeptical; although I knew little about the archaeological record, I was unaware of any identification of the precise site of the first teaching, but I politely responded with the Tibetan equivalent of"Oh, really?" The monk said, "Yes, Dge 'dun chos 'phel said so:' I was vaguely aware of who Dge 'dun chos 'phel was. In my graduate courses at the University of Virginia, Jeffrey Hopkins once mentioned that Dge 'dun chos 'phel had written that if the pure lands had been designed by the Tibetans, they would have been awash in buttered tea. I knew that Dge 'dun chos 'phel had written a sex manual. I knew that he had spent some time in India in the first half of the twentieth century. And I knew that he had written a book on Madhyamaka philosophy entitled Adornmentf or Nagarjuna's Thought (Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan), but I knew little more about it than its title. I took a photograph of the door, thanked the monk, and continued on my way. vii PREFACE ,...,___ viii I was in India at that time on a Fulbright fellowship, doing dissertation re- search on a school of Madhyamaka philosophy, especially as it was understood in the Dge lugs sect of Tibetan Buddhism. I was reading two famous doxogra- phies of the school, one from the seventeenth century, one from the eighteenth, with Tibetan monks residing in the refugee Dge lugs monasteries in southern India. I thought little about Dge 'dun chos 'phel for the next decade as I published my dissertation and then wrote a book about the Heart Sutra. In 1985, Heather Stoddard published a biography of Dge 'dun chos 'phel in France entitled Le Mendiant de l'Amdo. In a review essay published in 1989 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, David Seyfort Ruegg, the doyen of Madhyamaka studies, wrote, A judgement as to whetller GCh was a powerful and penetrating thinker or sinlply a gifted scholastic will have to await a detailed study of his contro- versial study on the Madhyamaka compiled by his disciple Zla ba bzang po, tlle above mentioned Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan . ... An assessment of tllis work will be no easy undertaking because it will be necessary to determine what belongs in this text to GCh hinlself and what might have been added by his disciple and editor (t lle compiler Zla ba bzang po ), because of the inherent difficulty of such a work tllat exploits the resources of Tibetan Madhyamika dialectics, because of tlle extensive Indo-Tibetan philosophical background tllat it presupposes, and because of the critical responses and refutations it has already called forth. An evaluation of tllis work will no doubt be of some inlportance for our understanding of tlle r6le of Middle Way philosophy in modern tinles.' This description led me to want to study and perhaps translate the text. My friend Elizabeth Napper kindly gave me her copy, and I began to read it. I made references to the text in an article for Professor Ruegg's Festschrift, where I con- sidered the views of Tsong kha pa, famous "founder" of the Dge lugs sect, and Dge 'dun chos 'phel on the vexed question of whether the Madhyamaka holds any philosophical position. I became intrigued by the text; the author clearly knew the Dge lugs scholastic tradition very well, but wrote about it in a way I had never encountered, either in substance or in style. It lacks the ploddingly systematic structure of most Tibetan scholastic literature ("With regard to the 1. D. Seyfort Ruegg, "A Tibetan's Odyssey: A Review Article," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1989): 309. PREFACE ,...,___ ix first topic, there are three parts, the first of which has five sections"). Instead, upon initial reading, it had very much the sense of being disconnected state- ments, perhaps uttered over a number of sessions, jumping from one topic to another without warning. Indeed, its style reminded me more of the Philosoph- ical Investigations than of any Buddhist text I had read. Adding to the difficulty of the work, both for the reader and the translator, is that it assumes a complete knowledge ofDge lugs scholastic vocabulary, especially in the areas of pramiit}a and madhyamaka, as well as the logical choreography of the debating courtyard. During my years at the University of Virginia, I had been trained to read Dge lugs scholastic philosophy, but had for the most part lost interest in it during the decade after I earned my degree there. Dge 'dun chos 'phel's text seemed to provide an opportunity for me to once again make use of the training I had received in Dge lugs scholasticism, albeit to translate a text that mocked that scholasticism. It seemed like the perfect project. I received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1992 and completed a translation of the text over the next year. In conversations with friends and colleagues in Tibetan Buddhist studies, I learned that a number of people, both in Europe and the United States, had set out to translate the text, but had given up for one reason or another. They said it was difficult, that it was cryptic in places, that whether Dge 'dun chos 'phel even wrote it was in dispute. All these things were quite true; the text was replete with mind-bending philosophical points, and I was uncertain about numerous points in my translation. It was also an awkward size: the translation was about one hundred pages in typescript, too long for an article, too short for a book. And then there were the refutations. Two prominent Dge lugs scholars had written detailed refutations of the text, each far longer than the text itself. These works were models of high Dge lugs scholasticism, exactly the kind ofliterature I was hoping to put behind me with the translation. And so my mind turned to other things, and to other works in the oeuvre of this most fascinating figure, especially his travel journals and his poetry (both of which are cited in chapter 1). In 2003, the centennial ofDge 'dun chos 'phel's birth, I received another fellowship and returned to the project in earnest. In November of that year, I was invited to participate in a conference to celebrate his life, which brought together scholars from India, Tibet, Europe, and Amer- ica as well as a number of Tibetans who had actually known him. It was a fascinating and inspiring event, held in the stylish premises of the Latse Con- temporary Tibetan Cultural Library in New York. There were translators for English and Tibetan, as well as for the dialect ofDge 'dun chos 'phel's beloved
The list of books you might like
