Lobsang Gyatso : Memoirs of a tibetan Lama

From his humble birth in a small, remote village in eastern Tibet in 1928, Lobsang Gyatso went on to found and head one of the foremost modern-day institutions of Tibetan Buddhist learning, the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in North India. Here he reveals to his biographer and translator Gareth Sparham the remarkable life he led as a boy herdsman in a Tibet now vanished, long before the Chinese communist takeover; as a rambunctious young monk in the world's largest monastery; his flight into exile and his later life as one of his nations foremost educators and preservers of Tibetan culture is more briefly dealt with in an afterword, his untimely death having prevented him from completing his narration. He emerges from this book as a master storyteller, an unfailing patriot and a realist who worked unceasingly to reverse his fellow Tibetans very difficult circumstances, never afraid to think for himself or to make his views known to a wider audience.