Ani Pachen was a Tibetan Buddhist nun who led her clan in armed rebellion against China. She was a woman of courage who gave up part of her life for Tibet’s cause.
Background
Pachen Dolma was the only child of a local chieftain from Gonjo in the province of Kham in eastern Tibet. Her father had a younger brother, Pomda Yonten. She grew up surrounded by lamas and a loving family. She learned to ride and shoot, even as she was drawn toward a spiritual life.
At 17, she overheard her parents discussing a man they were going to force her to marry. She was not going to marry. She got help from one of her parents’ servants when she threatened to jump off the roof, and she went to a monastery. Her father finally relented and said she didn’t have to marry; only then did she agree to come home.
Education
She studied at the monastery of Gyalsay Rinpoche, she devoted herself to meditation practice and Buddhist studies.
Career
When the Chinese invaded Tibet in the 1950s, Ani Pachen, a Buddhist nun, sat at the side of her father, a clan chieftain, in the war councils as her clan decided to resist. After her father died in 1958, Ani Pachen led about 600 resistance fighters who fought on horseback in mountainous terrain, attacking Chinese convoys and encampments. The Chinese overran Gonjo, and Ani Pachen was taken prisoner as she and her family fled over the Himalayas into India. She spent the next twenty-one years in prison, where she endured shackles, torture, and long periods of solitary confinement. After her release in 1981, she remained in Lhasa for seven years and took part in a number of large demonstrations. In 1988 she fled into India to avoid being arrested again. She remained at Dharmsala, where she joined the supporters of the Dalai Lama in exile, until her death.
Religion
Any Pachen said that her Buddhist faith kept her alive: for instance, she was determined to complete 100,000 ritual prostrations during nine months of solitary confinement
Politics
The Chinese, who had invaded in 1950, were desecrating monasteries and killing Tibetans as they steadily advanced toward Kham. In 1958, Ani Pachen sat at her father's side in the war councils as the clan decided to fight back.
Views
Quotations:
"That day I passed from my childhood. In a moment, I knew that my dream of a life devoted to meditation and prayer was no longer possible. Unable to follow my heart, I was bound by duty to carry on my father’s work. With my country threatened and my family in danger, I set about making preparations for war. From that time forward, my life was never the same."
"I was twenty-five years old when I was imprisoned for twenty-one years. I went into prison a young woman and came out an old woman. No one in my family survived but me. When they arrested me they bound my hands and feet and hung me upside down and interrogated me. They beat me continuously. I would pass out and they would throw water on me and beat me some more. They shackled me for a year. They put me in a hole in the ground and forced me to live in my own feces. All other prisoners suffered the same."
"I am walking to make people understand about Tibetan independence. I am walking so that people understand what we have suffered. I am walking so that people understand that the Tibetan culture is in danger of dying."
Personality
A deep sense of feeling engulfed her after mourning the death of Ani's father, and she would lay her Buddhist pacifism aside, straying from the Buddhist’s path of peace and compassion, to take up the persona of a warrior, and a leader.
Quotes from others about the person
“The writing is a little slow to digest because it is set in a cultural milieu that is new to Western readers. But the courageous Ani Pachen deserves the effort. And her cause deserves to be recognized as a tragedy, not just a slogan in the catalogue of human-rights abuses to which we in the Western comfort zone turn a complacent cold shoulder.” - London Sunday Mail
“What is moving is the way she successfully sought inner calm in the teachings of the Buddha, despite the anger welling up inside her. There was no vengeance, only remorse for the loss of the sacred scriptures and monasteries, which were destroyed as part of a forced abandonment of Tibetan culture, customs, habits and thoughts." - Malaysia New Straits Times