Sample Poems

Issue 7

Sample Poem

Names with asterisks link to bios.

Untitled

To Mother

Edward Hopper: Western Motel, 1957

Song Sent to Hor khang from Prison

from Ficticia, II

written ca. 1948
Gendun Chopel |

Gendun Chopel (Dge ’dun chos ’phel) is widely acknowledged -— both within the Tibetan regions of the People’s Republic of China and in the Tibetan exile community — as the greatest Tibetan poet of the twentieth century. He was born in 1903, in the far northeastern region of the Tibetan cultural domain, the same year that British troops invaded Tibet. He died in 1951, shortly after troops of the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa. Identified as an incarnate lama as a young boy and trained as a Buddhist monk at the highest levels of the Tibetan academy, Gendun Chopel left Tibet in 1934, spending the next twelve years in South Asia. He wrote extensively during this period, both poetry and prose, composing works ranging from a pilgrimage guide to the sacred Buddhist sites of India, to the most famous treatise on erotica in Tibetan literature. He returned to Tibet in January 1946. In the late summer, he was arrested, presumably for his political views, and spent the next three years in the prison at the foot of the Potala. The following poem was written in prison. In this poem, Gendun Chopel uses archaic words and images to evoke the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, which told of a sacred cord. When that cord is cut, death ensues. He next introduces Buddhist imagery, seeing the cord as something that binds the enlightened mind to the benighted body. When the cord is cut, liberation ensues. Until then, one is bound to the world. The poem appears in the fifth volume of his collected works, ’Dzam gling rig pa’i dpa’ bo mkhas dbang dge ’dun chos ’phel gyi gsung ’bum, 5 vols. (Zhang kang gyi ling dpe skrun khang, 2006).

Song Sent to Hor khang from Prison

Unknown here by anyone in any way
This long cord of the changeless god
Ties the boundless sphere of reality to the sphere of awareness
Ties the awareness of the child to the interior of the body
Ties the stone heap of the body to food and drink
Ties food and drink to external causes.
Thus the cord is tied, one to the other.
There are no points where it can be cut but these:

The first place is desired by none;
It is death, where the cord of body and mind is cut.
The other place is known by none;
It is where the cord decays, merging sphere and mind.

This mind is a goddess, beyond all bounds.
The homeland of this goddess is not this world,
Yet the little toe of the goddess of the mind
Is tied tightly to this body by a thread.

Then, until this thread is cut
Whatever the body feels, seems to be felt by the mind.
Whatever help or harm is done to this little toe
The goddess feels as pleasure and pain.

If the cord is cut, all is well.
Yet the whole world fears the cord’s cutting.
In striving to keep the cord connected
The ends of the cord become wrapped in thorns.

To extract the point of each thorn
We study each category of culture;
We stay busy with this taxing toil,
Extracting thorns until we die.
This unfinished busy-ness, never abandoned,
Seems an entrance; its purpose, the rebirth of beings.
When just one part of this mind, equal to space,
Sinks into the mire of deeds of flesh and blood,
Then there are terrors of hot and cold, hunger and thirst, hope and fear.
I wonder if this suffering ever ends.

Yet this body, fashioned by the glory of culture,
Achieved through a hundred endeavors,
In keeping with the truth of the queen of heaven’s prophecy
Must remain on this earth a few more years.

I sang this song.

translated from Tibetan by
Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. is Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His translation of the complete poems of Gendun Chopel, entitled In the Forest of Faded Wisdom, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2009.