[page 368] Despite a literary tradition going back thirteen centuries, Tibet generally has had a culture in which many important types of knowledge—not just of personal experience, but of history, philosophy and science, too—were transmitted orally. It is well known that "verse"—metrically regulated composition—is an excellent mnemonic device, and so it should not surprise us that a tremendous amount of Tibetan literature is in verse. From among the vast number of versified works found in their language, Tibetans have separated out certain pieces because of their greater concentration of rhythm, image and meaning, their heightened "imagery" (gzugs), "vitality" (srog) and "ornamentation" (rgyan) (see B. Newman, in this volume). These works are designated in Tibetan by at least three separate terms: glu (songs), mgur (poetical songs) and snyan ngag (ornate poetry).1

It is, of course, impossible to specify that these three genres amount to that formulation of "a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm" (Webster's: 887a) that in the West we call "poetry," but they probably are as close as we are likely to come to a Tibetan equivalent. This is so[page 369] especially if we accept that—problems of cultural translation aside—Western "poetry" is set off from other forms by its heightened rhythm, imagery, meaning, vitality and ornamentation, while Tibetan glu, mgur and snyan ngag are set off from other verse forms by their arrangement of rhythm, sound and meaning to create a specific emotional response to someone's experience.

Glu, mgur and snyan ngag are interrelated in subtle and important ways, but they are distinguishable. Indeed, one may see the movement from glu to mgur to snyan ngag as reflecting both the evolution of "poetry" in Tibet from ancient to more recent times and the spectrum of poetic styles, from that of popular, oral, indigenously rooted works, to that of monastic, literary, Indian-inspired compositions. In what follows, we will briefly consider the historical and stylistic parameters of glu, mgur and snyan ngag; analyze some examples of a sub-genre of mgur ("songs of experience": nyams mgur) that seems particularly comparable to the highly personalized "poetry" of the modern West; and conclude with some reflections on the relation between "poetry" (Western or Tibetan) and experience (religious or otherwise).

Thousands upon thousands of examples of glu, mgur and snyan ngag are scattered throughout the corpus of Tibetan literature, in ancient chronicles, edict collections (bka' thang), documents from Dunhuang, Treasure texts (gter ma), rituals, biographies, and the collected works (gsung 'bum) of the great masters of the various lineages. Only rarely have the works of multiple authors been anthologized,2 and rarer still are analytical works that seek to make sense of the sources, contents and forms of the Tibetan poetic tradition.3 Still, as indicated above, glu, mgur and snyan ngag (along with the Gesar epic corpus) together roughly comprise the Tibetan poetic canon. Glu, which remains in Tibetan as a general term for "song," is the earliest, most indigenous, most secular, and most orally and musically oriented of the genres. mGur, which originally was either a synonym or a subdivision of glu, came eventually to denote a more Buddhistic type of "song," and might be either Tibetan or Indian in its inspiration, oral or written in its style. sNyan ngag, "speech [agreeable] to the ear," is an ornate, written, Indian-inspired type of Buddhist (and occasionally secular[page 370] ) poetry that did not appear until the thirteenth century, well after the other two genres. The three genres are not absolutely distinguishable—glu and mgur often are used synonymously even in later periods, and the aesthetic theories behind snyan ngag often influenced post-thirteenth-century mgur, but they are distinct enough that we may isolate them and briefly consider the sources, themes and styles of each of them in turn.

As in many cultures, poetry in Tibet almost certainly had its origins in connection with ritual, music and dance. It is not surprising, therefore, that the oldest form of Tibetan poetry bears the name for "song"—glu.4 Glu are found scattered widely in both the documents found in the caves at Dunhuang5 and in later texts, especially the Treasure (gter ma) literature, that preserve authentically ancient material. Among the most important sources are the bTsun mo'i bka' thang, the Padma'i bka' thang and the Maṇi bka' 'bum. The glu found in these texts are broadly divisible into royal songs (rgyal po'i glu) and popular songs ('bangs kyi glu). The latter are generally not very well attested in the earliest sources, since it was royal rather than popular culture that was likely to be committed to writing at that time. On the other hand, reasonable inferences about the nature of such songs may be made from the ways in which they were utilized by later poets, especially Mi la ras pa (twelfth century), 'Brug pa kun legs (sixteenth century) and the sixth Dalai Lama (seventeenth century), as well as by the forms in which they have survived to the present day. They include love and marriage songs in dialogue form, planting and harvest songs, songs of advice (legs bshad), riddle songs and songs connected with religious ceremonies, such as consecrations (rab gnas).

Royal songs included two major sub-categories, mgur, which emphasize "positive personal experience, exalting either the singer's own exploits or those of his acquaintances...[and] express the singer's joy at having overcome an obstacle, hopes for future success, or praise for another person's deeds" (Ellingson: 67), and mchid, which are "usually songs of provocation and dispute...[which combine] vivid, sophisticated symbolic imagery with more direct insults to create sung verbal combat" (Ellingson: 68-69). As Ellingson notes, both mgur and mchid "were essential to[page 371] the political functioning of the Tibetan kingdom. . . .[A] mchid might furnish the spur to upset a precarious alliance and provoke a war, and mgur [be] used to cement an alliance and enhance the prestige of a leader" (69-70). Still another type of royal song recorded administrative policy (lugs kyi bstan bcos). Advice on how to rule, formulations of official policies, and even matters as prosaic as a census were preserved in the form of songs, probably for reasons more connected with mnemonics than aesthetics.

Both popular and royal songs had associated with them both a performative context and specific melodies (dbyangs or 'debs; see Ellingson: 247) that gave them a distinctness not conveyed by their written form. In strictly rhythmic terms, however, they tended to be somewhat alike, most often being set in straightforward six-syllable dactylic lines often arranged into stanzas. Frequently, they relied upon imagistic and semantic parallelisms from stanza to stanza, as well as certain emphatic particles (such as ni) and reduplicated or trebled onomatopoetic phrases, such as kyi li li, me re re, etc. An example that illustrates all of these stylistic features is the following:

The strong use of stanza-to-stanza parallelism, the theme of "nearness," the invocation of place-names, the references to natural phenomena, the repeated use of the emphatic "ah" (ni) and the utilization of trebled phrases (si li li, etc.) all are quite evident here; somewhat subtler, perhaps, is the way in which the song is saved from mechanical predictability by shifts in the placement of place-[page 372] names and trebled phrases. The essential structure is maintained, but variations add an element of grace that elevates the song above the commonplace.

We have already seen that in the earliest period, mgur probably referred to a sub-genre of glu in which singers boasted either of their own or others' accomplishments. Ellingson, for instance, cites the following mgur celebrating a Tibetan victory over the Chinese:

Such secular mgur continued to be preserved and composed, but with the growth of Buddhism in Tibet, especially in the eleventh and succeeding centuries, the period of the later diffusion (phyi dar) of the Dharma, "mgur" came increasingly to refer to religious songs with an experiential component: they might be either reports of spiritual realization or instructions based upon such realizations, or a combination of the two. Religiously oriented mgur do occur in the period of Buddhism's early diffusion (snga dar): Padmasambhava is said to have originated the tradition by singing of his accomplishments for King Khri srong lde'u btsan, and his disciple Vairocana is credited by the historian dPa' bo gtsug lag phreng ba with being the first great composer of Tibetan-language mgur, in songs combining Buddhist and popular themes for the purpose of propagating the Dharma (Ellingson: 230).

The categorization of mgur as a primarily religious genre, however, dates chiefly from the time of the greatest of all Tibetan poets, Mi la ras pa (1040-1123). Though his hundreds of mgur—the traditional number is a hundred thousand—were not given their definitive written form until several centuries after his death,7 their influence on Tibetan culture seems to have been widespread from Mi la's time onward, through their preservation in various oral versions and written recensions, and through the importance Mi[page 373] la quickly assumed as a Tibetan Buddhist culture-hero. Mi la's greatness lay in his ability to compose songs—and they were "songs," with dbyangs or 'debs melodies (Ellingson: 247-249)—that combined the imagery, structural parallelism and expressive directness of ancient glu with distinctively Buddhist themes and Indian-inspired metrical schemes. In particular, Mi la ras pa—and thus the classical tradition of mgur—can be seen as inheriting two major influences: (1) the early diffusion traditions of songs of "positive personal experience," primarily secular in orientation and distinctly Tibetan in style, and (2) the tradition—brought to Tibet by Mi la's guru Mar pa—of tantric songs, those often spontaneous, always richly symbolic dohās, caryāgīti or vajragīti sung by Indian mahāsiddhas to express their spiritual realizations.8 The themes, moods and styles of Mi la's mgur range widely: though the Dharma almost always is the real subject, it is expressed in verses at various times simple or complex, devout or wrathful, puritanical or ribald, humorous or stern, intensely autobiographical or impersonally didactic. For now, one brief extract, which demonstrates his combination of sensitivity to nature, unashamed expression of personal achievement and ability to promulgate Buddhist doctrine, will have to suffice:

The success of Mi la ras pa's songs in helping to popularize Buddhism, combined with the innate Tibetan love of poetry and song, helped assure that in the centuries after Mi la, mgur composition came to be a widely practiced art. Its composers ranged from "crazy" (smyon pa) Mi la ras pa-style yogis like 'Brug pa kun legs, to great polymaths like Klong chen rab 'byams pa, Tsong kha pa[page 374] and Padma dkar po, to Dalai and Paṇ chen Lamas, to modern figures such as Geshe Rabten, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.10 With such a range of mgur, it is difficult to generalize about the genre's themes and prosody. Don grub rgyal, who has written the most comprehensive study to date, lists seven major types of mgur, those that (1) remember the guru's kindness, (2) indicate the source of one's realizations, (3) inspire the practice of Dharma, (4) give instructions on how to practice, (5) answer disciples' questions, (6) admonish the uprooting of evil and (7) serve as missives to gurus or disciples (194-195). Obviously, many mgur will combine more than one of these approaches. Stylistically, mgur show an even greater variety, ranging from straightforward, rhythmically simple personal reports (most often in seven- or nine-syllable lines, mixing trochees and dactyls, that became as central to Tibetan verse as iambic pentameter to English) to complex, ingeniously constructed, highly ornamented verses (of up to twenty-one syllables) whose sophistication rivals that of Sanskrit ornate poetry, kāvya. Indeed, because of the influence of Indian aesthetics from the thirteenth century onward, it is difficult sometimes to determine whether a particular composition should be classed as mgur or snyan ngag. Don grub rgyal insists (31ff.) that mgur are distinguished by their shorter and more unpredictable metrical styles, their greater simplicity and directness and their incorporation of popular Tibetan images and phrases (Don grub rgyal, ch. 8). Nevertheless, most later mgur bear at least some influence from the Indian aesthetic tradition, and this places the genre squarely between glu and snyan ngag, in terms of both its historical development and its place in the culture, as a bridge between earlier, more popular, and later, more belleletristic modes of poetic expression.

The term snyan ngag first appears during the period of Buddhism's early diffusion as a translation for the Sanskrit term kāvya, a complex, highly rule-governed type of versification in which much of the greatest Indian classical poetry was written. As Buddhist Sanskrit texts, some of which employed kāvya, were translated into Tibetan beginning in the ninth century, Indian prosody began slowly to influence poetry in Tibet. In the early period, Sanskrit prosody could have been known by only a few, whose response[page 375] to it probably did not go much beyond experimentation with different metrical schemes. In the period of the later diffusion, Mi la ras pa's primarily trochaic verse clearly has been influenced by translations of Indian texts (especially vajra songs), but Mi la displays no knowledge of Sanskrit prosody—if his mgur are guided by an aesthetic, it is that of the spontaneous, inspired utterances of Indian tantric adepts or, in his own tradition, shamanic bards who draw their songs from the "sky-treasury" (nam mkha' mdzod) (Stein, 1972: 272-276). As with so many innovations in Tibetan intellectual life, it is to Sa skya Paṇḍita Kun dga' rgyal mtshan (1182-1251) that the real influence of kāvya on Tibetan poetry can be traced. In his mKhas pa la 'jug pa'i sgo, Sa paṇ "took upon himself the task of translating into Tibetan poems and verses of early Indian poets together with the structural and rhythmic rules of writing poetry" (Tsering: 8).11 Sa paṇ's enthusiasm for Sanskrit verse and prosody was not widely shared by Tibetans, but another Sa skya pa scholar, Shong ston rDo rje rgyal mtshan, continued his work, championing in particular the poetic and theoretical works of the Indian scholar, Daṇḍin (seventh century). By the end of the thirteenth century, Sanskrit aesthetic theories were having a significant effect upon the Tibetan intelligentsia, and Daṇḍin's Kāvyādarśa (Tib. sNyan ngag gi me long) was on its way to becoming the most important source of such theories—a position it has enjoyed until the present day.12

As noted earlier, the theory and practice of snyan ngag influenced the composition of mgur—and perhaps even glu—from the thirteenth century onward. However, its influence upon the tradition of glu was slight, and among mgur composers it influenced most those who received a classical monastic education, and least those whose sphere was less academic. sNyan ngag itself was composed almost entirely by those with an academic background—but as the monastic university system took hold in Tibet, this came to include many of the nation's greatest thinkers and, for that matter, saints. Examples of snyan ngag are scattered widely throughout the collected works of such figures as Tsong kha pa, the fifth Dalai Lama, Khams sprul bsTan 'dzin chos kyi nyi ma, A mdo dGe 'dun chos 'phel (who, in typically contrarian fashion, preferred Kālidāsa to Daṇḍin as an Indian model) and Dudjom Rinpoche. Quite apart from purely poetic compositions (especially in such genres as long-life prayers and pūjās; see Cabezón, Makransky in this volume), some of the finest examples of snyan[page 376] ngag will be found in the verse forewords, invocations and afterwords of independent treatises or commentaries.

There is not the space here to detail all the themes and principles of the snyan ngag tradition. Unsurprisingly, its imagery is largely borrowed from Indian models. Its metrical and semantic patterns tend toward the complex, with lines as long as twenty-one syllables and the poet's meaning played out across a stanza of four or more lines (or even multiple stanzas), rather than the single line-units of more popular poetry. In principle, snyan ngag are supposed to evoke one or more of the traditional affect-states (bhāva, nyams 'gyur) of Sanskrit aesthetics: charm, heroism, disgust, merriment, wrath, fear, pity, wonderment and peace, and to display the formal and verbal ornaments (alaṃkāra, rgyan) that help to produce those states. In practice, of course, the considerable differences between the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages limits the types of ornamentation that can be transmitted transculturally, nor do Tibetans seem to have been intent on evoking particular affect-states with quite the rigor that Sanskrit tradition demanded (see Don grub rgyal, chs. 7: 1 and 8). A brief excerpt from Tsong kha pa's rTen 'brel bstod pa ("Praise of Dependent Origination") will suffice to give the flavor of snyan ngag:

As Stein notes (1972a: 269-270), since the absorption into Tibetan culture of Sanskrit prosody, "there has strictly speaking been no development or innovation. . . . From that [time] onwards, we find side by side one style that is nearer to the indigenous tradition, in spite of adaptation, and another more learned and pedantic one of Indian inspiration." Thus, from the late thirteenth century to the present day, Tibetan poetry has consisted primarily of the overlapping genres of glu, mgur and snyan ngag. gLu is the most "indigenous,"[page 377] the most direct, the most connected to its musical, oral and secular roots. sNyan ngag is the most "learned and pedantic," the most ornate, the most élite and purely literary. mGur falls somewhere in between: highly "popular" examples of mgur are virtually indistinguishable from glu, highly literary examples could as easily be considered snyan ngag, but most mgur maintain, in varying degrees, a balance of elements—Tibetan and Indian, secular and religious, oral and literary, personal and universal—that make it the most appealing of the genres to modern readers, and one worth exploring, at least briefly, in more depth.

Whether secular or religious, ancient or classical, mgur are songs of "positive personal experience," but most of them do not display the intensely concentrated expression of subjectivity that has been a hallmark of Western (and Western-inspired) poetry at least since the rise of Romanticism. Indeed, we should not expect to find subjectivity conceived or expressed in exactly the same way in cultures so vastly different. At the same time, neither the Buddhist doctrine of "no self" nor some mythical "Oriental" subjugation of ego has entailed the elimination of a distinctly subjective, autobiographical point of view from at least some poetic forms. Thus, both early Tibetan mgur and Indian tantric vajragīti, not to mention the words of the Buddha as recorded in the bKa' 'gyur, often involve direct, personal reports of experience and claims to attainment, whether secular or religious, physical or psychological. The personal, subjective strain in the Tibetan poetic tradition is found in its most intensive form in the subgenre of classical mgur described by Don grub rgyal (194) as "songs about the way in which experiential realizations arise from one's having meditated on the guru's instructions," or, for short, "songs of experience"—nyams mgur.14 Like their Tibetan and Indian forerunners, nyams mgur express "joy at having overcome an obstacle [or] hopes for future success" (Ellingson: 67), especially in terms of the struggle for enlightenment. Their tone, therefore, is primarily positive and celebratory. However, the recollection of obstacles or the intention to overcome them introduces in some cases a note of uncertainty, providing a spiritual and artistic tension that heightens the poem's effectiveness—especially on an audience whose members are themselves hopeful, but not yet spiritually accomplished.[page 378] Here, we will briefly examine poems about spiritual experience from six authors. They range in time from the eleventh to the twentieth century, in tone from boastful to pessimistic, and in style from popular, glu-like songs to ornate instances of snyan ngag—but they all focus as a theme on personal spiritual experience, and thus, I would argue, are instances of "songs of experience," nyams mgur.

As we already have seen, Mi la ras pa is generally considered the greatest Tibetan poet, as well as the most important figure in the tradition of religious mgur composition—not to mention one of the pivotal figures in the lineage of the bKa' brgyud order. He is also perhaps the most straightforwardly personal of all Tibetan poets, singing again and again of his personal struggles and attainments. His life story, marked by an early flirtation with black magic and back-breaking ordeals at the hands of his guru, Mar pa, is known to virtually every Tibetan, and the background knowledge of the severity of his trials makes his frequent celebrations of spiritual triumph that much more satisfying to his audience. Here is one such celebration:

Here is a second example from Mi la ras pa, illustrating something of the outcome of his meditation, the great yogic ease that is entailed by the sort of struggle and victory described above:

Tsong kha pa Blo bzang grags pa (1357-1419), best known as the founder of the now-dominant dGe lugs school of Tibetan Buddhism, was a virtuous, charismatic saint, too, but in almost every other way, he was Mi la ras pa's opposite: he was a scholar, commentator and lecturer, who lived at the heart of the Tibetan monastic establishment. Perhaps because of his scholarly emphasis, his writings are far less personal than Mi la's. His visionary experiences (especially his famous encounter with Mañjuśrī) are recorded in biographies, not in texts directly attributable to him. Still, there are a number of texts by Tsong kha pa that might be considered nyams mgur, and they are made all the more interesting by their paucity. One of them, the Lam rim bsdus don ("Summary Meaning of the Stages of the Path") or Lam rim chung ngu ("Short Text on the Stages of the Path"), actually is referred to in some dGe lugs pa traditions by the alternative title of Lam rim nyams mgur ma ("Song of Experience of the Stages of the Path") (see Dalai Lama, 1988: 27). It does, in fact, summarize the dGe lugs version of the lam rim meditation sequence, running systematically—and in snyan ngag-influenced style—through such topics as guru devotion; the value of a human rebirth; impermanence, death and karma; the altruistic aspiration to enlightenment; the six perfections; and the tantric path. What makes the text a nyams mgur is the refrain, found after each of the last fifteen verses, where[page 380] Tsong kha pa actually seems to make a realization-claim, albeit modestly:

A second text in which Tsong kha pa speaks of his own experiences is the Rang gi rtogs pa brjod pa mdo tsam du bshad pa, in which he gives an account of his education and training, alluding to the difficulties he had to overcome in understanding various points of Mādhyamika and tantric doctrine. The account is interspersed with the refrain, addressed to Mañjuśrī:

Again, the claim is modest, but in the context of Tsong kha pa's autobiographical reticence, it stands as a clear indication that he does, indeed, occasionally sing of his own experience.

'Brug pa Padma dkar po (1527-1592) was a bKa' brgyud pa who looked back to Mi la ras pa for inspiration, yet he, like Tsong kha pa, was a great scholar and commentator, many of whose treatises remain definitive for bKa' brgyud pas today. As a recipient of the bKa' brgyud lineage, he was well acquainted with the tradition of mgur composition; indeed, his collected writings include a 78-folio selection of "vajra songs" (rdo rje'i glu). However, Padma dkar po was a citizen of a world far more intellectually and politically complex than Mi la ras pa's, so his mgur reflect a degree of doctrinal systematization, aesthetic influences from snyan ngag, and a certain ambivalence about the world that we see little of in Mi la. The following selection does seem to celebrate spiritual victory, but it is neither easily won nor, perhaps, incorruptible:

Most of Padma dkar po's nyams mgur do reflect the celebratory style of the genre, but, as Beyer correctly notes (1974: 74), it is "tempered by an all too acute awareness of the ways of the crowded world and the unsteadiness of the human heart, including his own." If Padma dkar po is not exactly modern in his ambivalence, he nevertheless displays a frankness that, in the inevitable context of nyams mgur—reporting one's experience so that it may inspire others—would be attractive to those who have known and continue to struggle with the same sort of ambivalence.

The sort of ambivalence hinted at in Padma dkar po is a central theme of the songs (mgul glu) of the sixth Dalai Lama, Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho (1683-1706), whose short, tragic life and popular way of expressing himself have endeared him to Tibetans nearly as much as Mi la ras pa. As a Dalai Lama, he was formally a monk and a member of the dGe lugs lineage, but his attraction to fleshly temptations beyond the Potala, and his interest in rNying ma pa doctrines, are well-attested. His songs are written primarily in quatrains of six-syllable lines evocative of ancient glu traditions. Their repeated references to lovers and love affairs have proven an embarrassment to the monastic establishment, and the argument sometimes is made that they reflect a symbolic, tantric type of discourse that refers to inner accomplishments. There is at least one song that does seem to contain tantric references:

This almost could be a vajra-song of the sort encountered in the Mother tantras, but it is obscure and atypical, and cannot establish the Sixth as a tāntrika posing as a libertine. The opposite argument, however, that he was simply a rake and hypocrite, with no interest at all in spirituality, seems no more persuasive. Indeed, it is probably safest to see the sixth Dalai Lama as a man torn between spiritual and sensual inclinations, as expressed in the following song:[page 382]

This may not exactly be a celebration of spiritual victory, but it certainly is a song about spiritual experience, expressed honestly in a popular idiom; as such, different as it may be from a song of Mi la or Tsong kha pa, and however it may stretch the boundaries of the genre, it does serve an example of nyams mgur.

The composition of nyams mgur is not confined to the ancient and medieval past; modern Tibetans have written them as well. Geshe Rabten (1920-1986) was a learned dGe lugs pa-trained monk who escaped from Tibet in 1959, and eventually settled in Switzerland. He has written of his retreat experiences in a twelve-verse mgur, to which he has appended a commentary. The outlook with which he enters his retreat is prompted by his guru's analysis of the illusory nature of a rather modern "basis of imputation," a hundred-rupee note, but in what follows, Geshe Rabten's language and viewpoint remain traditionally dGe lugs:

This could easily have been written by Tsong kha pa, and this demonstrates that, even in the modern era, traditional Tibetan views and modes of expression may still hold sway.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987) was a bKa' brgyud pa lineage-holder who also fled Tibet in 1959, settling in India, then Scotland, then Boulder, Colorado, and finally Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received an Oxford education to go with his Tibetan training, and explained Tibetan Buddhism to Westerners in language that often was couched in their own psychological and aesthetic categories. Very self-consciously an inheritor of Mi la ras pa's tradition of spontaneously expressing realization through mgur, Trungpa was an active and imaginative poet all his life, writing in both Tibetan and English. The latter are beyond our purview, but a brief sample of his Tibetan mgur, entitled Zur ze yi ge ("Cynical Letter") should suffice to demonstrate his verbal dexterity, strong[page 383] sense of irony, and mastery of both traditional bKa' brgyud pa and modernist styles:

Particularly notable here is Trungpa's ironic invocation of traditional Buddhist images of wheels, which may be either saṃsāric or transcendental, and his sense that he himself is a product of his "spinning," whether for better or worse.

It should be evident from the nyams mgur reviewed here that although Stein is right to maintain that most Tibetan poetic forms became fixed by the end of the twelfth century, the tradition has by no means stood still, and that constantly changing circumstances—Tibetan history is no more static than any other—have led to a rich diversity of content, tone and style, that only can be multiplied by the increasing contact Tibetan poets—especially those of the diaspora—are having with non-Tibetan culture. If it is argued that, in fact, there is such diversity of content, tone and style in these poems that we cannot reasonably subsume them under a single genre, I would simply reiterate what I suggested before: nyams mgur are above all united by a common theme, personal spiritual experience; all of the poems we have cited refer to this, so all of them are nyams mgur.

Nyams mgur obviously represent only a small portion of the Tibetan poetic tradition: they are not even the majority among mgur, let alone among glu and nyan ngag. At the same time, they include a disproportionate number of the greatest poems, and they probably are the most popular of the genres—no doubt because they speak to their audience, whether illiterate nomad or learned monk,[page 384] of real and personal experience, in a way that permits a certain level of psychological identification, even communion. We saw at the outset that poetry in the modern West is "writing that formulates a concentrated awareness of experience," and, indeed, simply within the American tradition of the past two centuries, the poets generally considered greatest are those that seem to concentrate their experience most intensely and imaginatively: Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, W. C. Williams, Stevens, Lowell.

Does this mean that nyams mgur fulfill a modern definition of poetry? They are, after all, songs (mgur) of experience (nyams). Nyams is a rich, multivalent term in Tibetan, connoting experience, thought, mind-state—indeed, much of what we would consider the inner dimension of a human being. However, in its primary usage, nyams means inner spiritual experience or realization, and, indeed, when we analyze the inner dimension expressed in nyams mgur, we see that it is essentially "religious," i.e., related to experiences on the Buddhist path to enlightenment. Tibetan poets, even the most "confessional," have tended to expose their sentiments largely within the context of their progress—or lack of it—along that path. They do not—as Western poets often do—report the minutiae of their inner states, or even speak much of the great non-religious passions that—sometimes, at least—must animate them. In this sense, nyams mgur as a whole would appear more closely to parallel the Western subgenre of "religious poetry," i.e., poetry that places front and center the poet's relation to what we might call "the transcendent." This genre, of course, includes the work of many great pre-modern poets, including Dante, Donne, Milton and St. John of the Cross, as well as a fair number of moderns, including (among writers in English) Shelley, Swinburne, Yeats and Eliot.

The comparison between nyams mgur and Western "religious poetry" has a certain appropriateness, but it is misleading in several important ways. First, and most importantly, the comparison may conceal an implicit denigration of Tibetan poetry, on the basis of its representing only a fairly narrow range of human experience, i.e., the "religious." This notion is woefully misplaced, for it fails to account for the considerable differences in what counts as "experience" from culture to culture. Tibetans were not and are not lacking in a complex range of "psychological states," but those states only partially overlap those of modern Westerners. Just as modern poets faithfully reflect the central, if not universal, concerns[page 385] of their culture, e.g., the individual's quest for meaning and certainty in an ambiguous world, so Tibetan poets have faithfully reflected their culture's normative, if not universal, concern: the individual's relationship to the attainment of enlightenment. Thus, though their concerns might strike a modern Westerner as "medieval," Tibetan poets reflect the important "experiences" of their culture as faithfully as do their Western counterparts.

Further, it might be argued that nyams mgur actually contain a wider spectrum of human experience than just the "religious"—especially with the dogmatic connotations that the term sometimes bears in the West. After all, (a) many Tibetan poets describe their obstacles as well as their achievements, so "deluded" states of mind receive their due, too. Also, (b) the practice by many poets of nondualistic meditations like rdzogs chen or mahāmudrā, or their realization of the leveling of all phenomena in the ultimate reality of emptiness, should open their poetry to their reporting, without discrimination, of whatever appears—very much as in Zen poetry nonduality becomes the basis for the positive valuation of all experience and phenomena, no matter how conventionally insignificant. Further, (c) the spontaneous, "mad" (smyon) style in which at least some mgur (notably those of Mi la ras pa and his bKa' brgyud pa successors) are composed should entail an unfettered mode of expression, in which traditional stylistic and thematic limits are transcended.

Indeed, Allen Ginsberg argues that the bKa' brgyud poetic tradition is a repository "of millennial practical information on the attitudes and practices of mind speech & body that Western poets over the same millennia have explored individually, fitfully, as far as they were able—searching thru cities, scenes, seasons, manuscripts, libraries, backalleys, whorehouses, churches, drawing rooms, revolutionary cells, opium dens, merchant's rooms in Harrar, salons in Lissadell" (Trungpa, 1983: 11). Thus, nyams mgur connect—if not with the mainstream of Western poetry or religiosity—at least with a significant alternative visionary and spiritual tradition, embodied in the modern era by Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Williams and Robert Creeley—as well as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Ginsberg himself.

Ginsberg is almost certainly right when he speaks of the mgur of Chögyam Trungpa in this vein, and he may well be right that the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of Tibetan Buddhism can be the basis for an aesthetic of "first thought, best thought," as[page 386] in Zen and the Western poets he cites. However, Trungpa Rinpoche is, so far, an exception, since he was explicitly influenced both by Zen and by Western modernism. A reconsideration of the other mgur-composers we have discussed makes it clear that (a) while obstacles are described by almost all nyams mgur composers, and may even be dominant in some (like the sixth Dalai Lama) their main focus remains "positive personal experience" of a religious type recognizable to most Tibetans, not the sort of introspective cataloguing known to Western readers, (b) whatever thematic freedom might in principle be entailed by meditation on emptiness, virtually no pre-modern Tibetan poet has paid much attention to exalting conventionalities, à la Basho or Williams—unless natural descriptions qualify, which is debatable, since nature seldom is described for its own sake;15 and (c) despite the spontaneity and freedom with which many mgur were composed, they have tended to fall fairly comfortably within stylistic and metrical parameters that were hallowed by tradition. Whether the poetic path followed by Trungpa Rinpoche will be followed by others as Tibetans increasingly interact with modern cultures remains to be seen, but for now, more traditional notions of poetic theme and style continue to hold sway.

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