Lhakpa looked at the glowing stub of his cigarette and reached for another, then reconsidered. He reached into a different pocket and produced another cone of incense and lit it with his cigarette. “Their committee published a list of agitators and cautioned them against further activity,” he continued. “They used all the favorite terms from the propaganda mills. Antisocialist hooligans. Reactionaries. Hotheads. Outsiders, even, though the gods only know what that meant at Larung Gar. Everyone was an outsider there. Some of those on the lists took the warning and left. But Tara redoubled her efforts, holding more meetings, printing her own notices about freedom of religion and freedom of speech, passing them out in the shelters where more and more people slept at night. She never spoke a harsh word directly about Jiao and Xun, or even their leaders in Beijing. It was always about praying and abiding steadfastly to the Buddhist way of compassion. She encouraged people to distribute flowers to the soldiers, and with each flower people were supposed to say a prayer for the soldier. She developed a following, and her meetings kept growing in size. Jiao loathed her but had to be careful because Beijing officials kept visiting and there were so many tourists coming that new hotels were being built. Larung Gar was becoming a business proposition that just had to be managed responsibly, that’s how Jiao put it. There was talk of human rights observers secretly entering the town as well, and they also had to be managed. Public Security started playing a bigger role. Huan arrived.

“Tara heard that some minister from Beijing was coming so she began planning a peaceful demonstration to greet him. She intended to stop his limousine by surrounding it with praying Tibetans and drape prayer scarves over his neck in the hope that the Compassionate Buddha would help him understand. It would have been a deep embarrassment to Jiao, who had told us more than once that when Beijing gave him a task no one was allowed to interfere. He was furious. ‘The motherland will not tolerate obstructionism!’ he often shouted at her.