The Theocrats of Tibet
Four centuries ago the title of Dalai Lama was conferred on a Tibetan abbot by a Mongol sovereign, writes George Woodcock. Fourteen incarnations of the Compassionate Bodhisattva have since ruled Tibet as priest-kings.
High in the Punjab hills, when one has climbed far enough through the woods of rhododendron and deodar, the Tibetan exiles who live on the hillsides above Dharamsala point out the peaks whose tips show white above the intervening ranges. Those peaks, they tell one, are Tibet itself. Here the world’s last theocratic ruler, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, finds a refuge in one of the sprawling hill-station bungalows that were left from the days of British rule, and looks out, not only on the mountain tops of the land from which he fled in March 1959, but also over the Indian hill-sides where the exiled remnant of his kingdom survives.
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