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series of stylized gestures—the questioner, for example, would try to distract his adversary by slowly raising his right hand above his head and then slapping it into his left palm.
    At 10:00 a.m., every day, His Holiness and his brother would be separated, and the Fourteenth would be escorted to a meeting with the members of his government, who ascended the steep stairs from their offices on the second and third floors. He was not allowed to speak. His regent, a flamboyantly corrupt monk named Reting Rimpoche, directed the nation’s business.
    When the Dalai Lama was a child, political affairs and religious studies were sheer drudgery. His tutors found the boy to be bright, with an impressive memory, and deeply concerned with underdogs, the friendless and abused. But he didn’t work at hislessons. “My only interest was in playing,” the Dalai Lama admitted. He was a strong-willed boy more interested in concocting elaborate war games than anything else. He was almost worryingly obsessed with gadgets, war machines (challenging his keepers to make tanks and airplanes out of balls of
tsampa
dough), military drills, and dangerous stunts, such as running off a ramp and jumping, to see who could leap the highest. Because the Dalai Lama was forbidden to have friends his own age, his adult attendants were shanghaied into mock battles. The young boy would toss missiles made of dough at their heads, and they would fire back.
    He hadn’t yet overcome his legendary temper, either. After losing a game to his sweepers (who swept the gleaming floors of the palace clean), His Holiness would sometimes stand and glower at them, literally shaking with rage. The ancient myths held that the Tibetan people had descended from a ravenous she-beast, and Tibetans believed Chenrizi had come to watch over them because of their wild nature. But at times it was the Dalai Lama who seemed ungovernable, a spirit of fury unleashed in the echoing rooms of the Potala.
    It was only with the sweepers that His Holiness had what could be called a normal relationship; the others used formal language when speaking to him, addressing the institution, the superior being, instead of the young boy. Protocol gave his ministers strict rules for what they could and couldn’t do in the Dalai Lama’s presence: sitting, for example, was sacrilege. In fact, the Dalai Lama often saw only the tops of his subjects’ heads, as they bowed low at the first sight of him and he, by tradition, looked up in the air. Nor could he be punished: when the Fourteenth did something bad, it was his timid brother Lobsang who was lashed with a whip hanging on their tutor’s wall. The Dalai Lama had the curious fate of being neglected and spoiled at the same time.
    When His Holiness was just eight, Lobsang, the last daily link to his old life, left for private school. Now the two brothers would see each other only on the occasional school holidays. “When he left after each visit,” the Dalai Lama said, “I remember, standing at the window watching, my heart full of sorrow, as he disappeared into the distance.” His estrangement from a normal childhood was complete. “Those children wrested from their families,” wrote the Tibet scholar Giuseppe Tucci, about the young Dalai Lamas,
    subjected to the strict supervision of elderly wardens … led through the endless maze of lamaistic liturgy and dogmatics and plunged forcibly into the ponderous works of their former embodiments, certainly do not know the blissful astonishment of childhood. Such strict discipline, such statue-like immobility as the dignity of that office imposes, the daily intercourse with gloomy, elderly people, look to me like a violent, ruthless suppression of childhood.
    As he entered his teens, the Fourteenth was barely treading water with his studies. At thirteen, he was introduced to Buddhist metaphysics, and his mind shut down completely. “They unnerved me so that I had the feeling of being dazed, as though