The life of the Sixth Dalai Lama does not end with his supposed
death at Kokonor in November 1706, on the way to Beijing, and an
audience with the Manchu Emperor Kangxi. This book, the so-called
Hidden Life, presents a very different Tsangyang Gyamtso, neither a
louche poet nor a drinker, but a sober Buddhist practitioner, who
chose to escape at Kokonor and to adopt the guise of a wandering
monk, only appearing some years later, after many fantastical and
mystical adventures, in what is today Inner Mongolia, where he
oversaw monasteries and lived as a Buddhist teacher. The Hidden
Life was written by a Mongolian monk in 1756, ten years following
the death of the lama, his spiritual teacher, whom he identifies as
Tsangyang Gyamtso, and in whose identity as the Sixth Dalai Lama he
clearly has complete faith. However, as one might imagine, there is
nowadays no agreement among the wider Tibetan, Mongolian and
Tibetological scholarly community as to whether this man was a
charlatan or deluded, or whether he was indeed the Sixth Dalai
Lama. The text is divided into four parts. The first part gives an
account of the background and birth of the Sixth Dalai Lama, while
the opening section of the second part (which is in direct speech,
dictated by the lama) continues on, through the political intrigue
in Lhasa at the end of the seventeenth century, to the lama's
escape at Kokonor. The remainder of the second part consists of a
visionary narrative, in which the lama travels through Tibet and
Nepal, and in which he encounters divine figures, yetis, zombies
and a man with no head, all of which is presented as fact. The
third and longest part is an account of the final thirty years of
the lama's life, and his activity in Mongolia as an influential
Buddhist teacher, including a lengthy and moving description of his
death. The final part includes a list of his students and, most
interestingly perhaps, a theological and philosophical
justification for the coexistence of the Sixth and Seventh Dalai
Lamas.
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