DEFIANT SPIRIT: THE DALAI LAMA

BY Buddhist reckoning, the Dalai Lama is more than 500 years old, since he is the reincarnation of all his predecessors. By Western standards he is only 23. Each time a Dalai Lama dies, monks spend months and even years looking for a suitable boy child born after his death (a system that in effect makes for a powerful regency).

Birth & Discovery. Born June 6, 1935, in the Chinese province of Chinghai, the Dalai Lama was one of six children of a peasant who lived near a three-storied monastery with a golden roof. It was this monastery that the regent of Tibet, looking for a successor to the 13th Dalai Lama, saw in the waters of Cho-Khor Gye, a lake that could tell the future. When a party of lamas descended upon the monastery, they came upon a small boy who ran up to one of them shouting, "Lama! Lama!" The boy seized a rosary that had belonged to the old Dalai Lama and hung it about his own neck. He had the protruding ears of a Buddha, the moles that marked the traces of a second pair of arms, the ability to pick out from a collection of objects--rosaries, canes, drums for summoning servants--the ones that belonged to the old man. In 1939, aged 4, seated on a golden palanquin, he was borne to Lhasa, where he was soon enthroned as the 14th incarnation of Chen-Re-Zi, the patron god of Bo (Tibet), and thus became for more than 3,000,000 followers the Living Buddha, the Holy One, the Tender, Glorious One, the Mighty of Speech, the Excellent Understanding, the Absolute Wisdom, the Defender of the Faith, the Ocean.

Education. In the vast (1,400 rooms) winter palace of Potala, the Palace of Gods, and in the smaller summer palace two miles away, the young Dalai Lama spent his days studying religion and philosophy, and training in the practices of dyhyana (meditation) as developed by the Mahayana Buddhist School. His mother was the only female he was allowed to receive within his household of servants, monks, abbots and the State Oracle, given to appropriately vague pronouncements ("A powerful foe threatens . . ."). The few Western visitors who, bearing sacred scarves, got audiences, found him a studious, insatiably curious and dedicated boy. He had a passion for cameras and for everything electrical, but he once observed to a visitor: "It is funny that the former body [i.e., the 13th Dalai Lama] was so fond of horses and that they mean so little to me."

Relations with China. In 1950, on hearing that the Chinese Communists had invaded Tibet, the Dalai Lama's advisers placed two balls of kneaded tsamba in a golden bowl of water, one to indicate that the Dalai Lama should leave Lhasa, the other that he should not. When the answer turned out to be yes, they set out cups of buttered tea for good luck, made their way over the mountain passes in freezing (24DEG below zero) weather to a monastery only ten miles from the Indian border. When they returned to Lhasa seven months later, the Dalai Lama was no longer the power he had been. The Communists gave him ten yellow limousines and a telephone (number: Lhasa 1), which could be connected with Peking. They filled his household with Communists, in 1954 "invited" him to Peking for some special tutoring, little by little passed on more and more of his duties to the Panchen Lama, their 21-year-old puppet.

They made the mistake of letting the Dalai Lama visit India in 1956, where a free-spending six weeks made him aware of the outside world. Since then, though Radio Peking has on occasion quoted the Dalai Lama in dutiful denunciation of the American imperialists, he has in fact shown a captive's ability subtly to defy authority. The old saying is still true: "To hold Tibet firmly, the conqueror must win the Potala's top floor."

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