Thubten Jigme Norbu, the eldest brother of the Dalai Lama and a tenacious symbol of the Tibetan struggle for independence, died Friday in Bloomington, Ind., his home in exile for four decades.
He was 86 by Western standards but 87 according to Tibetan tradition, which considers a person to be a year old at birth. A major Buddhist figure in his own right -- he was believed to be the 23rd reincarnation of a famous high lama -- Norbu had been in declining health after a series of strokes. He died of natural causes, said his son, Jigme.
Norbu taught Tibetan studies for more than 20 years at Indiana University at Bloomington. Amid cornfields on the outskirts of town he created a Tibetan cultural center that has drawn thousands of visitors, including the Dalai Lama. The two brothers disagreed on the status of Tibet. The Dalai Lama favors making Tibet an autonomous state, similar to Hong Kong, while Norbu insisted on independence.
He was a co-founder of the International Tibet Independence Movement, which has sponsored more than a dozen walks across the U.S. and abroad to draw attention to Tibet's suffering under Chinese rule.
Norbu "has been unwavering in his perspective that unless Tibetans regain rule of Tibet completely that there is no way to preserve their culture and religion. He didn't shift in that position his entire life," said Larry Gerstein, president of the International Tibet Independence Movement and a professor of psychology at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
The oldest son in a farming family of six children, Norbu was born in northeast Tibet on Aug. 16, 1922. At 4 he was identified as the reincarnate of a revered monk, Tagtser. At 8 he left home to enter the Kumbum Monastery near the Chinese border, where he rose at 4 a.m. every day to memorize 2,000 pages of Buddhist scripture.
He was 15 when high lamas declared that his then 2-year-old brother was the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of Tibet. After his brother's elevation, he moved from Kumbum to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, to join his family.
At 27, he returned to Kumbum as abbot of the monastery, which was one of Tibet's largest, with more than 4,000 monks. That year, 1949, coincided with the rise of the Chinese communists, who regarded Norbu as a prime target. Chinese soldiers invaded eastern Tibet, where Kumbum was, and turned the province into what Dalai Lama biographer Pico Iyer called "the largest gulag in the world." As Iyer reported, Mao Tse-tung's soldiers imprisoned 1 in 10 Tibetans and caused the deaths of 1 in 5 -- more than 1 million people -- through starvation, torture and execution.
