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Upon his death, the senior monks of Lhasa set about finding his successor in the traditional fashion. The regent went to the sacred lake of Lhamoi Lhatso, famous for its visions, and saw in its waters an image of a gold-roofed, three-story monastery beside a winding path. Other signs appeared. The embalmed body of the departed ruler seemed to move from pointing south to pointing toward the northeast. And auspicious cloud formations also appeared in the northeast. When a search party of monks arrived at the 20-family settlement of Takster, in the northeastern province of Amdo, its members were startled to find a gold-roofed, three-story monastery beside a winding path. They were even more taken aback when a two-year-old boy greeted them with familiarity and addressed their leader, disguised as a servant, by the name of his temple in distant Lhasa. The mischievous toddler, who slept in the kitchen of a mud-and-stone house, would become the 14th Dalai Lama.
At the age of four he was installed upon the Lion Throne in Lhasa and inducted into a formidable course of monastic studies. By the age of six he was choosing his own regent, and by the time he was 11 he was weathering a civil uprising. The Dalai Lama has written with typical warmth about his unworldly boyhood in the cold, dark, thousand-room Potala Palace, playing games with the palace sweepers, rigging up a hand-cranked projector on which he could watch Tarzan movies and Henry V, and clobbering his only real playmate--his immediate elder brother Lobsang Samten--serene in the knowledge that no one would readily punish a boy regarded as the incarnation of the god of compassion. Yet the dominant characteristic of his childhood was its loneliness. Often, he recalls, he would go onto the rooftop of his palace and watch the other boys of Lhasa playing in the streets. And each time his brother left, he remembers "standing at the window, watching, my heart full of sorrow as he disappeared into the distance."
Tibet itself (with an army of just 8,500) was in an equally vulnerable state of remoteness when Chinese forces, newly united by Mao Zedong, attacked its eastern frontiers in 1950. Hurriedly, on the advice of the State Oracle (who delivered counsel while in a trance), the 15-year-old boy was invested with full political authority, and while still in his teens, he traveled to Beijing in 1954, against the wishes of his protective people, to negotiate face to face with Mao.
Five years later, when angry Tibetans rose up ever more fiercely against Chinese aggression, their young leader consulted the State Oracle again and, one night, dressed as a humble soldier, slipped out of his summer palace, with his family and some bodyguards. For two weeks the party traveled over the highest mountains on earth, dodging Chinese planes and moving only under the cover of darkness, until at last, suffering from dysentery and on the back of a hybrid yak, the Dalai Lama arrived in India and began a new life in exile.