Tsering, Diki 1901-1981

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TSERING, Diki 1901-1981

PERSONAL:

Born 1901, in Tibet; died 1981, in India; married Sonam Isomo; children: sixteen, (nine deceased), including Tsering Dolma (daughter), Thupten Jigme Norbu, Gyalo Thondup, Lobsang Samten (sons), and Lhamo Thondup, a.k.a. Tenzin Gyatso (the fourteenth Dalai Lama).

CAREER:

Social role as Tibet's "Mother of Compassion."

WRITINGS:

(With Khedroob Thondup) Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother's Story, Viking (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

Diki Tsering died in 1981, but not before sitting down to a series of taped interviews with her granddaughter Yangzom Doma in which the matriarch shared her memories and impressions of having been the mother of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Married into virtual servitude at the age of sixteen, Tsering gave birth to her fifth child in 1935. Four years later young Lhamo Thondup had been named the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama and two of Tsering's other sons were also named incarnate lamas. Tsering joined the young Dalai Lama on his travels to India and China and became known as Tibet's "Mother of Compassion." China invaded Tibet in 1949 and ten years later Tsering accompanied her son and other members of her family into exile in India.

In 1997 Khedroob Thondup (Yangzom Doma's brother) began to compile his sister's recordings of their grandmother. After Doma died in a car accident in 1982 and his mother died in 1986, Thondup felt it was his duty to carry on this family legacy. The late 1990s was a time of great interest in the Dalai Lama in America so he knew it was the perfect time to edit and publish the interview transcriptions. The resulting autobiography of Tsering is Dalai Lama, My Son: A Mother's Story. Writing for Library Journal, James R. Kuhlman found Tserings's stories of her childhood and the hardship she endured as a Tibetan wife "simply told but compelling," and recommended the book for "its personal insights into Tibetan culture, the occasionally Byzantine quality of Tibetan Buddhism, and the status of women." A critic from Publishers Weekly also found Dalai Lama, My Son, "spare, fascinating, … enthralling, although the writing … is choppy and the narrative sometimes confusing." In Booklist, Donna Seaman marveled at the "astonishing amount of detail in [Tsering's] vivid and moving descriptions of everyday life, illuminating the simple if laborious world of Tibetan peasantry" and noted, "This story of faith and perseverance preserves Tibet's past."