Previous Dalai Lamas were not always peaceful monks

WASHINGTON (RNS) The Dalai Lama is spending 10 days here leading an
elaborate Buddhist ritual designed to encourage compassion -- exactly
the kind of peacenik advocacy we have come to expect from the
76-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But while most of Tibet's 13 previous Dalai Lamas displayed similar
moral scruples, a few weren't quite so peaceable, or even very monklike
at all.

Catholics may reluctantly recall instances of popes behaving badly.
But Tibetans don't draw bright moral lines between "good" and "bad"
Dalai Lamas, explained Robert Barnett, an expert on the history of Tibet
at Columbia University in New York.