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  • The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel
  • Kurtis R. Schaeffer
The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel. By Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Chicago University Press, 2006. 258 pages. $35.00 (cloth).

Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s The Madman's Middle Way is the latest contribution to the growing literature on one of the most intriguing—and certainly the most controversial—intellectuals of twentieth-century Tibet. As the second monograph in a new series from the University of Chicago Press entitled Buddhism and Modernity under the editorship of Lopez himself (the first book in the series was a volume of essays edited by Lopez and published in 2005, entitled Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism), the book holds the broader promise of initiating renewed reflection on the worldwide transformations of modernity throughout the twentieth century as viewed particularly through the lives and works of Buddhists in Asia and abroad. The book is smartly crafted, its six chapters each [End Page 1039] (save the last) laconically titled with a single word (1. The Life; 2. The Text; 3. The Commentary; 4. The Author; 5. The Critics; and 6. The Question of Modernity). Chapter 1 offers an overview of the life of Gendun Chopel based primarily on the few short Tibetan-language biographies available as well previous research (bibliography on page 4, note 1). Gendun Chopel was born in 1903 in Amdo, the northeastern region of the Tibetan cultural region, now situated in the Qinghai province of the People's Republic of China. In 1920 he entered Labrang Monastery (the largest monastic institution in the region) to begin philosophical studies but left prematurely in 1927—by force, choice, or some combination of the two—to travel to central Tibet and renew his studies at Drepung Monastery near Lhasa. In 1934 he met the Indian scholar Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963), through whose acquaintance he was encouraged to travel to India, where he sojourned for twelve years before returning to central Tibet in 1946. It is this long journey that gave rise to Gendun Chopel's longest (approximately half of his total extant output) and—many would say—most significant work, the Golden Surface: The Story of a Cosmopolitan's Pilgrimage. Lopez lingers on fascinating passages from the Golden Surface dealing with many discreet topics—colonialism (14), geography (16), science (18), and new religious movements in India, including theosophy (28)—to argue that Gendun Chopel's decade-long travels in South Asia "can be regarded as a series of encounters with the interlocking facets of a certain modernity. He encounters, and writes about, modern scholarship, modern travel, modern geography, modern archaeology, modern science, modern religion, and modern love" (13). Lopez returns to the topic of Gendun Chopel's modernity only in the closing chapter of the volume.

Chapter 2 (47–120) contains the first complete translation from Tibetan of Gendun Chopel's major philosophical work, the Adornment for Nagarjuna's Thought. The Adornment's title suggests that the work will be a commentary on the writings of the most important Buddhist philosopher associated with the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) tradition, the second-century CE Indian Nāgārjuna. Yet in this case the title is more evocative than descriptive, for Gendun Chopel is primarily concerned to destabilize the edifice of intellectual orthodoxy that had been constructed around Nāgārjuna's work by the Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism since the time of the school's founding figure, Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). Chapter 3—the longest chapter in the book—offers a section-by-section commentary on the preceding translation. Lopez's stated purpose for writing a commentary to Gendun Chopel's work is "to provide the doctrinal context of the work and a paraphrase of its arguments" (x), and in this he succeeds, giving the reader a section-by-section summary of a work that is quite often repetitive, rambling, obtuse, yet never uninteresting. Taken together, the translation and the commentary form one of the most significant contributions to the academic study of Middle Way philosophy in recent years. Of crucial concern for Gendun Chopel is the long-standing...

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