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Book Review: Novel forms of spiritual writing

By Tsering Namgyal | Tibet Sun

Chukora Tsering Agloe at his home in Dharamshala, India, 19 October 2009.Tibet Sun/India

Only until recently, two sets of writers have dominated the Tibetan literary scene in exile. Those educated in the colonial schools in the hill stations of India: the kids who grew up reading Rudyard Kipling under the shadow of Kanchenjunga. And the monks who waxed poetic in cursive Tibetan, offering praises to the brilliance of their teachers and the beauty of Buddhism.

Is there a middle ground between the secular and the spiritual in the Tibetan literary tradition? Chukora Tsering Agloe, whose book Song Offerings, has been published by the New Delhi-based Foundation of Universal Responsibility of the Dalai Lama earlier this year, seems to straddle both camps. Though the book is about Tibet — he left his home in 1985 — he writes mainly from the vantage point of Buddhism and spirituality, even though he is not officially a monk or a lama.

Over the past decade, a new generation of Tibetan youth growing up in exile has radically transformed the literary landscape, most notably following the publication of poet Tenzin Tsundue’s highly energetic writings in the mid-1990s. Enabling this change, of course, is new technology, which has made life easier for writers. (The emergence of desktop publishing and the Internet have eased the process of editing, publishing, and dissemination of their multifarious writings.)

Some Tibetan authors, such as Tsundue, write mainly on political themes, for exile is a mother of nationalism. And then there are those who write about Tibet of the past. For most writers of the Tibetan dislocation, writing is more an attempt to articulate their exilic consciousness and to map the cartographies of their diasporic identities on the blank page. As Tibetan writer Tsering Wangmo Dhompa had so aptly written: “When you lose an image, you learn to live in sentences.”

Writing for them is also an attempt to buffer the anguish of displacement and to transcend the conditions not of their making. Chukora was born in 1979, right after the Cultural Revolution, in a village called Ngon-Gha, beneath the great Tibetan poet-saint Milarepa’s holy retreat cave in Tsipri. Growing up so close to the sacred place, his writings derive inspiration from the singing mendicant.

Like most Tibetans growing up in the subcontinent, his worldview is shaped by his formative years in Tibet as well as his training in Western literature. In the case of Chukora, he notes, it was his reading of Blake and Wordsworth that not only offered him the possibility of writing but also gave him an appropriate form to contain his uniquely Tibetan sensibility. He holds an advanced degree from Loyolla College in Chennai.

“They taught me how to appreciate and admire nature with the subtlety of human sensitivity,” he writes. “Their works instantaneously appealed to my idyllic and pastoral childhood.”

The book opens with a prologue in which the author pens a conversation between a poet-fisherman and a mendicant on the bank of river Beas in Kangra Valley thereupon the poet decides to offer 108-songs to the yogi.

“The book contains 108-bead-poems strung on a thread of identity around my neck in the testing inferno of exile, and I leave the readers to find their own meanings,” he writes. “The songs I have sung here sprang from the depth of Tibetan consciousness, an essence derived from the great Indian and Tibetan masters of the past.”

Songs cover a whole gamut of themes, categorised into seven major sections, in which he meditates upon topics ranging from Tibetan culture, religion, landscapes of the Tibetan plateau and its philosophy. In the epilogue, the poet and the yogi returns to Tibet and goes to the Milarepa’s cave and the poet decides to spend his life in meditation.

The book has a narrative, with a clear beginning and an end, making it something like a novel, or a novel in verse. As a work of art, it amply yields itself to critical analysis. In addition, his descriptive writing combined with spiritual quests and insights in the end results in something like a Tibetan answer to Paulo Coelho. His poems however are reminiscent of the works of Chogyam Trungpa who was extremely successful both as a teacher and writer.

The book should appeal to anyone interested in understanding the new shapes and forms that Tibetan literature is taking these days. Indeed, for Tibetan literature to flourish and continue to be relevant, it may need to create a middle ground between the tradition and modernity, between the local and the universal. It needs to address the issues and challenges of the modern world while sipping at the fount of the great Tibetan literary and scholarly tradition.

Copyright © 2009 Tsering Namgyal

Published in Tibet Sun