Authors: Palden Gyatso, Tsering Shakya, Palden, Dalai Lama
ISBN-13: 9780802135742, ISBN-10: 0802135749
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Date Published: August 1998
Edition: 1ST. AMER.
Palden Gyatso was born in a Tibetan village in 1933 and became an ordained Buddhist monk at 18 just as Tibet was in the midst of political upheaval. When Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, it embarked on a program of reform” that would eventually affect all of Tibet’s citizens and nearly decimate its ancient culture. In 1967, the Chinese destroyed monasteries across Tibet and forced thousands of monks into labor camps and prisons. Gyatso spent the next 25 years of his life enduring interrogation and torture simply for the strength of his beliefs. Palden Gyatso’s story bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the strength of Tibet’s proud civilization, faced with cultural genocide.
Tibet's suffering exerts a profound claim on the world's compassion....In writing this wrenching memoir of extraordinary suffering, resistance, and endurance, Palden Gyatso has testified not only to the pain of countless individuals but to the devastation of a nation.
List of Illustrations | vi |
Foreword by the Dalai Lama | vii |
Acknowledgements | ix |
Poem of Dedication | x |
Preface | xiii |
Maps | xvii |
Prologue | xix |
One Beneath a Rainbow | 3 |
Two Cutting Ties with the World | 19 |
Three The Revolt | 34 |
Four The Arrest | 55 |
Five Flight | 72 |
Six No Escape under the Blue Sky | 91 |
Seven The Master Weaver | 111 |
Eight The Cultural Revolution | 125 |
Nine Reform through Labour | 143 |
Ten Death of the Helmsman | 154 |
Eleven Among the Ruins | 173 |
Twelve A New Generation of Splittists | 186 |
Thirteen Confronting the Enemy | 214 |