A poetry and life unique in the lineage of the Dalai Lama. The sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706), refused to take full monastic vows and returned to the world, loving alcohol, archery, and women with a passion that perhaps suggests he had a premonition of his early death at the age of twenty-four.
Geoffrey Waters has a PhD in classic Chinese from Indiana University. His other books of translations include Broken Willow: The Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji and Three Elegies of Ch'u.