Word: dalai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their way along some of the world's tallest mountains in central Kashmir. Most came on foot, some by yak, the more affluent by treacherous day-long Jeep or bus rides. Their destination: Leh, a remote stronghold of the Tibetan culture that had been selected by the 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled God-King, for a rare spiritual event...
...week for the ceremony approached, the town became an open-air monastery. Lamas in robes of red and ocher rubbed shoulders with laymen, zealously spinning the prayer wheels that would magnify a hundredfold the effect of incantations written upon them. The Dalai Lama, followed by flocks of devotees, visited monasteries rancid with the odor of butter-oil lamps. Then, leaving the bustling tent township erected for the occasion, he retired with his chosen monks to a small pagoda on the banks of the Indus River to devote six days to prayer and penance...
Finally, last week began the Dhukor Wangchen (the sermon of the Wheel of Time), one of Buddhism's most elaborate rituals. For each of three days, the air exploded with the bellowing of conch shells and rhythmic prayer chants. Then, in the hush that followed, the Dalai Lama delivered an eight-hour discourse on tantrism, the most magical form of Mahayana Buddhism. Renunciation, enlightened motive and a correct understanding of sunyata (nothingness) are the three prerequisites for the tantric practice, he explained. Disciples were given two reeds to sleep on, one under the pillow, the other under the mattress...
Step Toward Bliss. Such persistence is not hard to fathom. The Dalai Lama is, after all, believed to be the very reincarnation of the Buddha in Buddhism's Tibetan variant. To see him during one of his rare public appearances is a step toward bliss. To hear the Wheel of Time sermon, however, is a guaranteed shortcut to nirvana. Such a blessing is rarely available. A Dalai Lama delivers the sermon only a few times during his lifetime, six being the customary maximum. At Leh, the current Dalai Lama was delivering his sixth sermon...
...appeared in print before or were generally known: the agency's loan of B-26 bombers and CIA pilots for the uprising against Indonesian President Sukarno in the late 1950s, the drifting of balloons laden with propaganda over mainland China during the Cultural Revolution, the training of the Dalai Lama's mountaineer troops when they were driven out of Tibet in 1959 by the Chinese Communists. But often the book adds fresh detail. For example, in one of their periodic raids on their homeland, the hardy Tibetans helped resolve a debate that had been going...