"Holder of the White Lotus: The Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama"

The incumbent Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize winner Tenzin Gyatso, is fourteenth in a lineage whose history is every bit as bloody and intrigue-laden as that of the Papacy. The ‘first’ Dalai Lama was in fact the third; the second described himself as ‘a mad beggar monk’; the fourth was not Tibetan at all but a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. The sixth was a notorious womaniser, while four successive Dalai Lamas were almost certainly murdered. The present Dalai Lama has himself been the target of attacks that resulted in the brutal murder of a close colleague. He readily admits that Tibet never was Shangri La.

Yet while the Chinese call the Dalai Lama ‘a wolf in monk’s robes’, it is the image of Tibet as a uniquely peaceful land of wandering mystics that has prevailed. Holder of the White Lotus exposes the simplistic idea of a peaceful, but repressed, people and explores the country’s long and bloodthirsty history, as well as its folk-religious traditions.