In the most significant defection from Chinese-ruled Tibet in decades, one of Himalayan Buddhism’s most important lamas has escaped Chinese-controlled Tibet in a weeklong undercover flight across Nepal and into India.

The religious leader, the 14-year-old head of the Karmapa Buddhist order, stole away from the Tsurphu Monastery, north of Lhasa, on December 28 and arrived unannounced and unexpected on Wednesday in Dharamshala, India, where the Dalai Lama welcomed him to freedom.

Chinese leaders installed the boy as the head of the order in 1992 and used him as a symbol of their rule over Tibet. He is the most important Tibetan figure to defect since his predecessor, the 16^th Karmapa, and other Buddhist clerics including the current Dalai Lama fled with thousands of Tibetans after an abortive anti-Chinese uprising in 1959.

“It is a joyful thing for all Tibetan Buddhists,” said Robert A.F. Thurman, a leading American Buddhist scholar and professor of religion at Columbia University in New York.

Thurman, a Buddhist who speaks Tibetan, said that the flight of the 17^th Karmapa, who is venerated as a reincarnate by all major branches of Tibetan Buddhism, “is very embarrassing for the Chinese.”

“This means that even the ones they try to promote as puppets want to leave anyway,” he said.

China’s State Council Information Office acknowledged the Karmapa had left his monastery in central Tibet with a “small number of followers,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Xinhua report said the Karmapa had gone abroad to get musical instruments and the black hats used by his predecessors and cited a letter saying he did not mean to “betray the state, the nation, the monastery or the leadership.”

In 1994, the 17^th Karmapa, whose name is Ugyen Trinley Dorje, was the honored guest of President Jiang Zemin at Chinese national day celebrations in Beijing. The Chinese government recognized the boy as the legitimate holder of the title. “For the Karmapa to leave is really a big blow,” Thurman said.

Melvin McLeod, publisher of The Shambhala Sun, an American Buddhist journal, called the reports of the Karmapa’s flight “extraordinarily important news for the worldwide community of Tibetan Buddhist practioners.”

“There is no longer any fear that one of the major leaders in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy would be under the sway of the Chinese, but will return to the lineage of which he is so important,” he said.

In Woodstock, New York, where the Karmapa Buddhists maintain their largest monastery outside the Himalayan region, the Karma Triyana Dharma Chakra center, Tenzin Chonyi, the monastery president, said that the escape seems miraculous.

“We are wondering, how could that even happen?” he said. “Millions of Buddhists outside of Tibet have even waiting for decades to receive his blessings.”

Tenzin Chonyi, who spoke yesterday (Jan. 7, 2000) with monks in India, said that details of the Karmapa’s flight from the Tsurphu Monastery, about 40 miles north of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, were still sketchy, but that it appeared that he and four monks had left by foot, and were later picked up by trucks or other vehicles in Tibet and Nepal.

“For us it is a dream coming true,” said Tenzin Chonyi, who also fled Tibet as a youth. He added that the Karmapa’s escape underlined the worsening treatment of Tibetan Buddhist leaders by the Chinese.

“The situation in Tibet is not getting better any more for religious people,” he said. “His own safety was also danger.”

Buddhist scholars said that the Karmapa was apparently prodded into leaving because the Chinese did not deliver on a promise to let him visit his followers outside Tibet or invite his most influential teacher, Tai Situ of Rumtek Monastery in the Himalayan state of Skkim, to go to Tsurphu, the Karmapas’ central religious seat. Tsurphu was one of the monasteries most devastated by the Chinese, before and during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. With outside help and contributions, restoration began in the 1980s.

There was no immediate decision in India about the Karmapa’s fate as an illegal entrant there, but the Indians have been lenient with fleeing Tibetans for decades.

The Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, fled Chinese control for India in 1959 with many followers.

Seeds of mistrust grow only in suspicious minds. Trust is built on deeds, not words. To say less and do more for trust-building is the only way to weed out bed seeds. There is no shortcut or magical formula.

Karmapa Lama, the 14-year-old boy had not betray Beijing and hinted he would return. Karmapa Lama needs learn much than he wants in Tibet. Communist China cannot handle the spirit in religious area. Chinese government had never acquiesced to those requests and left him no choice but to leave. He had tried several times to obtain an exit visa to travel overseas as head of the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, which has a wide international following. “Chinese repression and treats to human rights, religious expression, and even life itself made his escape critical,” said a press release on the web site.

1941--- U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defines the American goal of the “Four Freedoms”

Freedom from fear.