The year was 1937. On a small farm growing barley, buckwheat, and potatoes in a far-flung village of northeastern Tibet, a little boy sat among chickens in a coop, happily clucking along. The boy and his family lived in a farmhouse with a strangely irregular roofline. Life was hard. His mother had given birth to sixteen children, of whom only seven survived.
Beyond this remote plateau—ruled for centuries by a religious monarchy and home to some six thousand monasteries, temples, and shrines—the modern world was entering a period of massive change that would affect the life of that small boy in ways he could never imagine. The Emperor of China had been deposed decades earlier, catapulting China into turmoil. It would soon be invaded a second time by Japan while radical factions readied themselves to exploit the chaos. Farther north, Stalin ruled Russia with designs on expansion. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement, which would end the British Empire, gathered steam. In Europe, Adolf Hitler was poised to attack in every direction.
For some months, a search party had been zeroing in on the little farmhouse, having determined from a prophetic vision that the next Dalai Lama would be found in the province of Amdo, near the monastery of Kumbum, living in a house with a peculiar roof. When the party spotted gnarled branches of juniper on the top of the farmhouse, they took it as a sure sign and presented themselves as weary travelers needing to spend the night.
The party’s leader, Kewtsang Rinpoche, passed himself off as a servant, the better to observe the child without creating a fuss. The child, whose name was Lhamo Thondup, correctly identified the Rinpoche’s home monastery.
A few days later the party returned and revealed their intention. Following long custom, they presented the boy with items that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, among them a ritual drum and a walking stick. Seeing these possessions, he’s said to have exclaimed, “Mine, mine.” While there were other candidates, these circumstances convinced those in power that this child qualified to be installed as His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
The Origins of the Lineage
Monasteries—and the Buddhist schools of thought (lineages) that linked the monasteries into great networks—were
