The Search For The Panchen Lama

An account of the story of the boy believed to have been the 11th incarnation of the Pachen Llama, who was taken from his family home by Chinese security forces, and never seen again.

On a peaceful summer day in 1952, ten monks on horseback arrived at a traditional nomad tent in northeastern Tibet where they offered the parents of a precocious toddler their white handloomed scarves and congratulations for having given birth to a holy child—and future spiritual leader. Surviving the Dragon is the remarkable life story of Arjia Rinpoche, who was ordained as a reincarnate lama at the age of two and fled Tibet 46 years later. In his gripping memoir, Rinpoche relates the story of having been abandoned in his monastery as a young boy after witnessing the torture and arrest of his monastery family. In the years to come, Rinpoche survived under harsh Chinese rule, as he was forced into hard labor and endured continual public humiliation as part of Mao's Communist "reeducation." By turns moving, suspenseful, historical, and spiritual, Rinpoche's unique experiences provide a rare window into a tumultuous period of Chinese history and offer readers an uncommon glimpse inside a Buddhist monastery in Tibet.

_______________ 'Splendid and fascinating ... Teltscher has made remarkable use of her source material, aided by the constantly perceptive and witty tone of Bogle's own writings' - Patrick French, Sunday Times 'It is hard to imagine this fascinating story being told with greater sensitivity or skill' - Sunday Telegraph 'Teltscher is a remarkable new historian ... wholly original' - William Dalrymple 'Thrilling and fascinating ... Letters, journals and documents are woven into the flowing narrative, which is wonderfully vivid and evocative' - Jenny Uglow _______________ An unlikely meeting between a young Scotsman and the Panchen Lama gives birth to a remarkable friendship In 1774 British traders longed to open relations with China so they sent a young Scotsman, George Bogle, as an envoy to Tibet. Bogle became smitten by what he saw there, and struck up a remarkable friendship with the Panchen Lama. This gripping book tells the story of their two extraordinary journeys across some of the harshest and highest terrain in the world: Bogle's mission, and the Panchen Lama's state visit to China, on which British hopes were hung. Piecing together extracts from Bogle's private papers, Tibetan biographies of the Panchen Lama, the account of a wandering Hindu monk and the writings of the Emperor himself, Kate Teltscher deftly reconstructs the momentous meeting of these very different worlds.

The life of the Sixth Dalai Lama does not end with his supposed death at Kokonor in November 1706, on the way to Beijing, and an audience with the Manchu Emperor Kangxi. This book, the so-called Hidden Life, presents a very different Tsangyang Gyamtso, neither a louche poet nor a drinker, but a sober Buddhist practitioner, who chose to escape at Kokonor and to adopt the guise of a wandering monk, only appearing some years later, after many fantastical and mystical adventures, in what is today Inner Mongolia, where he oversaw monasteries and lived as a Buddhist teacher. The Hidden Life was written by a Mongolian monk in 1756, ten years following the death of the lama, his spiritual teacher, whom he identifies as Tsangyang Gyamtso, and in whose identity as the Sixth Dalai Lama he clearly has complete faith. However, as one might imagine, there is nowadays no agreement among the wider Tibetan, Mongolian and Tibetological scholarly community as to whether this man was a charlatan or deluded, or whether he was indeed the Sixth Dalai Lama. The text is divided into four parts. The first part gives an account of the background and birth of the Sixth Dalai Lama, while the opening section of the second part (which is in direct speech, dictated by the lama) continues on, through the political intrigue in Lhasa at the end of the seventeenth century, to the lama's escape at Kokonor. The remainder of the second part consists of a visionary narrative, in which the lama travels through Tibet and Nepal, and in which he encounters divine figures, yetis, zombies and a man with no head, all of which is presented as fact. The third and longest part is an account of the final thirty years of the lama's life, and his activity in Mongolia as an influential Buddhist teacher, including a lengthy and moving description of his death. The final part includes a list of his students and, most interestingly perhaps, a theological and philosophical justification for the coexistence of the Sixth and Seventh Dalai Lamas.

Tragedy in Crimson is award-winning journalist Tim Johnson’s extraordinary account of the cat-and-mouse game embroiling China and the Tibetan exile community over Tibet. Johnson reports from the front lines, trekking to nomad resettlements to speak with the people who guard Tibet’s slowly vanishing culture; and he travels alongside the Dalai Lama in the campaigns for Tibetan sovereignty. Johnson unpacks how China is using its economic power around the globe to assail the Free Tibet movement. By encouraging massive Chinese migration and restricting Tibetan civil rights, the Chinese are also working to dilute Tibetan culture within Tibet itself. He also takes a sympathetic but unsentimental look at the Dalai Llama, a popular figure in the West who is regarded as a failure by many of his own people. Staggering in scope, vivid and audacious in its narrative aims, Tragedy in Crimson tells the story of a people on the brink of cultural extinction and the rising nation that is quashing them.

He's master of the PlayStation, he listens to rap music, he writes poetry and, in his eighteen-year-old hands, may hold the future of the Tibetan people. He is Ogyen Trinley Dorje, a Tibetan lama and the seventeenth incarnation of the Karmapa (third in line to the Dalai Lama). When he was fourteen, Ugyen fled Tibet and began his journey into exile - and the Chinese lost the boy they hoped would one day replace the Dalai Lama in the hearts of six million Tibetans. Today, he lives under house arrest, ostensibly being 'protected' by the Indian Government - which is more likely protecting its relationship with China. So begins the true story of the 17th Karmapa of Tibet, a story which has all the elements of a cracking tale: magical portents at his birth, a village childhood on the Roof of the World, attempted indoctrination by the Chinese-his short life provides a fascinating insight into the Contemporary Tibetan struggle, while his future as a religious leader of global significance is already being forecast. To write this story, Gaby Naher intends to travel throughout the region and interview key players of the Tibetan Government in Exile, as well as religious figures in the area.

In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the relationship between the Qing state and its most powerful partner in Inner Asia—the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism. Why did the Qianlong emperor invent the golden urn lottery in 1792? What ability did the Qing state have to alter Tibetan religious and political traditions? What did this law mean to Qing rulers, their advisors, and Tibetan Buddhists? Working with both the Manchu-language archives of the empire’s colonial bureaucracy and the chronicles of Tibetan elites, Oidtmann traces how a Chinese bureaucratic technology—a lottery for assigning administrative posts—was exported to the Tibetan and Mongolian regions of the Qing empire and transformed into a ritual for identifying and authenticating reincarnations. Forging the Golden Urn sheds new light on how the empire’s frontier officers grappled with matters of sovereignty, faith, and law and reveals the role that Tibetan elites played in the production of new religious traditions in the context of Qing rule.

An overall view of the Tibetan civilization, both ancient and modern Tibet. This book relates developments in Tibet to those in the rest of Asia.