Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen over the years, abruptly thrust their readers into bewilderingly alien territory. For every well-known novel by a Bronte sister, in these thrillingly multi-cultural days, Penguin’s editors will cast their eyes to Africa or China, and the result is a growing library of diverse texts to keep readers very profitably unbalanced.

And hoo boy, texts don’t get much more alien than one of Penguin’s latest, first English-language translation of a key text of Tibetan Buddhism, The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat, a hyperkinetic saint’s life of Ra Lotsawa Dorje Drak, a violently charismatic eleventh-century Tibetan buddha as written by the eldest son of the man’s nephew, Ra Yeshe Senge, some time in the early 13^th century.

As our translator and annotator Bryan Cuevas, Director of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at Florida State University, makes clear, Ra Yeshe Senge’s account is a crucial early document illuminating the legendary past of this “paradigmatic sinister yogin”:

The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat remains the only complete biography of Ra Lotsawa that is available to us, and the primary source that Tibetans for generations have turned to for the story of his life. The text is thus essential for understanding the legend of this notorious master of Buddhist sorcery and how through his many tribulations and triumphs he came to popularize his unique transmission of the Vajrabhairava tradition in Tibet.

Cuevas is keenly aware of what a discordant note that mention of “Buddhist sorcery” will strike with many of the West’s more misty-eyed mischaracterizations of Buddhism, and he has no patience with such a supernatural defanging of Buddhist history:

Magic has always been deeply embedded in Buddhist thought and has long been tied inextricably to conventional Buddhist forms of ritual action. This vital dimension of Buddhism, however, is not often acknowledged or to often ignored. The reasons for this are tangled up in the long and convoluted history of the term “magic” in Western discourse, with its mostly negative connotations, but derive also from certain closely related modernist assumptions about Buddhism as a rational, empirical philosophy fully compatible with science. Magic has no place in this constructed image of Buddhism, for it insists that magic is inconsistent with true Buddha’s original message – this in spite of overwhelming textual and historical evidence to the contrary.

And certainly The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat is chock-full of magic! In his relentless quest for money and power (and, when occasion warrants, to instruct the masses on the path to enlightenment), Ralo has more encounters with bandits and super-villains than the Avengers in a really bad week. He and his brothers and followers are accosted almost everywhere they go and, as in this sudden battle while on a pilgrimage to India, Ralo almost always proves victorious, displaying a wide array of superpowers:

As Ralo approached this spectacle, some Hindus shouted, “Hey, here comes one of those dharma followers, the sort fit to be killed!” When they came closer and surrounded him, Ralo, prepared to fight, rose up in the body of Glorious Vajrabhairava and roared with the eight laughters booming like thunder. The temples with all their gods laughters booming like thunder. The temples with all their gods collapsed into tiny pieces and every one of the Hindu attackers fainted and slumped to the ground. When they awoke from their stupor, they saw that the temple foundations, gods included, had been reduced to ashes. Absolutely terrified, they begged Ralo to forgive their evil deeds and then they all joined the inner fold of the Buddha’s teaching.

He also performs miracles with ease, often merely for the amusement of friends and onlookers, as when he transmutes water into an unending supply of beer (getting fewer chuckles: that wacky time he re-animated the corpse of a dead deer). Cuevas rounds all this bizarre, utterly gripping stuff with generous end notes and a glossary of terms, which will prove invaluable for readers who find the whole world of The All-Pervading Melodious Drumbeat bewildering. It is bewildering, but it’s also unforgettably energetic, unlike anything you’re likely to read this year. Imagine a Gospel of St. John that’s five times longer, full of beautiful young women, and that features a Jesus who sometimes, as Ralo does in a particularly unforgettable moment, siphons up milk through his godly pecker and spews it out of his mouth while the crowd cheers. Or at least try to imagine such a thing.