“But we are trying to carry on his message of peace.” “It should have been me who died,” Kunyan told us, her voice raw with grief. While on a walk in Florida to raise awareness for that cause, he was killed by a car. Like his father, he had been a tireless campaigner for the cause of Tibetan independence.
The saddest part of her story came when she told of the death of her son Jigme in 2011.
Left a widow by Norbu’s death in 2008, she now divides her time between Seattle and Bloomington. For years she helped her son Jigme and his wife Ya Ling operate the Snow Lion Restaurant in the city. “I can trace my lineage back 50 generations,” she told us (let me do the math for you-–that’s about 1,000 years).Īs we ate, Kunyan told us of meeting Norbu, coming to the U.S., and raising three sons in Bloomington. Though she is without pretense, she comes from a noble and ancient family in Tibet. After five minutes, I wanted to ask her if she would be my grandmother. Kunyan Norbu is one of those people who radiates warmth. Over a delicious meal of Tibetan food prepared by Kunyan and Ya Ling, our group got the chance to visit with a family that straddles American and Tibetan cultures with remarkable grace and good humor. When I visited Bloomington I was honored to meet Norbu’s widow Kunyan, his son Kunga, and his daughter-in-law Ya Ling. (See Indiana’s Tibetan Buddhist Temple for more information on Norbu’s life and the Tibetan Buddhist center he founded in Bloomington.) Kunyan Norbu, sister-in-law of the Dalai Lama (Lori Erickson photo) In his later years, he walked more than 8,000 miles on peace walks to promote awareness of the atrocities in Tibet and the cause of Tibetan independence.
The eldest brother of the Dalai Lama, Thubten Jigme Norbu, escaped Tibet in 1950 and became a professor of Tibetan Studies at Indiana University. Throughout his life he has continued to keep in touch with his relatives, including a branch that lives in Bloomington (now there’s a surprising turn of the karmic wheel). But that didn’t mean that his biological family ties were severed. But on my visit to Tibetan Buddhist sites in Bloomington, Indiana, I realized that he also belongs to a family-–one with surprisingly deep roots in the U.S.īorn Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama began his monastic education at the age of six. The Dalai Lama is so well-known that he seems as if he belongs to the entire world. Thubten Norbu with his brother (image courtesy of Ambassadors for World Peace)
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