The Blue Winged Bee: Love Poems of the VIth Dalai Lama

Poetry Book Society Choice The poems, called in English `The Love Songs of the VIth Dalai Lama', are known and loved all over Tibet. Priests being priests (lamas, lamas) have endowed them with spiritual significance, so that pious Tibetans can, if they choose, read them a little as we read `The Song of Solomon', or the poems of St John of the Cross. Ts'angs-dbyangs-rgyamts'o did write orthodox religious works, but Tibetan popular tradition does not hold that `The Love Songs' is among them. The English poems are not translations. They are not paraphrases, interpretations, or even imitations. They are simply `poems suggested by'. The Tibetan text has been taken solely as a point of departure.