The Dalai Lama’s teacher's autobiography offers glimpses into the young Dalai Lama's spiritual upbringing and his escape from Tibet.
As the mentor to the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Trijang Rinpoché became one of his most trusted confidants. Rinpoché’s status gave him a front-row seat to many of the momentous historical events that befell Tibet. He observes the workings of Tibetan high society and politics with an unvarnished frankness, including inside details of encounters with Mao Zedong, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Pope Paul VI.
Most widely known as a yogi with profound, lifelong religious training, Trijang Rinpoché was also a statesman, a preserver of culture, a poet, writer, and artist. His autobiography is a beautifully written account of Tibetan life in the twentieth century, including intimate details about the upbringing of the Dalai Lama.
"This is the autobiography of one of the Dalai Lama's two tutors, a translation from the original Tibetan that was published in 1975. Trijang Rinpoche (1901-81) was educated in Tibet, traveled with the Dalai Lama on his trip to China in 1954, and became a central figure in the preservation of Tibetan culture among the Tibetan exile community in India after the 1959 diaspora. He also traveled to Europe twice in the 1960s, meeting the Pope, among others, as the Dalai Lama's representative"--
"Kyabjé Trijang Rinpoché, the junior of the two great gurus of the Dalai Lama, was universally recognized as one of the greatest Buddhist tantric masters to escape to India following the Chinese Communist invasion of Tibet in the 1950s. He was also amazingly humble and down to earth. His story is not only a personal autobiography but a glimpse into the beauty and wonder that was Tibet. It is a story filled with emotional peaks as high as the Himalayas and the emotional lows that came with the loss of homeland and subsequent destruction. A must read for anyone interested in Tibetan culture, history, and spiritual life."
