Tibet: Reflections from the Wheel of Life

This work provides an intimate portrait of Tibet and its people as they make their pilgrimage through the wheel of life. The book offers lively and engaging, intimate and bawdy, humorous, tragic, revealing and inspiring stories of the Tibetans and reveals their extraordinary perception of their everyday lives. According to Tibetan belief, existence is an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. This book traces that journey from birth and childhood to adolescence, marriage, midlife, old age and death. We meet a woman who is married to four brothers and pregnant. She dreams of turquoise - a sure sign that the child in her belly will be a boy. Ten-year-old Tulku Ralo yawns as he sits on a grand throne blessing the reverent throng who flock to him; it is not easy being a god-child. The famous sleeping lama, Mindroling Rinpoche, who sleeps all day not because he is tired but because he is an advanced practitioner of dream yoga, changes the world by transforming his inner world. The pilgrimage of a family to Lhasa takes several years, for they cover the entire distance by prostrating the length of their bodies across the earth, surrendering to the primordial ground from which all Buddhas have arisen. All this is set against Tibet’s beautiful mountain landscapes, as well as the ongoing struggle of the Tibetans to win independance from China.