"Response to Mark Tatz' Review of "Ethics of Tibet

The review by Mark Tatz (Philosophy East and West 43, no. 2 [1993]: 337-341) was so full of gratuitous insults, misinformation, and self-exaltation that no reader should be surprised that I must respond with contrary evidence and let the chips fall where they may. The first point made by Tatz is that my initial translation (Calming the Mind and Discerning the Real) from Tsong-kha-pa's great opus, the Lam rim chen mo, was distinguished by a controversy with the reviewer Ceshe Lhundup Sopa, who, according to Tatz, showed how I had completely misconstrued Tibetan grammar. Buddhist texts stress that the external world is not really as it is imagined by ordinary consciousness, but also stress that persons differ in their ability correctly to assess these externals. I apparently did better than Tatz in this case, because I recognized at once that the review in that Buddhalogical journal, then being published in Madison, Wisconsin, was not written by Geshe Sopa. This was awkward for me; in responding to whoever actually wrote the review, readers might think I was impolite to the wonderfully educated Ceshe. When I included a remark on the excellent English, the then editor suppressed it (so he bet on the wrong horse). Later, at a Tibet day anniversary at the Dalai Lama's Tibet House in New York City, Ceshe Sopa's assistant-to my memory a certain Jones-confessed to me that he had written the review. Later, when the International Association of Buddhist Studies conducted an international meeting on Buddhism in Bologna, Italy, where I delivered a paper, Ceshe Sopa also attended; and on that occasion he initiated a handshake with me. This was as close as he would come to

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