your bridge home
True Valor
He is fifteen years old, an army is crossing into his country, and they have just handed him full power over it.
In 2011 he gave the power away.
The 14th Dalai Lama devolved the political authority of his office to an elected leadership.
And he ended, deliberately and permanently, a role his predecessors had held for close to four hundred years.
Institutions do not usually do that. Institutions defend themselves. He had been recognised at two, enthroned at four, and handed a country at fifteen.
And he decided that the system which had produced him should not continue. Then he dismantled it, while he was still alive to see it done.
Tenzin Gyatso was born on the 6th of July, 1935, in Taktser, a village in Amdo, to a farming family.
A search party identified him as the reincarnation of the thirteenth Dalai Lama when he was about two. He was enthroned at Lhasa on the 22nd of February, 1940.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.