There are several reasons why I have started this writing project by focusing on the story of the Dalai Lama: for one thing, it's a great story and I love stories! But also, there are lessons here about politics: about power, how to allocate it, and what to do with it, a topic that I always seem to keep coming back to these days.
By early March of 1959 the situation in Lhasa had become untenable. It was clear that the Chinese were about to capture the Dalai Lama, and it was equally clear that the thousands of Tibetans that surrounded Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace, were willing to sacrifice their lives to prevent that from happening. The oracle had been consulted several times and he insisted the Dalai Lama should continue to communicate with the Chinese authorities. Then, on the 17th.
A quick note to explain one reason why I am writing so much about the Dalai Lama these days. As we have seen, the Dalai Lama becomes the political as well as the spiritual leader of his people through a very (to western eyes) bizarre, and decidedly “undemocratic” [1] process. He is declared to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama through some dodgy evidence, isolated and rigorously trained, and appointed the leader of the Tibetan people at 15 (!). Before I continue with his story and tell you how that turned out [2], I want to pause and talk about why this is significant for me.
Tibetan buddhists believe in rebirth. To someone who is not a believer in any form of life after death this seems an absurdity. Which it is, if taken literally. But if speech was limited to considering only facts that are known to be true by experiment, we wouldn't get very far at all.
So what was I doing halfway across the world in Mumbai? For that, I have to go back in time, and talk about the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.
On March 17 1959 the 24-year-old Dalai Lama left the capital of Lhasa on a two-week journey across the Himalayas into India, as the Chinese military occupied Tibet, overcoming a tenacious resistance. He was accompanied by a small retinue of about 100 people, but many thousands more would follow him into safety in India.