The Treasury of Lives

Lama Chimpa Gyatso (bla ma sbyin pa rgya mtsho) was born in Chahar province, in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia on October 2, 1922 or 1923. His father’s name was Sodnam Gombu (bsod nams mgon po).

He received his early education in Inner Mongolia and his monastic education at Hoshion Süme and Togatu Süme Monasteries in Mongolia.[1]

In 1940, he traveled to Beijing to study at Yonghegong Monastery (dga' ldan byin chags gling, 雍和宫) which included a renowned Mongolian medical institute at the time. In 1942, he went to Kumbum Jampa Ling Monastery (sku 'bum byams pa gling) in Amdo, for higher monastic education. He studied there for two years.

He visited his home for the last time around 1944. The following year he went to Drepung Monastery (bras spungs dgon) in Lhasa and studied Tibetan literature and Buddhist logic, ultimately receiving his rabjampa (rab 'byams pa) degree. He mentions in one of his articles that when he arrived in Tibet in the 1940s, even though he had the necessary knowledge of classical Tibetan, he did not know how to speak in Tibetan colloquially. This was not a burden for his studies, as the medium was classical Tibetan.[2]

During the 1950 invasion of Tibet, Lama Chimpa, like many other Mongolian scholars studying in Tibet, fled along with the Tibetans to India. He arrived in Kalimpong, where he met Russian Tibetologist George Nicholas Roerich (1902–1960). He studied Sanskrit and English under Roerich and assisted him in compiling a Tibetan-Russian-English dictionary and translating Tibetan texts.

In 1952, he joined the International Academy of Indian Culture in New Delhi founded by famous Indologist Professor Raghu Vira (1902–1963) and worked there and in its Nagpur branch as the Tibetan and Mongolian language instructor for nine years, until 1961. He also assisted Raghu Vira and his son Lokesh Chandra (b. 1927) in compiling the Tibetan-Sanskrit Dictionary (bod dang legs sbyar gyi mdzod),[3] the Mongolian-Sanskrit Dictionary, and a Mongolian-Hindī Reader, and helped translate other Mongolian and Tibetan texts into Hindī and English. He also taught at the University of Delhi in the Department of Buddhist Studies. Around this period, he married a Sikkimese woman named Tsering Dolma (tshe ring sgrol ma).

In 1962, Lama Chimpa joined Visva-Bharati University as a full-time lecturer in the Department of Indo-Tibetan Studies and settled in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. At Visva-Bharati University, he taught Tibetan language, history, and Buddhist philosophy alongside famous Tibetan lamas like Chime Rigdzin, commonly known as C. R. Lama ('chi med rig 'dzin, 1922–2002), Tulku Thondup (sprul sku don grub, 1939–2023), and renowned Tibetologists like Suniti Kumar Pathak and N. Aiyaswami Śāstri. He also supervised research in Mongolian studies.

Apart from Mongolian and Tibetan, he had sound knowledge of Sanskrit, English, Hindī, Bengali, and Nepāli. This resulted in many scholars of different languages coming to him for assistance in translating Tibetan texts into their own languages. He also donated to research centers in India numerous Tibetan and Mongolian manuscripts and xylographs that he had brought with him from Tibet. He maintained good relations with Chinese scholars and students of Visva-Bharati. He was a close friend of Sino-Indologist Professor Tan Yun Shan (1898–1983), who was the founder of Visva-Bharati’s Cheena Bhavana, the oldest center of Chinese studies in South Asia.

Some of his notable students were Lopon Orgyen Tenzin Rinpoche (blo dpon o rgyan bstan 'dzin rin po che), Tulku Urgyen Chemchog (sprul sku o rgyan che mchog), Andrea Loseries, and Alaka Chattopadhyāya.

In collaboration with Alaka Chattopadhyāya, he worked on several important translations published in India. These included, in 1967, Atiśa and Tibet: Life and Works of Dīpaṃkara Śrīñāna in Relation to the History and Religion of Tibet. In 1970 they published an English translation of Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India (rgya gar chos byung). Lama Chimpa also compiled and published A Spoken Mongol-English Dictionary (1975), based on multiple previous dictionaries such as the Tibetan-Mongol / Mongol Tibetan Dictionary by Yeshe Dorj. 

Following C. R. Lama’s retirement in 1985, Lama Chimpa was appointed as the new head of the department.

He retired from the university in 1993 and settled with his wife in Kalimpong. Through his interest in Tibetan medical texts, he was closely associated with the International Trust for Traditional Medicine (ITTM) in Kalimpong, which he cofounded in 1995 along with Dr. Barbara Gerke from Germany and other Indian and German scholars. He established contacts with Mongolian scholars and inspired research on Mongolian medicine. During this period he worked on his autobiography, which, however, remains unpublished. Excerpts from his diaries from the 1930s and 1940s on Mongolian medicine were published in the ITTM journal AyyurVijnana in 1999. 

Lama Chimpa passed away on March 17, 2011 at his residence at Madhuban, Kalimpong.


1 Loseries, p. 60.

2 Lama Chimpa, p. 40.

3 Chandra, p. 9.

 

Ritiman Das is a research scholar at the Department of Indo-Tibetan Studies, Visva-Bharati University. He has translated the biography of Seventeen Nālandā Panditas into Bengali.

Published December 2022

Bibliography

Chandra, Lokesh. 1976. Tibetan-Sanskrit Dictionary. Kyoto. Rinsen Book Company. p. 9.

Gerke, Barbara. 2000. “International Trust for Traditional Medicine, Kalimpong, North-Eastern Himalayas, India- A Profile”, Asian Medicine: Newsletter of International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine,Dr. Waltraud Ernst, Editor.

Lama Chimpa. 1975. A Spoken Mongol-English Dictionary. Visva Bharati University, Shantiniketan. S. S. Printing Box, Bolpur.

Lama Chimpa. 1999. “On Traditional Mongolian Medicine.” AyurVijnana, vol. 6, spring, p. 43-47.

Lama Chimpa. 2000. “Personal Observations on Tibetan Language and Literature.”Tibetan Studies: Past and Present. Narendra Dash, editor. Delhi. Kaveri Publications.

Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyāya. 2011 (1967). Atiśa and Tibet: Life and Works of Dīpaṃkara Śrīñāna in Relation to the History and Religion of Tibet. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Delhi.

Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyāya (transl.). 1990 (1970). Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Delhi. Full text available online: https://archive.org/details/TaranathasHistoryOfBuddhismInIndia/page/n1/mode/2up

Loseries, Andrea. 2010. “Indo-Tibetan Studies at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan: Challenges of a Heritage Research Department in India.” InHeritage Conservation and Research in India: 60 Years of Indo-Austrian Collaboration. Gabriela Krist, editor. Vienna: Böhlau.