The 14th Dalai Lama

“Dalai Lama” literally means ocean priest. His vast followers, awestruck by his presence, cast their eyes downward, fall to the ground and weep. They cannot look directly in his eyes out of respect. The Dalai Lama realizes the magnitude of his position, but dismisses the idolatry. His people call him “His Holiness.” He calls himself a Tibetan who chooses to be a Buddhist monk. He also was leader of a country that Tibetans say is occupied and that Beijing says has always been part of China. He is considered the reincarnation of the previous 13 Dalai Lamas of Tibet, the first born more than 640 years ago. This Dalai Lama is different from his predecessors, though. For instance, the 13th Dalai Lama was strict and formal, and most Tibetans couldn’t get close to him except during public blessing ceremonies. The 14th Dalai Lama meets often with Tibetans and foreigners and never keeps people at a distance. He is among 600 Tibetan Buddhist monks living in Dharamsala, in northern India. About 7,000 of the 24,000 who live in this city are Tibetans, with the greatest concentration in the village of McLeod Ganj—the seat of Tibet’s government-in- exile. The Chinese occupied Tibet in 1950. For nine years, the Dalai Lama tried to negotiate peaceful coexistence with his people and the Chinese. When that failed, he fled in 1959 to India, where he set up Tibet’s government-in-exile. Lhamo Thondup was born July 6, 1935, to peasant farmers in Taktser, a poor settlement on a hill overlooking a broad valley in northeastern Tibet. Buddhist priests from Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, came for the boy when he was 2. Omens led them to him: from the way the head of the 13th Dalai Lama had turned in his coffin toward the child’s village, to the vision of the house seen in a lake by a high priest. The boy was renamed Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso and raised by monks in Lhasa in the 1,000-room Potala palace, where the fifth through the present Dalai Lamas resided. As a boy, he had no...