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I were hit on the head by a stone.” The only things that moved him were the stories of the Buddhist martyrs and the passages about suffering and forbearance that the scriptures abound with. At times, he would shed tears when reading them. But for the rest, he only let the verses play on his lips, not even trying to memorize them. He would edit the stories in his head to make them more exciting, or conjure up cliff-hanging adventure stories to avoid boredom.
    • • •
    Summer brought the move to the Norbulingka, and the young Dalai Lama quickly grew to love the rambling green place. He would take his younger brother, Choegyal, out on the pond in a tiny boat that could fit only the two of them. They would stare down over the gunwales of the boat and drop food to the fish that they could see flitting in the green water. His attendants would walk along the shore, tracking the progress of the vessel. The Fourteenth proved to be a daredevil, falling into the pond one time while trying to retrieve a stick and being rescued by a janitor who happened to hear his calls.
    When, at fourteen, he first met the Austrian soldier Heinrich Harrer (who would go on to write the memoir
Seven Years in Tibet
), the two worked a film projector together. At one point, the Dalai Lama convinced Harrer to speak through a microphone and announce the next film to his tutors sitting in the theater, which Harrer did in the casual way of a Westerner. “He laughed enthusiastically at the surprised and shocked faces of the monks when they heard my cheerful, disrespectful tones,” Harrer remembered. Harrer found the Dalai Lama to be an ebullient, confident teenager who felt the suffocating traditions of his office keenly. “From the first day of the year until the last, it was nothing but a long round of ceremonies,” the Dalai Lama wrote. “This formalism regulated every detail of our everyday life. You had to observe it even while talking, even while walking.” He preferred gossiping to politics—and the intrigues that swirled around Lhasa were as complex as any Tudor plot. When his father died in 1947, allegations circulated that he’d been poisoned as part of a complex conspiracy. (There was even one rumor that said the Fourteenth was not the real Dalai Lama but an imposter.)
    Harrer described the young man he met: “His complexion was much lighter than that of the average Tibetan. His eyes, hardly narrower than those of most Europeans, were full of expression, charm and vivacity. His cheeks glowed with excitement, and as he sat he kept sliding from side to side.…” The Dalai Lama wore his hair long (probably, Harrer thought, as protection against the freezing cold of the Potala Palace), suffered from bad posture as a result of many hours spent bent over books in his badly lit study, and had beautiful hands, which he kept folded. “He beamed all over his face and poured out a flood of questions,” Harrer remembered. “He seemed to me like a person who had for years brooded in solitude over different problems, and now that he had at last someone to talk to, wanted to know all the answers at once.”
    His Holiness was interested in the world outside Tibet but had few ways of learning about it. He had a seven-volume account of World War II, which he’d had translated into Tibetan, but there were large patches of world history that were a mystery to him. World War II had reshaped societies outside the Himalayas’ ranges and set in motion the forces that would threaten to overwhelm his country, but the Dalai Lama learned about the battles by paging through back issues of
Life
magazine, which arrived in Lhasa months after their issue date, already musty with age.
    All he had for an insight into power was the Tibetan myths and the murals that looped and spiraled across the walls of his palace. They told him how the great imperial era of Tibetan history, a time of conquest and national consolidation, drew to an end in the ninth century. The