The Smile and Wisdom, Dalai Lama Authorised Biography

This book is the result of forty years of association between the journalist Piero Verni and the main religious and spiritual authority of Tibet, as well as the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The biographical account, as gripping as a novel, of the extraordinary human adventure of a child who was born in 1935 in a remote corner of the Asian Middle Ages and has become an icon of our time. The narration of the Dalai Lama’s life is punctual, precise and detailed, intersecting with a meticulous reconstruction of the historical events that Tibet has experienced over the last 100 years. Often using the words of the Ocean of Wisdom collected during more than 40 interviews and private conversations that the author was able to have with the Dalai Lama, the reader is also offered a cross-section of the main cultural and religious aspects of Tibetan civilisation. From religions to theatre, from monasteries to the role of women, from the main initiations to the dramas linked to the Chinese occupation and the ruthless repression of all forms of protest by the Chinese regime.

Not only a biography, but also a fresco of an entire world whose very existence is now seriously threatened.

Thanks to its extremely fluent style, the book takes the reader to the Roof of the World. It makes him breathe the rarefied air of Lhasa or that of the remote mountain areas in the east of the country. It allows the reader to listen to the monks reciting their prayers inside the monasteries and to wander through the streets and alleys of towns and remote villages. Despite his fascination with Tibet, Piero Verni does not fall into the trap of describing the Roof of the World as an immaculate Shangri-la. On the contrary, he also describes its backwardness and darkness. It is often the Dalai Lama himself who highlights the limits of the universe of which he is the highest expression and which he would have liked to improve. But this was not allowed because of the Chinese invasion in the 1950s that forced him into Indian exile, which has not yet ended.

The book ends with two chapters of particular interest. The first one describes in depth the fruitful confrontation that the Dalai Lama maintains with the world of contemporary science and some of its main disciplines: from quantum physics to epistemology, from psychology to philosophy, from theoretical mathematics to anthropology and pedagogy. The last chapter is dedicated to the four commitments to which the Dalai Lama has decided to devote this period of his life: the promotion of fundamental human values, interreligious dialogue, and the promotion of human rights, safeguarding Tibetan culture and ecological commitment.

Two valuable and comprehensive forwards by the Dalai Lama accompany the book.