| A few days later, they gave him the traditional test of choosing objects belonging to the previous Dalai Lama from similar items which did not. In every case, the child correctly identified the 13th Dalai Lama's things, saying, "It's mine. It's mine."
Separated from his family a few years later, he was taken to Lhasa and spent a disciplined and lonely youth in the vast Potala Palace in Lhasa, undergoing rigorous training in matters of both state and spirituality.
Yet for all the isolation, austerity, premature responsibilities, and suffering he has endured, the Dalai Lama is a remarkably jolly and unembittered man. As Michael Goodman reported during His Holiness' first US visit,
head tilted back and eyes squeezed shut, he bursts into a gale of laughter...Like most Tibetans he is gifted with a keen sense of humor, and when he laughs his entire body takes part. He has a wonderful, unembarrassed laugh that begins as a deep-throated roar and fades away on a high pitch, as if all his previous thirteen incarnations were joining in with him. That he is able to laugh in the face of adversity after all he has experienced during the past three decades, suggests that he is a man who has found inner peace.
And despite the fact that his Tibetan government in exile toils unrecognized by any other nation except the Czech Republic, and that he wields no worldly power, he is revered by growing thousands around the world as that rarest of beings, a genuinely wise and good man whose "true religion," as he sometimes says, "is kindness."
By Yolanda O'Bannon
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