Ani Pachen Dolma, 68; Tibet’s ‘Warrior Nun’ and Author

Ani Pachen Dolma, known as Tibet’s “warrior nun,” who led the resistance against the Chinese and was imprisoned for 21 years, has died. She was 68. Dolma, who frequently brought her cause to Southern California, died Feb. 2 of heart failure at her home in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala, India.

Her remarkable story was detailed in her book, “Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun,” written with Adelaide Donnelly and published in 2000.

That summer, Dolma led one section of the San Francisco-to-San Diego march to rally support for Tibetan independence from China. The two groups met in Santa Monica to coincide with a visit here by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, who wrote an introduction to Dolma’s book. Actor Richard Gere, a Buddhist and active supporter of the free-Tibet movement, also wrote a preface and helped get the book in print.

The Tibetan Government in Exile had asked the nun to write the autobiography, and gave her stationery, overcoming her reluctance to tell her story on the grounds that others had suffered more than she had.

She finally agreed to the project, she told an interviewer last year, because: “Through my experiences, I can introduce to other people what has happened to my country and also let the younger generation know about what has happened to their country and what is going on. Also, I thought, I am old, I am an old lady now, so after I die I cannot bring my story with me. So I leave this story, and through this story I am hoping will generate some sort of support in the world to our cause.”

A reviewer for the Malaysia New Straits Times pronounced Dolma’s book “generally a good read,” and wrote: “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.”

A London Sunday Mail reviewer evaluated: “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.”

Born Pachen Dolma, the future freedom fighter was the only surviving child of Pomda Gonor, chieftain of the Lemdha clan in Gonjo in Kham, eastern Tibet. Although trained for marriage into another chieftain’s family, she also learned to ride horses and shoot guns and became religiously devout. In her teens, she rebelled against arranged marriage by fleeing to a monastery and becoming a Buddhist nun--Ani Pachen. “Ani” means “nun” and “Pachen” translates roughly to “Big Courage.”

But when her father died in 1958, clan elders insisted she take over his duties, and she abandoned the religious life to lead farmers and nomads in armed resistance to the invading Chinese People’s Liberation Army. When Gonjo was overrun, Dolma fled to the hills with her family and led the fighting until she was captured a year later.

For 21 years, until her release in January 1981, she endured cold, starvation, psychologically scathing interrogation and physical torture. She was kept in leg irons for a year, frequently hung upside down, and for nine months confined to a dark concrete isolation cell. She spent 11 years in the notorious Drapchi prison in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Her hair fell out, and her health never recovered from the years of malnourishment and mistreatment.

“Faith. Faith kept me going,” she said in an interview last year.

Even after her release, she continued to fight for the cause of independence in Tibet. But under threat of rearrest in 1988, she fled over the snow-covered Himalayas to Nepal and then to Dharamsala, where she realized her dream to meet the Dalai Lama and tell him her story.

Dolma made several trips to world capitals, including London and Washington, D.C., to rally support for Tibetan independence, frequently in the Dalai Lama’s entourage.

She left no immediate survivors.