A Treatise on Passion is the most famous, and infamous, work of Gendun Chopel, the most important, and controversial, Tibetan writer of the twentieth century. He was born in the far northeast region of the Tibetan cultural domain in 1903, the year that Brit- ish forces under the command of Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded his homeland. He died in 1951,

This book is his version of the Karma sutra with an emphasis on the pleasures of sex. "This is a pleasure that he knew not from books but from his own experience. And thus his second motivation in composing his Treatise on Passion was to convey that experience. In poem af- ter poem, on page after page, we find the exuberance of someone discovering the joys of sex, made all the more intense because they had been forbidden to him for so long. He had taken vows of celibacy when he was in his early teens and may have renounced his monk’s vows as late as age thirty-one, just four years before completing this work, where he describes in ecstatic and graphic detail the wonders he had discovered.