As a result, you've got genealogies of languages, script, nations, queens and kings, religious structures of the Hindu and/or Muslim and/or Buddhist and/or mixed and matched and foundered others, all working together to contextualize Chöphel's Buddhism within that great beast of time of Where It Came From and How Did It Get There and Why Is It Here And Not There and How Has It Thrived And Died and Survived. The main gist of it is, instead of the usual two whetstones of European goes to non-Europa and non-European immigrates to Europa, we've got this (ex?) Buddhist monk of a Tibetan who found the scriptures of his homeland a bit lacking and decided to go to the Buddha homeland of India to remedy such in any manner of epistemology he saw fit. Although this seems to be the doorway to decline, there is nothing I can do about it.In terms of what I have read, I'd smash The Discovery of India and Epitaph of a Small Winner and whatever random articles of theological debate I've imbibed over the years together and set it all down in late 1930's Tibet/India/Sri Lanka/South Asia in general (Chöphel may have gotten even further than that but I'm not the mind to track it down right now). If something that is easy is explained in a way that makes it difficult, people become terrified and take it as a mark of great learning. Alas! Such is the nature of reality that if you explain something difficult to fools in a way that makes it clear, they are unhappy and despise you for it. I have a hunch, though, that neither of these reckon themselves in the nuances of five or more religions, languages, and the empires of the past three millenia, so this work would have them beat in that respect. The easiest way to confirm this as fact is to ask the simple question of, what is this, exactly? Religious philosophy? Buddhist ethnography? Reconciliation of modern science and spiritual principle? Extensive critique of thousands of years of ideological inheritance? A journey to the holy land for purposes of theological cross reference and a great deal of shaking one's head at dogma, obfuscating priests, and massacres committed in the name of faith? There have been many pilgrims in the annals of the travel records, many ideologues in the pages of our books, and perhaps it is lack of reading experience that causes me to not immediately leap from this to the likes of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and A Time of Gifts. The term translated as "the in-between" is the Tibetan term bardo, made famous in the West by the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead in describing the borderland between one lifetime and the next.I said to myself when I first saw this that it was a wondrous piece of work, and now that I've finished I'll say it again. Gendun Chopel takes a certain pride in investigating what lies between God and Mammon, those topics that neither the pious nor the pecuniary pursue. Exploring a wide range of cultures and religions central to the history of the region, Gendun Chopel is eager to describe all the new knowledge he gathered in his travels to his Buddhist audience in Tibet.Īt once the account of the experiences of a tragic figure in Tibetan history and the work of an extraordinary scholar, Grains of Gold is an accessible, compelling work animated by a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present. He is also sharply, often humorously critical of the Tibetan love of the fantastic, bursting one myth after another and finding fault with the accounts of earlier Tibetan pilgrims. Gendun Chopel describes the world he discovered in South Asia, from the ruins of the sacred sites of Buddhism to the Sanskrit classics he learned to read in the original. Now available for the first time in English, Grains of Gold is a unique compendium of South Asian and Tibetan culture that combines travelogue, drawings, history, and ethnography. Yet he considered that manuscript, which he titled Grains of Gold, to be his life’s work, one to delight his compatriots with tales of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, while alerting them to the wonders and dangers of the strikingly modern land abutting Tibet’s southern border, the British colony of India. Gendun Chopel was a prolific writer during his short life. He emerged from prison three years later a broken man and died soon after. But he did not receive the welcome he he was arrested by the government of the regent of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka. In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel (1903–51) sent a large manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in the northeastern corner of Tibet.
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