When the Dalai Lama sat down on Saturday with Richard Gere and Robert Thurman, father of actor Uma and US professor of Buddhism, it was supposed to be for a few hours contemplating sacred art and silent meditation.
But with Chinese troops smothering the protests in Tibet with brutal ease, the 14th Dalai Lama, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion, found himself pondering not celestial peace but bloody violence.
Like almost everything the 72-year-old does, who he meets and what he says in his lopsided English are picked over and pulled apart.
Gere and Thurman founded Tibet House, in New York's hip upper west side, which serves as a cultural mission for the "occupied" nation of Tibet. Their headline-grabbing appearance will no doubt deepen suspicions in Beijing that Saturday's event at the Delhi Foundation for Universal Responsibility was politics masquerading as religion.
`FREEDOM LOVING'
On Friday, one of China's bitterest critics, Representative Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, descended the steps of the main temple at the home of the Dalai Lama in McLeod Ganj in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas hand-in-hand with the Tibetan spiritual leader and blasted Beijing.
The ever-active Pelosi, who during an official visit in 1991 unfurled a pro-democracy banner in Tiananmen Square in 1991, infuriated the Chinese government with a call on "freedom-loving people" to denounce the communist regime, which has grown edgier about international pressure on Tibet ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
Although he describes himself as a "simple Buddhist monk," last week's events in the Tibetan plateau have underlined the Dalai Lama's importance as a symbol of peaceful protests and a struggle for cultural freedom. For Tibetans he is the Ocean of Wisdom, a god-king who engenders intense devotion -- his name was chanted repeatedly by protesters across the roof of the world.
DIFFERENT VIEW
Chinese officials have a different view, one rooted in the feeling that the Dalai Lama has used his moral and religious authority to destabilize Tibet. In an extraordinarily vituperative attack, state-run media said that the Chinese leadership is engaged in a "life and death struggle" with the Dalai Lama, who is "a wolf in a monk's robe, a monster with a human face but the heart of a beast."
To anyone standing in McLeod Ganj, a British Raj hill station above Dharamsala last week, where he has lived in exile since 1959, the rhetoric seems faintly absurd -- a Chinese dragon scared by a mouse that prayed.
The Dalai Lama's base of power is a former British cantonment compound that now consists of a concrete monastery, a temple and a long yellow bungalow called the Heavenly Abode. It is a far cry from his former home, Lhasa's Potala Palace, which sprawls across more than 1,000 rooms and 13 storys. Supporters say that his private office has just "half a dozen" full-time officials.
Every year, hundreds of Tibetans risk bullets, imprisonment, frostbite and hypothermia to escape through Nepal to the Dalai Lama's home in exile. Last week, one monk from Tibet said he had made the perilous journey because he wanted to see "the god before he left the Earth."
"Chinese should get out of Tibet, we don't like them. They are murdering our culture. The Dalai Lama is proof we are not Chinese," said Ruchun, a 31-year-old Tibetan monk from Gansu Province, on one of the daily protest marches in McLeod Ganj last week.
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