Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler

By Gendun Chopel, Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez

“Translated with grace and precision . . . gives us a rare glimpse of how Asian religion and life appeared from the perspective of the Tibetan plateau.” —Janet Gyatso, Harvard University

In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel sent a manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in Tibet. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka. But he did not receive the welcome he imagined: he was arrested by the government of the regent of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason. He emerged from prison three years later a broken man and died soon after. Gendun Chopel was a prolific writer, yet he considered that manuscript, to be his life’s work, one to delight his compatriots with tales of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, 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. 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. 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. The work of an extraordinary scholar, Grains of Gold is a compelling work animated by a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present.

“The magnum opus of arguably the single most brilliant Tibetan scholar of the twentieth century.” —Lauran Hartley, Columbia University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9780226092027

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

All humans born in this world are given, through their past karma, a task that is suited for them. This [book] seems to be the humble task entrusted to me. Thus, wandering through the realms, I have expended my human life on learning. Its fruit has taken the form of a book.

Gendun Chopel, 1941

Aluvihāra, sandy monastery, located in the highlands of Sri Lanka, holds a special place in Buddhist history. According to the traditional chronicles, it was there that the words of the Buddha, preserved for centuries only in the memories of monks, were for the first time committed to writing in the final decades before the Common Era. Two millennia later, in that same monastery, a less famous task of writing was completed. In this case, the purpose was not to preserve something old but to compose something new.

In 1941, a young destitute Tibetan, a former monk who had given up his vows, prepared a package. In it, he placed his life’s work, a manuscript of more than five hundred pages written over the previous seven years, together with hundreds of watercolors that he had painted, intended as illustrations for the book he had composed. A stranger in a strange land, he was the only Tibetan living in Sri Lanka and so could not entrust the package to a compatriot. Instead, he sent it off to his homeland in the far northeastern corner of Tibet, over three thousand miles away. Carried by ship, train, and yak, the package crossed seas, mountains, and deserts to arrive at its destination. He called the book Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler.

The package reached its destination but his words remained unread. In 1946, the author returned to Tibet and was promptly thrown into prison for three years. He died in 1951. In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India, never to return. For a decade beginning in 1967, Tibet, like China, was ravaged by the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in 1990, during a brief relaxation of Chinese restrictions on Tibetan literature, Grains of Gold was published in its entirety for the first time, fifty years after its composition. It was published without its illustrations; during the Cultural Revolution, all but twenty-seven of some two hundred watercolors had been lost. It is recognized today as perhaps the greatest work of Tibetan letters of the twentieth century. It is translated here for the first time.

Who was Gendun Chopel and why did he write this book? Neither question is easy to answer. Indeed, Grains of Gold deserves an entire monograph to explore its origins, its legacies, and its myriad fascinations. This introduction can only offer a hint of these.

Gendun Chopel was born in Amdo (modern Qinghai Province) in 1903, not far from the birthplace of Tsong kha pa (1357–1419), the famous founder of the Geluk, the newest of the four major sects of Tibetan Buddhism. His father was a māntrika, a priest and practitioner of the Nyingma or ancient sect of Tibetan Buddhism, which traces its roots to the mythically potent but historically problematic visit to Tibet by the Indian tantric yogin Padmasambhava in the late eighth century. The theme of the new and the old, the modern and the ancient, would appear again and again throughout Gendun Chopel’s life.

Gendun Chopel was something of a child prodigy and was identified as an incarnate lama (tulku) of the Nyingma sect as a young boy. Not long after his father’s death, he entered the local Geluk monastery, before moving in 1920 to the great regional monastery of Labrang Tashi Khyil, where he excelled in the formal debates that are so central to the monastic curriculum. In the philosophical hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, the tenets of the Indian Buddhist schools are considered superior to those of the non-Buddhist Indian schools of Hinduism and Jainism. In the debating courtyard, Gendun Chopel became famous, even notorious, for his ability to hold and defend non-Buddhist positions, defeating monks who held Buddhist positions. He was eventually invited to leave the monastery.

In 1927, he left his home region of Amdo, never to return. Accompanied by an uncle and a cousin, he set off on the four-month trek to the capital of Tibet, Lhasa, where he enrolled at Drepung, the largest monastery in the world, having over ten thousand monks. Again he excelled in debate, but fell into shouting matches with his teacher, the eminent scholar and fellow native of Amdo, Sherap Gyatso (1884–1968), who eventually refused to call him by name, addressing him only as madman. During his time in Lhasa, Gendun Chopel seems to have supported himself as a painter, attracting the attention of Phabongkha Rinpoché (1878–1941), the most powerful Geluk lama of the day. It was during this period that he became friends with Trijang Rinpoché (1900–1981), with whom he shared a love of poetry. Trijang Rinpoché would go on to become the tutor of the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

In 1934, the distinguished Indian scholar Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963) made his second trip to Tibet in search of Sanskrit manuscripts. He came to Lhasa seeking a Tibetan to assist him in gaining access to the libraries of the monasteries and temples he wished to visit. Sherap Gyatso recommended Gendun Chopel. By this time, Gendun Chopel had successfully completed the scholastic curriculum at Drepung and was waiting to take the examinations for the geshé degree, the highest academic degree of the Geluk tradition. Rather than take the examinations, he decided to accompany Rahul Sankrityayan in his search for Sanskrit manuscripts in the monasteries of southern Tibet. At the conclusion of their expedition, Sankrityayan invited Gendun Chopel to return with him to India, where he would spend the next twelve years.

In many ways, Grains of Gold is the most important product of those years, but it was not the only one. Gendun Chopel traveled extensively, often alone, throughout South Asia; he studied Sanskrit, Pāli, and English, gaining considerable facility in each. He translated selections from the Sanskrit play Śakuntalā and several chapters of both the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhagavad Gītā from Sanskrit into Tibetan. He translated the Dhammapada from Pāli into Tibetan and is said to have translated Dharmakīrti’s famous work on Buddhist logic, the Pramāṇavārttika, as well as Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, both from Sanskrit into English, although these translations are not extant. His extensive knowledge of Tibetan literature brought him to the attention of European scholars working in India. He assisted the Russian Tibetologist George Roerich (1902–60) in the translation of an important fifteenth-century history of Tibetan Buddhism, The Blue Annals (Deb ther sngon po), a work that is cited repeatedly in Grains of Gold. He helped the French scholar Jacques Bacot (1877–1965) decipher several Dunhuang manuscripts on the Tibetan dynastic period. He also read English translations of Tang historical records. The Dunhuang and Tang materials eventually served as the basis for his unfinished history of early Tibet, the White Annals (Deb ther dkar po). He visited and made studies of most of the important Buddhist archaeological sites in India, publishing Guidebook for Travel to the Holy Places of India (Rgya gar gyi gnas chen khag la ’grod pa’i lam yig), a pilgrimage guide that is still used today. And he studied Sanskrit erotica and frequented Calcutta brothels, producing his famous sex manual, written in verse, the Treatise on Passion (’Dod pa’i bstan bcos).

Gendun Chopel spent the last two years of his travel abroad, 1944 and 1945, in West Bengal and Sikkim, where he became involved in discussions with a small group of Tibetans who would become the ill-fated Tibetan Progressive Party, which sought democratic reforms in Tibet. Gendun Chopel designed its logo, which showed a sickle and a loom against a snowy peak.

After twelve years of travel, Gendun Chopel returned to Tibet in 1946. He did not receive the welcome he expected. In Lhasa in late July, the government placed him under arrest, informing him only that charges had been brought against him for distributing counterfeit currency. He maintained his innocence throughout his interrogation, which included flogging, but he was incarcerated, eventually in the prison at the foot of the Potala, the palace of the young fourteenth Dalai Lama.

He was released in 1949, just a year before the Chinese invasion. By most accounts, he emerged from prison a broken man and he became increasingly addicted to alcohol and opium. His writings had been confiscated and he showed no interest in reviving his many projects, although he dictated to a disciple his thoughts on Madhyamaka philosophy. This would be published posthumously as his controversial Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought (Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan), a work critical of certain Geluk interpretations of Madhyamaka philosophy, printed on paper provided by a Nyingma lama. On September 9, 1951, too weak to stand, he was taken to the window to watch the troops of the People’s Liberation Army march into Lhasa. Gendun Chopel died a few weeks later on October 14, 1951, at the age of forty-eight.

Often neglected and sometimes abused by his compatriots during his short life, Gendun Chopel has become a Tibetan culture hero since his death—venerated both in Tibet and in the Tibetan exile community—a visionary scholar, poet, and painter who has been heeded too late. His collected works have been published at least five times since 1990. Schools are named after him in his native Amdo, and scholarly papers are published in Tibetan on his life and thought. The modern art gallery in Lhasa is called the Gendun Chopel Artists’ Guild.

Although completed when he was only thirty-seven years old, he considered Grains of Gold to be his life’s work. At the beginning and end of this long book, Gendun Chopel explains his motivation for writing it. In the first chapter, he notes the supreme importance of India for Tibet—its history, culture, and religion—and for the Tibetan imagination. He writes:

Here in our country, due to the example set by the bodhisattva kings and ministers, everyone—the eminent, the lowly, and those in between—has immeasurable faith, affection, and respect for India, this land of the noble ones, the special land from which the teachings of the Conqueror came to Tibet. Because of this, everything we do with our body, our speech, and our mind—the manner in which our scholars express their analysis, our style of composition, our clothing, our religious rituals—all of these are permeated by Indian influence as a sesame seed is permeated by its oil, so much so that when it is necessary to provide a metaphor in a poem, only the names of Indian rivers, mountains, and flowers are suitable.

Yet he notes that, in part because of the reverence for all things Indian, many mistakes and exaggerations about India had become accepted as facts in Tibet. Based on what he saw and learned in his travels, he wants to describe India, both past and present, as accurately as possible.

Another statement near the end, in the seventeenth and final chapter of this long book, is more telling:

Because of the power of our own prejudices, I was not keen to discuss the origins of the Muslims and their histories. However, after the gradual demise of the [Buddha’s] teaching, we had no familiarity with what had happened in India [from then] up to the present. In particular, nothing of the history of India of the past seven hundred years seemed to have been heard in Tibet. Therefore, I strongly motivated myself and wrote about it. In any case, the histories and chronologies prepared [by the Muslims] have extremely reliable sources. In contrast, when it comes to the histories of the upholders of the Buddhist teachings, it is as if they have utterly vanished in India.

Although Tibet was surrounded by Buddhist cultures for centuries, according to traditional histories the first contacts did not occur until the seventh century, when the king Songtsen Gampo sent a delegation to India to learn Sanskrit and devise a script for the Tibetan language, which, at least according to legend, did not have an alphabet. The script, modeled (as Gendun Chopel shows) on a Gupta period form of devanāgarī, was duly invented, and a grammar, based on the eight cases of Sanskrit, was devised. This script was invented, according to tradition, to provide the medium for the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan, a process that began in earnest in the next century and continued into the thirteenth century, by which time Tibet possessed the largest translated corpus of Indian Buddhist literature, larger than that translated into Chinese. This prodigious collection was made possible by the presence of Indian masters, the paṇḍitas, who made their way to Tibet and by Tibetan scholars who made their way to India, especially during the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. The sometimes harrowing accounts of Tibetan pilgrims in their travels across the Himalayas and to the Indian plains, braving bandits, poisonous snakes, and oppressive heat, portray India as a place of both sanctity and danger: the site of Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and passage into nirvāṇa, but also a strange and perilous land.

Tibetan pilgrimage to India continued until much of northern India came under Muslim control. The great Kashmiri paṇḍita Śākyaśrībhadra arrived in Tibet in 1204; the last Tibetan pilgrim to leave a detailed account of his travels to central India, Chak Lotsawa, went to Bihar in 1234. Nepal and the Swat Valley of what is today northern Pakistan were visited by Tibetan pilgrims in subsequent centuries, and in 1426 the Bengali tantric master Vanaratna visited Tibet. In 1752 a Tibetan pilgrim traveled to Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Between 1771 and 1777 the third Paṇchen Lama dispatched four missions to India. A Bhutanese monk and government official spent three years in Calcutta during the same period. After that, although commerce continued between India and Tibet, cultural exchange, or at least high cultural exchange, largely stopped and was curtailed even further after 1792, when the Qing emperor declared Tibet closed following Chinese military intervention in repelling Nepalese incursions into western Tibet. Within Tibet, the mystique of India only increased over the centuries, revered as the source of Tibet’s written language, Tibet’s religion, and much of Tibetan culture. India was called the land of the noble ones (’phags yul, a translation of the Sanskrit āryāvarta).

With the decline and fall of the Qing, Tibetan travel to India became easier, although few made extensive visits or left accounts of their travels. The Paṇchen Lama spent six weeks in India in the winter of 1905–6. The thirteenth Dalai Lama spent 1910–12 in India but remained for the most part in the Himalayan border region, making a one-month pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy sites in February 1911. But among the many Tibetan travelers to India over the past five hundred years, none spent as long a period of time, learned the languages as well, or left such a detailed account as Gendun Chopel. One of the purposes in writing Grains of Gold was to bring his compatriots up to date. But it does much more.

It is the work of an extraordinary scholar. In his treatment of a remarkable range of topics, both sacred and profane—from the date of the historical Buddha to the correct name of the jujube—Gendun Chopel demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the vast corpus of Tibetan literature. He cites with ease from a wide assortment of classical texts, from sūtras both famous and obscure, to the works of celebrated Indian authors, both Buddhist and Hindu, such as Āryadeva, Kālidāsa, and Daṇḍin, to works of such great Tibetan authors as Sakya Paṇḍita, Butön, and Tsong kha pa, to Tibet’s many histories and chronicles. To read Grains of Gold is to observe the mind of a scholar at home in vast fields of learning, from philosophy to linguistics, from poetics to iconography, from the monastic code to tantric practice, from mythology to history.

It is not, however, only a work of antiquarian scholarship. During his time in South Asia, Gendun Chopel discovered a new old world. He saw the ruins of the sacred sites of Buddhism. He learned to read the Sanskrit classics in the original. He was exposed to all manner of recent research on the history of India. This caused him not only to understand the present in ways unlike his compatriots but to reimagine the past as well, a past that encompassed the entire cultural inheritance from India to Tibet.

Throughout Grains of Gold, Gendun Chopel is sharply, and often humorously, critical of the Tibetan love of the fantastic. With so little contact with India for so many centuries, all manner of misinformation, even about the distance from Gayā to Bodh Gayā, had crept into Tibetan literature: what was in fact a seven-mile walk had become a five-month journey. Over the course of the seventeen chapters, he bursts one myth after another—We need not take so seriously this bad tradition that excites all the fools—while beseeching his readers not to be angry with him for doing so. He finds, for example, that the names of the four fantastic ocean continents that surround the axis mundi Mount Meru in the traditional Buddhist cosmology are in fact the names of more mundane regions of India.

Gendun Chopel clearly saw himself as a latter-day pilgrim, traveling to the holy places of India as his fellow Tibetans had done almost a millennium before. He knows their accounts well and mentions them often. Yet visiting the same places that they visited, he often finds fault with their accounts, humorously attributing the incredible things they describe to their advanced tantric vision. The travelers he admires most, and the ones he relies on with the greatest confidence, are not Tibetan but Chinese: Faxian, who traveled through South and Southeast Asia from 399 to 412; Xuanzang, who traveled through Central Asia and India from 629 to 645; and Yijing, who spent twenty-five years traveling in South and Southeast Asia, finally returning to China in 695. Gendun Chopel likely read their accounts in English translation. Of them, he says:

When one encounters the guides to India of these three earlier and later Chinese monks, it makes one wonder if they returned from India just yesterday. Their detail and accuracy are beyond measure. As for us, not only is our own country closer to India but, also, so many Tibetan scholars and adepts went there; in brief, among the foreign countries, there should be none more knowledgeable about India than Tibet. Yet, apart from Chak Lotsāwa’s description of Bodh Gayā, no Tibetan seems to have provided such detailed accounts. Even those who wrote in the later times, when they would describe the size of a region or the measurements of a stūpa, perhaps because of the way things appear to the eyes of us who are from a smaller place, their descriptions are much too large. Yet when one looks at ruins and so forth today, the measurements given by the Chinese monks, in cang and li, remain just as they described them.

In some ways, Grains of Gold is a twentieth-century version of their accounts; he visits many of the same sights and reports what he finds.

Like the Chinese pilgrims, Gendun Chopel studied Sanskrit, and Sanskrit plays a key role in Grains of Gold. For the Tibetan scholar, Sanskrit is the literary language par excellence. As he says in the opening pages, a skilled Tibetan poet alludes to Indian, rather than Tibetan, mountains and rivers. The culture heroes most esteemed in Tibetan history are the lotsāwas, the translators, those who made the long journey to India to learn Sanskrit so that they could translate the treasury of Buddhist teachings in the sūtras, śāstras, and tantras into Tibetan. Gendun Chopel places himself in that lineage. As he wrote in the colophon to his translation of the Dhammapada:

They say that today there is in Magadha

After a gap of eight hundred years in India,

A late-coming translator [from Tibet]

Who actually reads the Sanskrit treatises.

In the eight hundred years since the great lotsāwas, knowledge of Sanskrit had declined in Tibet, resulting in a Tibetanized Sanskrit. Having now studied Sanskrit with a genuine Indian paṇḍita, Gendun Chopel mocks this Sanskrit repeatedly. As he writes in another poem:

From Khagya to Gengya [two places in Amdo] is far.

The road from Ü to Amdo is very long.

From Magadha to Tibet is most distant.

From actual Sanskrit to Tibetanized Sanskrit is farther than that.

Gendun Chopel, however, had learned Sanskrit well and wished to display that knowledge. Grains of Gold contains dozens of passages in transliterated Sanskrit as well as a number of passages in his own hand in devanāgarī and Brāhmī scripts. In part, this is a traditional Tibetan homage to Sanskrit belles lettres. But it also has an element of self-display. Given the poor state of Sanskrit knowledge in Tibet that he bemoans, few of his readers could have made sense of all of the Sanskrit in Grains of Gold. It serves not so much as something to be comprehended by his Tibetan readers but instead as something to be acknowledged, a seal of authenticity for all that he has to say. His readers are reading the words of a paṇḍita.

Yet his study of Sanskrit led him to ponder larger questions about language. Throughout his life, he remained proud of his Amdo heritage and its language. He had studied traditional Tibetan grammar and Sanskrit poetics in his youth. Once in South Asia, he studied Sanskrit, Pāli, and English and must have also learned some regional languages. From his comments in Grains of Gold, it is clear that he also learned some Russian and Burmese. These experiences caused him to think deeply about language. For example, he opens chapter 8 with the observation that there are two principal forms of writing: the pictorial (ancient Egyptian and Chinese) and the alphabetic, arguing that the former is more natural while the latter was specifically designed. Such comparative analysis had never appeared in Tibetan before.

Although the primary focus of the work is South Asia, Gendun Chopel considers a wide range of cultures that played central roles in the cultural and political history of the region. Thus, he devotes extended sections to the Parthian dynasty, which extended into Afghanistan, the emperor Kaniṣka of the Kushan dynasty, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni of the Ghaznavid dynasty of Afghanistan, and the Mughal king Humayun’s capture of Kandahar and Kabul. In addition to extensive discussions of Buddhism and Hinduism, there are long sections on Islam and Sikhism, as well as discussions of the modern Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna and of Madame Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophical Society), all through the lens of Tibetan Buddhism, providing perspectives on these religions not encountered elsewhere.

Grains of Gold is thus clearly much more than the travel journals of Gendun Chopel, as it is so often described. Exactly what else it is is more difficult to say. However, three major themes might be identified. The first is the classical Indian past. As noted above, Tibet has long revered India but generally only from afar. The names of the kingdoms of ancient India were well known to learned Tibetans. Gendun Chopel visited the ruins of many of these sites, recently excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India, and he describes what he finds to his compatriots. The chapter on the Aśokan inscriptions is but one example of this element of the work.

In order to write history—both a history of ancient India and a history of ancient Tibet—Gendun Chopel develops his own historical method, one that was not previously known in Tibet. When writing about India after the thirteenth century, Tibetan historians had to rely on texts that contained all manner of oral traditions and hagiographies, comparing one text to another in an effort to provide an accurate narrative. In chapter 6 of Grains of Gold, Gendun Chopel lays out 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, (e) comparison of what has been translated from the languages of different countries, and (f) comparison, as much as possible, of 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. Therefore, because no such signs and ruins whatsoever can be found for those [kings] who appeared before the birth of the Buddha, when one describes these [events of antiquity], one can rely only on texts, and those texts do not agree with each other.

Here, Gendun Chopel describes what might be called a critical historiography, even a scientific method, one that makes extensive use of the archive and of the archaeological record.

The second theme is the recent Indian past and the modern Indian present. As noted above, since the fall of Indian Buddhism in the thirteenth century, cultural commerce between India and Tibet had been severely curtailed, such that Tibetans knew very little about the events of the subsequent centuries despite their long association with and geographical proximity to India. He seeks to remedy the situation with Grains of Gold, with chapters 11–13 providing a chronological survey of the rise and fall of Hindu and Muslim dynasties, the period of Mughal rule, and the coming of the Europeans. In many ways Grains of Gold is the product of an intellect trained in the classical Tibetan tradition, who seeks to portray the realities of a world—and especially India, the revered land of the noble ones—that had changed in ways beyond the imagination of the Tibetan people.

The third theme is early Tibetan history. The period that Gendun Chopel spent in India (1934–46) was one of strong anticolonial and nationalist sentiment in India; his friend and teacher Rahul Sankrityayan was a prominent leader of the independence movement and was incarcerated by the British. While in India, Gendun Chopel learned of the Dunhuang manuscripts, the oldest records of the Tibetan state, which showed that Tibet had been a great military power of Inner Asia in the seventh and eighth centuries. He writes about life in ancient Tibet in chapter 15 (and subsequently in his unfinished history, The White Annals). It was also while in India that he was able to study the ancient Sanskrit scripts that had served as the basis of the Tibetan alphabet, the topic of chapter 9.

When these three themes are considered together, the purpose, and importance, of Grains of Gold becomes somewhat clearer. It is a work that engages modernity, in its complex forms, more fully than any work in Tibetan literature: not content merely to catalog its many subjects, Grains of Gold enters into conversation with them.

Tibet’s encounter with modernity occurred much later than some other nations of Asia, due in large part to the fact that Tibet never became a European colony. Christian missionaries never became a significant presence, Buddhist monks were not educated in European languages, European educational institutions were not established, the modern printing press was not introduced. Gendun Chopel arrived in India with Tibet’s reverence for India’s classical past but with little knowledge of its colonial present. He quickly adapted, however, learning Sanskrit and English and making immediate use of the fruits of Orientalist scholarship. He also drew on the insights of British excavations of ancient Buddhist sites. He thus developed a kind of modern classicism, using the tools and the methods of modern scholarship to recover and document the Buddhist heritage of India, a heritage that had been largely lost to Tibetans since the thirteenth century. He marveled at the wonders of science and technology, providing Tibet’s first sustained discussion of science in the final chapter of Grains of Gold. And he recoiled at the racism, greed, and mendacity that he saw at the heart of the colonial project. He was the first Tibetan to observe colonialism firsthand over a period of more than a decade, and he described it to his compatriots as a warning.

Yet his relationship to British colonialism is complicated. Despite his disdain for the Europeans, and for the British in particular, Gendun Chopel relies heavily on their scholarship and adopts much of their narrative of the history of India, a narrative that conforms well to his own Buddhist vision of India’s past. In this narrative, Hinduism is largely represented from its classical past, with great works of literature lauded while greedy brahmin priests are disparaged. The truly towering figures of the classical period are Buddhist, including the Buddha himself and the great ecumenical emperor Aśoka (304–232 BCE). Buddhism and classical Hinduism are destroyed by the Muslims, whom Gendun Chopel often refers to as kla klo, barbarians, the Tibetan equivalent of mleccha, a term used in classical Indian sources to refer to the Muslims. Making use of the accounts of the Chinese pilgrims, he describes at great length Nālandā, for Tibetans the most revered of the many monasteries of India, and then meditates movingly on what remains after its destruction at the hands of the Muslims. In chapters 12 and 13, the atrocities of various Muslim rulers are recounted in gruesome detail. The brutality is broken briefly by the benign rule of Akbar, ecumenical like Aśoka, only to return to tyranny under the iron rule of Aurangzeb. Those whom Gendun Chopel lauds for their bravery are those who do battle with Muslims: the Rajputs, Śivājī, the Sikhs. This is very much the history of India as told by the British, preservers of India’s classical past, benign rulers who wrested control of the subcontinent from the cruel Mughals. This is a history that Gendun Chopel easily adopts, up to the point of British rule. He also has little good to say about modern Hindus, even writing sarcastically about the sainted Ramakrishna. As he writes, Today, Magadha, the home of our forefathers, is under the control of the Hindus as the wife and the British as the husband; it not a pleasant place and has been made uninspiring.

Even the works that he chose to translate from Sanskrit and Pāli into Tibetan—Śakuntalā, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gītā, and Rāmāyaṇa, certainly classics in their own right—had already found their place in the Orientalist canon, translated into English, in some cases by officers of the East India Company, in the nineteenth century. Although a devotee of the Mahāyāna, Gendun Chopel even expresses at least a literary preference for the Hīnayāna: In general, because all the stories in the Hīnayāna [scriptures] are narrated in an ordinary way, when the deeds of the Buddha are recounted, they are always quite moving. The majority of what appears in the Mahāyāna sūtras is excessively elaborate. The father of Buddhist studies in Europe, Eugène Burnouf, had expressed an identical sentiment in Paris in 1844. Through this process, Gendun Chopel develops a demythologized view of Buddhism, yet a view that remains profoundly devout.

Grains of Gold is therefore not merely a work of antiquarian history, although it contains much ancient history. It is a highly motivated work, one that seeks to incorporate modernity into the classical Tibetan worldview. Gendun Chopel was witness to what had happened when a traditional culture encountered modernity in the form of colonialism, as India had, and sought a different model for Tibet, a way for Tibet to adapt to modernity without suffering as India had.

In one sense, then, Grains of Gold is a tragic work, the product of years of study and privation, written with such care by Gendun Chopel for his compatriots, sent by sea with a certain urgency in 1941 from Sri Lanka to a distant destination in Tibet, intended to delight its readers with stories of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, and to alert its readers of the wonders and dangers of a most modern present abutting Tibet’s southern border. Yet it would remain unread for fifty years, long after its author was dead. By that time, the modern colonialism and imperialism that Gendun Chopel described, and condemned, had already struck Tibet. Grains of Gold is thus the product of a tragic figure in Tibetan history, whose life spanned Tibet’s brutal encounter with modernity. He was born in 1903, a year before the British invasion of 1904. He died in 1951, as the People’s Liberation Army entered Lhasa. He wrote for a people who would read his work too late. In this sense, it is one of the many markers of the tragedy of Tibet. At the same time, it remains a compelling work, vibrant with a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present.

The Title

In Tibetan, the full title of Gendun Chopel’s book is Rgyal khams rig pas bskor ba’i gtam rgyud gser gyi thang ma. The first part of the title literally means, tales of wandering by one who knows the kingdoms, with the term rgyal khams pa also having the sense of a vagabond. We have chosen to use Irmgard Mengele’s rendering of rgyal khams rig pa, cosmopolitan. The ornamental title, gser gyi thang ma is more difficult. Gser (pronounced ser) means gold. However, the meaning of the word thang ma is less certain, making the precise meaning of the title unclear, especially because Gendun Chopel never mentions it in his text. The term can mean both plain or surface as well as chronicle. However, in his native region of Amdo, in far northeastern Tibet, thang ma refers to the individual grains that are spread flat on the ground to dry after being harvested. Based on this meaning, we have translated this term in the title as Grains of Gold. Although Gendun Chopel never uses the term in the book, there are rhetorical reasons for translating it in this way. Throughout the book, and indeed in many of his writings, Gendun Chopel laments the fact that his work is not taken seriously by his fellow Tibetans. He attributes this neglect in part to the fact that his research focuses on what many would consider minor historical details (rather than deep religious truths) learned through dogged research (rather than revelation), yielding him neither fame nor riches. In a poem that appears in chapter 15, he writes:

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.

Although he was a highly trained scholar of both the Nyingma and Geluk sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and widely and deeply read in the vast literature of all the sects, both major and minor, he was not regarded as a lama and did not write traditional Buddhist treatises. In this sense, what he wrote did not produce the benefits of a traditional Buddhist teaching; it was not a real cause of heaven, that is, an auspicious rebirth, or liberation, the achievement of buddhahood. In both his prose and his poetry, he is also a keen, and cynical, observer of hypocrisy, contemptuous especially of those who, in the guise of Buddhist teachers, gather great wealth for themselves. Often living on the border of poverty in India, he is certainly not such a person. His writing, therefore, also does not serve as a gateway for gold and silver. Instead, Gendun Chopel takes a certain pride in investigating what lies between God and Mammon, those topics that neither the pious nor the pecuniary pursue. 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.

Yet he argues repeatedly in the book that these small things that he has learned are of great value. And thus in the book he spreads these tiny but valuable things—grains of gold—on the ground before the reader. They are grains, suggesting something that is harvested with great labor. They are also grains because the book is filled with all manner of small but fascinating facts, previously unknown in Tibet. They are gold, something precious, but just small individual grains, not the larger nuggets of gold received by the high and the mighty. Thus, in a poem in chapter 8, he writes:

Spread upon the ground, this pauper’s precious treasure,

Gathered by a scholar as he wandered through the realms,

Is no match for the rich man’s golden dharma,

Passed down in whispers from ear to ear.

Chapter Summaries

The titles of the seventeen chapters of Grains of Gold often give little sense of their content. Furthermore, there is an element of stream of consciousness, a very learned consciousness, in Gendun Chopel’s prose, with one topic reminding him of another, as would occur in conversation. Just as he wandered through South Asia over the course of twelve years, he wanders from topic to topic over the course of seventeen chapters. Thus, especially in the longer chapters, the contents sometimes take the form of a series of interconnected excurses. In order to provide the reader with a fuller sense of the contents, we provide a summary of the seventeen chapters here.

Although Grains of Gold is often referred to in English as Gendun Chopel’s travel journals, chapter 1 is the only chapter that fits clearly into that category, and even then, the chapter reveals some literary artifice. It reads as a chronological account of his travels in 1934 with Rahul Sankrityayan to the monasteries of southern Tibet in search of Sanskrit manuscripts, ending with their arrival in India. However, the chapter was clearly written some years later. In 1938, Gendun Chopel returned to Tibet with Sankrityayan on a second expedition, visiting, most notably, the great monastery of Sakya. Although this chapter has received attention from scholars for the list of Sanskrit texts it contains, the chapter begins with an eloquent explanation of why he decided to write the book. The chapter is also important for Gendun Chopel’s criticisms of the way Tibetans have used and abused the precious Sanskrit manuscripts that have lain, sometimes moldering, in their monasteries for centuries.

Chapter 2 begins with a long and lyrical passage on the variegated natural beauty of the Indian subcontinent. After a brief discussion of snakes and lizards, Gendun Chopel provides a kind of ethnography of the Indian people, focusing especially on those practices of diet and hygiene that Tibetans would find exotic.

Chapter 3, titled How the Lands Were Given Their Names, does in fact begin with a discussion of place names and how the name of a single place varies in various languages. But Gendun Chopel soon turns rather abruptly to a description of some of the most famous Hindu deities, including Rāma, Śiva, and Kālī. This leads in turn to a fascinating discussion of Buddhist art and iconography, an early example of what might be termed art history by a Tibetan author. It contains the first discussion in Tibetan literature of the apparent aniconism of early Indian Buddhism, in which images of monks and deities are common, but the Buddha himself is never depicted. Gendun Chopel writes, In summary, innumerable stone carvings of the life of the Buddha, which can be determined to date from the time of the emperor Aśoka and so forth, are seen in various regions; what would be the space for the Buddha is either left empty or else two footprints are carved on the throne.

Chapter 4, the shortest in the book, deals with early Tibetan royal chronology and the question of how the city of Lhasa got its name. He offers a close examination of an inscription on a Licchavi dynasty pillar preserved outside Kathmandu and explains how the inscription disproves a traditional Tibetan reading of a passage from an Indian tantric text, long seen as a prophecy of the founding of Lhasa.

Chapter 5 is a detailed description of India: its geography, its climate, and its major cities. There is something of a travelogue quality about this chapter, with Gendun Chopel describing what he saw in a number of cities, especially those important for the history of Tibetan Buddhism, such as Amarāvatī, where the Buddha is said to have taught the Kālacakra Tantra. The most detailed description is of the region of Oḍḍiyāna in the northwest (the Swat Valley in modern day Pakistan), important as the source of so many tantric teachings. Interspersed into the narratives are descriptions of Indian women and of the caste system and disparaging remarks about brahmins. The chapter ends with a short history of Buddhism in Burma, a region that Gendun Chopel did not visit.

The long chapter 6, despite having the most prosaic title of all the chapters—On Men, Women, Food, Drink, and Various Apparel—is one of the most fascinating. It presents the history of ancient India in the chronology that was understood by European scholars at the time that Grains of Gold was composed. It also contains the first Tibetan-language discussion of nineteenth-century race theory. It begins, In general, the human beings in this world can be placed into two principal races on the basis of their bodies and the shape of their faces. There is one called the Āryan, a race with a small face and a wide forehead, with a high nose, deep-set eyes, and large bodies where body hair grows in abundance. And there is one called the Mongol, a race with a large face with their eye sockets filled with flesh, flat noses, and smooth skin, with little body hair. He goes on to describe the Āryan language family (providing cognates from Russian and Sanskrit), and he also provides comparisons of Tibetan and Burmese, presumably the first instance of a Tibetan scholar discussing what linguists today call the Tibeto-Burmese language family. It is in this chapter that Gendun Chopel provides the most explicit discussion of the historical method that he has adopted throughout the work. He then goes on to recount the Aryan invasion of India, the structure of ancient Indian society (including the caste system and the four stages of life), Vedic literature and religion, the six schools of Hindu philosophy (with an excursus on scriptural interpretation), the rise of Buddhism, the life of Mahāvīra and the rise of Jainism, the Buddhist councils, the coming of Alexander, and the reign of the Emperor Aśoka and his dispatch of Buddhist missions. This same chapter provides the life story of the Buddha—something obviously well known in Tibet—but drawn from the sources employed by European Indologists, sources largely unknown in Tibet (especially from Pāli), noting discrepancies from Tibetan versions on a number of key moments in the traditional biography.

In chapter 7, Gendun Chopel recounts his efforts to identify an Indian plant mentioned in Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Valid Knowledge (Pramāṇavārttika). This leads to a description of the flora (especially trees) and the fauna (especially birds) of India, focusing on the trees, flowers, and birds that figure prominently in Indian Buddhist literature, things that would be familiar to Tibetans only by name.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with linguistics. Chapter 8 focuses on orthography, beginning with Gendun Chopel’s theories on the origin of writing in various ancient societies. The bulk of the chapter deals with how the Tibetan alphabet evolved from Indian scripts. Chapter 9 considers the grammatical differences between Tibetan and Sanskrit. With regard to the Tibetan language itself, Gendun Chopel explores three key issues: (1) the development of the writing system based on an ancient Indian script, (2) the current gulf between the spoken and the written Tibetan, and (3) the relationship between Sanskrit and Tibetan.

On the question of the origins of the Tibetan alphabet, Gendun Chopel’s views have proved to be prescient; what he wrote in the 1930s is now generally accepted by the contemporary generation of Tibetan scholars. The traditional view, which he attributes to Shalu Lotsāwa (although versions of it appear in much earlier sources), held that the letters ca, cha, ja, zha, za, and wa were added to the traditional Sanskrit alphabet when the Tibetan alphabet was invented. But Gendun Chopel notes that in India, even young infants in India are able to pronounce the sounds ca, cha, and ja; these letters thus could not be the ones invented specifically for Tibetan. Instead, he argues it was the letters tsa, tsha, and dza whose corresponding sounds do not exist in Indian languages; for Gendun Chopel, the fact that these letters carry a special mark, the tsalak (tsa lag) or "tsa hand," offers further evidence. The Tibetan letter ’a also had to be invented in order to represent a phoneme present in Tibetan but not Sanskrit.

For the origin of the Tibetan script, it had long been believed that cursive or headless (umé) Tibetan was based on the vartula script while the capital or headed (uchen) was developed from the lañca script. Gendun Chopel notes, however, that these ornamental Indian scripts arose after the development of the Tibetan script and so could not have been their source. He argues instead that the origins must lie with the Gupta script in use at the time. Although the precise origins of the Tibetan script have yet to be determined, Gendun Chopel’s theory remains a credible hypothesis.

Gendun Chopel was not the first to speculate that, in ancient times, written Tibetan must have closely mirrored the spoken language; the prefixes and superscripts that are silent today must have been pronounced in the past. Although these speculations did not originate with him, his views on the question have been confirmed by modern linguistics. Gendun Chopel seemed torn on how to respond to the challenge posed by the chasm between the spoken and written Tibetan. He is clearly impressed by the ease with which Indians acquire literacy, aided by the fact that the written language has kept pace with the changes in the spoken language. Yet, at the same time, he is deeply concerned that a modernization of Tibetan spelling would do irrevocable damage to the classical literary heritage. Gendun Chopel could not have foreseen the threats to the Tibetan language that would arise in the late twentieth century. Today, the question of modernization of written Tibetan has attracted serious attention among a new generation of Tibetans who face the same dilemma that Gendun Chopel pondered.

Although not discussed explicitly in Grains of Gold, later in his life, Gendun Chopel called for a new approach to Tibetan grammar, one that more naturally reflected Tibetan forms rather than those borrowed from Sanskrit. He would likely be heartened that a number of Tibetan scholars have responded to his call with works such as Bod skad kyi brda sprod gsar bsgrigs smra sgo’i lde mig (A modern Tibetan grammar: opening the gateway of speech) by Thupten Jinpa.

Chapter 10 is Gendun Chopel’s translation from the Prakrit of thirteen of the rock edicts of the Indian emperor Aśoka from the third century BCE. Although the story of Aśoka was well known in Tibet, the rock edicts had never been translated into Tibetan, having only been deciphered by James Prinsep of the East India Company in 1837.

As noted above, Gendun Chopel explains that one of his purposes in writing Grains of Gold is to bring his compatriots up to date on what occurred in India from the time of the last sustained Tibetan cultural contact with the subcontinent up to the present day. Chapter 11 thus begins a three-chapter sequence that together provides a history of India from the Gupta dynasty, which began in the fourth century CE, to the fall of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. In fact, although titled The Gupta Dynasty, chapter 11 begins much earlier, with the reign of great patrons of Buddhism such as Aśoka and Kaniṣka. Gendun Chopel expresses his admiration for the great poets and dramatists of classical India, especially Kālidāsa. The chapter also includes a long and nostalgic description of the rise and fall of the great Buddhist monastery of Nālandā, where so many of the works central to Tibetan Buddhism were composed. In the chapter on the Gupta dynasty, he pauses from a narration of royal succession to observe that during this period, Hindu caste divisions became more rigid and that it was also the time that saw the rise of the practice of sati or widow burning, which he describes in horrified detail.

Chapter 12 covers the Pāla dynasty, which ruled regions of northern India from 750 to 1174 CE, the period of Tibet’s most extensive cultural contact with India. The great Hindu philosopher Śaṃkara lived during this period, and Gendun Chopel discusses the differences between Advaita Vedānta and Madhyamaka. Because this period saw the rise of Islam in South Asia, over this and the next chapter, Gendun Chopel offers a lengthy description of Islam, almost sixty pages in length, the most extensive ever to appear in Tibetan literature to that point. Although there was a small community of Muslim merchants and butchers in Lhasa, and Uighur and Kashmiri Muslims were known in the far eastern and western regions of Tibet respectively, the history and doctrines of Islam were largely unknown to Tibetans, who referred to Muslims with one of two terms: kha che (Kashmiri) or, in the texts, following the custom of classical Indian authors, simply as kla klo (barbarian), mleccha in Sanskrit. Here is how Gendun Chopel begins his discussion:

Now, I will write about the origins and histories of the Muslims who ruled India for a long period in the later times, exactly as they appear in the chronicles, without slipping into even the least criticism stemming from my own personal [feelings]. Now, with respect to them, the Indians call them mleccha, which means barbarian or bandit, a derogatory name. Their actual name is Musulman and their religion is Islam; some of their later kings who ruled India are called the Mughal kings. The religion of those called Jew or Yehuda, which appeared prior to Jesus, and the system of the Musulmans have the same root. Thus the religions of Jesus and Islam also have the same original source.

Chapter 13, From 1,600 Years after the Passing of the Buddha to the Present, covers the period from about 1000 CE to the fall of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. It recounts the reigns of a series of Muslim rulers until it reaches the Mughals, where the good king Akbar and the evil king Aurangzeb are described at some length. The chapter concludes with a long and laudatory description of Sikhism.

Chapter 14 is devoted to Sri Lanka. It is the second longest chapter in the text and could be a freestanding work (and was published as such in 1996). Gendun Chopel spent sixteen months in Sri Lanka in 1940–41. According to his own reckoning, which there is no reason to dispute, he was one of the first Tibetans ever to visit the island, at that time, the British colony of Ceylon. His description of Sri Lankan culture and history is particularly interesting because, unlike in India, Buddhism remained active on the island. Thus, Gendun Chopel had his first encounter with co-religionists outside Tibet. As an accomplished Buddhist scholar, Gendun Chopel was well acquainted with the doctrines of the Hīnayāna, yet he had never met one of its adherents; Tibetan Buddhism was Mahāyāna in affiliation. His views of Theravāda Buddhism are ambivalent. On the one hand, he is frustrated by the refusal of the Sri Lankan monks to accept the Mahāyāna sūtras and the tantras as canonical Buddhist texts. He writes, The minds of the Sinhalese monks are more narrow than the eye of a needle. On the other hand, he is deeply moved by the purity of their monastic discipline; when accompanying them on their alms rounds, he feels that he has been transported back to the time of the Buddha. Taken together, his impressions of the Buddhism—and the Buddhists—of Sri Lanka provide a fascinating insight into what occurs when a scholastic category comes to life. The second half of the chapter is a history of Sri Lanka, drawn largely from the Mahāvaṃsa.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, there was something of a pan-Buddhist movement in Asia, led by such figures as the American Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) and the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), one of the founders of the Mahabodhi Society. Gendun Chopel was well aware of these efforts; his own Guidebook for Travel to the Holy Places of India had been published by the Mahabodhi Society. Rahul Sankrityayan had traveled to Sri Lanka to study Pāli and be ordained as a Buddhist monk, and Gendun Chopel’s visit may have been inspired by that of his teacher. His views of Buddhist ecumenism in this chapter are therefore of particular interest. At the beginning of the chapter he writes, I think it would be wonderful if the great Buddhist countries had at least some familiarity with each other. At the end of this long chapter, he concludes, Each of the two [the Sinhalese and the Tibetans] has reached the peak of hardheaded stubbornness. Thus, for the time being, it is vitally important for both sides to live in a state of appreciation and affection for each other from our respective lands so that at least the recognition of our kinship in having the same Teacher and teaching will not be lost.

Chapter 15 deals with ancient Tibetan history, especially the period prior to the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh century, a topic that Gendun Chopel would return to in his unfinished history of ancient Tibet, the White Annals. Here he discusses such topics as the presence of Tibetan words in neighboring lands as evidence of the region being under Tibetan control in the past. He describes ancient Tibetan dress, speculating that the raiment of Tibetan kings is still to be seen in the dress of Tibetan deities. In addition, he provides a long discussion of the still vexing question of the etymology of the Tibetan name for Tibet: Bod (pronounced bö).

Chapter 16 is devoted to Hindu mythology. Gendun Chopel’s purpose here appears to be to bring many of the Vedic and Hindu myths, especially from the purāṇas, to the attention of the Tibetan scholars who would have been familiar with versions of these from classical Sanskrit Buddhist sources. Although Gendun Chopel rarely identifies his sources here, the first part of the chapter draws directly from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, before turning to stories about some of the most famous Hindu gods, including Gaṇeśa. There is also a lengthy description of the life of Krishna, drawn from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa.

Chapter 17, simply called Conclusion, contains Gendun Chopel’s most direct discussion of various facets of the colonial modernity he encountered in India. It opens with a powerful condemnation of European colonialism. He writes, for example, Young women were captured and, to arouse the desires of the gathered customers, were displayed naked in the middle of the marketplace and then sold. If thoughtful people heard how they treated the bodies of humans like cattle, their hearts would bleed. It is in this way that the foundations were laid for all the wonders of the world, railroads stretching from coast to coast and multistoried buildings whose summits cannot be seen from below. The remainder of the chapter includes a brief history of the British in India and Gendun Chopel’s observations on the new religions he encountered in India (including Theosophy and the teachings of Ramakrishna). This is followed by the first detailed Tibetan discussion of western science, one that culminates with a passionate appeal to his fellow Tibetan Buddhist thinkers to take modern science seriously. He turns next to somewhat wishful claims that active Buddhist communities were still to be found in India. Gendun Chopel ends the book with a final poem and instructions to an unnamed lama in Tibet on how to publish Grains of Gold.

Despite being composed less than a century ago, we know very little about when and where Grains of Gold was written during Gendun Chopel’s twelve-year sojourn in South Asia. He says that he first drank the water of the Ganges in 1934 and that the first city he visited was Patna, where he stayed for about a year. In his account of Sri Lanka, he describes being present at the dedication of a stūpa, which we know from other sources took place on June 17, 1940. His colophon at the end of the work says that it was completed at a monastery in Sri Lanka, which we know he visited for sixteen months in 1940 and 1941. Beyond this, there are few temporal markers in the text. There is even a question of when Gendun Chopel completed the book. The colophon indicates that he dispatched the manuscript from Sri Lanka, which he departed in 1941. However, a passage in chapter 12 about the number of years that have passed since the Muslim Hijra in 622 calculates to 1946, and in chapter 14, the chapter on Sri Lanka, he mentions a Tibetan date which calculates to 1944. This suggests that there was more than one manuscript of Grains of Gold, with the Tibetan editor in Lhasa using the colophon from the earlier edition, sent from Sri Lanka.

Some elements of the book seem to have been written as self-contained essays, beginning with an homage to the Buddha and ending with a brief colophon. These include the entire chapter on Sri Lanka, the extended passage from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa in chapter 16, and the discussion of science in the final chapter. A number of passages are repeated, sometimes verbatim, in two or more places in the text, another possible sign of multiple editions.

It is therefore difficult to identify all the places that Gendun Chopel visited or to map his travels. It is clear that many of his descriptions are eyewitness accounts, while others appear to be reports based on written sources or stories that he may have heard.

Sources

In this work, Gendun Chopel writes about a wide array of subjects, ranging from classical Sanskrit poetry to the history of Burma to the lives of the ancient Tibetan kings to the history of Islam in India. In many cases, he indicates his sources; sometimes he does not. It is abundantly clear from this book that he was extraordinarily well read in the vast literature of Tibet, including the texts that form the Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections of kangyur and tengyur as well as Tibetan historical sources. That knowledge is all the more impressive because this book was written while he was living in India, where his access to Tibetan texts would have been limited.

He also demonstrates an impressive knowledge of Sanskrit literature, quoting liberally, in Sanskrit, from religious and literary classics throughout the book. For example, in chapter 16, he quotes extensively from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, with passages from the Sanskrit text.

In a poem he sent back to friends at his home monastery in Amdo, he wrote:

With the years of my youth passing away

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.

In fact, however, he put English, the language of the foreigners, to good use; it appears that many of the chapters here draw from