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beginning around AD 629, transformed Tibet into a relentless military power. His armies pushed into Nepal and Burma, into Tang-dynasty China, the border areas of India, and the neighboring kingdom of Zhang Zhung. But he also established Lhasa as a cosmopolitan mecca, sending scholars to northern India to create a written Tibetan language and bringing astrological systems from China, laws and civil administration from the Uighurs, and art from Nepal. The king, in his most lasting legacy, then imported Buddhism to Lhasa and declared it the official state faith. Before Songtsen Gampo, the Tibetans had practiced Bön, “the nameless religion,” a shamanistic belief system populated by demons, vengeful ghosts, snake-gods, and devils who called for human sacrifice and who could only be controlled by a priest known as a “bön,” or invoker of spirits.
    Gampo’s successor, Trisong Detsen, summoned the legendary guru Padmasambhava from India and encouraged him to journeyto every corner of Tibet, teaching the Four Noble Truths:
to live is to suffer; suffering is caused by desire; desire can be overcome; and the path to that overcoming is embodied in the Noble Eightfold Path—right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration
. Sin is not the great villain in Buddhist philosophy; ignorance is. We sin because, in our ignorance, we fail to see how lying and stealing and committing violence harms our own karma and leads only to more suffering. Tibetan Buddhism has often been called a science of the mind, and with some justification. It’s a struggle to understand life and overcome its illusions so that one may gradually attain a sublime equanimity. Padmasambhava was the first to expound its principles in the Land of Snows.
    The guru didn’t attack Bön so much as cannibalize it, incorporating the faith’s demons and legends into the Buddhist pantheon and thereby giving even the simplest peasant a clear way of comprehending the new religion. It was said he faced down the Bön deities by causing massive avalanches, stopping the wind, and bringing the waters of frigid lakes to a boil, all through a mind honed by constant meditation. By the twelfth century, Buddhism had conquered the country, this time not by imperial decree but by capturing the hearts of ordinary citizens.
    The young Dalai Lama slept in the Great Fifth’s bedroom, on the seventh—and uppermost—story of the Potala. “It was pitifully cold and ill-lit,” he remembered. “Everything in it was ancient and decrepit and behind the drapes that hung across each of the four walls lay deposits of centuries-old dust.” He made friends with the mice who came to steal the food left as offerings for the Buddha. In the morning, after his 7:00 a.m. breakfast, the DalaiLama and his brother Lobsang were given their lessons together, beginning with reading and memorization of Buddhist texts. The Dalai Lama was trained through the traditional Tibetan methods. First, he was taught to read and then to write (including a very exacting course in penmanship, divided into training in one script for writing manuscripts and in another for official communications and private letters). Then he began to memorize the classic scriptures, both to sharpen his memory and to give him a basic understanding of Buddhist principles. This was followed by
nyam tee
, “teaching from experience.” Here a lama would be invited to the Potala to give a lecture on a specific virtue, illustrating the point with real-life stories and quotations from Lord Buddha and the classic Indian authorities. Next came perhaps the most important step of all, the practice of meditation, where the student was left alone in complete silence to contemplate the lessons of the day and to begin the internal explorations that are the grist of the monk’s life. Finally, that development was tested in debates with tutors and teachers, accompanied by a