Escape from the Land of Snows

Escape from the Land of Snows Stephan Talty

This is more than an escape, it is also an expose’ of the selection of the Dalai Lama and the workings of the church itself.  Not all is as peaceful as we would like. 

Tibetans do not have a word for religion.  Religion is life not a belief. 

It is hard to not be caught up in the mystic tale of the selection and life of the Dalai Lama.  The current Dalai is one of my favorite leaders in the world.  Consider that he comes from a land where the average elevation is over three miles above sea level and that this is a very isolated land and yet he shows wisdom I see if very few people.

But he was not a studious person, he wanted to play instead of the study (sounds like a grandson) and he preferred to play with tanks and other war toys.  Yet as a child who was not allowed to play with other children he still showed great empathy for people without means.

You will also learn about a long and complicated relationship between China and Tibet that eventually led to the terrible destruction of true Tibet.  The action was centuries in the making.

In this book we learn that the Dalai Lama found his holiness and inspiration in response to the Tibetan need for a leader as Mao swept his awful cultural destruction in to the holy land.

The land of Tibet has always been isolated and little understood – much of this isolation coming by the choice of the Tibetans, but of course when they needed aid, this isolation worked against them.  This was a pacifist nation that was forced in to violence and the challenge of responding to the unjustified invasion of China. 

The Dalai Lama had never been out of his nation; he knew about the world only from his atlas.  He was not trained in response to war or uprising.  One day he is told he is the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and a holy person then he is forced to flee for his life and the life of the religion he represents.  It is a tragic journey that ultimately makes both Tibet and his holiness part of the consciousness of millions of people throughout the world. 

The books scope includes the story of many Tibetans not in the Dalai Lama party.  This is a gut wrenching story of a very innocent population suffering terrible loss, trying to resist or to escape.  The sadness of their futility is even greater than the revulsion for the treatment they received from the Chinese. 

On the evening of March 17, 1959, as the people of Tibet braced for a violent power grab by Chinese occupiers - one that would forever wipe out any vestige of national sovereignty - the 24-year-old Dalai Lama, Tibet's political and spiritual leader, contemplated the impossible. The task before him was immense: to slip past a cordon of crack Chinese troops ringing his summer palace and, with an escort of 300, journey across the highest terrain in the world and over treacherous Himalayan passes to freedom - one step ahead of pursuing Chinese soldiers.Mao Zedung, China's ruthless Communist dictator, had pinned his hopes for total Tibetan submission on controlling the impressionable Dalai Lama. So beloved was the young ruler - so identified with his country's essence - that for him to escape might mean perpetual resistance from a population unwilling to tolerate an increasingly brutal occupation. The Dalai Lama's minders sent word to the Tibetan rebels and CIA-trained guerrillas who waited on the route: His Holiness must escape - at all costs.In many ways, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was unprepared for the epic journey awaiting him. Twenty-two years earlier, government search parties, guided by prophecies and omens, had arrived at the boy's humble peasant home and subjected the two-year-old to a series of tests. After being declared the reincarnation of Tibet's previous ruler, the boy was brought to Lhasa to learn the secrets of Buddhism and the ways of ultimate power. Forced in the ensuing two decades to cope with aching loneliness and often stifling ritual - and compelled to suppress his mischievous personality - Gyatso eventually proved himself a capable leader. But no previous Dalai Lama had ever taken on a million Communist Chinese soldiers bent on stamping out Tibetan freedom.