Lhasa Quotes

People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly.

Wherever I live, I shall feel homesick for Tibet. I often think I can still hear the cries of wild geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear, cold moonlight. My heartfelt wish is that my story may create some understanding for a people whose will to live in peace and freedom has won so little sympathy from an indifferent world.

Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as the place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it — fragmentary and uncertain though it is — that distinguishes man from all other animals

The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hirther Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwannaland, Lhasas, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be . At any rate it out to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. (leter 53)

The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City?

Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him. Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked. Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.

Hassan gags and has an asthma attack - a catarrh as fatal as lhasa and hanta. Cramps as sharp as darts and barbs jab and jag at gastral tracts. Carpal pangs gnarl a man's hands and cramp a man's palms. Hassan asks that a shaman abstract a talc cataplasm that can thwart a blatant rash (raw scars that can scar a man's scalp and gall a man's glans: scratch, scratch). A warm saltbath can blanch all plantar warts and stanch all palatal scabs. A transplant can patch a basal gland. A bald shah barfs and farts as a labman bawls: 'plasma, stat' (alas, alack: a shah has a grand mal spasm and, ahh, gasps a schwa, as a last gasp).

Such experiences are all too rare,” he continued, “and they but too soon become blurred in the actualities of daily intercourse and practical existence. Yet it is these few fleeting moments, which are reality. In these only we see real life. The rest is ephemeral, the unsubstantial. And that single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the rest of my lifetime.

Tibetans are not famed for their perseverance. Full of enthusiasm at the start, and ready for anything new, their interest flags before long. For this reason I kept losing pupils and replacing them, which was not very satisfactory for me. The children of good families whom I taught were without exception intelligent and wide awake, and were not inferior to our children in comprehension. In the Indian schools the Tibetan pupils are ranked for intelligence with Europeans. One must remember that they have to learn the language of their teachers. In spite of that handicap, they are often at the head of the class. There was a boy from Lhasa at St. Joseph's College, at Darjeeling, who was not only the best scholar in the school, but also champion in all the games and sports.

As political tensions rose the sudden shift in the Chinese government’s position led to accusations of Chinese infiltrators among those early Wabaling Khaches allowed to leave for India. In India, concern centered on several pro-Chinese Wapaling Khaches who were suspiciously, some felt, included among the Barkor Khaches approved by the Chinese government’s Foreign Bureau in Lhasa to be allowed to emigrate to India.

I fled toward my babysitter’s house, thinking it a wiser choice than my own. There was no time to look over my shoulder, the voices kept coming. Miraculously, we made it to her porch. I could hear her Lhasa apso, Bubba, barking. The boys came to a stop. She came to the door, our panic clear. She looked to the group of boys, understanding coming to her eyes. “Fuck off, you little shits!” I can still see it, her yelling at them, it was rare to feel protected.

There might be a war on, there might be Nazi tanks on the Champs Elysées and Jews rounded up in the Marais, but this is still Paris, damn it. There are still fresh baguettes baking across the arrondissements, and if the cinemas have to occasionally show a German film to please the troops – H.A. Lettow and Ernst Schäfer’s documentary of the SS expedition to Tibet, Lhasa-Lo – Die verbotene Stadt, for instance – then so be it. Paris is still gay, there is still music in the cafés and wine in the brasseries, and aren’t some of those German soldier-boys handsome?

Lhasa The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

Hump, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, moral pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of the darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down on travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. Colllie Knox says 1/8 of the world's population speaks 'English', and that is the biggest language group. if true, damn shame__ say I. May the curse of Babel strike at all their tongues till they can only say 'baa baa'. It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.

A second railway in Tibet opened, between Lhasa, the capital, and the second city, Shigatse. The first, in 2006, linked Qinghai province with Lhasa. The railways are the highest in the world.

In the face of these obstacles, the Kashmir Khache established their own school and maintained their cohesive identity over the next several decades.

Their harsh reception in Kashmir unsettled the many Khaches who had come to believe a myth of their own making, that as Khache they were Kashmiri. The contradiction between the case the Indian government made for their departure from Tibet, based explicitly on their Kashmiri heritage, and what they encountered when Kashmir refused to accept them as Kashmiri deeply disoriented the entire Khache community.

Of the some 400 surveyed, nearly 300 had become Saudi citizens or permanent residents. The immigration to Saudi Arabia was largely accomplished through the assistance of Ma Bufang, a Qinghai Muslim who served as the Republic of China’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1957 until 1961 and who would himself ultimately obtain Saudi citizenship.76 The welcome they received and the commercial success they achieved there remained well known because many of those who fled had traveled through India (often specifically Kashmir).

In an effort to encourage the uprising in Tibet, U.S. State Department officials in 1959 urged Chiang to offer recognition of “Tibet as an independent state” to solidify anti-Communist activities in Tibet.79 While Chiang did not in the end agree to this, the Nationalists did offer the roughly one hundred Khaches ROC citizenship and passports (they had left India prior to being granted Indian citizenship).

The exact response from the Saudi government was not recorded, but the gist was clear: the Khache would not be welcome. With their final appeal to leave India dashed, the Khache, by and large, turned to making the best of a life there.

It was not just the manner of their arrival—traveling in government-assigned trucks instead of stealing across the Himalayan passes on foot—that separated them from their Tibetan Buddhist compatriots. Certainly, both groups shared a desire to extricate themselves from their desperate situation in Tibet, but the manner in which they were received in India quickly divided them. The Tibetan Muslims, by asserting and receiving formal acknowledgment of their Indian ancestry, arrived in India effectively as Indians, not Tibetan refugees. The consequences of this differentiation began to be manifested almost instantly, as they crossed over the mountainous pass into India. Greeted as Indians, not Tibetans, as citizens, not refugees, as Muslims, not Buddhists, the Khache faced a very different set of circumstances, choices, and reception in post-Partition India than did the Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama.

Though different from the Khache, many Uyghur, Kazakh, and Hui Muslims from northwest China fled China and settled in Saudi Arabia after the fall of the Nationalist Chinese government in 1949.

While the Khaches regarded their Indian citizenship as a political means to a desired end, the Tibetan Buddhists saw their refusal of Indian citizenship as evidence of their commitment to an independent Tibet. Their defiant rejection of citizenship served as a means by which their loyalty to Tibet was authenticated.

In this formulation, then, it might be correct to suggest that Tibetan Buddhists who flowed into India “refused and were refused citizenship in South Asia.”89 The Khache, by accepting the “gift” of Indian citizenship that was offered to them, were thus perceived as rejecting the privileged label of refugee, and subsequently they were refused the right to be Tibetan, at least among the Tibetans in exile community.

On the one hand, the very criteria by which they exited China was that they were not Tibetan. On the other hand, by almost every measure—language, culture, centuries of intermarriage, and their recognition of the Dalai Lama as their ruler—they were Tibetan. The Dalai Lama’s tone in his letter to the Khaches was to fellow Tibetans. This was not a letter that could have been sent to others who might have witnessed the excesses of the Chinese, such as the Nepalese, Ladakhis, or Bhutanese. The Dalai Lama approached the Khaches as Tibetans, as the Tibetan government had for centuries.

Unlike the difference of opinion between various Khache groups over where to settle that had occurred in November 1960, now, almost a decade later, an overwhelming majority were of a single mind: to make a move to Saudi Arabia.

In a little known fact, many Muslims from China, Xinjiang, and Tibet had chosen to settle in Saudi Arabia, often out of political expediency, and appeared to be prospering.

While the Khaches regarded their Indian citizenship as a political means to a desired end, the Tibetan Buddhists saw their refusal of Indian citizenship as evidence of their commitment to an independent Tibet. Their defiant rejection of citizenship served as a means by which their loyalty to Tibet was authenticated. Not surprisingly, then, to be a refugee was, by definition for the Tibetan Buddhists (and their supporters), to be a Tibetan.

The exiled Tibetan community’s emphatic rejection of citizenship is overshadowed by the fact that India never publicly offered them citizenship. As McGranahan pointedly concludes, “One cannot receive a gift that is not offered.

Faced with the choice of clinging to a Tibetan past or a future in Kashmir, the Khaches who have lived most of their lives in Kashmir have chosen to marry Kashmiris to ease the lives of their children, and they have pressed to be accepted by Kashmiris.

But as the Dalai Lama noted on one of his recent visits, the Tibetan Muslims of Srinagar, to a far greater degree than the Tibetan refugees spread across South Asia, Europe, and the United States, have managed to stave off acculturation and maintained Tibetan as their language of communication.

After more than a half century of living in India, there is an increasing difference of opinion among Tibetan refugees over whether the refusal of citizenship comes at too high a price.

By early May 1959, it became clear that the Chinese could not stem the tide of refugees, nor would they passively accept that India was offering sanctuary to the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetan refugees. It was then that Nehru, for the first time as prime minister, candidly asserted that India had to adhere to its basic values and beliefs “even though the Chinese do not like it.”7 With this assertion, and in the face of China’s virulent anti-Indian rhetoric, Nehru assented to providing accommodation and material relief to the Tibetan refugees who had begun to find their way into India. Within the month, the Indian government had begun to issue “Indian Registration Certificates” to the more than 15,000 Tibetans who had entered the country. By the end of 1962, when the Chinese had effectively sealed the Indo-Tibetan border, no fewer than 80,000 Tibetans had traveled by foot from Tibet, with most of them settling as resident refugees in India.8 China regarded India’s actions in providing asylum for the Dalai Lama and the multitude of refugees who flowed into India in the months and years following the March Uprising as prima facie evidence of India promoting Tibetan independence.

Late on March 17, 1959, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama changed out of his customary maroon robes into khaki pants and a long black coat. Knowing he could carry little, he hastily rolled up a favorite thangka of the Second Dalai Lama and slid it into a small bag. With this in hand, he slipped out the main gates of the Norbulinka Palace under the cover of darkness. Several trusted officials whisked him through the crowds, which had gathered there in an attempt to protect their revered leader, and down to the banks of the Kyichu River where several small coracles awaited to row him and his small group across the river. Early the next morning, having reached the 16,000-foot Che-la Pass overlooking the Lhasa valley, he paused, turned, and cast a long last glance over the Tibetan capital. Implored to hurry by his small guard unit, he quickly began the descent and his march south to the Indian border.1 It would be the last time he would see his city.

Having money means more opportunity to practice generosity,” he agrees. “Which is the true cause of wealth.

It’s not what happens to you that matters, but the way you interpret things.

Then another thing,” the Dalai Lama continued. “There are different aspects to any event. For example, we lost our own country and became refugees, but that same experience gave us new opportunities to see more things. For me personally, I had more opportunities to meet with different people, different spiritual practitioners, like you, and also scientists. This new opportunity arrived because I became a refugee. If I remained in the Potala in Lhasa, I would have stayed in what has often been described as a golden cage: the Lama, holy Dalai Lama.” He was now sitting up stiffly as he once had to when he was the cloistered spiritual head of the Forbidden Kingdom. “So, personally, I prefer the last five decades of refugee life. It’s more useful, more opportunity to learn, to experience life. Therefore, if you look from one angle, you feel, oh how bad, how sad. But if you look from another angle at that same tragedy, that same event, you see that it gives me new opportunities. So, it’s wonderful. That’s the main reason that I’m not sad and morose. There’s a Tibetan saying: ‘Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.

On one level, this reawakening of the relationship between the refugees in India and the Khaches in Srinagar is related to the fact that the Srinagar Tibetan Muslims have, through their status in Kashmir as “non-state subjects,” come as close as one can to being refugees. Despite having lived in Srinagar for over six decades, the Khache still remain outsiders, owing to the political constraints that have made their acceptance by the Kashmiri community difficult. While always citizens of India, they are refused “citizenship” in Kashmir. Their status as citizens of India but refugees in Kashmir has caused many Kashmiri to confuse the Khaches’ situation with that of the Uyghurs and Kazaks who had arrived as refugees in the early 1950s, suggesting it was the Kashmiri government in 1959 that granted the Khache citizenship and settled them in Srinagar.112 There is great irony in noting that it was in Lhasa that foreigners often cast the Khache as Kashmiri and now, having settled in their ancestral homeland of Kashmir, they are treated as Tibetan.

Today, most Khaches in Srinagar prefer to be called “Kashmiri,” and they bristle at any implication that they are Tibetan. As one Tibetan Muslim explained, “In Tibet we are called Kashmiris and in Kashmir we are being called Tibetan.”113 When asked to comment further by a Kashmiri newspaper reporter, one elder Khache explained, “We are basically Kashmiri, but people still call us Tibetans, which hurts us.”114 Another puts an even a sharper edge to his response, “Don’t call us Tibetans. We are not refugees. We are Kashmiris.”115 One could perhaps dismiss these responses as a reflection of lingering fears from a bygone era if such distinctions did not remain of consequence. When asked, many younger Kashmiris expressed disbelief and even exasperation about their parents’ or grandparents’ decision to settle in Kashmir, a place where they were unwelcome, even as other Khaches lead relatively more prosperous lives in Kathmandu, Kalimpong, and Darjeeling. Like many second-generation immigrants, this younger generation feels only a distant tie to their grandparents’ homeland. “Even if tomorrow Tibet might be liberated from China, we will stay here only,” said twenty-year-old Irfan Trumboo.

Article 370 of the Indian Constitution dictates that the state of Jammu and Kashmir govern all matters except those surrendered to the Union of India.

Indian courts had long ruled that they were unable to intervene in the rights of non-state subjects because Article 370 of the Indian Constitution dictates that the state of Jammu and Kashmir govern all matters except those surrendered to the Union of India. Recently, however, in a case challenging the limitations of Indian federal guidlines as they relate to federal finance laws, the court asserted broadly (and against decades of legal precedent) that the constitution of Jammu and Kashmir did not supersede that of India: It is rather disturbing to note that various parts of the judgment speak of the absolute sovereign power of the State of Jammu & Kashmir. It is necessary to reiterate that Section 3 of the Constitution of Jammu & Kashmir, which was framed by a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of universal adult franchise, makes a ringing declaration that the State of Jammu & Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India.

Lhasa showed a vicious side of her no one had ever seen before, and she bared her teeth and began biting pirates in the bum very hard at every turn, and dodging their swipes at her.

If nothing around us has any genuine substance, then all the happiness or unhappiness we feel comes from our mind. All qualities, attractive and unattractive, are a product of mind alone.

love and compassion—the true causes of happiness.

The greatest obstacle to our own happiness, she tells us, is too much thinking.

Nothing happens by chance.

anger causes so much misery both for the person on the receiving end, as well as for the person experiencing it.

We should be careful who we blame for our unhappiness when we ourselves have created the causes for our unhappy experiences.

the bond of blood. How strong it is, and how it has the power to reach across oceans.

thinking about the past, especially going over bad things that have happened in our minds again and again, serves no purpose.

It wasn't easy, however, to get rich in Tibet. The hard ground and extreme cold precluded extensive agriculture- most Tibetans still depend on yak meat and barley flour- and little infrastructure for heavy industries existed outside Lhasa. The high altitude, an average elevation of thirty-five hundred meters, and low oxygen deterred many outsiders. The only thing that Tibet seemed to possess in great quantity was its religion and an exotic past that the Chinese discovered could be packaged and sold to tourists.

Peacocks from eastern India, Parrot from the depths of Kongpo, Though born in separate countries Finally come together In the holy land of Lhasa

Separating Tibetans from the propaganda that smothers them, whether western or Chinese, was one of my aspirations. But pushing aside the heavy, patterned blankets decorated with Buddhist symbols that shield the entrances to Lhasa’s teahouses did not admit me into a secret world where Tibetans spoke unguardedly. Instead, I was confronted with a passiveness completely at odds with the belligerence of the nomads of Kham and the people of Amdo. Resolving the contradiction between those two extremes was something I never managed to achieve during my time in Tibet.

How do you think the Dharma is able to describe the death process in such detail? It’s not a whole bunch of lamas sit around speculating on what might happen. It’s because they actually go through it. Frequently.

singular presence gave Lhasa and all of Tibet validation.  It was also the home of most of Tibet’s precious jewels. The treasure was such a point of pride that by age four, every citizen knew the exact number of gold leaf taels wrapped around the long dead 5th Dalai Lama (one hundred and ten thousand) and how many pearls and gems were inlaid into his quilt (eighteen thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven).

It is widely held that the Beryl was destroyed years ago, during one of the Chinese offensives.  It was kept in Lhasa, at the Potala Palace, in a room called the Hall of Scriptures. “It was said to be there in 1751, when the Chinese invaded and sacked the palace.  The wing that held the Blue Beryl--the Red Palace--was burned.  No one has seen the original Blue Beryl since.”               McAlister already knew all of this.  “How did you get the page from which you work?”               “Members of my family have always been healers.  Long ago, a medical book was purchased in the market in Lhasa.  When my father died, I inherited all of his material possessions.  The page I have was stuffed inside one of the medical textbooks, just a single page.  It has a color drawing of the anatomy of the human eyes on one side, and the prescription for curing blindness on the other.

imagine they would have records at the temple.  However, I would think the best place to look would be the Archive of Tibetan History at the Central Library in Lhasa.   They have an excellent archive related to the history of medicine in Tibet.  You’ll be surprised.  Some of the data has even been digitized using grants from wealthy supporters.  It’s very good.  I’ve used it myself.

. . . Out of nowhere Matt became aware of an intense, blinding white light that filled the center of the room. It was without circumference or center, moving as a panoramic mirage. It was bright to the point of being uncomfortable. But the discomfort did not come from the brilliance itself. Rather, it arose because it made the darkness inside him all that much more apparent. He found himself eager to escape it.

Party Committee for Tibet, told a group of Indian journalists in Lhasa on Sunday that the talks with the Dalai were “ongoing and always smooth, but we are discussing only his future, not Tibet’s.” ‘Many Tibetan leaders

Everything was falling apart—the 1960s, rock and roll, the Wenners’ marriage. When Wenner gave Jane an ultimatum over the phone—come back from Europe or don’t ever come back—she returned to San Francisco. But Jane had fallen for Sandy. She packed her bags, and the Lhasa apso, and took a train to New York to live with Bull, moving in with his mother on East Sixty-First Street, surrounded by birds and harps and butterflies and needles.

He rushed back to the phone and dialed a number from memory. In a few seconds, the kitchen phone in a noodle house in Lhasa’s Chengguan District would ring, but only once before Olen promptly hung up. He waited thirty seconds and then dialed a second number, this one belonging to a low-end hotel in Dagzê County. He disconnected after two short rings.

His tail arched gaily over his back and waved like a beautiful plume. Long golden hair fell like a curtain over his face, hiding his eyes until they flashed out merrily when he tossed his head. He was, Momo knew, the most beautiful dog in the world, and as her father had said of the head lama’s terrier, like a prince among men. He was as gentle as he was strong, and had fine manners. Before entering the house in winter he always stopped to shake the snow from his long, thick hair. He sat up and begged for his tsampa, and said thank you with a bark and a wave of his paw. He could stand on his hind legs and dance to the music of Nema’s fiddle. Day and night he was at Momo’s side, in the house or on the hills, and always lovingly obedient to her least command, a merry and adoring companion. He understood, naturally, all her words and even her thoughts, and Momo returned his love in full measure.

My Journey to Lhasa, few

Lhasa was that kind of place. You had no idea what was going to happen under the bright blue sky. The coin you bought might turn out to be priceless. Perhaps the girl walking toward you, who beauty made you forget everything else, was descended from the Nepalese nobility. Lhasa, the city of the sun, where you had no idea what tomorrow would bring, where people came from miles around to chase their dreams.

It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. But the Chinese built it. Perhaps only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese President Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day. They bring with them many things, such as consumer goods from across China, computers, colour televisions and mobile phones. They bring tourists who support the local economy, they bring modernity to an ancient and impoverished land, a huge improvement in living standards and healthcare, and they bring the potential to carry Tibetan goods out to the wider world. But they have also brought several million Han Chinese settlers.

In October 1947, the Nationalist government in Nanking informed the Indian Embassy of its wish to modify such agreements as were entered into between Great Britain and Tibet, including the Simla Agreement, 1914, that defined India’s frontier with Tibet. In the same month, the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa had also addressed a letter to India’s Prime Minister seeking the return of ‘all our indisputable Tibetan territories gradually included into India’, which included parts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh, Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan.

When I was young and living high above the city of Lhasa in the Potala Palace, I frequently looked at the life of the city through a telescope. I also learned a lot from the gossip of the sweepers in the palace. They were like my newspaper, relating what the Regent was doing, and what corruption and scandals were going on. I was always happy to listen, and they were proud to be telling the Dalai Lama about what was happening in the streets. The harsh events that unfolded after the invasion in 1950 forced me to become directly involved in issues that otherwise would have been kept at a distance. As a result I have come to prefer a life of committed social action in this world of suffering.

If heaven is the Lord's, the earth is the inheritance of man and consequently any honest traveller has the right to walk as he chooses, all over that globe which is his. What I heard was the thousand-year-old echo of thoughts which are re-thought over and over again in the East and which, nowadays, appear to have fixed their stronghold in the majestic heights of Thibet. I am one of the Genghis Khan race who, by mistake, and perhaps for her sins, was born in the Occident. So I was once told by a lama. I saw a wolf passing near us. It trotted by with the busy, yet calm gait of a serious gentleman going to attend to some affair of importance. The true Blissful Paradise which, being nowhere and everywhere, lies in the mind of each one of us. How happy I was to be there. en route for the mystery of these unexplored heights, alone in the great silence, "tasting the sweets of solitude and tranquility", as a passage of the Buddhist Scripture has it. Human credulity, be it in the East or in the West, has no limits. In India, the Brahmins have for centuries kept their countrymen to the opinion that offering presents to those belonging to their caste and feeding them, was a highly meritorious religious work. As a rule, the place where grain is ground is the cleanest in a Thibetan house. Asiatics do not feel, as we do, the need of privacy and silence in sleep.

What seems devastating at the time can turn out to be a new beginning, a different chapter.

there is no such thing as permanence or solidity—that every thing and every being in this world is undergoing constant change.

Blind faith is not a quality to be encouraged

Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence’ that would be applicable to international behaviour of modern states. Considering the fact that the future of the Tibetan people who had been subjugated by military force was at stake, the preamble was ironic. The Chinese premier gleefully accepted the treaty which not only recognized China’s possession of Tibet but, in fact, legalized it. Additionally, while allowing for trade with the Chinese government in Tibet, the Indians gave up their right over numerous facilities that existed in Lhasa and along the trade route that linked the Tibetan capital to Kalimpong in West Bengal. The Indian infantry detachments at both Gyantse and Yatung and the Indian Mission in Lhasa were to be withdrawn.

Ever since I was five years old,” David-Néel wrote in My Journey to Lhasa, “I wished to move out of the narrow limits in which, like all children of my age, I was then kept. I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown. But strangely enough, this ‘Unknown’ fancied by my baby mind always turned out to be a solitary spot where I could sit alone, with no one near.

Tsampa is made by adding flour to the butter tea, kneading the mixture into a dough and then breaking off small pieces to eat.

We turned a corner and saw, gleaming in the distance, the golden roofs of the Potala, the winter residence of the Dalai Lama and the most famous landmark of Lhasa.

The Great Trigonometrical Survey WHEN I WAS IN SECOND grade, I did my should-be-famous person report on one Nain Singh, who surveyed over 2,000 kilometers from Nepal to China. That alone might not sound entirely worthy of a report, but consider he accomplished this in 1865 and on threat of death. Tibet wasn’t so tolerant of foreigners back then, famous for beheading uninvited visitors. So Nain set out, disguised as a lama on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, to conduct the Great Trigonometrical Survey and triangulated his way across the Himalayas, using two known points for every unknown to measure the length of his country. He survived. I wasn’t so sure I’d be that lucky as I mounted the last few steps that led to my two known points: Jacob, who was standing next to Erik. They couldn’t have been more different, those two. And I was the unknown in this triangulation problem.

A child, indeed, but the heart of the concentrated faith of thousands, the essence of their prayers, longings, hopes. Whether it is Lhasa or Rome—all are united by one wish: to find God and to serve Him.

Bao Bao was a Lhasa apso. His name was pronounced like the bow in “bowwow” and it meant “treasure” in Chinese. It should have meant hairy, spoiled mop.

One of the most important teachings in the Dharma is that while scholarship is valued, having an open heart is valued even more. If nothing around us has any genuine substance, then all the happiness or unhappiness we feel comes from our own mind. It's not what happens to you that matters, but the way you interpret things. The greatest obstacle to our own happiness is too much thinking. Thinking about the past, especially going over bad things that have happened in our minds again and again, serves no purpose. It is completely useless mental activity. In fact, it is worse than useless, because it can only harm our happiness. Meditation combats stress by lowering blood pressure and the heart rate. it improves the immune function so you don't get colds and flu so much. It boosts DHEA production - that's the only hormone that decreases directly with age - slowing down aging.

When Alexandra David-Néel finally returned to Paris and wrote about Tummo and other Buddhist breathing techniques and meditations in her 1927 book, My Journey to Lhasa, few doctors and medical researchers believed the stories.

Much had impressed him about the Chinese in Lhasa: how quickly they built hospitals, bridges and the first-ever primary school, and how they did not take “as much as a needle” from the people. Even as they mocked and destroyed the culture, they also seemed to offer a route to the modern world.