Amazon.com
The Dalai Lama's mother was illiterate but was a natural storyteller. When her granddaughter asked her to talk about her life, the stories began to roll out. She told of her wedding at the age of 16, her state of virtual servitude as a married woman, murderous ghosts, and her two dead sons left for the birds. Then, after a three-year drought and other strange events preceding the birth of her fifth child, the lamas came from Lhasa, and her Cinderella future was cinched. With her son the Dalai Lama ensconced in his palace, this nondescript peasant woman whose 16 children yielded three incarnate lamas, strolled her garden estate and hobnobbed with the aristocracy. And yet the intrigue, the perils of domestic and international politics, would soon take her husband's life, drive her remaining children into exile, and have her yearning for the quiet drudgery of her former life. Diki Tsering speaks with the unadorned simplicity of an ordinary country girl about a life that was anything but ordinary. --Brian Bruya
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Publishers Weekly
This spare, fascinating autobiography by the Dalai Lama's mama addresses issues as diverse as faith, political intrigue and the harsh demands of rural life. Born at the turn of the century to a hardworking peasant family in a frontier region of Tibet, Diki Tsering (her married name) entered an arranged marriage at 16 and found herself entirely under the thumb of a brutal, sometimes violent mother-in-law. She bore 16 children, but only seven survived their toddlerhoods (four of these deaths were blamed on a malevolent family ghost). One of her sons, of course, was recognized at age four as the incarnation of the Dalai Lama, the highest religious and political leader in Tibet. Diki Tsering followed him to urban Lhasa, where she traded her dawn-to-dusk working life for the leisured, and sometimes bewildering, social role as Tibet's "Mother of Compassion." She accompanied the youthful lama on his travels to India and on a year-long expedition to China, where officials attempted to coax the Tibetan entourage into capitulating to Chinese leadership. When the party arrived home, however, they discovered that the Chinese had already infiltrated Tibet, taking over Diki Tsering's homeland and other areas. The family managed to escape to India in 1959, sneaking out at night dressed as soldiers. The story is enthralling, although the writing (edited from taped interviews with Diki Tsering before her death in 1980) is choppy and the narrative sometimes confusing. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
