Tibetans weigh future as Dalai Lama approaches 90

RNZ News

21-04-2025

Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama attends a long life prayer offered to him by his students and devotees at his temple in McLeod Ganj, some 10 Km from Dharamsala on 25 October 2023.
Photo:
MONEY SHARMA / AFP
When the Dalai Lama turns 90 in July, the Buddhist monk, who for
many exiled Tibetans
personifies dreams of a free homeland, will ask if they want a successor.
For the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, his landmark birthday will be a time to encourage people to
plan for an eventual future without him
and address whether there will be another Dalai Lama.
The answer, at least according to his translator of nearly four decades, is clear: yes.
"I know for a fact that he has received petitions from across the Tibetan Buddhism communities, including some from inside Tibet," Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa, 66, said, who helped produce the leader's latest book, "Voice for the Voiceless".
Jinpa believed the post, which he likened to a Buddhist "papal institution" not only for Tibet but also encompassing the Himalayan regions of India, Bhutan and Nepal, as well as Mongolia and some Russian republics, would continue.
"My hope is that before his birthday, July 6, he will issue a final statement," Jinpa said, speaking in India, where the Dalai Lama had been based since fleeing into exile in 1959.
"If my guess is right, and he says that the continuity of the institution will remain, that means then there will be a new Dalai Lama."
Many exiled Tibetans fear China would name a successor to bolster control over a land it poured troops into in 1950.
Buddhist scholar and the key translator to the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, Thupten Jinpa.
Photo:
AFP/ARUN SANKAR
The current Dalai Lama was identified in 1936 when, aged two, he passed a test by pointing to objects that had belonged to the post's previous occupier.
He was hailed as the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, a role that stretches back more than 600 years.
"One constant in everybody's life has been the presence of the Dalai Lama," Jinpa said, who fled Tibet with his parents as a baby, around the same time the Dalai Lama escaped.
If there was to be a 15th, the Dalai Lama had said he would "leave clear written instructions" on what would happen after his death.
Jinpa, who trained as a monk before completing his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, said that a foundational principle of Buddhism was the contemplation of impermanence.
"Anything that comes into being will come to an end," he said.
"Where there is birth, there will be death."
But he said the Dalai Lama - who has said he wants to live until he is 113 - also wants followers to confront a future, someday, without him.
"The idea of a world without him is almost unthinkable," Jinpa said.
"But that will happen, and His Holiness has himself been very explicit in making sure that people are thinking about it."
Jinpa said that plans for the future had long been in progress.
The Dalai Lama stepped down as his people's political head in 2011, passing the baton of secular power to a government chosen democratically by 130,000 Tibetans around the world.
"He has already prepared the formal political structure for carrying on the struggles of the Tibetan cause beyond his lifetime," Jinpa said.
"But one of the things that he can't just transfer to an elected body... is the moral authority, and his status as the symbol of a nation, and a symbol of the aspiration of the Tibetan people," he added.
"This is why the continuity of the Dalai Lama institution becomes important."
China, which has said Tibet was an integral part of the country, insisted the Dalai Lama "has no right to represent the Tibetan people".
Jinpa said the Dalai Lama was only advocating for greater Tibetan autonomy.
"If we were asking for independence, it's a completely different thing," he said.
Tibetans and Tibet supporters commemorate the 66th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan National Uprising against China's occupation in The Hague, Netherlands, on March 10, 2025.
Photo:
AFP/ROMY ARROYO FERNANDEZ
The Dalai Lama has already said that if there "is a consensus that the Dalai Lama institution should continue", then the Office of the Dalai Lama - the Gaden Phodrang Trust in India's Himalayan hill town of McLeod Ganj - would hold the responsibility for the recognition of the next leader.
He has also made it clear that any successor would by necessity be "born in the free world".
In 1995, Beijing selected its own child as the Panchen Lama, another influential Tibetan religious figure, and detained a Dalai Lama-recognised six-year-old, described by rights groups as the world's youngest political prisoner.
"The Chinese will choose another 'Dalai Lama', that's for sure," Jinpa said.
"It will be ridiculous, but they will do it."
But he was confident that Tibetans would not acknowledge whoever Beijing selected.
"They can suppress, they can ban, they can force," Jinpa said, noting that Beijing forbids the Dalai Lama's photograph in Tibet.
"But you can never change people's heart. What's in the heart belongs to the individual, and the loyalty will always be to this Dalai Lama, and whoever is going to be chosen through the traditional system."
- AFP