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The Herald Scotland
16-07-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Dalai Lama, China at odds over how successor will be chosen
Tibetan tradition holds that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk upon his death is reincarnated in the body of a child, who must be identified and then trained in Buddhist practice. In his declaration, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama said Gaden Phodrang, the foundation he created to uphold the Dalai Lama tradition, will have sole authority to recognize his successor. "They should accordingly carry out the procedures of search and recognition in accordance with past tradition," he said. "No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter." Beijing insists that it does. "The reincarnation and succession of the Dalai Lama is inherently an internal affair of China," said Yu Jing, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in India -- where the Dalai Lama has lived in exile since 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet -- in one of a series of posts about the matter on the social platform X. She described the Nobel Laureate as "a political exile engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion." Janet Gyatso, a professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that should China opt to pursue its own selection process, it wouldn't be the first time Buddhism has dealt with a dispute over the identity of the reincarnated Dalai Lama. "What they (China) will do is not easy to say," Gyatso said. "But the political stakes are much higher than they've ever been." A decades-old conflict About 100,000 Tibetans live in exile, the majority of them in India, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nicole Willock, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, said China's rebuke of the Dalai Lama's declaration illustrates an ongoing effort to belittle Tibet into irrelevance. "The current CCP (Chinese Communist Party) policy under Xi Jinping is to isolate the Dalai Lama as he ages, forcing international corporations and anyone who wants to do business with China to forget about Tibet," she said. As an example, she cited "Ghost of the Mountains," a Disney documentary feature about snow leopards - the national animal of Tibet - which she said makes no mention of Tibet, instead using Chinese terms to refer to it and the Tibetan plateau. China colonized Tibet in the mid-20th century, at a time when African and Asian nations were gaining independence from colonial powers. In 1959, a failed uprising saw the Dalai Lama flee Tibet for northern India, where he set up a government in exile, which China has since refused to recognize. Now, both sides are clashing over who gets to choose the Dalai Lama's successor. "This is a history that the current PRC (People's Republic of China) regime wants the world to ignore," Willock said. "The CCP thinks if they control who the next Dalai Lama is that they will control the narrative on Tibet." How the Dalai Lama reincarnates The announcement on July 2 by one of the world's most influential religious figures, whose sway extends far beyond Buddhism, offered relief to those puzzled by his previous public musings over whether the tradition of Dalai Lama leadership should endure or defer to a democratically elected authority. It also answered the wishes of followers who've held ever more frequent ceremonies wishing him good health and longevity while calling for his reincarnated return. "Tibetans really want to have a Dalai Lama," Gyatso said. The 14th Dalai Lama, born in 1935 as Lhamo Dhondup and enthroned in 1940, is a living example of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of recognizing reincarnations of previous Lamas who continue their work in the new reincarnation. While the faith holds that everyone reincarnates, Gyatso said, only those who are highly enlightened, such as the Dalai Lama, can choose where they will do so. "They can choose what mother and father they will be born to, in the best conditions to continue their work," she said. However, once that happens the reincarnation must be pinpointed and recognized as such, a process handled "by highly evolved monks and specialists," she said. "There's a whole bunch of tests and methods done, usually when the child is about 3 or 4 years old." In his statement, the Dalai Lama said his nonprofit foundation would oversee the succession process in consultation with his closest advisers and leaders of various Tibetan Buddhism traditions. Jose Cabezon, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the declaration marked the first time the Dalai Lama had been so definitive about the certainty of a 15th Dalai Lama and how that person would be chosen. While offering "a great sense of relief" to Tibetans, he said, the statement's specificity was also "a warning to the PRC government not to meddle in this process." Deciding who the real Dalai Lama is What could happen, Gyatso said, is that two Dalai Lamas may be raised concurrently - one who becomes head of the Tibetan government in exile, and the other who assumes some as yet undefined role in China, which has said it will oversee selection of the Dalai Lama's successor through a timeworn imperial ritual in which names of possible reincarnations are drawn from a golden urn. "What we're expecting to happen is that they (China) will conduct their own process," Gyatso said. "The Tibetans and the rest of the world will decide who they think is the real Dalai Lama." Should such a scenario unfold, she said, most Tibetans outside China would likely follow the Dalai Lama in exile, while Tibetans inside China would be under enormous political pressure to accept the government-endorsed figurehead. Cabezon said Beijing's insistence on appointing the Dalai Lama's successor is ironic given that the government eschews religion and considers reincarnation to be superstitious. "Beijing will undoubtedly appoint a 15th Dalai Lama and promote that boy as the 'true' Dalai Lama," Cabezon said. But he believes that choice "will have little legitimacy in the eyes of Tibetans." Could a split have an upside? Gyatso said the Tibetan community "is very upset" about the potential dichotomy. "They don't want the confusion of having two Dalai Lamas," she said. Nonetheless, she said, such a situation might not be without benefit. "If the Chinese government wants to recognize its own Dalai Lama, let them give him genuine Buddhist training and upbringing, just like the current Dalai Lama got and the next one will," Gyatso said. "Let him study Buddhist philosophy and ethics. If they can produce a Dalai Lama with wisdom and the ability to reach a lot of people with the important teachings of Buddhism, that would be great." The challenge for both, she said, will be producing a leader on the scale of the present Dalai Lama, who has been not only an influential Buddhist leader but respected on the world stage as well, addressing issues such as environmentalism and neuroscience. "Let's see you both train and educate in the best way," Gyatso said. "If they're both great leaders with wisdom, then they won't be in competition; they'll visit and collaborate. That will be the test.... The way we'll know who's really the Dalai Lama is by (seeing) who is able to develop the wisdom and ethical leadership recognized by people all over the world. If we have two of them and they're both great, I'll be happy, because two is better than one."
USA Today
15-07-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Could there be two Dalai Lamas? Spiritual leader's statement portends clash with China
Could there eventually be two Dalai Lamas? The 14th Dalai Lama's announcement in early July that he will reincarnate as Tibetan Buddhism's next spiritual leader reassured worried followers. But the statement also foreshadowed a confrontation with China over who gets to choose his successor – and the chance that parallel efforts could be conducted to do so. Tibetan tradition holds that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk upon his death is reincarnated in the body of a child, who must be identified and then trained in Buddhist practice. In his declaration, the 90-year-old Dalai Lama said Gaden Phodrang, the foundation he created to uphold the Dalai Lama tradition, will have sole authority to recognize his successor. 'They should accordingly carry out the procedures of search and recognition in accordance with past tradition,' he said. 'No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter.' Beijing insists that it does. "The reincarnation and succession of the Dalai Lama is inherently an internal affair of China," said Yu Jing, spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in India — where the Dalai Lama has lived in exile since 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet — in one of a series of posts about the matter on the social platform X. She described the Nobel Laureate as 'a political exile engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion.' Janet Gyatso, a professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that should China opt to pursue its own selection process, it wouldn't be the first time Buddhism has dealt with a dispute over the identity of the reincarnated Dalai Lama. "What they (China) will do is not easy to say," Gyatso said. "But the political stakes are much higher than they've ever been.' A decades-old conflict About 100,000 Tibetans live in exile, the majority of them in India, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. Nicole Willock, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, said China's rebuke of the Dalai Lama's declaration illustrates an ongoing effort to belittle Tibet into irrelevance. 'The current CCP (Chinese Communist Party) policy under Xi Jinping is to isolate the Dalai Lama as he ages, forcing international corporations and anyone who wants to do business with China to forget about Tibet,' she said. As an example, she cited 'Ghost of the Mountains,' a Disney documentary feature about snow leopards – the national animal of Tibet – which she said makes no mention of Tibet, instead using Chinese terms to refer to it and the Tibetan plateau. China colonized Tibet in the mid-20th century, at a time when African and Asian nations were gaining independence from colonial powers. In 1959, a failed uprising saw the Dalai Lama flee Tibet for northern India, where he set up a government in exile, which China has since refused to recognize. Now, both sides are clashing over who gets to choose the Dalai Lama's successor. 'This is a history that the current PRC (People's Republic of China) regime wants the world to ignore,' Willock said. 'The CCP thinks if they control who the next Dalai Lama is that they will control the narrative on Tibet.' How the Dalai Lama reincarnates The announcement on July 2 by one of the world's most influential religious figures, whose sway extends far beyond Buddhism, offered relief to those puzzled by his previous public musings over whether the tradition of Dalai Lama leadership should endure or defer to a democratically elected authority. It also answered the wishes of followers who've held ever more frequent ceremonies wishing him good health and longevity while calling for his reincarnated return. 'Tibetans really want to have a Dalai Lama,' Gyatso said. The 14th Dalai Lama, born in 1935 as Lhamo Dhondup and enthroned in 1940, is a living example of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of recognizing reincarnations of previous Lamas who continue their work in the new reincarnation. While the faith holds that everyone reincarnates, Gyatso said, only those who are highly enlightened, such as the Dalai Lama, can choose where they will do so. 'They can choose what mother and father they will be born to, in the best conditions to continue their work,' she said. However, once that happens the reincarnation must be pinpointed and recognized as such, a process handled 'by highly evolved monks and specialists,' she said. 'There's a whole bunch of tests and methods done, usually when the child is about 3 or 4 years old.' In his statement, the Dalai Lama said his nonprofit foundation would oversee the succession process in consultation with his closest advisers and leaders of various Tibetan Buddhism traditions. Jose Cabezon, a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the declaration marked the first time the Dalai Lama had been so definitive about the certainty of a 15th Dalai Lama and how that person would be chosen. While offering 'a great sense of relief' to Tibetans, he said, the statement's specificity was also 'a warning to the PRC government not to meddle in this process.' Deciding who the real Dalai Lama is What could happen, Gyatso said, is that two Dalai Lamas may be raised concurrently – one who becomes head of the Tibetan government in exile, and the other who assumes some as yet undefined role in China, which has said it will oversee selection of the Dalai Lama's successor through a timeworn imperial ritual in which names of possible reincarnations are drawn from a golden urn. 'What we're expecting to happen is that they (China) will conduct their own process,' Gyatso said. 'The Tibetans and the rest of the world will decide who they think is the real Dalai Lama.' Should such a scenario unfold, she said, most Tibetans outside China would likely follow the Dalai Lama in exile, while Tibetans inside China would be under enormous political pressure to accept the government-endorsed figurehead. Cabezon said Beijing's insistence on appointing the Dalai Lama's successor is ironic given that the government eschews religion and considers reincarnation to be superstitious. 'Beijing will undoubtedly appoint a 15th Dalai Lama and promote that boy as the 'true' Dalai Lama,' Cabezon said. But he believes that choice 'will have little legitimacy in the eyes of Tibetans.' Could a split have an upside? Gyatso said the Tibetan community 'is very upset' about the potential dichotomy. 'They don't want the confusion of having two Dalai Lamas,' she said. Nonetheless, she said, such a situation might not be without benefit. 'If the Chinese government wants to recognize its own Dalai Lama, let them give him genuine Buddhist training and upbringing, just like the current Dalai Lama got and the next one will,' Gyatso said. 'Let him study Buddhist philosophy and ethics. If they can produce a Dalai Lama with wisdom and the ability to reach a lot of people with the important teachings of Buddhism, that would be great.' The challenge for both, she said, will be producing a leader on the scale of the present Dalai Lama, who has been not only an influential Buddhist leader but respected on the world stage as well, addressing issues such as environmentalism and neuroscience. 'Let's see you both train and educate in the best way,' Gyatso said. 'If they're both great leaders with wisdom, then they won't be in competition; they'll visit and collaborate. That will be the test…. The way we'll know who's really the Dalai Lama is by (seeing) who is able to develop the wisdom and ethical leadership recognized by people all over the world. If we have two of them and they're both great, I'll be happy, because two is better than one.'
The Intercept
20-06-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
A Harvard Commencement Speaker Mentioned Gaza. The School Refused to Publish Her Speech.
Support Us © THE INTERCEPT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Harvard University's campus in Cambridge, Mass., on May 27, 2025. Photo: Sophie Park/Bloomberg via Getty Images Harvard Divinity School broke precedent by refusing to publish a video of its commencement speech after a speaker went off-script to call attention to the perilous conditions in Gaza, The Intercept has learned. 'There are no safe zones left in Gaza after 600 days and 77 years of genocide,' said Zehra Imam, who graduated from the Harvard Divinity School this spring and participated in the embattled Religion and Public Life program. Imam, who is Muslim, was speaking with two other students from Christian and Jewish faiths who had cleared a draft of their planned remarks with the school — and agreed that Imam should go off-script to address the ongoing genocide. 'I center Palestine today, not just because of its scale of atrocity but because of our complicity in it,' Imam said. 'Class of 2025, Palestine is waiting for you to arrive. And you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in your living rooms until you are ready to meet its gaze.' Harvard did not publish a video of the speech on its website or YouTube page, as it did with commencement speeches in past years. When Imam and her co-speakers asked why, the school told them the decision was made due to 'security concerns.' The decision runs counter to the public perception that Harvard is crusading against President Donald Trump's threats to cut university funding to crush speech, according to seven Harvard Divinity School students and staff who spoke to The Intercept. While the university has been publicly praised for fighting back against Trump, its efforts to censor Imam's speech and wipe out the civic engagement she took part in have raised concerns among students and staff that the school is actually capitulating to pressure from the White House. The school made a password-protected version of the speech temporarily available to people with a Harvard login, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept. But choosing not to release it publicly 'feels to a lot of students suspicious and just contradictory,' said Perlei Toor, a second-year divinity school student. 'That's not what happened last year or the year before that.' Behind the scenes, the school has been quietly dismantling the Religion and Public Life program from which Imam graduated. Until recently led by the Divinity School's only Palestinian staff member, the program has drawn Trump's ire — and criticism from some alumni, campus leaders, and students. Imam ended her portion of the speech with a poem from a student in Gaza — one of several refugees to whom she offers poetry lessons via an organization she founded connecting U.S. students with students in refugee camps. She and her co-speakers received a standing ovation. 'I had a dream / I went back home / slept in my bed / felt warmth again,' she read. 'I had a dream / My eyes forgot the blood, the loss, the patience … My nose forgot the smoke smell, the deaths, the corpse rotten … My body skipped what I had lived.' Read our complete coverage The suppression of Imam's speech capped off a chaotic year for the Divinity School's Religion and Public Life program. As of last month, Harvard had pushed out the program's three leaders, canceled a class, suspended one of its initiatives, and cut most of its staff. The program itself is still relatively new: Harvard launched Religion and Public Life in late 2020, following worldwide protests against police brutality to focus on 'educating leaders to understand the civic consequences of religion, in service of building a just world at peace.' During a time of uncertainty, the program would 'shape our character and trajectory both in the years to come as well as in our tumultuous present.' After the October 7 attacks, the program's troubled trajectory began to take shape. Program leaders, faculty, and staff sent a newsletter urging affiliates of the Divinity School to 'challenge single story narratives' that justified retaliation against Palestinians. Harvard Divinity School Dean David F. Holland disavowed the statement, as the Harvard Crimson reported, saying it did not represent the school and described it as 'unproductive.' The following year, the group Students Against Antisemitism sued Harvard over claims that the school had failed to stop antisemitism on campus. The suit criticized the Religion and Public Life program for hosting a screening of the film 'Israelism,' which documents changing Jewish attitudes toward Israel, and took aim at the program's flagship course, which took students on a trip to Israel and the West Bank. Harvard agreed to a confidential settlement in the suit last month. Last May, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance released a report on campus antisemitism that took further aim at the letter program faculty sent after the October 7 attacks. It also criticized the program's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which ran the flagship course and examines how religion can promote peace in situations of violent conflict and mass displacement. The initiative, the report claims, 'appears to focus entirely on the Palestinians.' According to Toor, the second-year student, this framing is emblematic of misconceptions about the Religion and Public Life program. News stories and discourse about the program often miss 'just how much Religion and Public Life does besides Palestine and Israel,' she told The Intercept. The program provides opportunities for students to connect religious studies to the public sphere through tracks in government, journalism, and humanitarian aid, among other topics, and to take on related internships. It also plans more than half of the school's programming and events. Late last year, facing political pressure and security concerns, program leaders decided not to take students on the trip to Israel and the West Bank or offer the flagship course this spring. Shortly after, the departures of several program leaders were announced. In January, Assistant Dean Diane Moore, who built the program and taught the course, announced she would leave the program early. The next day, Assistant Dean Hussein Rashid announced he would leave the program at the end of the academic year because of what he described as the school's anti-Muslim bias and a 'hostile environment to Muslims and Arabs.' Moore did not respond to a request for comment. Rashid declined to comment on the record. According to Toor, the program has been a necessary home for people of all faiths. 'Because of the diversity of the staff and because of the range of topics that students were able to explore,' Toor said, 'especially since the inauguration of Trump, [the program] has been a real space of ministerial comfort.' But in April, Harvard's much-anticipated report on antisemitism presented a narrative closer to the one from the Jewish Alumni Alliance. Released just after the school said it would not comply with a letter with Trump's demands, the April report was a result of the efforts of Trump's antisemitism task force. The school had just pushed out leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and ended its partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank. The new report identified the Religion and Public Life program as one of several offenders that contributed to the 'frequency and intensity of treatment of Israel as an oppressor state and the Palestinians as an oppressed people in courses and public events throughout the campus.' This, according to the report, was 'indicative of institutional bias and hostility.' 'While the program was publicly launched with what seemed like a broad mandate to explore the intersection of religion and various aspects of public life, in practice, it focused heavily on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presenting a perspective widely perceived as consistently anti-Israeli and aligned very narrowly with a strand of pro-Palestinian politics,' the report read. 'This narrow focus on this exceptionally polarizing topic appears to have stemmed from the decision, made soon after RPL's founding, to center its programming around a multi-year case study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.' The program focuses on a wide range of topics like the economy, democracy and voting rights, education, and humanitarian aid, said Toor. Topics related to Israel and Palestine are a fraction of the work it does on campus. The program continued to shrink, this time with cuts. Shortly after the report was published, the school began notifying staff and other program leaders — including its only Israeli professor — that their contracts would not be renewed due to budget cuts. The school also announced it was pausing the program's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. One of the staff cut was Hilary Rantisi, the program's Palestinian American associate director who co-taught the flagship course. 'They terminated the only Palestinian employee that they had,' said Preston Iha, a first-year student in the Masters of Divinity program. 'Which is, again, signaling and makes people wonder who is really welcome at a school that claims to welcome everybody.' Last month, the day after the commencement, the school notified program staff about additional cuts. Four staff members' jobs were eliminated, and a fifth staffer was given a three-month extension of their contract, which is set to end June 30. A new program director, Terrence L. Johnson, will take over at the end of June — but students and staff told The Intercept it's not clear what the program will consist of after its staff was gutted. 'It seems like, yes, there could be budget cuts,' said Toor. 'But for you to target one program so specifically, and for that program to also be heavily mentioned in the antisemitism report and the Islamophobia report, it seems like too much of a coincidence.' Imam, the commencement speaker, was one of three students who told The Intercept the Religion and Public Life program was one of the major reasons she attended Harvard in the first place. 'It's very, very frustrating to see this censorship and attack on academic freedom,' Imam said. Shir Lovett-Graff, a Jewish spiritual leader who graduated from the Divinity School last year, said the attacks on the program were part of a long-running pattern at Harvard. 'Far before the Trump administration targeted Harvard and any university, far before Trump was elected into office for his second term, Harvard itself, internally, has a legacy of cracking down on pro-Palestine voices,' said Lovett-Graff, who helped found the student group Jews for Liberation, the largest Jewish student organization at Harvard Divinity School. 'It is not out of the ordinary or unexpected in any way for Harvard to crack down on pro-Palestine or even Israel-critical spaces on campus. That is part of Harvard's legacy,' Lovett-Graff said. They said they were grateful the program had been 'a place of connection for Jewish students, staff, alumni and faculty who are not represented by the Jewish mainstream of Harvard and beyond.' Toor, the second-year student, told The Intercept she feared that with the program gutted, students would lose a comforting space on campus. 'Students have been flocking to the office just to hang out and vent and have a safe space where they could be a person of color, where they can be Muslim, where they can be an international student in times when that is really needed and has felt really limited,' Toor said. 'This is a home that's being lost for a lot of students.' 'It's definitely sending the wrong message for Harvard Divinity School,' said Iha, the first-year student, 'which touts itself as being a moral center, to capitulate to these really immoral demands.' Imam said given everything she'd seen Harvard do to gut the program and censor speech on Palestine, she was concerned that the school would not approve her speech if she showed them what she planned to say about Gaza. 'Having seen everything in my time at Harvard Divinity School, I was worried that if I had shared those exact things in my speech and submitted that version, that I would not have been allowed to actually share what I wanted to,' Imam said. 'I wanted Gaza to have the last word. I wanted to center Palestine.' Join The Conversation
Time Magazine
16-06-2025
- General
- Time Magazine
Raúl E. Zegarra
Zegarra is Assistant Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His most recent book is A Revolutionary Faith
Wall Street Journal
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Harvard Also Has Christian Antisemitism
'As queer and trans people, political radicals, abolitionists and anti-Zionists, imagination is our calling,' a Harvard Divinity School student pronounced on campus. She denounced Israel's 'state violence, settler colonialism, fermented trauma and religious nationalism.' The setting wasn't an encampment, an unauthorized graduation speech, or a foreign-funded Middle East studies seminar. It was a sermon at morning prayers inside Harvard's Memorial Church. The university owns and operates the church, which occupies a prominent position in the physical center of campus. The Harvard Corp. selects and employs its minister. The church website, with audio and transcripts of sermons, has a address. Contributors to the church get a tax receipt that says 'thank you for donating to Harvard University.' Memorial Church calls itself 'an interdenominational Protestant church' and 'a community of social critique and human compassion.' When it comes to Israel and the Jews, as the Divinity School student's speech indicates, Harvard's main campus church has been heavy on critique and light on compassion. Hostility has come from professors and professional clergy, too.
