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The Beggar Lama is the story of the Gyalrong Kuzhap, a Tibetan Buddhist polymath and reincarnated lama who has led a remarkable life through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Note on the Maps
Introduction
Act I: Childhood (1930–1941)
1. Birth and Recognition
2. Special Education
3. Just a Kid
Act II: The Lhasa Trip and Monastic Life (1941–1948)
4. On the Road
5. Life at Drepung
6. On Freedom
Act III: Heaven and Hell in the New China (1949–1976)
7. Reshuffling Powers
8. New Society, New Life
9. The Calm Before the Storm
10. The Democratic Reform
11. Riding the Revolutionary Tides
Act IV: An Intellectual Life (1966/1977–)
12. From Cowshed to College
13. The Closing Age of Giants
14. The Last Breath
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tenzin Jinba teaches anthropology and sociology at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border (2013).
Summary
The Beggar Lama is the story of the Gyalrong Kuzhap, a Tibetan Buddhist polymath and reincarnated lama who has led a remarkable life through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century. Born in 1930 in Tsanlha, Gyalrong, on the easternmost fringes of the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, he would go on to become a monk, a Communist official, a professor of Tibetan studies, and a leader in the Tibetan cultural survival movement in China.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth and open-ended conversations over more than a decade, Tenzin Jinba presents the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s life story. The Beggar Lama chronicles his journeys—from Gyalrong to Lhasa, from steadfast Communist to critic of the Chinese regime, from scholar to activist—painting a compelling portrait of an influential and unconventional figure. In so doing, the book shows how the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s tale intertwines with larger social and political developments, providing a wide-ranging history of Tibet, the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, and China over the past century.
The Beggar Lama shares the Gyalrong Kuzhap’s insightful and often critical views on Tibetan cultural and religious institutions, the Chinese Communist Party’s social and political agendas, Tibetan studies in China, and the prospects for Tibetan cultural rebirth. Above all, it is a story of hope in dark times, as the Gyalrong Kuzhap seeks with his “last breath” to prevent Tibetan culture and memory from vanishing.
