05.10.08
Holder of the White Lotus
Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lama by Alexander Norman
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer
The Dalai Lama is the most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine. He draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match, and sits there laughing, exuding an infectious joy, despite the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have known. Unique, celibate, idealistic, compassionate, exotic - he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else. What is his secret? According to these two books, it lies in the fact that his mind was trained from an early age in an abstruse religious tradition that makes no distinction between the spiritual and temporal worlds.