{"id":10028,"date":"2015-10-04T23:04:41","date_gmt":"2015-10-04T15:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/?p=10028"},"modified":"2015-10-05T01:08:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-04T17:08:04","slug":"across-many-mountains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/across-many-mountains\/","title":{"rendered":"Across Many Mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_0713\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It was winter of 1959, the same year the Dalai Lama<\/strong> went into exile and the prophecy made by Padmasambhava<\/strong>, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, was being fulfilled in a terrible way. This ostensibly 1,200-year-old prophecy says: \u201cWhen the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like the ants across the face of the earth and Buddhis teachins will reach the land of the red man.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 The iron birds, or Chinese planes, were flying over our land, and the horses on wheels, or Chinese trains, had brought troops to the border forcing my mother and grand-parents to set out on a perilous journey.<\/p>\n

Although the Chinese had invaded and occupied our land in 1950, it was not until years later that they dropped their initial false friendliness and began systematically arresting, torturing and imprisoning Tibetans, especially Buddhist monks and nuns, and aristocrats. As my grandmother was a nun and my grandfather a monk, they were in great danger. Their monastery was attacked and pillaged by Chinese soldiers. The Chinese ran riot in the village below the monastery.<\/p>\n

They dragged aristocrats across the village square by their hair and beat them, made them clean latrines, destroyed their houses, stole their sacred statues and gave their land to the peasants. They\u00a0stole livestock, hurled insults at venerable lamas and trampled on centuries-old village traditions. It was this barbarism that made my grandmother and my grandfather decide to flee to India with my mother and her four-year-old sister.<\/p>\n

They planned to cross the Himalayas on foot, with little money and no idea of the tirals and tribulations they would meet along the way. They were equipped with nothing but home-made leather shoes, woolen blankets, a large sack of tsampa<\/em> \u2013 ground-up roasted barley \u2013 and the certainty that escaping the country that had taken in the Dalai Lama was their sole chance of survival. This conviction was based solely on their unshakable faith. My grandparents couldn\u2019t speak any Indian language, they know not a single person on the Indian subcontinent and they hadn\u2019t the slightest idea of what awaited them…<\/p>\n

Across Many Mountains – Yangzom Brauen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was winter of 1959, the same year the Dalai Lama went into exile and the prophecy made by Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism, was being fulfilled in a terrible way. This ostensibly 1,200-year-old prophecy says: \u201cWhen the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like the ants across the face of the earth and Buddhis teachins will reach the land of the red man.\u201d\u00a0 The iron birds, or Chinese planes, were…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[148],"class_list":["post-10028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10028"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10035,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10028\/revisions\/10035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jipp-world.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}