| His Holiness Dalai Lama |     |
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| His Holiness Dalai Lama | |
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   kal 240.jpg His Holiness Dalai Lama The Spiti Valley, the Himalayas, India, August, 2000 The Dalai Lama was born as Tenzin Gyatso on 6 July 1935 in a farming family. At the age of two, he was recognised as the incarnation of a Dalai Lama. He was officially acknowledged as the 14th Dalai Lama when he was four. When he turned fifteen, a year after China occupied Tibet in 1959, he assumed full political power as leader of the Tibetan people. In 1959, when the Tibetan National Uprising was brutally crushed by China, he and his closest colleagues had to escape to India where he was granted political asylum. Around 80,000 of the Tibetan people followed him into exile. In Dharamsala, in the northeast of India where he now lives, he established the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and started his fight for the freedom of his homeland, where 6,254 monasteries and temples were destroyed and 1.2 million Tibetans died due to execution, torture, famine or prison camps. Although his country was occupied by China five decades ago and he cannot visit Tibet, throughout all these decades he has been struggling for peace and non-violent solutions. People have accepted him as one of the greatest moral authorities of this time, as a great humanist and a human rights activist. The world showed its admiration and respect in 1989 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a man who does not pretend, manipulate nor show a different face from what you see. The Kalachakra Initiation is a complex system of teachings, dances, prayers, the making of a sand mandala, receiving empowerment and taking of vows that, according to legend, Buddha handed over to the first king of Shambale, the land of the enlightened people. The teachings were then passed on to the Dalai Lamas who, in Buddhist belief, represent enlightened beings. One of the most revered Buddhist tantric ceremonies was led by the holiest man of Buddhism. |
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