Word: lamas
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...Exile and OpportunityWhat could be called a global movement on behalf of post?identity thinking seems one of the brightest hopes of our new world order and one often advanced by such close friends and admirers of the Dalai Lama as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu. Yet what has made the Dalai Lama's example particularly striking-and what was perhaps partly responsible for his receiving the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace-is that he has had to live these principles and put them to the test during almost every hour of his 72 years. He came to the throne...
...than by the one described by Machiavelli. The central principle of Buddhism is the idea of interdependence-the notion that all sentient beings are linked together in a network that was classically known as Indra's Net. Thus, calling Chinese individuals your enemy and Tibetans your friend, the Dalai Lama might suggest, is as crazy as calling your right eye your ally and your left your adversary; you usually need both to function well, and all parts of the world body depend on all other parts. "Before," I heard him say last November, "destruction of your enemy was victory...
...than a religion) is that we can change our world by changing how we choose to look at the world. "There is nothing either good or bad," as Hamlet said, "but thinking makes it so." For most of us, for example, exile means disruption and loss. But the Dalai Lama has decided that exile is his reality and therefore should be taken as opportunity. Almost as soon as he left Tibet in 1959, he started to draw up a new democratic constitution for Tibetans, allowing for the possibility of impeaching the Dalai Lama. He threw out much that he regarded...
...perhaps, it has offered a possibility to many others on a planet where there are, by some counts, as many as 33 million official and unofficial refugees. By showing how Tibet can exist internally, in spirit and imagination, even if it is barely visible on the map, the Dalai Lama has been suggesting to Palestinians, Kurds and Uighurs that they can maintain a cultural community even if they have lost their territory. Communities can be linked not by common soil so much as by common ground, a common foundation...
...Challenging ChinaYet even as the Dalai Lama has managed to make all these breakthroughs in the exile world, in Tibet itself he has made little visible progress over the past 50 years. Every Tibetan I've met remains immovably devoted to him. And yet, as he said to me 12 years ago, "in spite of my open approach of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder." The violence that broke out recently was a harrowing reminder of the fact that 98% of Tibetans have no access to their leader and are denied the most basic of freedoms...