Palden Gyatso was a 28-year-old Tibetan monk when Chinese authorities put him in prison for resisting China’s 1959 overthrow of Tibet’s government and the takeover of its culture.

Gyatso, now 72, spent most of the next 33 years of his life in prison, where he endured physical and emotional torture as the Chinese tried every means possible to break his spirit of resistance and his will to continue fighting for Tibetan freedom.

He was beaten, shocked with electric cattle prods and suspended from a ceiling above a burning fire. Gyatso also suffered through periods of starvation and forced labor.

In 1992, after he finished his last prison sentence, he managed to escape from Tibet into exile in India, carrying with him some of the torture instruments that had been used on him.

Yet, after all those horrific experiences, Gyatso doesn’t hate his Chinese captors or that nation’s rulers.

Rather, he pities them.

Gyatso, speaking through an interpreter, uses a Tibetan metaphor to explain his feelings about those who mistreated him for so many years.

“Those who are driven by ignorance and anger are like a crazed or drunken elephant. That kind of elephant will only make a mess for himself and others. There’s nothing to feel for him but sympathy and pity,” Gyatso says.

Nor is he angry.

“As I have mentioned in my book (“The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk”), I don’t have any anger or grudge against the Chinese. It behooves me not to have anger. As a Buddhist practitioner, anger is your worst enemy. Any religious person should be able to make his anger subside,” Gyatso says. “I really believe anger will bring unhappiness to yourself and others, and turn friends into enemies. I have to have tolerance and forgiveness.”

Gyatso, who now lives in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala in India, is spending a week in Lawrence and the Kansas City area, where he is speaking to audiences about his experiences under Chinese repression and Tibet’s continuing struggle for freedom.

Gyatso is in the United States on a speaking tour sponsored by a New York-based chapter of the international group Students for a Free Tibet. He plans to return to India in June.

While he is in Lawrence, Gyatso is staying with Marian O’Dwyer, owner of the Phoenix Gallery, 919 Mass.

O’Dwyer, who practices Tibetan Buddhism, met Gyatso when he visited KU several years ago to speak at an event hosted by the now-defunct local chapter of Students for a Free Tibet.

Using meditation to survive

Gyatso, a small and slightly built man, nevertheless cuts a striking figure on the streets of downtown Lawrence, where a Buddhist monk in a burgundy robe is an unfamiliar sight.

He’s accompanied around the city by O’Dwyer and his interpreter, Rigdzin Tingkhye, a native Tibetan who lives in Seattle.

He welcomes questions about his life experiences, his thoughts on Buddhist practice and the situation in Tibet today.

Gyatso is asked how he was able to survive the harsh and cruel conditions of his decades-long prison sentences. (Every time he would finish serving one sentence, he would be re-arrested for taking part in political activities opposing the Chinese occupation.)

“I have spent 33 years in prison and have been physically and mentally tortured many times, but somehow I was able to endure those sufferings,” he says.

Gyatso called upon his training as a monk, using a meditation technique called tonglen, to refocus his thoughts when he was undergoing torture.

“When I do that, it immediately gives me inner strength and spaciousness,” he says. “It gives my spirit much more courage.”

He credits the discipline of his Buddhist practice for keeping him from losing his sanity and helping him to survive physically, though when he was finally released from prison, he was very weak.

“Sometimes I thought, ‘Oh, I might die,’ but the innermost strength of my spirit said, ‘I might live,'” Gyatso says.

One of the ways he used his time in prison was to memorize everything about his experience: the names and descriptions of his guards, how his captors treated his fellow inmates, and the daily humiliations of prison life.

Memorization, Gyatso explains, is part of a monk’s training. Here, it served him well.

“I decided, ‘I must live to tell my story.’ Many monks told me, ‘You have to live. Stay strong; our death should not be a waste. Tell our story to the outside world.’ I remember everything,” he says.

Spirit remains ‘vividly alive’

Gyatso stresses he doesn’t have any anger toward those who tortured and imprisoned him. For him, it would defeat the purpose of his Buddhist practice: showing compassion for all beings.

“I like to mimic the path of a bodhisattva (a person motivated by altruism, who lives to serve others). Even after all this brutal torture, I don’t have an individual grudge against anybody. Yes, of course, at a given moment there is anger,” he says. “But it might help the world if this ordinary Buddhist monk talks about how anger causes our peace to deteriorate and destroys communities and nations. It all breaks down to anger, hatred and revenge. I am hoping that the telling of my story will bring some sort of hope for the future.”

Tibet remains under the political and cultural oppression of China, Gyatso’s fellow monks and nuns remain imprisoned or exiled.

“Inside Tibet, the situation is not any better. It has worsened. But the Dalai Lama (the spiritual leader of that nation) has become a symbol of peace and nonviolence around the world. This helps the cause,” Gyatso says.

“The spirit of Tibet is still vividly alive, inside and outside of Tibet.”