Editing Tenzin Gyatso (section)

== Biography ==

Tenzin Gyatso was recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in 1937 and enthroned in 1940; he assumed full political authority in November 1950, at age fifteen, as the Chinese People's Liberation Army advanced into eastern Tibet. During an extended 1954–1955 stay in inland China, he was personally tutored in "the Soviet Union's nationality policies and Marxism-Leninism" by the Tibetan Communist cadre Phüntso Wangye, while Wangye's colleague Liu Geping covered Chinese Communist Party history.<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C., Dawei Sherap, & William R. Siebenschuh (2004). ''A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phüntso Wangye''. University of California Press, p. 195.</ref> He later recalled finding Communist Party officials more substantive and trustworthy in conversation than non-Party officials, whom he experienced as merely polite and evasive, and stated that his own lifelong impulse to help the poor made Marxist proletarian, internationalist, egalitarian theory attractive to him; he recalled that his discussions with Liu Geping gave him "genuine interest" in Marxist revolution, and described himself, in his own words, as "half Marxist and half Buddhist."<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C. (2014). ''A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3: The Storm Clouds Descend, 1955–1957''. University of California Press, p. 350.</ref> He confirmed that he asked more than once to become a Party member, motivated by admiration for the discipline and effectiveness he associated with specific Communists he met on tour, and that Phüntso Wangye and Liu Geping both advised him it was "better to postpone" formal membership, letting him attend Party meetings informally instead; he framed his own relationship to Wangye in explicitly comradely terms, as one "Khamba revolutionary" alongside himself as "one Amdo revolutionary."<ref>Goldstein (2014), ''Storm Clouds Descend'', p. 352.</ref> Phüntso Wangye's own memoir glosses the "half Buddhist and half Marxist" self-description as reflecting the Dalai Lama's own realism that professed belief and lived practice do not always match, "just as not every Buddhist follows the Buddha's words in the same way."<ref>Goldstein, Sherap, & Siebenschuh (2004), ''A Tibetan Revolutionary'', p. 195.</ref>

In the same period, the Dalai Lama supported, alongside the Tibetan official Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, early and voluntary reform measures aimed at the traditional estate/serf system, including debt cancellation and reductions in land rents and taxes.<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C. (2007). ''A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 2: The Calm before the Storm, 1951–1955''. University of California Press, pp. 454–463.</ref> Between 1957 and 1959, as Sino-Tibetan relations deteriorated, he adopted what he later described as a "two paths" strategy of overt cooperation with Mao Zedong combined with covert tolerance of, and private sympathy for, the anti-Chinese Khamba resistance; he refused Chinese requests to deploy the Tibetan army against the Khambas, and summarized his own position: "You felt one thing in your heart and you had to say something else with your mouth."<ref>Goldstein, Melvyn C. (2019). ''A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 4: In the Eye of the Storm, 1957–1959''. University of California Press, p. 447.</ref> He has separately recounted, in his own published autobiography, Mao Zedong privately telling him "Religion is poison," a remark he says horrified him.<ref>Goldstein, Sherap, & Siebenschuh (2004), ''A Tibetan Revolutionary'', p. 196, quoting Tenzin Gyatso, ''Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama'' (1990), p. 99.</ref> Following the March 1959 Lhasa Uprising, he fled to India, followed within two years by roughly 80,000 other Tibetan refugees.<ref>Goldstein (1989). ''A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State''. University of California Press, p. 825.</ref>

Under his direct personal involvement, the government-in-exile promulgated a new Constitution of Tibet in 1963, establishing an elected legislature and an executive Kashag alongside explicitly socialist-inflected economic provisions — state ownership of land, a bar on concentrated private wealth, and guaranteed minimum living standards — wrapped in liberal-democratic procedural guarantees; this probably represents the clearest institutional embodiment anywhere of a Buddhist-Marxist doctrinal synthesis being written into an actual governing charter.<ref>Avedon, John F. (1984). ''In Exile from the Land of Snows''. Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 106–108.</ref> In a 1996 published dialogue, he restated and substantially elaborated his self-description, praising Marxism's foundation "on moral principles" and its concern for "the fate of the working classes... as well as... those who are underprivileged and in need," while attributing the failure of Soviet-style regimes not to Marxism itself but to "the failure of totalitarianism" and its excessive emphasis on class struggle and hatred over compassion.<ref>Tenzin Gyatso, & Marianne Dresser (1996). ''Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses''. Berkeley: North Atlantic, pp. 109–110.</ref> In a 2006 interview he distinguished a compassion-motivated "good anger," directed at correcting social injustice, from destructive anger.<ref>Noriyuki Ueda, & Tenzin Gyatso (2013). ''The Dalai Lama on What Matters Most: Conversations on Anger, Compassion, and Action''. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads, p. 99.</ref> By 2013 he described himself as further to the left than the Chinese Communist Party's own leadership, remarking, "I feel I am more Marxist than those Marxist parties."<ref>Ueda, & Tenzin Gyatso (2013), ''What Matters Most'', p. 66.</ref> In a 2016 academic interview, his most theoretically developed statement on the subject, he tied Marxism to "a sense of concern for the well-being of the majority... of the needy, of the poor, of the suffering people," contrasted this with capitalism's exclusive concern with "gain and profitability," acknowledged that religious leaders "could be invoking karma to support ruling-class ideology," and floated nonviolent political mobilization by the poor against wealth inequality, asking rhetorically whether it should proceed "with support from Marxist theory."<ref>Anup Dhar, Anjan Chakrabarti, & Serap Kayatekin (2016). "Crossing Materialism and Religion: An Interview on Marxism and Spirituality with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama". ''Rethinking Marxism'' 28, nos. 3–4, pp. 587–591.</ref> He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.