Publisher's Synopsis
In 1539, Tsarchen Losal Gyatso, a Tibetan lama, whose mastery of the tantric Buddhism of the Sakya tradition has never been surpassed since, made a pilgrimage from Tibet's western regions into the centre of the country. This is his record of that journey, providing a personal window into the country at that time and into the mind of this charming master. Tsarchen and his companions slowly pass through the countryside, crossing high passes and rivers, descending into deep valleys, visiting hermitages, estates, temples, villages. Tsarchen's journal is sometimes strikingly similar to the famous Narrow Road to the Interior of the Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho, which records a journey taken in 1689, exactly 150 years after Tsarchen's trip. As with Basho's classic, Tsarchen's text is written in a mixture of luminous prose and verse, with an immense amount of hidden meaning. The text of this work was used as the heart of a biography of Tsarchen by the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-82), who said of Tsarchen's work that it is composed of
