THE DALAI LAMA fled Tibet sixty-three years ago, after China’s invasion of his country. He’s been trying to return ever since. During that more than half a century of exile, the Dalai Lama entrusted one individual to speak officially to the People’s Republic of China. The Dalai Lama’s Special Envoy: Memoirs of a Lifetime in Pursuit of a Reunited Tibet is a newly published book by that individual, Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari.
I first met Gyari in the late 1990s in Washington, D.C., when I collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution on Tibetan cultural programs. Later, when I lived in Kathmandu and traveled frequently to Tibet to document human rights abuses for the International Campaign for Tibet, I was in close contact with him. While we discussed political matters in our frequent meetings, he was most concerned about the state of Buddhist practice in his homeland, inquiring about little-known temples, asking if an aging hermit was still practicing there. Or he would ask if the collected writings of a nineteenth-century lama, which he had directed to be published, were being distributed to small monasteries in a remote corner of eastern Tibet. He sent messages and monetary offerings with me for yogis in far-flung hermitages, monks in larger monasteries, and remote nunneries. I always returned with handwritten or videotaped messages for him, including one from a senior rinpoche who identified where Gyari’s
