Word: lamas
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...Buddhist reckoning, the Dalai Lama is more than 500 years old, since he is the reincarnation of all his predecessors. By Western standards he is only 23. Each time a Dalai Lama dies, monks spend months and even years looking for a suitable boy child born after his death (a system that in effect makes for a powerful regency...
Toward week's end Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, new president of the ruling Congress Party, seemed to reverse her father's earlier decision to close India's borders against refugees. Paying tribute to the Dalai Lama (who has reportedly fled Lhasa) as a "man of vision and intelligence." Nehru's daughter promised that any Tibetans fleeing to India would be "granted asylum under international...
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...