Word: lamas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...eight different directions. Suddenly the teenage ruler was obliged to take a crash course in statesmanship, traveling to Beijing to negotiate with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. Finally, in March 1959, when a bloody confrontation seemed imminent as 30,000 steadfast Tibetans rose up against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama slipped out of his summer palace dressed as a humble soldier and set off across the highest mountains on earth. Two weeks later, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a dzo, a hybrid yak, the "Holder of the White Lotus" rode into exile in India...
Since then, his has been a singularly delicate balancing act, the guest of a nation that would prefer him to remain silent and the enemy of a nation that much of the world is trying to court. Undeterred, the Dalai Lama has organized 53 Tibetan settlements in India and Nepal and set up institutes to preserve his country's arts, its scriptures and its medical traditions. In recent years he has begun to race around the world like a Buddhist John Paul II -- lecturing at Harvard, meeting the Pope and attending to his flock, be they unlettered peasants...
Many young Tibetans would like their leader to be more militant. Angrily noting that there are more than 3,000 political prisoners in central Tibet alone and that Beijing has at least 300,000 troops on the "Rooftop of the World," they advocate violence. But the Dalai Lama refuses to be intemperate. "Once your mind is dominated by anger," he notes thoughtfully, "it becomes almost mad. You cannot take right decisions, and you cannot see reality. But if your mind is calm and stable, you will see everything exactly as it is. I think all politicians need this kind...
...Dalai Lama spends much of his time reflecting on how Tibetan Buddhism can teach, and learn from, other disciplines. He believes, for example, that Buddhism can show Marxism how to develop a genuine socialist ideal "not through force, but through reason, through a very gentle training of the mind, through the development of altruism." He sees many points of contact between his faith and "psychology, cosmology, neurobiology, the social sciences and physics. There are many things we Buddhists should learn from the latest scientific findings. And scientists can learn from Buddhist explanations. We must conduct research, and then accept...
...devout that they would readily give up their lives for their leader. In the draft constitution he drew up in 1963, the God-King included, against his people's wishes, a clause that would allow for his impeachment. Now he is considering new methods for choosing the next Dalai Lama -- adopting an electoral system similar to the Vatican's, perhaps, or selecting on the basis of seniority, or even dispensing with the entire institution. "I think the time has come -- not necessarily to take a decision very soon, but to start a more formal discussion, so that people can prepare...