Palden Gyatso
1933 (92 года)After the 1959 Tibetan uprising, Palden Gyatso was arrested by Chinese officials.[1] He spent the following 33 years in different Chinese prisons and labour camps.[3] He was forced to participate in barbarous reeducation classes and was brutally tortured,[3][7] leading to irreversible physical damage. During this time, he continued to abide by the Dharma (Buddha's teachings).[4]
1992 Palden Gyatso was released. He escaped to Dharamsala in India,[4] the place of the Tibetan exile government. There he wrote his autobiography Fire Under The Snow in Tibetan,[7] since translated into many other languages and the subject of a forthcoming film.[4][6]
During his following visits in America and Europe he became politically active as an opponent of the Chinese occupation in Tibet and as a witness of many years under Chinese confinement.[3] In 1995 he was heard by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.[1] In 1998, he won the John Humphrey Freedom Award from the Canadian human rights group Rights & Democracy.[8] In 2009 he spoke at the inaugural Oslo Freedom Forum.
These days Palden Gyatso is living in Dharamsala and following his Buddhist studies.[4]
Fire Under the Snow
Makoto Sasa
Palden Gyatso
Palden Gyatso, a Buddhist monk since childhood, was arrested by the Chinese Communist Army in 1959. He spent the next 33 years in prison for the "crimes" of peaceful demonstration and refusal to denounce his apolitical teacher as an Indian spy. He was tortured, starved and sentenced to hard labor. He watched his nation and culture destroyed, his teachers, friends and family displaced, jailed or killed under Chinese occupation. Fire Under the Snow reaches back to Palden's birth in 1933 and follows him through the Orwellian nightmare that began with the Chinese invasion. We cut back and forth between the past and Palden's present as an activist, living in exile. Our P.O.V. becomes a "third eye" hovering over Palden’s current life, haunted by his memories of the past. We explore the escalating cycle of interrogation and physical violation during his years in prison that ended decades later with Palden's escape from Tibet and a cathartic meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Fire Under the Snow
