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Tsering Shakya's The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 is a clear-eyed description of recent Tibetan political history. Shakya weaves a red thread of suffering through his pages, but he also picks out golden flecks of human nobility. The young Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. He has lived there ever since, not far from the Indian-Tibetan border. He also travels around the world to publicize Tibetans' plight (or, as Chinese officials say, to cause trouble) and to teach Buddhism.
From the turmoil in Tibet, many Buddhist teachers have dispersed around the world. They represent a religious tradition brought to Tibet from India beginning in the 8th century. Twenty-five years ago the Dalai Lama made his first visit to the United States. He gave a series of public lectures on the basics of Buddhism. His translator, Jeffrey Hopkins, collected, edited, and published them as Kindness, Clarity, and Insight. This volume offers a clear but simple introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, recently reissued in an anniversary edition with Hopkins' remembrances of the tour, which was a watershed in Western interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in the Dalai Lama as a religious teacher.
One can also approach Tibetan Buddhism through biographies. Lobsang Gyatso's Memoirs of a Tibetan Lama is a gem. Gyatso became a monk as a boy in rural Tibet and traveled to Lhasa with a caravan of traders to enter Drepung Monastery, which then housed ten thousand monks. He paints a beautiful picture of the human complexities of the monastery, his adventures in negotiating his studies, and his duties as a house proctor for the monastery and a lender of seed grain to the lay community.
After the Chinese invaded Tibet, Gyatso fled with thousands of others to be with the Dalai Lama in India. He established the Buddhist School of Dialectics in Dharamsala, the mountain town where the Dalai Lama resides, as a place where both Tibetan refugees and Westerners could study. His memoir ends with an afterword by his friend and translator, Gareth Sparham, who recounts with sorrow how Gyatso was murdered. The most likely suspects were Tibetans angry at his support for the Dalai Lama's effort to suppress the worship of their "protector deity" Dorje Shugden, who they believed was angry because their religious practices and beliefs were being mixed with those of other sects and religions.
That Tibetan Buddhism suffers from sectarian violence came as a revelation to many in the West, where in the post-1960s era the religion has often been portrayed as the very exemplar of gentle tolerance. This perception reverses a common 19th-century Western view of Tibetan Buddhism, with its rosaries, monasteries, strict clerical hierarchies, robes, chants, elaborate liturgies and set prayers, as a pagan counterpart to Papistry.
But if many in the West at that time saw Tibetan Buddhism as having supposedly corrupted the simple, pure message of the Buddha, freethinkers and liberals often saw it as a living fossil, surviving in the mountains while Buddhism elsewhere was either diluted or, as in India, annihilated by Islamic invasions and Hindu opposition. They saw Tibetan Buddhism not only as a rarity in itself but also as a base from which they could launch a critique of Christian orthodoxy.
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