A poetry and life unique in the lineage of the Dalai Lama. The sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (16831706), 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.