I was resting when Phom Lol ran into my cell. Resting and thinking. So much had happened in the last three weeks. Our monastery seemed permanently disrupted, the patterns of centuries trembling in the wind of coercion. So many familiar faces gone, so many brothers we would not see again. And for all this sacrifice, only further oppression. It was hard now; fear threatened our prayers, loss coloured our meditation, anger tainted our compassion. Had we been wrong? Should we have continued to accept the constraints on our freedoms, the slow death of our culture? This I was asking myself when Phom Lol ran into my monastery cell.

“Brother, brother!” Phom Lol was always eager, always optimistic – ‘The Little Encourager’ the Abbott called him.

“Brother, they’re bringing journalists to Lhasa. A press conference.” He knew this as he knew everything, because he’d been told by Avat, chef at the tourist hotel.

“What good will that do?” I asked wearily, “The authorities will display their Business As Usual Tibet. Unrest quelled, agitators confessing, religion tolerated, and Avat’s wonderful fusion cuisine at the tourist hotel.”

“The western press, brother!”

“Then they will serve South African wine with the wonderful fusion cuisine.”

“It is our opportunity. Perhaps our last opportunity. We can speak the truth. Make it clear His Holiness did not start this. Set the record straight.”

“We fool ourselves when we consider fairness and justice our right. Like compassion, they are responsibilities only. Perhaps the authorities are correct, we should continue our monastic life …”

“Without passing it to the next generation?”

“… we should accept that Tibet has always been a part of China …”

“For sixty years?”

“… and silently endure our lot.”

“We cannot do that. Not when they accuse His Holiness of fomenting insurrection, of violence, of sharing their own selfish motives.”

“Phom Lol.” I looked him in the eye. “If we attempt to speak to the western press we will be imprisoned, we will be tortured, some of us will be killed. Does compassion ask mothers to cry in the night for loss of their children?”

He looked down, swallowed, then looked resolutely at me. “If need be. Until we succeed. Or we are none.”

I reflected later that we were no longer naiive. We had been. We had believed the west would act out of principle. We had believed China would negotiate with us. We had believed many unlikely things; we were a simple, trusting people in a complex, cynical world.

But it was reality, not naiive hopes, that moved us now. We had learned too well how the authorities operated. But this reality was largely invisible to the west; one saffron-robed monk looked much like another, and if they seemed fewer these days, well, support for religion was declining the world over, wasn’t it?

The world needed to know our reality. The world needed to hear the truth. And who else could tell it? I realised that Phom Lol was right. We needed to be there. More than that, I recognised a personal call, a challenge. I must go.

None of us could expect to return. In our monastery I was the last who had taken orders while His Holiness was still in Tibet; there was much sadness. But for all his youthful enthusiasm I would not let Phom Lol join us. He was tomorrow’s hope, and the past must buy tomorrow’s opportunity.

Yet as we crowded into the press conference waving our home-made banners, I had but one thought. Can presenting the truth – the unreasonable, demanding truth – ever be a true act of compassion?