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From Victim to Liberator: The Power of Compassion

I was on a meditation retreat in the south  of France when a visiting master was  introduced to the group. An audience of over three hundred Western   students of  Buddhism waited quietly for him to speak. He was  about forty years old, quite tall and broad-shouldered for a Tibetan,   with an  enormous presence likea mountain, though he barely smiled. As he began   to talk  he repeatedly wiped at his draining right eye, as if something  in him was constantly crying, but his voice remained  strong. Soon his personal story unfolded.

For  fifteen years, as a young man, this Rinpoche and  his elderly master had been imprisoned inside Tibet  as victims of Chinese persecution. Although he did  not go into details, the conditions they had had to  endure were of the roughest sort, with many days spent  chained together in their dark, dirty cell. The Chinese,  he said, not content with normal torture, had been  determined to persecute devout Tibetans in the worst  possible way by denying them the right to meditate; every time their