WHO WILL BE THE NEXT DALAI LAMA.

Tibetans dispute China's claim that it has right to select next Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama speaks at the “Wisdom and Compassion for Challenging Times” event in New York on 3 May 2009.File photo/Reuters/Eric Thayer/US

As the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has aged, he’s taken to publicly musing about the future incarnation of his successor he might do so when he appears in Albany on Wednesday assuming there is to be another Dalai Lama.
For more than six centuries, the next Dalai Lama has been chosen by regents who, it is said, through omens and portents found the deceased Dalai Lama’s reincarnation in a young boy they would choose as the next Dalai Lama, the political and spiritual leader of Tibet.
But selecting a successor to the 14th Dalai Lama, who turns 74 on 6 July, is complicated by China’s claim that it has the right to select the next Dalai Lama, outside of Tibet, which it rules. The last interregnum the time during which a leadership position is vacant between two successive reigns was a perilous time for Tibet. In the 17-year breach between the death of the 13th Dalai Lama and the hurried November 1950 assumption of political power by his successor, Tenzin Gyatso, at the age of 15, China invaded Tibet.
An interregnum could prove perilous for the next Dalai Lama as well.
In 1995, China kidnapped the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second-ranking religious leader, and his family days after the Panchen Lama was selected. He was 6 years old. Neither the Panchen Lama nor his family has been heard from since.
China’s government selected its own Panchen Lama in China.
“The fake Panchen Lama, that’s what Tibetans call him: ‘Substitute one,’?” said Gander Thurman, executive director of Tibet House, a New York City nonprofit Tibetan cultural organisation.
No wonder the Dalai Lama has said he might choose his reincarnation in his own lifetime, though that would seemingly defy the laws of metaphysics.
Trying to guess what will happen after the 14th Dalai Lama dies would be a popular parlour game among Tibetan Buddhists if the stakes weren’t so serious.
“We’re looking at conflict, two Dalai Lamas, and the Chinese have said the Dalai Lama can only be born inside Chinese borders,” said Robert Barnett, the director of the modern Tibetan studies programme at Columbia University. “So we’re heading for another phase of disagreement, a really quite serious conflict if this issue isn’t resolved before the Dalai Lama dies.”
At various times the Dalai Lama has said he’s amenable to his people breaking with tradition and choosing to vote for his successor or voting to do away with the institution of Dalai Lama.
He’s even mused the next Dalai Lama could be a girl.
The Dalai Lama, who has described himself as semiretired, has said he’s agreeable to surrendering his position as head of state if Tibetans-in-exile choose to elect their top government leaders. The Dalai Lama would maintain his role as spiritual leader.
“He’s trying to intimate that he’d like to do that or threatening that he might not reincarnate so a kid does not get turned into a hot potato,” Thurman said.
Meanwhile, Tibetan Buddhism experts say China doesn’t intend to engage the Dalai Lama in fruitful negotiations.
“The Chinese are waiting out the death of the Dalai Lama,” Thurman said. “They’d like to waste time. There’s no solution if you keep dithering around.”
There will be “extraordinary levels of recrimination and bitterness within Tibet if the Chinese let him die outside Tibet without the situation resolved,” Barnett said. “That will be a terrible political legacy for China to bequeath his successor.”
If there’s a successor.RESEARCH INFORMATION BY TSERING DOLMA.