A Tibetan in exile worries about a friend, a monk imprisoned by the Chinese.

As a younger man, then in his early 30s, Khenpo Karten Rinpoche spent three months in a Chinese prison. The perplexing reason – not that they need a reason, as the Chinese have a knack for making Tibetans who tick them off disappear – was blame: Rinpoche says the Chinese blamed him for having contacts in India, especially with the Dalai Lama, the leader-in-exile of Tibetan Buddhism.

“They feed you once a day, some rice, or noodles or a steamed bun. You don’t get much water or anything to drink,” Khenpo Karten says of his time in the prison. We’re speaking with the help of a translator. His English is quite fine, but the cell connection from the retreat center in Oregon he’s visiting is poor, and the translator gives him confidence.

“You can meditate in prison,” he says. “Some of the other monks or nuns who have been there three months or more, they would just go to work. It was slave labor. No pay.”

It wasn’t the first pain the Chinese would inflict on him. Just a few months after he was born, the government executed his mother and uncle on the same day. His main teacher was imprisoned and tortured. More than 1.8 million Tibetans have been killed.

Just as perplexing as Khenpo Karten’s arrest in 1997 was his sudden release. Re-arrest could come at any time. He left his monastery and trekked across the Himalayas to India, where he would live for a decade before coming to the Monterey Peninsula in 2007.

Call it the eternal cycle: The current abbot of Rinpoche’s Tibet monastery, Khenpo Kartse Rinpoche, was arrested on Dec. 6 in Chengdu, where he had traveled to purchase a new idol for the Jhapa monastery in the Nangchen area of the country. The charge, according to Students for a Free Tibet, is “endangering state security.” Just a few weeks later, 16 monks from the monastery also were arrested for their involvement in a protest demanding Khenpo Kartse’s release, according to Phayul.com, a news and information website for Tibetans outside of Tibet.

The 16 monks were released a few weeks ago, but Khenpo Kartse remains in prison. He’s been denied access to his lawyer, who is also being held on a charge of endangering state security. And the monks and their families have all been warned that if they try to hire attorneys, they will face arrest too, according to Amnesty International.

Amnesty International has taken up his case, and so has Khenpo Karten: “They blame him, like they blamed me,” Khenpo Karten says. “It’s been happening 55 years since we lost our country to the Chinese. There is no freedom of speech, there is no human rights. There is no freedom.”

Khenpo Karten plans to bring attention to the plight of his country, and that of his friends and fellow monks still in Tibet, through a series of events on March 10, Tibetan Uprising Day. First there will be a rally at Window on the Bay (4-6pm, signs and flags will be provided); then a talk by Khenpo Karten on the current situation in Tibet (6:30-8pm) at Wave Street Studios; and a showing of the 2002 film Cry of the Snow Lion.

Khenpo Karten hopes to establish a permanent Dharma center for Buddhist studies and meditation on the Peninsula. In a blog post on his own website (even Tibetan monks have websites these days; his is khenpokarten.org) he writes that Khenpo Kartse’s arrest follows a path of governments refusing to intervene to help the people of Tibet and instead bowing to China’s power.

“As I write, my heart is filled with sadness and my eyes are filled with sorrowful tears. Yet I feel there is a hint of hope that engulfs me as well,” he writes. The sorrow comes from the repression of his people, and the hope from his people’s unwillingness to give in.

“Despite it all, the Tibetan people’s determination has become harder than iron and their promise as stable as a mountain,” he adds. “I am a believer of truth and I am confident there will be a day for truth to triumph.”

Tibetan Uprising Day seems like a good day to start.

Please RSVP to 655-1846, 236-4542 or carmelkhenpo@gmail.com.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or twitter.com/maryrduan