Word: lamas
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...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...
...summer palace, with his family and some bodyguards. For two weeks the party traveled over the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes and moving only under the cover of darkness, until at last, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a hybrid yak, the Dalai Lama arrived in India and began a new life in exile...
...Dalai Lama's very refusal to be dictatorial and his calm assurance that Tibetan Buddhist centers, unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, "have no central authority" and are "all quite independent" have left him somewhat powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy (a prominent lama was slapped with a $10 million sexual-harassment suit in California). And his wish to make peace among the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism has so infuriated a few that earlier this year three members of his inner circle were found murdered in their beds, apparently...
Though the Dalai Lama deals with such problems serenely, having endured insurrections for a half-century, the issues of delegating responsibility and authorizing the reincarnations of departed lamas take on particular urgency as he passes through his 60s. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly so two years ago, when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, by placing the Dalai Lama's six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate...