Word: dalai
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...time I revisited him, the Dalai Lama was contemplating the latest strange turn in this enforced interaction with the modern world: the $70 million Hollywood movie Seven Years in Tibet and Martin Scorsese's remarkable new film, Kundun, both of which tell the story of his early life. Sitting cross-legged in his armchair, rocking back and forth as he spoke and always keeping an eye out to make sure my cup of tea was full, the famously accessible doctor of metaphysics talked with full-bodied candor, for day after day, about his death, the increasingly public divisions within...
...making scant headway in his cause. Last September some reporters openly criticized the (non-Tibetan) organizers of his trip to Australia because of their $20 T shirts and official sponsorship from Nike, Thai International Airlines and Ford. I must confess, though, that I know of this only because the Dalai Lama told me of it--and a caustic clipping about the "Dalai Lama Show," the only item up on the bulletin board of the Dolma Ling Nunnery in Dharamsala...
...appreciate fully the incongruities of Tenzin Gyatso's life in the celebrity age, you have to recall that he was born in a cowshed in a tiny farming village in what was locally known as the Wood Hog Year (1935). The previous Dalai Lama, the 13th, had been one of the great reforming spirits of a tradition whose leaders had all too often been ineffectual boys manipulated by regents. Beset by imperialists of all stripes, the farsighted Lama, in his last written testament, predicted a time in Tibet's history, soon, when "monks and monasteries will be destroyed...
...even more taken aback when a two-year-old boy greeted them with familiarity and addressed their leader, disguised as a servant, by the name of his temple in distant Lhasa. The mischievous toddler, who slept in the kitchen of a mud-and-stone house, would become the 14th Dalai Lama...
...four he was installed upon the Lion Throne in Lhasa and inducted into a formidable course of monastic studies. By the age of six he was choosing his own regent, and by the time he was 11 he was weathering a civil uprising. The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his unworldly boyhood in the cold, dark, thousand-room Potala Palace, playing games with the palace sweepers, rigging up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbering his only real playmate--his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten--serene...