FREEDOM IN EXILE: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama, HarperCollins, 288 pages, $22.95.

In prose as light and strong as a cobweb, the 56-year-old Dalai Lama, supreme secular and spiritual leader of Buddhist Tibet, chronicles the colorful story of his life and the tragedy of his country, brutally invaded and subjugated by Communist China 40 years ago.

“I fled Tibet on 31 March, 1959,” he begins. “Since then I have lived in India. During the period 1949-1950 the People’s Republic of China sent an army to invade my country. For almost a decade I remained as political as well as spiritual leader of my people and tried to establish peaceful relations between our two nations. But the task proved impossible. I came to the unhappy conclusion that I could serve my people better from the outside. When I look back to the time when Tibet was still a free country, I realize that those were the best years of my life.” This wrenching reflection from the holy man Buddhist Tibetans accept as the reincarnation of the 13 previous Dalai Lamas is a devastating one.

When the reigning Dalai Lama dies, it is the belief of Tibetans that his soul will return almost immediately in the body of a Tibetan child, usually one between 3 and 4 years old. With the aid of the state oracle, and a system of clues provided by options and auguries, a search party from the government sets out to find the child whose identity matches the component parts with which the search party works. Tibet’s present leader, son of middle-class farmers living in Amdo, northernmost province of Tibet, was 3 when he was discovered and deemed to be the reincarnated Dalai Lama. Whisked off immediately to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, he was installed in a palace and prepared for the years of intense training that lay ahead. During this time, in ceremonies of installation, he ascended to the Lion Throne, “a vast, jewel-encrusted and beautifully carved wooden structure.”

When he was 15, Tibet’s freedom was torn from it when, without warning, 80,000 soldiers of Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army marched across the border and attacked its weaker neighbor. Valiantly Tibet’s tiny army of 8,500 attempted to defend their county, but the might of Communist China prevailed. Under the pretense of bringing Tibet into “the big family of the Motherland,” the Chinese lost no time in completing their bloody conquest. Since that dark October day in 1950 more than a million Tibetans have been murdered, tortured and imprisoned. Legions more have died of starvation, privation and heartbreak. “In Amdo, the northeastern province where I was born,” says the Dalai Lama sadly, “there exists the largest gulag known to man — big enough by some estimates to cater to the internment of up to 10 million prisoners.”

Desperate appeals were sent to the United Nations by the Dalai Lama, but because Tibet — content with its remote isolation — had never sought to become a member, there was no response from the organization. Large numbers of Tibetans waged guerrilla warfare but were no match for China’s prodigious army. Unchecked, the marauding Chinese crushed Tibet in a ferocious reign of terror that consisted of crucifixion, disemboweling, beheading, burning, beatings to the death, live burials, hangings in which the victims died upside down, dragging Tibetans behind horses until, mercifully, they ceased to breathe, and tearing out the tongues of prisoners with meat hooks so that, before being executed, they could not shout, “Long live the Dalai Lama.”

Since then China has continued to exploit Tibet for its own purposes, holding the country at bayonet point with contingents of more than 300,000 troops. “On top of this,” writes the Dalai Lama, “China maintains at least one-third of its nuclear weaponry on Tibetan soil. And becaue Tibet contains one of the world’s richest deposits of uranium, the Chinese are likely to render large areas of the country hazardous from radioactive waste through their mining activities.” For the profitable convenience of China, factories have been opened to make products that China ships out for its own gain. Hydroelectric power stations light up Chinese quarters, but Tibetans are kept in the dark. Tibet’s mainstay crops of barley and buckwheat have been eliminated in favor of the wheat China needs. Indifferent to Tibet’s future, the Chinese ignore ecology and raid nature without conscience.

Globally, China’s steady stream of population transfer is destroying the cultural identities of many nearby countries. In Tibet, for example, where the native population is somewhere around 6 million, the Chinese have infiltrated 7.5 million Chinese immigrants. In Manchuria, the population of 2 million or 3 million natives has been eclipsed by a hoard of 75 million Chinese. Similarly in Eastern Turkestan — a border country of Tibet — the Chinese population has expanded from 200,000 in 1949 to more than its current 7 million. And in inner Mongolia the ratio of Chinese is 8.5 million to 2.5 million Mongolians.

Dedicated though he is to the ideal of world peace through regional peace (in 1989 he won the Nobel Peace Prize), the Dalai Lama regards China’s invasion of Tibet as “China’s rape of Tibet,” and he continues his determined world quest in search of help for his suffering country.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. She also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”