The Tibetans call their own country Bo, sometimes adding Khawajen, "Land of Snows." Their own recorded history dates back some 2300 years, to the time of the Macedonian Greek empire in the west, and the late Chou empire in China.  During Tibet's first eight centuries, it was ruled by a military dynasty. It had an animistic religious system, run by a priesthood of shamans practicing divination, sorcery, and sacrifice. It was politically based on a royal family believed to have descended from the heavens, and the kings, like the pharaohs of Egypt, were interred in large burial mounds, along with possessions and companions.

The early dynasty was centered in the Yarlung Valley, a river valley running south from the eastward flowing Tsang­chu (the Brahmaputra), near present­day Tsetang. Gradually, over the centuries, the dynasty added tribes and territories to its domain, uniting the lords of neighboring kingdoms in a feudal, military network. The tribes they unified were already tied by three main common bonds: their territory, language, and religious tendency. They all inhabited the approximately one ­million ­square ­mile Tibetan plateau, with an average altitude of 13,000 to 14,000 feet. The Tibetan language belongs to the Tibeto-­Burman language family, a family distinct from the language families of the surrounding lowland areas. Religiously, Tibetans tended to deify elements of nature, especially mountains and sky, and shared a complex set of rituals of sacrifice, divination, and propitiation of a large group of underworld, landscape, and celestial deities.

Living at very high altitude involves a complex  physiological adaptation through many generations.  Rival kingdoms from surrounding lowlands could not intrude for long on the high plateau, thus the early Tibetan dynastic culture was able to develop without interference for many centuries.  The Tibetans' struggles with their natural environment and with each other strengthened them, and by the sixth century they had unified the highland and become an empire to be reckoned with. They began to mount campaigns in all directions into the lowlands. At this time they developed a fearsome reputation among the Chinese, Turkish, Mongolian, Persian, and Indic peoples.

In the early seventh century, an emperor named Songzen Gambo reached the militaristic empire's natural limits. Unity among warlords is always tenuous, and the high ­altitude Tibetans had no interest in further expansion outward into the lowlands. He began transforming the civilization from feudal militarism to something more peaceful and spiritual, based on the people's cultivated moral outlook. In working on this transformation, Songzen Gambo investigated the major civilizations of outer (from his perspective) Asia, and noted that Universalist (Mahayana) Buddhism provided the cultural backbone of the dynasties of India, the silk route city states of central Asia, and the Tang dynasty of China. So he began a systematic process of  cultural adaptation. He sent a team of scholars to India to learn Sanskrit, create a written language for Tibetan, and begin to translate the vast Buddhist literature. He married nine princesses from different surrounding countries, including Nepal and T'ang China, requesting each to bring Buddhist artifacts and texts with her to Tibet. He built a system of imperial temples, centered on the Jokhang and Ramoche cathedrals in his new capital at Lhasa, with a network of branch temples creating a pattern of sacredness to contain the nation.

For the next two and a half centuries, his successors continued his work of cultural development, sponsoring translations, holding research conferences, building institutions, and educating their subjects. This process reached a high point during the 790's, in the reign of Emperor Trisong Detsen, who, with the help of the Indian adept Padma Sambhava, built the first monastery at Samye. Here the Indian Buddhist university structure and curriculum were transplanted, and a sixty-­year process of collecting all the useful knowledge then available in Asia was begun. Mathematics, poetry, medicine, the art of government, art and architecture; ­all these branches of learning were cultivated, not only Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Scholars were invited from Persia, India, Uighuria, Mongolia, the silk route states, and Yang China.  Tibetans became skilled at comparison and combination, in their quest for the best understanding of man and nature. For example, during the 830s, hundreds of scholars from all over the known world spent a decade comparing the medical systems of India, China, Persia, Mongolia, and central Asia, creating a Tibetan medical system that integrated the best available psychology, anatomy, neurology, surgery, botany, chemistry, and nutrition with Buddhist spiritual technology.

After this high point, a period of confusion ensued.  There was a revolt within the royal family itself. A series of assassinations and coups ended with the collapse of the dynasty, the regional fragmentation of the nation, and the temporary suppression of Buddhism. Within a century, however, Buddhist insights and institutions reemerged, now rooted among the people, with sponsorship from regional rulers. For the next three centuries, Tibetans more and more turned their interests toward Buddhist education, and monasteries were built all over the country. The vast work of translation was completed and a voluminous indigenous literature was developed. No new royal dynasty emerged to control the whole country. Tibetan militarism was unable to return due to the power of Buddhism and its morality of nonviolence. Local noble families still ruled regional areas, but more and more they shared even their social and political power with the rapidly developing monastic institutions.

 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after Genghis Khan invaded and unified most of Eurasia, Tibet was formally incorporated within the Mongol Empire. In reality, the political status of Tibet was very little changed, divided into thirteen main administrative regions, each run by a combination of a local ruling family and a local monastic hierarchy.  Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol empire fell apart, and the native Tibetan dynasty asserted control over Tibet. At the same time, a spiritual renaissance was ushered in by the life work of Lama Tsong Khapa, who founded the Great Prayer Festival in Lhasa in 1409.  Thus began a  new era of national dedication to Buddhism, as the main aim of life, and established a tradition  for the whole nation to come together for two weeks of prayer and celebration every lunar new year. The keys of the city were turned over to the monastic abbots, and all ordinary business was suspended. This festival was a core event for all Tibet from 1409 until 1960, when the Chinese occupation stopped it by force.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the renaissance initiated by Tsong Khapa transformed the spiritual, social, and physical landscape of Tibet. In region after region monastery building intensified, as more and more men and women became determined to fulfill their evolution and attain enlightenment. The social climate became more and more peaceful, as fewer and fewer individuals were available for the armies of the remaining local warlords. One of Tsong Khapa's younger disciples, Gendun Drubpa, and his subsequent reincarnations, led the order in the sixteenth century, until during an historic visit to Mongolia in 1573, Sonam Gyatso  was named "Dalai Lama" ("Oceanic Master") by the Mongolian emperor Altan Khan. Including his two predecessors retroactively, Sonam Gyatso became known as His Holiness the Third Dalai Lama.

 During Sonam Gyatso's time and that of his successor, the warlord rulers of Tibet had begun to feel too constrained by the steady wave of spiritual renaissance, popular dedication to enlightenment education, and money  and time consuming monastery building. A period of turbulence ensued around the turn of the seventeenth century, with the fate of the country in the balance. Would the secular forces of the remaining militaristic aristocratic warlords prevail, curtailing the ascendancy of the monastery centered lifestyle, in parallel with what was happening at the time in northern Europe, China, and Japan? Or would they give up their ways of violence, lay down their arms, and, once and for all, themselves embrace the path of spiritual evolution?

 In 1642, almost exactly a thousand years after the building of the Jokhang cathedral, His Holiness the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-1682) was crowned king of Tibet. The "Great Fifth," as he is known, created a unique form of government eminently suited to Tibet's special society. It was almost completely demilitarized, acknowledging the centrality of the monastic institutions in the national life.  The nobility was virtually expropriated, retaining the use and income from parts of their hereditary estates only as salary for service to the Ganden government. They were completely deprived of their private armies, losing their feudal power of life and death over their peasants, who up to then had closely resembled the medieval serfs of Russia and Europe.

Internationally, Tibetan independence and national integrity were guaranteed by the new pan-Asian emperors of the era, the Manchus. A people from the forests north of Korea, they conquered northern China in 1644 and wished to conquer the rest of East Asia undisturbed by any rivals. Due to his authority over the fearsome Mongols, the Dalai Lama was seen as a potent ally by the new Manchu emperor. In 1651, an alliance was formed between the Manchu Shun Chih emperor and the Great Fifth. The Manchus recognized the Dalai Lama's secular authority over Tibet and his spiritual authority over the world as they knew it. The Dalai Lama recognized the Manchus as legitimate rulers of Manchuria and China and as international protectors of the Buddhist Dharma, its practitioners, and institutions. The bottom line was that the Dalai Lama agreed to encourage the Mongols to practice Buddhism, and the Manchus agreed to protect the peace for the demilitarized Buddhist societies. The Tibetan pacification of the Mongols, the demilitarization of that most militarily powerful society, is one of the remarkable social transformations in history,  though it is no more astonishing than Tibet's self-transformation over the previous millennium.

In spite of some neglect of its material progress, Tibet developed during its modern period into a relatively happy land. Tibetan society was organized to maximize the individual's potential for inner development, economic pressure was mild, and conflict within and warfare without were rare. However, it was still far from a perfected Buddha-land. In modern geopolitical terms, it became highly vulnerable during our century as a result of one positive quality and one negative quality. Positively, it was long demilitarized and therefore no match for the modern armies first of the British and eventually of the Chinese. Negatively, it had become too isolated from other nations, locking them out as Buddhism disappeared from them. Consequently, the only two nations with a little knowledge of Tibet, the British and the Chinese, were able to misrepresent Tibet to the rest of the world in any way that suited their immediate need. When the British wanted to enact trade agreements with the sovereign Tibetan government, they dealt with Tibet as the independent nation that it was. Meanwhile, they let the world at large think of Tibet as under China, to keep the Russians out and to keep the Chinese happy, pleased for the British to retain possession of Hong Kong and its valuable trade opportunities.

The Chinese likewise knew very well they did not control Tibet, that Tibetans had no sense of being Chinese, and that no Chinese person had ever had the slightest feeling that any Tibetan was a kind of Chinese. Meanwhile, they still pretended to the world that they owned Tibet (which they call Sbitsang, "the Western Treasury"), that it had always been a part of China. Thus when the Maoist government invaded Tibet in 1949, they told the world they were "liberating" their own country's Tibetan province from foreigners (there were half a dozen Europeans in Tibet). But since Tibetans considered the Chinese to be foreigners, they resisted being "liberated" to the death. The full force of the Red Army overwhelmed the Buddhist Tibetans, and the Chinese occupation ever since has only endured by brute force. Over a million Tibetans have died unnaturally, and the entire Buddhist culture has been shattered. Not a single Tibetan does not dream and pray to be free and independent of the invaders.

 In order to transform Tibet into a part of China, the Chinese have attempted to suppress the Tibetan language, Buddhism and the culture based on it, and all vestiges of Tibetan national identity. Such a project is doomed to failure, as the Tibetans simply cannot make themselves into Chinese. Therefore the attempt to make Tibetans into Chinese ends up killing off the Tibetans. Fortunately, during this time His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama has succeeded in maintaining a healthy community in exile, with the patronage of the government of India, And there is a hope that the nations of the world, if they learn about Tibet in time, will not let the genocide of the six million Tibetans be completed.