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To date, approximately fifteen Western children have been sought out and recognized as lama reincarnations—known as tulkus. Lama Thubten Yeshe, for example, was reincarnated in Spain. Recently one of the most unusual reincarnate recognitions took place when a revered senior Tibetan lama visiting in this country recognized a thirty-eight-year-old Christian woman from Maryland as the reincarnation of a Tibetan teacher.

If we leave our skepticism aside for a moment, the next question is why are so many reincarnate lamas reportedly choosing to be born in the United States? Of course, there are no simple answers. It might be our commitment to maintaining a democratic country and a home for religious freedom. Or perhaps there’s another answer: As Padma Sambhava predicted so long ago, Tibetans are now scattered around the world, especially in North America—”the land of the red-faced people” of the ancient prophecy, and they have brought their teachings with them. Perhaps as a nation, the United States needs the wisdom of these spiritually accomplished reincarnations, and we are now, for the first time, open to hearing their lessons.

TIBETAN WISDOM ARRIVES

IN THE WEST

Until the Chinese invasion in 1950, Tibet was primarily thought of as Shangri-La, a magical land of ancient wisdom and inaccessible beauty in which foreigners were rarely allowed to travel. One of the first bestselling paperbacks in the world, James Hilton’s 1933 adventure novel Lost Horizon, was about a monastery in Tibet. Shrouded in myth, two miles high, and protected by the snowcapped Himalayas, Tibet’s capital city, Lhasa, the home of the Dalai Lama, was often called “The Forbidden City.” Isolated and cloistered, Tibet had not changed for many centuries, and modernization and technological progress were strongly resisted. It had never gone through an age of reason or scientific development.

There is an understandable tendency to romanticize the Tibet that existed before China’s violent takeover. However, it’s a mistake to think that Tibet was a Shangri-La where everyone was enlightened, happy, and a nonviolent vegetarian. Although Tibet probably enjoyed the most sophisticated spiritual technology and understanding of the “inner” sciences, we can’t pretend that it was a perfect society. It had a long way to go in bringing into the everyday world what it had seemed to master in a spiritual world. In fact when we examine it closely through rational humanistic eyes, we can’t help seeing that it was a medieval theocracy which democracy, literacy, and modern medical advances had yet to reach. What is essential for us today is to extract gold from that Himalayan ore—to find the unchangeable essence of wisdom teachings in the rocky mountainsides of Asian culture, theology, and anachronistic cosmology.

Before China’s takeover, a devoted spiritual life and monastic vocation was considered the profession of choice. One-third of Tibet’s male population inhabited the thousands of monasteries scattered across the land; well-populated nunneries were also widespread. Until recently, the only wheels in general use in Tibet were prayer wheels, which, along with the beaded rosaries known as malas, were constantly in hand, transforming all activities and one’s entire life into an ongoing prayer.

Around 1920, the current Dalai Lama’s predecessor (the prescient Thirteenth Dalai Lama) had issued ominous predictions about the Chinese government’s plan to conquer Tibet and suppress the practice of Buddhism. But Tibetans, more committed to preserving the status quo than to evolving to modern times, ignored these warnings. When the United Nations was formed after World War II, Tibet chose not to join and paid dearly for that backward-looking choice.

In 1950 when China entered Tibet, some of the lamas, monks, and laypeople had the foresight to leave the country; fortunately a few were able to carry with them some ancient sacred objects and writings. Most Tibetans, however, remained. Although the young Dalai Lama feared the worst, for nine long years he remained in Lhasa, trying