Download Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero AudioBook Free
On the night of March 17, 1959, as the people of Tibet braced for a violent electric power grab by Chinese language occupiers-one that would forever wipe out any vestige of countrywide sovereignty-the 24-year-old Dalai Lama, Tibet's political and spiritual innovator, contemplated the impossible. The task before him was tremendous: to slide past a cordon of crack Chinese troops ringing his summer time palace and, with an escort of 300, journey over the highest terrain in the world and over treacherous Himalayan goes by to freedom-one step ahead of pursuing Chinese soldiers.Mao Zedung, China's ruthless Communist dictator, acquired pinned his hopes for total Tibetan distribution on managing the impressionable Dalai Lama. So beloved was the young ruler-so identified with his country's essence-that for him to flee might mean perpetual level of resistance from a inhabitants unwilling to tolerate an increasingly brutal profession. The Dalai Lama's minders delivered phrase to the Tibetan rebels and CIA-trained guerrillas who waited on the option: His Holiness must escape-at all costs.In lots of ways, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was unprepared for the epic journey awaiting him. Twenty-two years earlier, government search celebrations, led by prophecies and omens, acquired arrived at the boy's humble peasant home and subjected the two-year-old to some tests. After being declared the reincarnation of Tibet's previous ruler, the boy was taken to Lhasa to learn the secrets of Buddhism and the means of ultimate power. Required in the ensuing two decades to handle aching loneliness and often stifling ritual-and compelled to curb his mischievous personality-Gyatso eventually proven himself a capable innovator. But no previous Dalai Lama acquired ever taken on the million Communist Chinese language soldiers bent on stamping out Tibetan freedom.