The Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism's Global Dialogue

Tenzin Gyatso, born Lhamo Thondup in 1935 in the Amdo region of northeastern Tibet, was recognized in 1937, at age two, as the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama lineage, following the traditional process of consulting oracles, interpreting visions at the sacred lake Lhamo Latso, and testing candidate children's ability to identify objects belonging to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and was formally enthroned in Lhasa in 1940. He assumed full political authority over Tibet in November 1950, at age fifteen, several weeks after the People's Liberation Army entered eastern Tibet, and spent the following decade attempting, with limited success, to negotiate Tibet's status with the government of the People's Republic of China, including a 1954 visit to Beijing for meetings with Mao Zedong. Following the outbreak of the Lhasa Uprising in March 1959, amid fears for his safety, the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and crossed into India, where the Indian government granted him asylum and where he established, at Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh, the Central Tibetan Administration, commonly called the Tibetan government-in-exile, which has since coordinated the exile Tibetan community's education, monastic re-establishment, and political advocacy from its base in that Himalayan hill town for well over six decades.