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When I was writing this book of adult fairy tales back in l970, the Dalai Lama was still a young man living in exile in India. We in the West received only the vaguest rumors about what the Chinese were doing to Tibet. Had I known that the lamaseries were being reduced to rubble, the monks tortured, killed, or driven into exile, the religious life suppressed, the native people treated as second-class citizens, I doubt that I could have written with such levity, even though I knew that levity and not gravity (seeking the happiness of all sentient beings) is the Tibetan way to enlightenment.

Very little was known about the real Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Though I had taken my graduate degree in religious studies, and had recently, like my neighbor Alan Watts, made a transition from Christianity toward an interest in the religious philosophies of the East, I certainly lacked the authority to write about the subtleties of Tibetan Buddhism. Much as this philosophy of karmic consequence---of how to live and how to die---attracted me, my aim was not to write about the facts of religion but to pursue the possibilities of fiction as a path to spiritual understanding. Spiritual humor was my chosen venue, having been much influenced in childhood by fairy tales, and in adult life by the Sufi storytellers, by Gurdjieff, by stories about Ramakrishna and Rumi, by the writings of Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, particularly The Little Prince, and by that extravagant raconteuse of magic and mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Neel, I found my imagination playing with the notion of what it must be like to be at once a child, a king, and a Buddhist incarnation of holiness within a world still resonating with pre-Buddhist mystery and magic. Because I wrote less as a savant than as a naïf with a certain degree of religious experience, it seemed appropriate, and hopefully modest, to assume the viewpoint of a somewhat mischievous child. . . .

. . . I want to express my appreciation for the real Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet in his efforts to transmit teachings about human understanding and compassion, and for the delight he gives us in being alive. This must be an especially difficult period for him with so many of his people wanting to take a politically more confrontational approach. All of us who have come to appreciate the Tibetan people pray that the issue of return to the homeland be resolved in such a way that both they and their Chinese occupiers (née neighbors) emerge from the ordeal freer in spirit and more enlightened in mind. And I want to thank the Tibetan people for their unique generation of spiritual energy into the hearts and imaginations of all humankind.

Pierre Delattre is a writer and painter living in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northern New Mexico between Santa Fe and Taos. Tales of a Dalai Lama was his first book of fiction, followed by Walking On Air,and Episodes,a memoir. He has published stories, poems and essays in many magazines, and has just completed a book of essays entitled The Art of Beauty.

Pierre Delattre's paintings have been on exhibit in several galleries in and around Santa Fe, and at his home studio in Penasco, where he lives with his wife, the painter Nancy Ortenstone.  Mr. Delattre took his graduate degree in Religion and the Arts from the University of Chicago Divinity School, and has been involved in the relationship between art and spirituality ever since, including work in theatre, music, television and film, with emphasis on spiritual humor.