The Dalai Lama is the most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine. He draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match, and sits there laughing, exuding an infectious joy, despite the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have known. Unique, celibate, idealistic, compassionate, exotic - he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else. What is his secret? According to these two books, it lies in the fact that his mind was trained from an early age in an abstruse religious tradition that makes no distinction between the spiritual and temporal worlds.Unlike the plethora of Hollywood meditators and their celebrityappendages who claim friendship with the Dalai Lama, Alexander Norman has known him well for two decades.
As the ghostwriter of his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, and the ethical guidebook Ancient Wisdom, Modern World, he spent more than 250 hours interviewing him. In the eccentric world of Tibetology, it may not be strange that Norman also happens to be a practising Roman Catholic, a former British Army officer and a vintage-aircraft enthusiast.Starting from the first principle that the Dalai Lama is a series of reincarnations of the Bodhisattva Chenrezig, his book sets out to examine the historical roots of the lineage. It is not always a pretty story. Several Dalai Lamas were murdered at a young age, and one was a notorious seducer who drank hard, wore his hair long and refused to take monastic vows. Norman seems at times to be shocked by the fruits of his own research.
His starting
point is the savage murder in 1997 of one of the Dalai Lama's closest
allies in a doctrinal dispute, which he calls “a case of hitting the
goat to scare the sheep”. Delving into Tibet's past, he examines a
complex interplay of sorcery, reincarnation, divination and the
assertion of worldly power. The establishment of the institution of the
Dalai Lamas in 1578 arose out of a rivalry between monasteries,
regional warlords and the Mongolian descendants of Genghis Khan, who
all needed spiritual sanction for their actions.
The story that follows is
some distance from what we are used to in contemporary political
discourse: we meet a protector deity who emerges from a lotus flower,
“his mouth open with warm blood bubbling at the corners”, a key
religious text that has been hidden under a rock for several hundred
years, and agrou......
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A Nepalese teenaged boy who was hailed as a reincarnation of the Buddha has reappeared after nine months of wandering through the jungles of eastern Nepal, police said. "A team of police found the Buddha Boy sitting under a tree in the Piluwa jungle after there were rumours that some locals had spotted the boy on Monday afternoon," said Rameshwor Yadav, a police officer in the Bara district, 170 kilometers (106 miles) east of Kathmandu. Ram Bahadur Bomjan, 16, had disappeared in March ...Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhism
A boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has opted to turn his back on the Buddhist order, claiming that he had been taken away from his family and that he had suffered a great deal as a result of him being chosen."As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god.But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused con...Nepal's 'Buddha Boy' disappears again
Submitted by Pendekar Timur: A Nepalese teenager hailed as a reincarnation of the Buddha has vanished for a second time in southern Nepal, a member of his support committee said. Ram Bahadur Bomjam, 17, who shot to fame in 2005 when his supporters said he had begun a meditation session that would go on uninterrupted for years, went missing on Thursday night, the committee member said Saturday."He suddenly disappeared from his meditating site in the jungle of Bara," said RajuShah, a mem...Buddha Boy In Nepal Goes Missing Again
Chinese archaeologists have claimed that a 1,000-year-old miniature pagoda, unearthed in Nanjing, holds a piece of skull belonging to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. The pagoda was wedged tightly inside an iron case that was discovered at the site of a former temple in the city in August. The four-storey pagoda, which is almost four feet high and one-and-a-half feet wide, is thought by archaeologists to be one of the 84,000 pagodas commissioned by Ashoka the Great in the second cent...Mystery of vanished "Buddha Boy" grips Nepal
The weekend disappearance of a Nepalese boy whom supporters hail as a reincarnation of the Buddha has sparked a nationwide search. Supporters have showered 16-year old Ram Bahadur Bomjan with money and gifts for allegedly sitting in motionless meditation in the roots of a pipal tree without taking food or water, or using the toilet, since May 16 last year. The youth, dubbed "Buddha Boy" by the media, left the site in southern Nepal because the thousands of devotees who flocked there ha...Reincarnation of the Tibetan Karmapa
Last week, the highest spiritual leader of Tibet, His Holiness, the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa Trinley Thaye Dorje, visited Manila for the first time. The Karmapa heads one of four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Karma Kagyu. The other schools are the Ningma, Sakya and Gelupa, each having its own spiritual head.The Dalai Lama, political and spiritual leader of Tibet, belongs to the Gelupa school.The Karma Kagyu is considered “one of the most precious lineages in Tibet.”The Karmapa was first incar...Buddhists welcome science into monasteries
The Sarnath Buddhist monastery, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, is revered as the site of the Buddha"s first discourse after his enlightment - the stream from which the teachings of Buddhism flowed.But if you visit the monastery between 20 and 31 January, you couldwitness the start of a new stream of teaching. More than 30 Tibetan monks, plus a handful of nuns, will be collaborating with a team from SanFrancisco"s Exploratorium ("the museum of art, science and human perception") to build e...Nepalise Buddha boy 'reappears'
A missing Nepalese teenager popularly known as "Buddha Boy" reappeared briefly on Sunday, his followers say. The committee managing the meditation site of Ram Bomjan, 16, released video of its members purportedly meeting the boy near his village in southern Nepal. The boy's meditation and apparent 10-month fast attracted global attention before he vanished in March. Large numbers of devotees flocked to see him to leave offerings. A massive search operation is still under way. The c...Deepening mystery of missing 'Buddha boy'
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Nepal's 15-year-old "Buddha Boy" has deepened, after he briefly appeared to supporters then vanished again. Footage apparently shot on Sunday shows Ram Bomjon, the would-be Buddha, meeting members of the committee that manages his hugely popular, and profitable, pilgrimage site.Ram isshown with unkempt hair but looking healthy. Committee president Bed Bahadur Lama said Ram left his meditation place 10 days ago because of the nois...
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Nepal's "Buddha Boy" reappears
Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhism
Buddha Boy In Nepal Goes Missing Again
'Buddha's skull' found in Nanjing
Mystery of vanished "Buddha Boy" grips Nepal
Reincarnation of the Tibetan Karmapa
Nepalise Buddha boy 'reappears'
Deepening mystery of missing 'Buddha boy'
