The Rainbow Palace

Description

This moving and powerful book charts Choedrak's painfully deprived Childhood in rural Tibet, the harsh years of training in the monastery and his eventual rise to become a Lhamenpa, personal physician to the Dalai Lama. But unfortunately, this personal achievement only marked the beginning of his greater struggle. The Chinese occupied Tibet in 1950 and the country descended into violence and chaos. Choedrak, among thousands of others, was imprisoned under the most cruel and repressive conditions imaginable. The events he was forced to be witness to and endure were so appalling that it is hard to believe he managed to retain his humanity let alone his religion. Yet Choedrak managed not only to find incredible reserves of bravery and strength but compassion for his torturers whom he ended up tending as patients. This book is not only a humbling and inspiring personal testimony but a historical account of the Chinese oppression of Tibet: a horrific and systematic breach of human and civil rights that the international community has left shamefully unchallenged. Choedrak's life, and those of other Tibetans who have suffered under occupation is both a terrible measure of the cruelty of which human beings are capable and the incredible resilience of the human spirit and its will to love.--Rebecca Johnson ISBN:9780553813036