Word: dalai
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...China battled with bombs and paratroops to blot out the last vestiges of independence in Tibet, and the Dalai Lama's spectacular escape into India (see FOREIGN NEWS), brought home the point for would-be neutralists in Asia and Africa that they stay neutral in the cold war to their ultimate peril...
Birth & Discovery. Born June 6, 1935, in the Chinese province of Chinghai, the Dalai Lama was one of six children of a peasant who lived near a three-storied monastery with a golden roof. It was this monastery that the regent of Tibet, looking for a successor to the 13th Dalai Lama, saw in the waters of Cho-Khor Gye, a lake that could tell the future. When a party of lamas descended upon the monastery, they came upon a small boy who ran up to one of them shouting, "Lama! Lama!" The boy seized a rosary that had belonged...
Education. In the vast (1,400 rooms) winter palace of Potala, the Palace of Gods, and in the smaller summer palace two miles away, the young Dalai Lama spent his days studying religion and philosophy, and training in the practices of dyhyana (meditation) as developed by the Mahayana Buddhist School. His mother was the only female he was allowed to receive within his household of servants, monks, abbots and the State Oracle, given to appropriately vague pronouncements ("A powerful foe threatens . . ."). The few Western visitors who, bearing sacred scarves, got audiences, found him a studious, insatiably curious and dedicated...
Relations with China. In 1950, on hearing that the Chinese Communists had invaded Tibet, the Dalai Lama's advisers placed two balls of kneaded tsamba in a golden bowl of water, one to indicate that the Dalai Lama should leave Lhasa, the other that he should not. When the answer turned out to be yes, they set out cups of buttered tea for good luck, made their way over the mountain passes in freezing (24° below zero) weather to a monastery only ten miles from the Indian border. When they returned to Lhasa seven months later, the Dalai...
They made the mistake of letting the Dalai Lama visit India in 1956, where a free-spending six weeks made him aware of the outside world. Since then, though Radio Peking has on occasion quoted the Dalai Lama in dutiful denunciation of the American imperialists, he has in fact shown a captive's ability subtly to defy authority. The old saying is still true: "To hold Tibet firmly, the conqueror must win the Potala's top floor...