First he prays for the long life of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

Next, he chants a mantra 100 times, Om ah hum ho hamkshamalavaraya hum phat ... a reminder of his Tibetan Buddhist vows.

Then he launches into the White Umbrella Prayer, a powerful 20-minute practice to protect against negative forces in this existence and the next.

As part of his Tibetan spiritual practice, Kunchyo Gyaltsong prays several hours a day — on the bus, while working and in his living-room shrine. His daughter, Tashi, believes the chanting is beneficial for her father's health. He learned the White Umbrella Prayer, above, a few words at a time when he was a child herding goats in a Tibetan village with no schools. He has been chanting it more than 50 years.

Kunchyo has been chanting the White Umbrella Prayer for nearly six decades. He learned it, a few words at a time, when he was a child herding goats through mountain gorges and barley pastures 2 miles above sea. His tiny village in Tibet's Amdo province had excellent wheat but no roads, no electricity, no schools. Come winter, when the sheep were too cold to stray far, the boys would gather to memorize prayers in front of the fire, slurping their milk tea quickly before it could freeze.

So far, the White Umbrella Prayer seems to be working. Kunchyo has survived the Chinese military invasion, Indian refugee camps and American excess. On his long journey, he has carried a small silver box stuffed with talismans wrapped in prayer parchment and scraps of silk. There's a photo of the Panchen Lama, medicinal seeds and granules to take just before death, a lock of hair from a 120-year-old nun. "My life protection box," he says. Kunchyo has preserved an ancient and fragile culture - and is passing it on to the next generation.

He and his wife, Dekey, have two daughters, Tashi and Nortso, who are 26 and 23. They grew up in Marysville, moving a few years ago with their parents to Edmonds. Both daughters are graduates of the University of Washington, where, with another friend, they founded the local chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. They are fluent in biomolecular assays, international politics and traditional Tibetan dance. They take turns driving their dad to the bus stop.

"I'm not much a smart man, just a normal working person," Kunchyo says, marveling at the distance between his remote, bookless childhood and the academic accomplishments of his daughters. "Maybe my prayer life helped me. Maybe my God helped me. Someone helped me!

"You need, yourself, to work hard. Then someone protects you. For that, you believe."

The bus hiccups through Route 99's garish gauntlet toward Everett Community College, where Kunchyo will scrub toilets and vacuum classrooms on the graveyard shift. He settles into the molded blue bus seat, mottled knapsack in his lap. His lips move, his breath swells, the syllables click, tumble and hiss.

To observers, he appears to be a gentle old man with permafrost hair muttering to himself on the bus. "Oh my gosh, what do they think?" he laughs, whenever fellow commuters back away. "All the time, I'm chanting to myself!"

SEATTLE IS HOME to the oldest Tibetan community in the United States. The highest Sakya lama in the nation lives here, as did the most learned incarnate lama in North America. (That lama's reincarnation, a 9-year-old Seattle boy, is now learning to lead a monastery outside Katmandu.)

But Kunchyo Gyaltsong is neither Tibetan nobility nor religious scholar. He is an ordinary man who, like so many refugees, was catapulted on an extraordinary journey by violence in his homeland. The Chinese military assault started in Amdo in 1949, eventually killing 1.2 million Tibetans and destroying 6,250 monasteries.

At 14, Kunchyo escaped Amdo on foot, walking for months over rivers and snowy mountains to reach Lhasa. Since then, he has been a freedom fighter on the border, a road builder and construction worker in India, a lumberjack in Maine, a landscaper in California, a mill worker in Marysville, and now, a custodian in Everett.

Why do Americans say, Life is so short? the custodian wonders. "Myself, I think life is very long."

KUNCHYO GYALTSONG is 63. His favorite television show is "The Price is Right." He has weathered a heart attack but is otherwise quite healthy, attributing his strong constitution to chanting and the Tibetan "Precious Pills," concocted from crushed gems and herbs, that he mashes in hot water before swallowing. Even though Kunchyo has forded rivers filled with corpses and seen friends killed, he has never suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder or the blues. He rarely catches colds.

While working the graveyard custodial shift at Everett Community College, Kunchyo Gyaltsong sometimes prays so loud the night watchman thinks he's singing.

Tashi triages doctor's orders and lab tests in the emergency room of Swedish Medical Center's Providence Campus. She's a multi-tasking technological whirlwind just one generation removed from a Tibetan village with no clocks.

"His own spiritual practice has kept him healthy more than any one physical action," says his oldest daughter, Tashi. "In Tibetan medicine, a lot of the healing has to happen through the mind."

In a few months, Tashi will start medical school at the UW. In a week, the whole family will drive to Portland to see the Dalai Lama. Kunchyo has crossed paths with Tibet's spiritual and political leader more than a dozen times over the years. Being in the presence of His Holiness brings Kunchyo great joy.

"To us, he's sacred," Tashi says of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. "He's not just a celebrity. Not just a human-rights person. He's the ultimate teacher. Not only about Buddhist teachings. How to live life in the States. Here we have the luxury of working and money, and you can buy material goods. He reminds us there are other things that are more important, bigger purposes beyond having a nice house and clothes."

Every week, all around the globe, the Dalai Lama meets, blesses and holds teachings for countless followers - 150,000 Tibetans in exile (including 5,000 in the United States), as well as increasing swells of non-Tibetans attracted to his message of compassion and nonviolence.

The last time the Dalai Lama visited the Northwest (home of about 300 Tibetan-Americans and more "Free Tibet" bumper stickers per capita than any place in the world) the crowd was so large, Kunchyo and his family couldn't get anywhere near the Westin Hotel to hear His Holiness speak. So they stood on the curb a block away, hoping to glimpse his car.

The entourage finally arrived and the Dalai Lama stepped out to shake hands with people lining the street. Tashi was stunned when His Holiness recognized her father, greeting him by name.

"You must be Kunchyo," he chuckled, patting the custodian on the head. "So you're here."

WHAT IF HE WERE NOT? What if Kunchyo Gyaltsong had remained in that tiny mountain village?

Assuming he wasn't "disappeared," Kunchyo is certain he would have ended up a weathered farmer just like generations and generations in his family for a thousand years before him.

And Tashi?

Tashi's mom, Dekey: "If I never left Tibet, I might have a more old-fashioned belief - OK, they're 16, or 17, we better find a husband! At 17, she gets her hair done. Teeny tiny braids. Y'know the movie `10'? Then, any boy's family who wants to can propose. Now, since I've been here 25 years, that's the last thing on my mind. I want her to get an education."

Tashi: "Y'know, sometimes I'm sitting there, watching `Seinfeld,' and I think, it's so strange that this is what's normal for my life. ... If just a couple little things had happened differently, my life would be sooOOOooo different. ... Right now I am so bookish, it's hard to imagine not being able to read or write. Not being able to pick up the newspaper. Not being able to run to the library."

In Tibetan Buddhism, who you are in this life is a result of your past actions, including past lives. So, what had Tashi done in her previous existence to wind up as a UW medical student rather than as a girl bride in a roadless village, or, say, as a bug?

From a Buddhist perspective, that's the wrong question.

"Karma isn't about trying to explain past events," Tashi says. "It's about trying to guide this existence. It's less important to find out why I am where I am today than how to live my life so the next rebirth would be a good one ... In Buddhism, being reborn as a human is very precious and rare. It's like a turtle swimming under the ocean, coming to the surface and having their head pop up through a small life preserver exactly.

"Considering the opportunities that being a human allows, I want to make sure at the end of my life, I've left a positive mark and not a negative impression."

AT 4 ON A TUESDAY afternoon, the emergency room of Swedish Medical Center's Providence Campus is abuzz.

Room 3, stroke patient. Room 4, infected chest wound. Room 1, fresh off an ambulance, a 54-year-old newlywed tourist with nausea, vomiting and a sick heart.

"Emergency - this is Tashi." She swivels between a cluttered white board, computer, label printer, chart slots, pneumatic tubes and a telephone programmed with 24 numbers.

Technically, she's charged with coordinating physicians' orders. She is a multitasking technological whirlwind - just one generation removed from a clockless village where goatherders used the sun and stars to tell time.

"They call it unit coordinator," Tashi smiles at the task overload. "The Dump."

Between 4:22 and 4:27, she arranges a records transfer, pages the nursing supervisor, prints patient labels, transmits and receives faxes, processes EKG orders -- all while explaining that she became interested in patient care while working at hospitals to pay for college.

Tashi says her dad's traditional Tibetan medical beliefs expand her health-care vocabulary. She'll start UW medical school this summer and plans to practice family medicine, keeping in mind the Tibetan medical philosophy that mind and body are inseparable.

Tashi plans to specialize in family medicine. She wants to improve access to health care for refugees and immigrants who are baffled by the insurance system and medical jargon. She hopes to enhance her western medical practice with aspects of Tibetan medical philosophy. (Not for acute care, like the cases in the emergency room; more for chronic illness.) And some day, when Tibet is free, Tashi says, she'll return to help her people.

In Tibetan medicine, mind and body are inseparable. All illness stems from imbalance in the mind that is then channeled through the body. Sickness is caused by three poisons: desire, hatred and delusion. These result in imbalances of wind, bile and phlegm humors which, in turn, can produce 84,000 different disorders.

Tibetan texts describe an elaborate body landscape where phlegm governs metabolism, bile is linked to the body's structure, and wind deals with circulation of blood, nerve impulses, even thoughts. To treat, doctors often use herbs and recommend changes in diet, behavior and prayer. That's vast oversimplification, of course, of a sophisticated health-care system that goes back to the 4th century.

Tashi took several courses in medical anthropology during college in addition to researching "T-Cell Recognition of HSV-1 in the HSK Patient."

"I naturally started looking at my own heritage and ideas of illness my parents had passed down to me, mostly home remedies. I didn't realize how sophisticated the Tibetan medical sciences were until I started reading. It wasn't just about folk cures."

In Western medicine, she says, "we're big on having a name for everything. Every minute bone has a name longer than the actual bone." Tibetan medicine tries to identify relationships rather than merely treat the body as a Cartesian machine of isolated parts.

Say, when Tashi is a doctor, she sees a 40-year-old patient constantly-on-the-go with racing heart and high blood pressure. "There are all these ways of changing his blood pressure," Tashi says, "but there's not a drug in the world that's going to solve his real problem without a lifestyle change."

During her senior year, Tashi traveled to Dharamsala, India, to observe doctors at the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute, the world's only educational center for exiled doctors who use Tibetan medicine. A home video of her three-month visit shows Tibetan doctors each morning chanting a prayer about using their best heart and mind to treat patients - perhaps the equivalent of western doctors reciting the Hippocratic oath every day.

Because the clinic has no central heat, everyone is bundled up. Zoom in on a padded older woman with frosty braids. She regularly visits the clinic with various ailments and complains today of knee pain. After chatting awhile, Dr. Dhadon Jamling discovers the woman has been bending down to fry cookies, which is probably why her legs hurt; a cookie moratorium is suggested. The deeper problem is that the woman's alcoholic son has moved back home, causing his mother great aggravation.

This is a wind disorder. Wind disorders are behind most illness that western medicine would consider psychological. Tashi focused on wind disorders while at the Tibetan institute because they fuel post-traumatic stress disorder, a prevalent problem among refugees.

Surprisingly, the incidence and severity of the disorder among Tibetan refugees turned out to be much less than expected, given that thousands were imprisoned, tortured, separated from their families, driven from their homeland and forced to witness killings and the destruction of sacred temples.

One extensive Danish study of Tibetan torture survivors identified several factors that helped with healing: 1) a sense of social belonging in the exile community, 2) devotion to Buddhism, which is all about handling suffering, 3) telling their story to a good listener, and 4) an audience with the Dalai Lama.

"Most of them come with a determination to see His Holiness," doctors at the institute told the researchers, "and when they have seen him, the mental problems from the hardships during the flight are over."

WHEN KUNCHYO first met the Dalai Lama, he was 19. His Holiness was 22.

Kunchyo was trim and muscular, a young man with high cheekbones burned by wind and sun. His Holiness had spent much of his youth studying and praying in a dark palace. He had no wrinkles around the eyes, as he does now, but smiled the same gentle smile. When Kunchyo went for an audience at Norbulingka Palace, His Holiness smiled and lightly touched the top of Kunchyo's head.

This was Lhasa, 1957.

Kunchyo had walked four months and three days to escape the Chinese occupation of his province. Growing up, Kunchyo had lost both parents by age 9, so he'd been looked after by five older sisters and one of the village's richer farmers. The communists imprisoned and eventually killed Kunchyo's foster father because of his wealth, and for three years police interrogated Kunchyo for days at a time, depriving the boy of food, water and sleep while asking him questions he could not answer.

Early one spring, Kunchyo and a friend took off. They wore homemade shoes and two coats each, a heavy sheepskin cloak and a wool chuba, and carried a sack of tsampa barley. It snowed and rained the first 20 days, and they ran out of tsampa after two weeks. From then on, they had to forage and beg.

Four decades later, Kunchyo still remembers sighting the brilliant gold roof of Jokhang Temple, Lhasa's geographic and religious center. "My first time to Jokhang Temple," he said. "I cried."

In Lhasa, Kunchyo joined a troop of freedom fighters assigned to guard the palace of the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second-highest-ranking lama. The 35 young Tibetans, armed with outdated muskets, were no match for the Chinese army, and everyone knew it. Strangers on the street would stop to give them amulets, including the silver box, to help protect their lives.

Soon enough, the Panchen Lama realized Tibet was falling. His own life might be spared, but not his guards', so he released them. The high lama prepared special medicines they should take in dire situations (to aid in recovery or rebirth) and sent them toward India.

One night, when Kunchyo's crew volunteered to secure the Lhasa Tsangpo River for a crossing of military supplies, he saw three boats slip across in darkness. The next day, the troops learned the Dalai Lama was on the middle boat, escaping toward India.

They followed, running for seven days with no sleep and hardly any food. Ten miles from the border, they collapsed in a mountain house to rest. Chinese soldiers ambushed that night, killing four of Kunchyo's friends and all the horses. In the confusion, Kunchyo stumbled upon a Chinese horse carrying a stained canvas shoulder bag but no rider. The horse was weak, so he let it go; he took the bag. Inside were 12 biscuits. He shared the food with his remaining comrades, and two days later, they escaped to safety.

THE WORN CANVAS BAG rests in Kunchyo's living room in a chest topped by seven offering bowls, his life-protection box, a glowing red lotus and several photographs of high lamas, including one of the Dalai Lama meeting with President Clinton.

Inside the canvas bag are packets of Tibetan medicine: plum pellets, chalky seeds, brown balls the size of peppercorns. There are several "Precious Pills," individually wrapped in pink and saffron silk.

PRECIOUS CORAL 25, one of the pink instruction sheets reads. This precious pill is made from coral, mother of pearl, pearl, and lapis lazuli . . . taken for everything from severe headaches, brain disorders, fainting spells and seizures ... Excellent for all nerve disorders which cause loss of body movement, stiffness of the body and loss of memory.

Kunchyo takes Tibetan medicine about twice a year, as soon as he notices fellow custodians sniffling and coughing.

Dalai Lama's visit The Dalai Lama will visit Portland May 13-15 for a Pathways to Peace Festival sponsored by the Northwest Tibetan Cultural Association. There will be a free celebration and peace walk Sunday afternoon in Pioneer Courthouse Square. Other events require tickets. For more information, call 503-222-7172, e-mail info@nwtca.org or go to www.nwtca.org.

Tashi doesn't use Tibetan medicine, but that's because she doesn't like the taste, not because she doesn't believe. Asked if one pill can actually do what the pink instruction sheet claims, she says, diplomatically, that ground herbs and gems function differently from the strong chemicals in western drugs.

Tibetan medicine works on the body gently, Tashi says, over time.

Maybe it's the same way culture is passed from one generation to the next. You don't swallow it like a caplet, or study it in a book. It's digested.

In little moments: Watching TV, eating pineapple, Kunchyo mentions the plantation next to the refugee camp, how Tibetan families were so poor, they'd pool their rupees to buy a single pineapple.

In significant stories: Kunchyo's audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, when His Holiness inquired about Kunchyo's plans for the future. "I'd like to go to school," Kunchyo said. So His Holiness arranged it. At 26, the same age Tashi is now, Kunchyo learned to read and write while helping build a refugee school. That led to a job in a Maine lumber mill and, eventually, the Marysville sawmill and his daughters' Northwest roots.

EVERY TIME THE DALAI LAMA has come to this corner of the country, Kunchyo and Dekey have taken their girls to see him. Next week, when the family travels to Portland, Tashi will sell books about Tibet; Kunchyo will reunite with a childhood friend; the whole family will attend a talk especially for Tibetans delivered by the Dalai Lama in their native language.

To see His Holiness in person, Tashi says, "there's a really, really great sense of joy. I don't know if it's something everyone feels or if it's genetic or what ... It rejuvenates my energy staying true to the Tibetan cause: Tibetan independence and our beliefs in non-violence and caring for others and compassion."

IN THE MORNING, sipping milk tea at the kitchen counter, Kunchyo chants while Tashi works at Global Source Education, a Seattle-based nonprofit that helps K-12 teachers develop lesson plans about global issues.

In the afternoon, Kunchyo prostrates and prays in his living room while Tashi triages phone calls in the emergency room.

In the evening, Kunchyo continues chanting while he buffs floors and erases chalkboards.

One night, close to midnight, the custodian comes upon an empty chalkboard. Lessons were there once, and would be again. Kunchyo left Tibet as a goatherder; maybe Tashi would return as a doctor. Around and around, Kunchyo erases the board, clearing a path for whatever comes next.

Paula Bock is a staff writer for Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is the magazine's staff photographer.