Author(s): Palden Gyatso

Biographies | Tibetan Buddhism

In 1992 the Venerable Palden Gyatso was released after 33 years of imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese forces in Tibet. Fire Under the Snow is the story of his life- his childhood in the small village of Panam, his training as a monk and his trek to the great monastery of Drepung, near Lhasa. In 1959 he was arrested after a non-violent demonstration for Tibetan freedom. Shackled and beaten, he was sentenced to the first seven years of his long incarceration. In the years that followed he could only watch as monasteries were destroyed, books burned and many thousands of Tibetans executed. When Palden was eventually released it was on the understanding that he would return to monastic life. Instead he escaped to India where he began to reveal what he had endured. His devastating memoir bears irrefutable testimony to the suffering of Tibet under Chinese rule.