Word: potala
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Beneath triumphal arches, about 350 Communist trucks roared through Tibet into the Forbidden City of Lhasa last week, along two new main roads from Red China. Thirty thousand Tibetans gathered before the legendary Potala palace to greet the trucks, which symbolized their first main road contact with the outside world. Communist authorities paid tribute to the eternal friendship between Red China and Tibet, which the Communists had conquered in 1951, and decorated the workers who had drawn the new highways across the roof of the world...
...Lhasa with its gold-roofed Potala ("Palace of the Gods"), the Dalai Lama's magnificent winter residence. Lhasa itself at times looks less like a holy place than a sort of religious slum. The poorly clothed priests are herded in their hopelessly overcrowded cloisters (one of which has 10,000 inmates), and the camera in one distasteful sequence watches them being fed as cattle are, by the scoop. The scene enforces the impression of a country where -according to the Thomas' narration-so many men become priests that few are left to be fathers...
From the gilded rooftop of Lhasa's Potala Palace, heralds blew 14-foot-long copper trumpets. Below, in the building's ornate Assembly Hall, a bright-eyed, 16-year-old boy sat on a high throne, about which clustered Tibet's most powerful lamas, abbots and monks. They had come in the country's hour of peril, with Chinese Communist invaders lodged deep in the Himalayan upland, to witness the coronation of the 14th Dalai Lama, the reincarnated Buddha of Mercy. Hours of prayer and ritual reached a climax when the adolescent god-king accepted...
...supplies over the rugged caravan tracks and lofty passes from China. Meanwhile, the boy Dalai Lama and his elderly Regent Takta Rimpoche still seemed to be in Lhasa, accord ing to Sinha; they debated flight to India, last-ditch resistance, or submission to the Chinese. From Lhasa's Potala Palace to the U.N.'s Security Council went a mesage asking for help against "unprovoked aggression." There seemed not a chance...
...Kokonor Kid" has already been put to learning the mantras and tantras-Buddhist charms, incantations and prayers-which will fill his days as long as he lives. This week in the Potala, lavish with gold and lacquer and stinking with yak-butter lamps, the Embodiment will kneel, facing east, in a big hall where envoys of foreign powers will bring him gifts. When messages from them have been read aloud, he will make three genuflections and nine prostrations in gratitude for celestial favors. The Regent will clothe the Dalai Lama in garments worn by his predecessor. Enthroned, the boy will...