The Passion Book: A Tibetan Guide to Love and Sex by Donald S. Lopez Jr. & Thupten Jinpa & Gendun Chopel & Donald S. Lopez Jr. & Thupten Jinpa

Author:Donald S. Lopez, Jr. & Thupten Jinpa & Gendun Chopel & Donald S. Lopez Jr. & Thupten Jinpa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Self-Help, General, Sexual Instruction, Religion, Buddhism, Tibetan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

A virtuous family, the lineage of monks, the way of a layman,

A time of abundance, a time of poverty,

The best of monks, the worst of laymen,

My body has changed so much in one lifetime.10

Our interest in this volume is not the end of Gendun Chopel’s life, or his major prose works: Grains of Gold, Guide for Traveling to the Sacred Sites of India, the White Annals, or Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought. It is instead his longest work of poetry and the earliest extant complete work from his time in India. It is also his most famous work: A Treatise on Passion (’Dod pa’i bstan bcos). According to the colophon, it was completed “in the latter part of the middle month of winter in the Tiger Year in the great city of Mathurā in Magadha near the banks of the glorious Yamuna River.” The Tiger Year of the Tibetan lunar calendar was 1938. He thus completed this work in early 1939, four years after his arrival in India.

In many ways Gendun Chopel’s Treatise on Passion mirrors the complexities and contradictions that characterized the life of this most famous of modern Tibetan authors. Like its author, the work craves respect and recognition from Tibetan aristocrats and intellectuals, yet it mocks their sensibilities. The text celebrates the Indic sources of classical Tibetan culture, yet condemns contemporary Indian sexual mores. The text extols the ideals of a monastic life, yet questions the vow of celibacy that is its foundation. It demands the right to sexual freedom for the masses, yet is written for the educated few who could read literary Tibetan. Indeed, like its author, A Treatise on Passion remains something of an enigma within Gendun Chopel’s oeuvre. The apparently simple question “Why did he write this text?” does not have a simple answer. One must first consider the larger question of the place of sexuality in the Buddhist tradition that Gendun Chopel knew so well.

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