Customer Reviews

The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama

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This is a very unique, though sometimes problematic, historical study of Tibet. Thomas Laird had the opportunity to interview the Dalai Lama dozens of times while constructing this book, while His Holiness heartily endorsed and encouraged the project. Thus, we get a very eye-opening combination of corroborated historical data and religious conviction. Granted, this pattern isn't always successful, and the book gets off to a rocky start with the ancient history (and pre-history) of Tibet, for which information is scarce. In the early part of the book, Laird depends more on the Dalai Lama's mythological and faith-based creation tales and his interpretations of sketchy historical and archeological evidence (or, in his view, interpretation of history at different spiritual and mental levels). While it is always fulfilling to hear directly from His Holiness, the result here is a rather confusing and dubious history. Laird doesn't help much with googly-eyed reactions to the Dalai Lama's wisdom like "this is vast and complex," or "this is very difficult for non-Tibetans to understand." Meanwhile, Laird exhibits the standard Western devotee's simplistic amazement at having his mind blown by Tibetan philosophy, and while his feelings are surely sincere, he doesn't articulate them very well.

Fortunately, the book gets much better as it moves into the modern era, in which Laird can analyze concrete historical data and the Dalai Lama can give his own unique perspective on his country's developments. Laird also gained confidence by this point, actively debating His Holiness on contradictions in Tibetan philosophy or mistakes he may have made as a political leader. Ultimately, this book offers strong coverage of Tibet's history after the colonial era, with a very insightful focus on how the country has been affected by geopolitics and the worldwide support for the Tibetan cause, not to mention this Dalai Lama's vast popularity. Though there is one story that gets brushed over quickly - China's meddling in the succession of the Panchen Lama. For great coverage of that episode, plus another strong modern history of Tibet and the Dalai Lama, I would recommend "The Search for the Panchen Lama" by Isabel Hilton. "Trespassers on the Roof of the World" by Peter Hopkirk offers more in-depth coverage of the colonial era, while this book by Laird possibly offers the most accessible (though not totally problem-free) look at ancient Tibet, before you decide to tackle the classical histories noted in his list of references. [~doomsdayer520~]

I read this book a week after going to Tibet for the first time in October, 2007. It confirmed everything that I experienced in Tibet with a former monk as the guide for our group of 20 (China Focus Tours), and enriched our experience enormously. I'm glad I read it soon after the trip so the place names, experiences, history and relationship with China were so fresh. We had been warned in China not to ask about or comment on politics or religion while we were in Tibet. I did ask one mild question and got a reply from our guide that clearly told me that he could not respond.

The book will probably tell general readers more than they want to know about the intricacies of the changes of rule over the last fourteen hundred years but it helped me understand the richness of Tibetan Buddhism. I found it well written and fascinating throughout. The author clearly has a pro-Dalai Lama bias (how else could he have arranged the many interviews with the Dalai Lama?). We found China to be virulently anti-Dalai Lama and this book helped me understand that. The personal details of the Dalai Lama's life and the lives of his predecessors gave me a full sense of what it has meant to be Tibetan both recently and in the long history.

We knew that China had changed Tibet enormously in recent years but we were astounded on our visit to see how they have been moving Han Chinese into Lhasa and changing the face of Tibet. "The Story of Tibet" helped us understand how the incursion of China since the 50's has changed the culture that visitors will see--as long as the Tibetans aren't completely submerged by the Chinese. It seems about 50/50 now. Brief visits to Sera Monastery with our ex-monk guide who had lived there 14 years, to Jokhang Temple when no other tourists were there and to a non-tourist village outside Lhasa during harvest helped me understand the Tibetan culture described well in "The Story of Tibet."

I also recommend Tsering Shakya's "The Dragon in the Land of Sorrow" for a very detailed history of Tibet since 1947. "The Story of Tibet" covers in 65 pages and much less detail what Tsering Shakya describes much more fully in 450 pages.

We learned while we were in Tibet that the Potala Palace will be closed next year before the Olympics in Beijing, probably permanently. A new museum is being built at the base of the Potala that will show visitors what the Chinese government wants them to know about Tibetan Buddhism and this marvelous building. We were there in early October, 2007. Go now.The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947

Thomas Laird's latest book is a pleasure to read. It successfully juggles history, legend and the thoughts of the present day Dalai Lama for an entertaining and enlightening view of Tibet. The Story of Tibet is more than a survey of a civilization, a tale of a lost country, an interview with a living moral compass, a cautionary tale and a primer on Tibetan Buddhism. It is also a story of the personal relationship between the author and the greatest spiritual figure of our time. The Dalai Lama has an openess to the interpretation of history and the discoveries of modern research and science that is non-dogmatic and hopeful. It is really inspiring to see how willing His Holiness is to letting go of past belief systems when there is experiential, tangible evidence to the contrary. If only the other world leaders could except change so graciously.

Subtitled if boldly "Conversations with the Dalai Lama," this combines interviews and commentary about Tenzin Gyatso's homeland with Laird, who offers a popular history of the embattled nation. I stress "nation": this collaborative work stresses the claims that Tibet's entitled to its own independence, as it was taken over somewhat as a client state by the Mongols and then the Manchu rulers in tandem with China, not as a vassal of China itself, but around the same time, if in different contexts, from the larger subservient entity around present-day (if greater) Mongolia. This may smack of nitpicking, but in fact it distinguishes Tibetan rights to be recognized as its own sovereign state, rather than the dubious PRC (following the Kuomintang Nationalist government) argument that China should incorporate Tibet "back" into its empire.

If you have little interest in such a treatment, you'd best go elsewhere for more romantic or more propagandistic fare. This book, written for a wide audience, nonetheless devotes considerable space to debunking not only the illusion (held by some New Age admirers today) that a strife-free, non-martial Shambhala materialized in medieval times, but the common leftist riposte that it was a corrupt realm of cruel monks, feudal savagery, or serf-perpetuated ignorance. It's not always a grippingly narrated tale, especially in long stretches of tedious medieval and early modern sections, but the novelty of hearing Tibetan history echoed and elaborated by the Dalai Lama via Laird's own knowledge, interpretations, and comparisons to Western models makes this an inherently valuable document.

Laird's careful to assert his own Western understanding of how politics can infiltrate into the purportedly religious condition into which the Dalai Lamas have been born. He serves often as a skeptical foil for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama's hesitant disclaimers and introverted aversions to his leadership role when-- as a youth of sixteen-- he found himself set up by Mao to be manipulated, perhaps, into the Communist's potential dupe as their prize convert to collectivist purity and Marxist fervor. This poignant story of the current Dalai Lama's predicament's terribly deepened. You learn what's far too little taught: about 20-40 million whom Mao and his regime killed of their own people, and the 500,000-1.2 million Tibetans murdered since the triumph of Marxism. We in the West prefer often to ignore these facts, but such data have been compiled.

From Tibet, as Laird notes, we can predict how China may treat other minorities and neighbors, and how determinedly the PRC manipulates spokespeople from East and West whom it favors or monitors to tell its sanitized story in our media. This spin-doctoring proves relevant. It tells us if we care to hear beyond the commercials and the glitz many serious lessons amidst our global post-Olympic awe at China's supposed human rights "progress." The Dalai Lama's eloquent at times and then bitter when he summarizes the idealism of the early cadres, his own admiration for what he was promised would accompany Marxist reforms, and his own disillusionment at the spiritual and physical distortions that befall those Chinese who warped after young optimism for a cause curdled into deceit, invasion, and thuggery.

The brief accounts of torture, slaughter, and destruction inflicted on Tibet by China here humble you, and one must ask if China's advances economically and socially rest indeed on a legacy of rapine and plunder no less savage than that done by imperialists elsewhere. The Tibetans-- facing capitulation or extermination-- have been left with little choice. Despite the claims that many modern nations admire non-violent resistance more than revolution against tyranny, which countries stand by Tibet today? Out of all the United Nations in 1950, only El Salvador sponsored, as Laird shows years ago, a resolution in the UN condemning China's invasion, and such protests mattered in the long run about as much as may a few banner-waving activists in the Olympic Stadium a few days ago, I suppose, vs. the clout that 1.3 billion people hold over the silence of 6 million natives of Tibet. I hope I am disproved in the future.

One intriguing aspect of this story of overwhelming force vs. principled resistance emerges in how the Dalai Lama had to survive with next to nothing of worldliness or a knowledge of realpolitik let alone the outside world when he had to deal with being a prize captive-- or hostage so to speak-- of Mao and his minions in the early 1950s. Laird prods the Dalai Lama to reveal more of his own reactions to this dangerous diplomatic situation in which he suddenly found himself. Eager manipulations and nimble retellings of history by the PRC belie their frequent mendacity regarding the status of Tibet today and historically. What the Dalai Lama articulates historically-- in talks with Laird-- as a patron-priest relationship of Tibetan rulers with their Chinese contacts and Mongol emissaries, akin to popes and emperors in medieval Europe, becomes more the predecessor for the Mongol-Tibetan and then Chinese-Tibetan power-sharing rather than the hegemony willed by China, past and present.

Regarding critiques by other reviewers, I found that Laird never strikes a worshipful tone or a credulous stance towards what the Dalai Lama explains or what Tibet's defenders counter. Laird gives as good as he gets, and he holds his own ground against what he regards now and then as the naivete or intransigence of his formidable interlocutor, one of the very few people alive who, as Laird comments, has dealt with every president from FDR on. The Dalai Lama and Laird talked at length over a period of years, but they never become over-familiar. It's a meeting of two smart people, rather than inspirational claptrap, conversational blather, or pat platitudes. It's a study in how the world works, vs. how some of us less wordly would like it to work.

The appeal of Buddhism also permeates parts of the Dalai Lama's exchanges with Laird, a skeptic at best. Even he is moved by the compassion the Dalai Lama embodies. He sees what we cannot: a double vision of the common and the uncommon. This fits not only with Buddhism acceptance of transience and impermanence, but with, as Laird cleverly shows, many Westerners in their acceptance of the Resurrection despite its clashing with "facts." If billions can believe in the rising of one from the dead despite our everyday knowledge that what's dead stays dead, then, looking at Tibet through the Dalai Lama's eyes, we can better perceive the multiple perspective appreciated by him and other Buddhist adepts.

Such similarities and contrasts with our own culture and mindsets make this one of the book's strongest appeals for readers curious, unfamiliar, or mystified by the continuing appeal of Tibet in the judgment and dreams of so much of the world today. Tibet's not a mystical playground, but it has amassed a cultural patrimony and spiritual legacy worth preserving, and its defense should -- in an idealistic world again-- remain our priority even in our debased condition! You don't have to be Buddhist to learn many lessons here.

History throughout the ages has usually been told through conversations and discussion. But then specialists got into the act and the stories dried up but were written in tomes with endless footnotes and arcane language. What if a non-specialist teamed up with a critical modern stakeholder? The result is The Story of Tibet as related by His Holiness The Dalai Lama to Thomas Laird, a Tibetophile who spent many years in Nepal and has traveled through Tibet. The region holds a special place in the hearts, minds and spirits of many in the West. Free Tibet bumper stickers abound. His Holiness admits he knows little history and Laird has done some homework prodding from a Western perspective and the two carry on face-to-face discussions over a few years. The book is entertaining and readable in its chatty style. Alas, it isn't a people's history, the genre that began with Zinn's classic People's History of the United States and a soon to be released People's History of the Third World. Meanwhile this glimpse of the storied mountain realm is well worth reading.

This is a remarkable and valuable work which combines in one volume an entire bookshelf of concepts. First, it presents to the Western reader an overview of the history of Tibet from ancient times to the present. Secondly, it examines the sources of the People's Republic claim to the territory and people of Tibet and mounts a countervailing challenge. Thirdly and most uniquely, it records a series of interviews the author had with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, obtaining his view and commentary on the history of his native land.

In the final part of the book, history, challenge and commentary all come together in a unique exploration of the geopolitical issues concerning Tibet and China. One can see why this is such a thorny issue for the Chinese and why they desperately protest anything to do with the Dalai Lama and his visits to other nations.

Hollywood has made Tibet into Shangri-La, a mystic mountain land of wonders. Laird's portrait of this ancient land shows that the facts can be even more amazing. However, his overview of early history is uphill work for the reader. In sharp contrast, when he interviews the Dalai Lama, Laird adopts a more journalistic style and these interviews are real gems. The Dalai Lama is an authentic personality with a clear if unique perspective and the pages sparkle when he is talking, brimming with sadness, determination, optimism and humor.

The author has attempted to blend a conventional history with the commentary of an unconventional (by Western standards) man. That these things mix no better than oil and water is not the author's fault. The Dalai Lama's insistence that there is the common history that all can see plus an uncommon history working beyond the surface is an illuminating aspect to the ongoing drama between China and Tibet.

"Conversations with the Dalai Lama" covers 9 years of in-depth meetings that the author had with the present Dalai Lama of Tibet about the history of that country. I found it so engrossing and wanted to share so much of it with you that I littered the pages with pieces of paper and finally resorted to dog-earing this poor copy in my hands. What a great project for one man of greatness and a sound background in history and life in Asia to undertake. He had the total confidence of the Dalai Lama and his insights and comments about how the Dalai Lama lives now is extremely interesting and helpful in understanding the man. I found this to be more helpful than anything I have read so far and recommend it without reservation to everyone reading this now!

This book is a fabulous source for any one interested in Tibet, it's history, culture, as well as the situation today. The scope is so broad that it reflects on the history of all of Asia.

At a very young age, he had to make decisions that his experience and education did not prepare him for. Tibet's history, culture and geography and the disposition of China's rulers assured that none of the options would have a good result. Through the years, the Dalai Lama has acquired wisdom and grace.

Laird reports the story of Tibet as seen through its spiritual leader. The circumstances of history have left Tibet standing alone, unable to defend itself from neither battle with nor assimilation from its large and influential neighbor. Laird and the Lama take us through pre-history, the Mongol incursions, the development of monestaries, the flight of the Dalai Lama and the sacking of the monestaries in the Cultural Revolution to the current stage of Chinese settlement.

As expected, the book is at its best in the era of the 14th Dalai Lama, since so much detail can be provided. I presume the interviews in this part will part of the canon for future historians of Tibet.

The amazing thing about this narrative, as Laird points out, when Tibet is to blame, the Dalai Lama does not cover. He recognizes the abuses of the nobles, the brutal society, the lack of technology, and even the feudal conditions brought on by the church-state which he in name headed. Not many rulers would admit to the role of internecine strife and the betrayal of the people by its aristocracy as a factor in its inability to ward off the influence of a larger nation as the Dalai Lama does. Laird sympathetically explains the Dalai Lama's difficulties in pursuing a non-violent path to autonomy (recognizing the inability to achieve independence).

One era not mentioned in this history is the arrival of the Europeans.The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet gives a good portrait of Tibet-Chinese relations in this period. While relations were cordial, China had "minders" planted in Tibet, watching and reporting all.

Thomas Laird had a brilliant idea which he has brought to fruition - obtaining the Dalai Lama's views on the history of his homeland through a wonderful series of conversations. Beautifully executed and a great learning experience on both sides of the conversation. It became clear that the Dalai Lama gained a surprising number of new insights into Tibet's history and Thomas (and the readers) gained new perspectives on the second, inter-twined spiritual level of life and history in Tibet. This second level is harder for us to comprehend, and Thomas has done his best to get the message through - at least I think readers will now have some better hope of understanding without undergoing a full immersion in Buddhist thought. The book provides a fascinating first hand insight into the extraordinary times in Tibet through the twentieth century. Not a 'hard core' history, but a truly enlightening story nonetheless.

As a minor criticism, the critical points on China's current domination of Tibet, based on false pretences as it is, were laboured a little too heavily. We get it - it doesn't need quite so much repetition to ensure the point is made.

Unfortunately for Kindle users (me included) the beautiful illustrations and photos don't present as well in that format - from that perspective, this is probably better purchased as a hardcopy.

A really interesting book, a novel conversational approach, the whole concept is well done.