• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Then, in 1959, the tension and insecurity under which native Tibetans had been living took its toll, and a revolt began in the eastern province of Kham and spread to Lhasa. The Dalai Lama was alerted when the Chinese Communist government invited him to attend a theatrical performance and insisted that he leave his bodyguard and attendants at home. Worried about their leader’s safety, thousands of Tibetans surrounded his palace. When fighting broke out, the Dalai Lama, dressed as a peasant, slipped out of the palace under the cover of darkness and started the difficult and dangerous three-week trek by horseback and foot across the mountains out of Tibet and to political asylum in India. Without knowing that the Dalai Lama had departed, the Chinese Army shelled his palace the day after he left, and thousands of unarmed Tibetan civilians died.

As the Chinese moved quickly to take over the monasteries and stamp out the practice of Buddhism, many other lamas and monks also made the arduous flight from their homeland. Close to a hundred thousand Tibetans were able to leave before the Chinese closed the borders, but many who started the trip disappeared in the Himalayan wilderness and were never heard from again. For those left behind, life has been cruel and harsh. Nuns, monks, and lamas, as well as laypeople, have been tortured and murdered. Amnesty International has estimated that as many as 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese Army, and many Tibetans still remain in prison camps northeast of Tibet. Of the countless centuries-old monasteries that once adorned the barren Himalayan plateau, only two dozen remain, which the Chinese have left standing mainly for show.

The lamas and monks who escaped needed new homes. Many, like the Dalai Lama, who now makes his home in Dharamsala in India, settled in neighboring regions and countries—India, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Bhutan. Others traveled farther afield, ending up in France, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States. These teachers also remembered the Buddha’s instructions to his first sixty enlightened disciples to continue to spread his teachings: “Go forth, oh monks, for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world.”

EAST GOES WEST/WEST GOES EAST

Buddhism has transformed every culture it has entered, and Buddhism has been transformed by its entry into that culture.

—ARNOLD TOYNBEE

With the Chinese invasion of Tibet, it was as if a dam had burst: Suddenly Tibetan wisdom began to flow freely down from the roof of the world and to the West. Nuns, monks, lamas, and teachers who had never left their cloistered monasteries and hermitage retreats were confronted with a new world—filled with men and women eager to learn the Dharma. Tibetan teachers say that if it’s possible for any good to have come from the Chinese invasion, that good has been found in the dissemination of the teachings to so many new students.

Lama Yeshe may have been the first lama in Nepal to teach Westerners, but he was far from the last. By 1971, the lamas in exile had realized that the only way for the Buddhism they cherished to survive was to pass it on. These Tibetan masters remembered very well Padma Sambhava’s prophecy; several, in fact, were even recognized reincarnations of his disciples. And there to fulfill the prophecy came Westerners looking for guidance and eager to develop their own spiritual lives and transplant the flowering tree of enlightenment to their own countries.

When I arrived in Kathmandu in 1971, it was still a virginal valley essentially unchanged by tourism and almost as remote as Tibet. For centuries, if you were “on the road,” Kathmandu was the link between Europe and the mystical East; it was a destination for explorers, hippies, mountain climbers trying to conquer Everest, as well as seekers trying to climb the spiritual mountain and conquer their inner selves. Until the 1950s when the first car arrived, the Himalayan trade routes