Gendun Chophel Gendun Chophel was born in 1903 in Sholphang in Rebkong, Amdo. At the age of fourteen, after having learnt to read and write from his father, he entered the local Drisha Monastery. Three years later, he enrolled into the 2,500 monk-strong Labrang Tashi Kyil Monastery. Since a small child, GC had proven himself to be something of a prodigy, reciting long and complex liturgical texts after hearing them only once. By the time Gendun Chophel was in Labrang he had earned for himself the reputation of a master debater; his specialty was in defending positions that in traditional parlance would have resulted in sure and ruinous defeat: once he took up the Jain position, rejected by Buddhists, that plants have consciousness and not one monk in the courtyard could prove him wrong. In the film, his friend recounts how GC unfailingly beat his opponents through such tradition-bending eloquence and wit that his every religious battle inevitably ended with the witnessing monks erupting in rambunctious laughter: “Ho, ho, ho!” Gendun Chophel’s unorthodoxy was revealed early on even in such benign act as reading from a scripture. Once, during a routine recitation in the monastery’s chamber where some hundreds of monks were reading from portions of the Buddha’s 108-volume cannon, their individual incantations riding, crashing and disappearing in the over-arching deafening boom, GC was to be observed in a corner reading his text silently, intently.