Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Tibetan by Geoffrey Waters. The life and poetry of the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706), are unique in the lineage of the Dalai Lama. He refused to take full monastic vows and returned to the world, loving alcohol, archery, and women with a passion that perhaps suggests that he had a premonition of his early death at age twenty-four. The 120 poems included here are like small windows through which one glimpses the life he led. Most of them are made up of four unrhymed lines of six syllables each, yielding something between the Japanese haiku and the Chinese jueju (quatrain) in their brevity.

Tsangyang Gyatso (March 1, 1683 - November 15, 1706) was the sixth Dalai Lama. He was a Monpa by ethnicity and was born in the present-day region of Arunachal Pradesh in India. He led a playboy lifestyle and disappeared, near Kokonor probably murdered on his way to China in 1706. Tsangyang Gyatso composed poems and songs that are still immensely popular in Tibet to this day.