Chöpel, Gendün

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PeopleChöpel, Gendün


དགེ་འདུན་ཆོས་འཕེལ
Gendun Chöpel(1903 - 1951)
Buddhist Digital Resource Center

Amdo Gendun Chopel, a twentieth-century philosopher-artist-historian, has emerged as one of the most controversial figures in the recent history of the Land of Snows. He remains to this day the most admired and loved writer and poet, bridging the divide between tradition and modernity. He traveled widely in India and the Himalayan region in the 1930s and 40s, encountering philosophers and revolutionaries and absorbing their ideas. His compositions, from descriptions of New York skyscrapers to brilliant commentary on Madhyamaka philosophy, are widely read. In the chaotic last days of the Tibetan state he was accused of being a Communist spy and was imprisoned in Lhasa, his unfinished Political History of Tibet destroyed, and his spirit broken. He died just weeks after the Chinese Communists arrived in Lhasa.

... read more at The Treasury of Lives

Library Items

Book
Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler
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. 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 during his short life. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

At 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. (Source: University of Chicago Press)
Chöpel, Gendun. Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler. Translated by Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. Buddhism and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Book
The Blue Annals Parts I & II
The Blue Annals is a landmark in the historical literature of Tibet composed by a well known scholar and translator Gos lo-tsa-ba-gZon-nu dpal (1392-1481 A.D.). It is the main source of information for all later historical compilations in the Land of Snows. This work is invaluable inasmuch as it establishes a firm chronology of events of Tibetan history and works out in detail the list of the names of famous religious teachers and their spiritual lineage. The work is divided into fifteen chapters, each dedicated to the history of a particular school or sect of Tibetan Buddhism. It provides a comparative study of the chronological data given by T`ang Annals, Blue Annals, and Tunhuang chronicles. The Blue Annals appears to be a faithful reproduction of the list given in the T`ang Annals with minor differences. The book concludes with the portrayal of the origin, etc. of the communities of the four schools. It contains indexes for Sutras and Sastras, Personal Names and Book Titles and Personal Names (Tibetan), etc. (Source)
Roerich, George N., and Gendün Chöpel. The Blue Annals. Parts 1 & 2. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2007. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283021/mode/2up.

Other names

  • ཨ་མདོ་དགེ་འདུན་ཆོས་འཕེལ་ · other names (Tibetan)
  • a mdo dge 'dun chos 'phel · other names (Wylie)
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