Word: tibet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although pre-communist Tibet closely approximated a feudal society, with the majority of the population serving as herders or farmers while the lamas, or monks, reigned as the nobility, anyone was free at any time to become a lama. The monasteries provided spirtual education and organized the administrative aspects of government, while the rest of the Tibetans lived mostly in villages, owned their own means of lievelihood, and above all, practiced Tibetan Buddhism...
From a Western point of view, the Dalai Lama is a deposed king, an exiled leader of the world's last theocracy. Tibet, ringed by the highest mountains on earth, suspended midway between the imposing civilization of India and China, was for hundreds of years a land of mystery, effectively keeping out intruders. In the early 1950s, however, China began to push for the annexation of Tibet. The current Dalai Lama, then 15 years old, was still undergoing monastic training as successor to the previous Dalai Lama and had not yet assumed leadership of the country. After consulting with...
...after almost ten years of pressure, China marched in and declared Tibet a Chinese territory. The Dalai Lama and about 100,000 Tibetans managed to escape. Since then the exiled leader and roughly 70,000 Tibetans have been living in Dharamsala, India, trying to preserve Tibetan culture and liberate their country from the Chinese...
James Hilton, the author of Lost Horizons, modeled his apocryphal land of "Shangri-la" after Tibet. Heinrich Harrer, a European mountaineer who served as tutor to the Dalai Lama during the 40s, wrote in wonder of a land where one quarter of the adult population were monks or nuns. In his travels through Tibet. Harrer noted that there were no public inns. Tibetans opened their homes to all travelers, he wrote, as if grateful for the opportunity to serve. Harrer encountered niches of subtropical vegetation growing amidst snow-covered montains, monasteries built upon seemingly inaccessible cliffs, and mediums...
Buddhism arrived in Tibet during the 7th century A.D. Over the following centuries it merged with many of the shamanistic practices of the native Bon religion to become a somewhat more mystical brand of Buddhism than that practiced in either India or China. A combination of the Theravada, Tantric, and Mahayana achools, modern Tibetan Buddhism blends the idea of seeking personal liberation from the material world through spiritual enlightenment and "magical" techniques with the supreme importance of helping others along the path toward enlightenment in this world...