The Dance of 17 Lives: The Incredible True Story

The extraordinary story of the exiled Tibetan teenager who has been hailed as one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the coming age.

In January 2000, an Ambassador taxi twisted its way up the narrow road leading toward Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills of northern India-the home in exile of the Dalai Lama. In this aging car was a fourteen-year-old boy: the 17th Karmapa, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. The boy's arrival in Dharamsala was the culmination of an escape. He had journeyed nine hundred miles across the Himalayas, in conditions of high danger, far from the monastery in Tibet where he had lived since he was eight. His arrival took everyone by surprise: far-flung devotees, the world's press, the Chinese government, even the Dalai Lama himself, who was reminded of his own escape into exile more than forty years earlier.

Fascinated by this charismatic young figure, British writer Mick Brown traveled to Dharamsala to meet him and found himself drawn into a web of intrigue. Amid a feud of Byzantine complexity concerning the boy's succession, Mick Brown gained unique access to both sides. In The Dance of 17 Lives, the author reveals what he uncovered: tales of miracles and murder, the settling of two-hundred-year-old scores, and the enduring spirit of Tibetan Buddhism in the face of all adversity.