American Academy of Religion

The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel byDonald S. Lopez,Review by: Kurtis R. SchaefferJournal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 2006), pp. 1039-1042Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4139979 .

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Book Reviews 1039

God as Creator, including a conception Hartshorne calls "neoclassical." Accord- ing to neoclassical thinking, proper religious language about divine creativity is not about only one event (the beginning); instead, it is about divine influences upon all events at all times in all spaces. Moreover, Hartshornean neoclassical thought denies that the idea of an absolute beginning of time makes sense. Inso- far as Hawking considers only selected aspects of a classical view of God, his account of the theological implications of cosmological models is unavoidably seriously inadequate.

Collaborating with Mlodinow did not yield a more adequate account of theological implications, nor a significant advance in cosmological theory, but it did succeed in making scientific cosmology more easily available. In addition to being briefer, less technical and "more leisurely" (BrHT 1), the briefer history includes references to data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the COBE sat- ellite, and discussion of new increments in progress toward a unified theory. Casual readers are likely to find the new chapter on "Wormholes and Time Travel" to be more entertaining than the original chapter called "The Arrow of Time." And for such readers, it is probably good that the briefer history omits the original discussion of "imaginary numbers," "imaginary time," and the "three arrows" of time. Readers looking for theory about "Black Holes," and why Hawking argues "Black Holes Ain't So Black," will need to read the earlier history (BHT, chaps. 6 and 7). The illustrations are attractive and helpful.

For leisure reading, the briefer history can replace the brief history. For scholarly work, the briefer history is an addendum-a review and update. Either way, we should be very grateful to Hawking and Mlodinow for sharing the con- tent and excitement of recent cosmological inquiry by translating math-based theory into relatively simple words and pictures.

doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfl023 Advance Access publication October 11, 2006

Theodore Walker, Jr. Southern Methodist University

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 mono- graph 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 ofBuddhism), 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

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1040 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

(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 Moder- nity). 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 Ndgdrjuna. 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 Ndgdrjuna'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 suc- ceeds, 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 con- cern for Gendun Chopel is the long-standing debate whether Middle Way phi- losophy is largely a critical endeavor that avoids positive claims, or whether it proposes a thesis itself about the nature of enlightenment. More generally, such debate revolves around the role of reason in Buddhist praxis, especially in connection with providing adequate guidance to the unenlightened. Gendun

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Book Reviews 1041

Chopel is, to put it crudely, skeptical about the role of reason on the path to enlightenment, for how can the philosophizing of the unenlightened mind pos- sibly provide proper guidance for realizing the enlightened mind? "Regarding these conventional phenomena that have the nature of fictions," he cautions, "it comes down to the fact that there is nothing suitable other than a mere decision by this mind of ours, which is itself a source of fictions. However, those who strive wholeheartedly in search of the ultimate truth must understand at the out- set that this fiction-making does not take you very far" (51).

Chapter 4 (220-29) briefly addresses the problems of authorship surround- ing the Adornment for Ndgdrjuna's Thought that have plagued the work since its initial reception. "Most vexing," according to Lopez, "for those who would question the authenticity of the Adornment is that G[endun] C[hopel], a prod- uct of the Dge lugs [Geluk] academy, would entrust the compilation of his final work to a Rnying ma pa [Nyingmapa], and that its publication would then be urged and sponsored by a prominent Rnying ma lama" (223). Chapter 5 moves one degree further from Gendun Chopel's Adornment for Ndgdrjuna's Thought itself to consider the fierce criticism the work has engendered in the last several decades. It is not difficult to see why the work caused a stir. In addition to calling into question the received commentarial tradition and the thriving scholasticism of the Gelukpa School, Gendun Chopel at times verges on a more wide-ranging relativism: "Beyond each mountain pass is a different religious sect with thou- sands of scholars and fools who follow it, saying 'Just this is true; this will not deceive you'. This self-authorization of one's own truth delights a group of simi- lar beings; when to a group who does not agree, they are scornful" (63). As a result of his unwillingness to defend orthodox Gelukpa viewpoints, Gendun Chopel has been charged by late twentieth-century Gelukpa writers with reckless innovation (241).

Finally, chapter 6 addresses the issue of modernity in relation to Gendun Chopel's major philosophical work. The Madman's Middle Way pairs the most traditional of Gendun Chopel's writings with a most untraditional reading of his life and works as an Asian modernist fully conversant with the intellectual cur- rents of late colonial South Asia. Lopez thus urges that it is "necessary to con- sider the vexed question of modernity in the Adornment, in some ways the most traditional work produced by the most modern of Tibetan authors" (245). Treating Gendun Chopel as a modern writer is certainly a productive project, one for which there is ample resource in his extant body of writings. One only has to look at the passages on colonialism and science in his travelogue, which Lopez so expressively translates in chapter 1 of the book, to recognize a thinker deeply enmeshed in early twentieth-century debates over the relationship between tradition and innovation. (Gendun Chopel's Golden Surface travelogue will likely provide fertile grounds to discuss him as a modernist.) Yet treating Gendun Chopel's Adornment for Nagarjuna's Thought as a modern work is a more challenging task. Lopez suggests that Gendun Chopel's Gelukpa critics regarded the Adornment as a subversive work, with its relentless critique of scho- lasticism (246), but that these same critics miss the fact that Gendun Chopel was not meeting them on their own scholastic grounds but was attempting in the

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1042 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion

Adornment to create a "poetics of enlightenment" (248) meant to evoke the pro- found gulf between enlightenment and unenlightenment, all the while maintain- ing firm conviction in the reality of enlightenment as it is described in Buddhist scripture (252). If the Adornment thus cannot be described as modern in terms of content and argument, it "may be judged," according to Lopez, "as a modern- ist work from the perspective of its style; it is a collage of elements drawn from disparate sources, its tone vacillating between pious poetry and biting satire" (252). Yet these elements-collage, stylistic variation, and even satire-may be found throughout the history of Tibetan literature (one has only to look at the biting irony of the twelfth-century contemplative-cum-military leader Lama Zhang's self-critical poetry or the polemic invective of the great fifteenth- century Gelukpa logician Kedrup). These stylistic features may be necessary to count Gendun Chopel's work as modern, but they are not sufficient. Lopez presses the point further stating that Gendun Chopel "manipulates ... the found- ational categories of Buddhist philosophy so that the aesthetics of enlightenment might triumph over the philosophical certainty derived from reason." He con- cludes that "it is perhaps in this sense that the Adornment might best be regarded as a modernist work" (254). Again, this characterization could be made of a large body of Tibetan literature, particularly works from the Great Seal (phyag chen), Great Perfection (rdzogs chen), and Buddha Nature (de gshegs snying po) traditions, all of which tend toward poetic evocations of Buddhism's soteriologi- cal goals even when they are complex treatises. It is difficult as well to assess Lopez's treatment of the Adornment as a modern work, for he does not provide a working definition of modern literature, modernity, or modernism in The Mad- man's Middle Way, and we are thus left without a clear-cut baseline from which to judge along with him the Adornment as modern. In the end, we might suggest that the debate over modernism is less relevant to an appreciation of Gendun Chopel's Adornment for NJgirjuna's Thought than Lopez suggests by the final chapter of The Madman's Middle Way. The Adornment is simply a compelling work of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. Furthermore, the Adornment does not need to be modern for Gendun Chopel to be considered a modernist, and Gen- dun Chopel himself need not be proven a modernist for Lopez's careful transla- tion and exegesis of this twentieth-century Tibetan writer's principle philosophical work to be both engaging and enlightening.

doi: 10. 1093/jaarel/fl024 Advance Access publication October 25, 2006

Kurtis R. Schaeffer University of Virginia

The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. By Bryan J. Cuevas. Oxford University Press, 2003. 328 pages. $25.00 (paper).

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is-next to the Dalai Lama himself-likely the most widely known subject of Tibetan Buddhism in Europe and North America. Since the publication of Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Y. Evans-Wentz's

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.161 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 08:19:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions