Lobsang Gyatso was born in 1928 in a small village in eastern Tibet. He became a monk at the age of eleven and in 1945 traveled to central Tibet to study at Drepung Monastery. Fleeing Tibet in 1959, he eventually setlled in Dharamsala, India, where he went on to found in 1974 the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, which he guided until his death in Februrary 1997.