Simon Ings

A Buddhist garden of earthly delights

Gendun Chopel’s long, dizzying poem is not only spectacularly explicit but a deeply sensitive guide to the different needs of men and women

issue 09 June 2018

The Tibetan artist and poet Gendun Chopel was born in 1903. He was identified as an incarnate lama, and ordained as a Buddhist monk. In 1934 he renounced his vows, quit Tibet for India, learned Sanskrit and — if his long poem, usually translated as A Treatise on Passion, is to be taken at face value — copulated with every woman who let him.

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