After the 1989 death of the Panchen Lama, the second most prominent lama in Tibet, the Dalai Lama identified Gehdun Choekyi Nyima, a Tibetan boy who was six years old at the time, as the reincarnation, but Chinese authorities were incensed by the Dalai Lama’s involvement from abroad, and the boy and his family were placed in seclusion. The government has passed a series of laws stipulating that it has ultimate authority over the “management of living Buddha reincarnation,” an act of remarkable intellectual flexibility for the officially atheist Communist Party. Only one thing is certain, he says: his successor will be found outside Tibet.Ĭhina disagrees. Or, he says, he might select his own reincarnation while he is still alive-a theological twist known as madhey tulku-which would give him the chance to train a successor and avoid the gap in leadership that has always been a time of instability for Tibetans. He has taken to musing aloud that he might be reincarnated as a woman, or that Tibetans might vote on whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue at all. As a practical matter, he believes that the traditional practice of identifying a young Tibetan boy as his reincarnation may no longer make sense, not only because he lives in exile but also because times have changed. The Dalai Lama’s death, which he calls a “change of clothing,” is not a taboo subject as a Buddhist, he says, “I visualize death every day,” and the political stakes are too large to ignore. (Recently, she prophesied that Tibet would be an independent country by 2016.) She once predicted that he would fall ill, and he subsequently contracted a gallbladder infection. Later, the Dalai Lama accepted a present from an eight-year-old Indian girl who is regarded as a prophet. Then came some of the supremely odd moments that one has come to expect in the company of the Dalai Lama: A smiling Indian man approached the stage and unrolled a gift, a large portrait of the birthday boy, which the artist had painted in his own blood. The Dalai Lama took in some school-dance-troupe performances, greeted members of the local Lions Club, and handed out public-service prizes. The festivities that followed seemed to owe less to temple rituals than to those of a Midwestern ice-cream social. He sat down beneath a banner inscribed in his honor: “The sun in the sky, the jewel of the world, the light of our hearts, may you live a long life.” At the stage, he pivoted to face the audience with a look of wide-eyed astonishment, an expression that he applies to many things. After the band came a throng of monks in maroon-and-saffron robes, and at its center was the Dalai Lama, ambling up the path from his office with a side-to-side gait, stooped forward “like a middle linebacker,” as his friend the late Abe Rosenthal, of the Times, once put it. Families in Tibet routinely contact his office with the request that he name their newborns.Ī few minutes after nine, a band with drums and bagpipes marched into the temple courtyard, playing the Tibetan national anthem, which is illegal in Tibet. For the more than five million Tibetans living inside Chinese borders, the Dalai Lama remains a venerated figure, and he is surprisingly present in their daily conversation. Set high on a ridge, in the shadow of snowbound peaks, the town is a mix of refugee community and hippie retreat, with dreadlocked Israeli backpackers jostling among freshly shorn monks. Today, Dharamsala is the capital for more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile worldwide. “Trees will take fifty years to grow, so what’s the point?” “People said, ‘We’re going to be going back in a few years,’ ” Thubten Samphel, a writer and spokesman for the government in exile, recalled. He was followed by thousands of refugees, many of whom expected a short stay when they were urged to plant trees in their settlements, they waved off the idea. The exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet-His Holiness to Buddhists, and HHDL to his Twitter followers-settled in Dharamsala half a century ago, after rejecting China’s claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. He skips the party most years, but he had promised to attend his seventy-fifth, so five thousand people turned up at the temple that morning, in a humid downpour, to await his arrival. on July 6th, in the Indian Himalayan town of Dharamsala, where he lives. The Dalai Lama’s birthday party, an event he has never much cared for, was set to begin at 9 A.
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