Daja Wangchuk Meston

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Daja Wangchuk Meston (b. 1970) is an author and Tibet activist. Meston is an American citizen who was raised as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Comes the Peace: My Journey to Forgiveness (with Clare Ansberry; Free Press, 2007) is his memoir.

Meston came to Nepal at the age of 3, his mother having been drawn there for religious reasons. She was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun by Lama Thubten Yeshe. Meston was placed as a foster child with a Tibetan family, and at the age of 6, given to the care of Kopan Monastery as a boy monk. Gradually his nun-mother becomes a source of confusion and embrassment as her infrequent visits to the monastery draws unwanted attention to the lone white boy-monk. Meston remembers this as a terrible experience--partly because of being white, and partly out of poor conditions in the monastery. He got himself expelled as a teenager for violating the vow of celibacy, and--despite being culturally Tibetan in white skin--he is sent "home" first to Italy and on to California, to live with his unknowen step-grandmother (a former bullfigthter). He eventually makes his way to Boston where he enrolled at Brandeis University.

Meston attracted international attention in 1999, while investigating the highly controversial World Bank's Western Poverty Reduction Project in Qinghai. Arrested and detained by the police on suspicion of espionage, he jumped from a third-story window and was injured. The Chinese authorities released on humanitarian grounds after trememdious pressure form NGOs, US and European goverenments and international supporters of Tibet. He was banned from China for five years.