If we had to face even one third of the trials this man has encountered, we would have become basket cases by now. But this man, with a permanent half-smile on his face, goes around the world, advocating compassion, forgiveness and peace.
Dalai Lama is not really his name. It is the name of the position he holds. He is actually the 14th Dalai Lama. After the 13th Dalai Lama died, Tibetan Buddhist leaders searched for his successor for several months. Their search led them finally to a two-year old boy called Lhamo Thondup in Taktser, China. He had been born in a peasant family two years earlier, on 6 July 1935. Identifying him as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, they proclaimed he was the 14th Dalai Lama.
Separated from his family, he had to begin his religious education at the age of six. He learnt logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, medicine and Buddhist philosophy, monastic discipline, metaphysics, and epistemology. In 1950, at the age of fifteen, he assumed full political power as the Dalai Lama. In October of that year, China invaded Tibet and occupied it. In 1954, Dalai Lama went to Beijing for peace talks with Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders. The talks did not stop the continued suppression of the Tibetan people by Chinese troops, and that led to a Tibetan uprising in 1959, which was brutally put down. Learning of the Chinese government’s plans to kill him, Dalai Lama fled with his closest advisers and several thousand followers to Dharamshala in Northern India, where he set up a government in exile.
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Fr M A Joe Antony SJ
