Khenchen Ngawang Palzang’s Counsels
Khenchen Ngawang Palzang’s (1879–1941) counsels are consistent with the grounded, serious persona of his magnificent autobiography, Wondrous Dance of Illusion. They are relatively straightforward, often confessional, and infused with a melancholy that he imparts to his students, urging them to turn away from saṃsāra. Translator Joseph McClellan is steadily working his way through these writings.
Sources
The texts comprise the second volume of Ngawang Palzang's nine-volume Collected Works. In the older, undated, umé edition, this volume contains thirty-five titles. In the 2017 Chengdu edition, there are twenty-nine titles.
In 2022, Joseph McClellan translated over twenty of the texts in the old edition before checking them against the higher-quality new edition. In 2023, the drafts were checked by the Bhutanese editor Ninjyed N.T., after which they were shared with Lotsawa House for publication.
Highlights
The texts published so far as part of the initiative include:
Other Texts
Longer pieces, which are found only in the older edition, include:
Counsel on Primordial Purity (gdams pa gdod nas rnam dag; 20 folios), which may have been an unfinished text.
Counsel on the Jewel of Bodhicitta (gdams pa byang sems rin chen; 20 folios).
Lungtok’s Sad Song of the Sage (lung rtogs gsung drang srong skyo glu; 27 folios).
There is also at least one puzzling piece entitled A Prophecy of Hopelessness (re ba med pa’i lung bstan), which seems to employ peculiar Eastern Tibetan idioms and elements of fiction.
Funding
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