Tibet Struggles to Survive

The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso, the incarnation of Tibet's patron deity, Chenresi, "the Buddha of mercy," passed on to "the Honorable Field" in 1933, there to await rebirth as the present Dalai Lama in 1935. Toward the end of his long rule he was gravely worried by the communist suppression of Lamaist Buddhism in Mongolia, which for almost four hundred years had been dominated by the Tibetan form of religion. In creating a Mongolian nation on the Soviet pattern in the 1920s and early 1930s, Mongolian Communists destroyed almost all the monasteries which regarded the Dalai Lama in Lhasa as their