The Uncertain Path
TENZIN GYATSO, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, was flown from his home in Dharamshala to a private hospital in Delhi on 10 April 2019. He was 83 years old and suffering from what appeared to be a chest infection. He was discharged from hospital two days later. The following month, over seven thousand people gathered outside his residence to offer prayers for his long life. Addressing the gathering, Gyatso tried to assuage their fears.
“Once I had a dream that I was swimming, even though I can’t swim, and Palden Lhamo”—a female deity worshipped by Tibetan Buddhists—“was riding on my back,” he said. “She remarked, ‘There’s no doubt you’ll live until you’re 110 years old.’ Other people too have dreamt that I may live till I’m 113.”
Imagine that these dreams come true. The year is 2048; it has been almost ninety years since Gyatso escaped to India following the Chinese invasion of Tibet. He has presumably worked with the religious leadership in the Tibetan community to plan for the future. Perhaps he has appointed his successor already—through a procedure called ma-dhey tulku, or emanation before death, he has directly transferred his religious authority into the body of the next Dalai Lama, foregoing the lengthy process of identifying the next incarnation. Perhaps his successor is a young boy from India, or perhaps it is a young girl from Nepal. Perhaps he has decided that there will be no successor, or perhaps he has not yet designated a successor, leaving the task to other senior lamas, who will almost certainly have to contend with a rival candidate propped up by the Chinese.
Or tragedy could strike tomorrow. Tibetan Buddhism places a strong emphasis on death—thinking about it, talking about it, contemplating its certainty. No matter how much mental preparation is done, Gyatso’s death will have grave implications, not just for the Tibetan diaspora. The fourteenth Dalai Lama is not only a spiritual leader; in exile from the roof of the world, he sits at the centre of a maelstrom of geopolitics, with some of the most powerful states in the world—China, India and the United States—looking to stake their claim on the future. His presence has papered over fissures within the Tibetan community-in-exile over the past six decades and, despite his efforts to put in place structures of governance that can outlive him, whoever succeeds him will face a unique challenge.
ALTHOUGH GYATSO has said that he spends eighty percent of his time on spiritual pursuits and only twenty percent on temporal matters, the religious and political leadership of Tibet have been united in the person of the Dalai Lama for almost five hundred years. The Gelug sect, founded by the fourteenth-century monk Tsongkhapa, was one of several monastic orders competing for adherents and patronage in the medieval kingdoms of the Tibetan Plateau and among the Mongol tribes of Central Asia. Altan Khan, a Mongol ruler who converted to the sect in 1578, conferred the title of dalai—oceanic, suggesting depth of knowledge—on the Gelug lama Sonam Gyatso. The title was retrospectively applied to the first two leaders of the sect, and Altan’s great-grandson succeeded Sonam Gyatso as Dalai Lama. In 1642, following his defeat of the Tsang dynasty, which favoured the rival Karma Kagyu sect, the Mongol chieftain Güüshi Khan installed the fifth Dalai Lama as the ruler of a unified Tibet. Lhasa, where the Gelug sect was headquartered, became the Tibetan capital.
The Dalai Lama lineage continued to be shaped by outside influence. In the eighteenth century, the Qing Empire replaced the Mongols as the hegemonic power in Tibet. As part of a 1792 ordinance to assert his authority over the unruly Tibetan periphery after it had twice been invaded by the Gurkha rulers of Nepal, the emperor reformed the selection process for lamas. Instead of the arcane rituals that sometimes allowed rival reincarnations to emerge due to factional strife, the names of prospective candidates would be placed in a golden urn, with future reincarnations being chosen by the drawing of lots, to be administered by the Qing representative in Lhasa. “The new system added to the moral authority of the Emperor in Tibet and deprived the offices of the Dalai Lama and the Panch’en Lama of their character of self-regulating autonomies,” the Chinese diplomat Li Tieh-tseng writes in The Historical Status of Tibet.
The golden urn was used during the selection of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Dalai Lamas, as well as of the eighth and ninth Panchen Lamas—the second-highest spiritual authority in the Gelug sect. The system started to break down in the early twentieth century, as the Qing Empire came to an end following the Revolution of 1911 and the British Empire began to increase its presence in the region. Tibet attained de facto independence—the British argued that China held suzerainty, but not sovereignty, over Tibet—and the Kuomintang government in China, too preoccupied with civil war and a Japanese invasion to directly intervene, began approving exemptions from the use of the urn.
It was not used in 1939, when a young boy named Lhamo Dhondup—who would later take the regnal name Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso—was approached by a group of monks in Takster, a village in the region of Amdo, which was then ruled by the Kuomintang general Ma Bufang. A series of signs had led them there: the direction that the embalmed head of the thirteenth Dalai Lama was facing, the incumbent regent’s vision of a monastery by a lake and investigations by the reigning Panchen Lama, who had shortlisted three potential candidates in the region.
The monks arrived in disguise to test the child. He is said to have recognised one of them and correctly identified a series of objects owned by the previous Dalai Lama. Although some Lhasa aristocrats preferred not to choose a child born in Chinese territory—and the Panchen Lama had aligned himself with the Kuomintang after fleeing Tibet, in 1923, following a dispute over taxation—the monks eventually received instructions that Dhondup was the one. After arranging a suitable bribe for Ma, they brought the child to the capital.
Tenzin Gyatso has proven to be an unusual Dalai Lama. As a child, he displayed an unorthodox interest in the world outside of monastic institutions. This was in part due to exposure. One of his tutors was a rare foreigner in Lhasa: an Austrian adventurer, and former member of the Nazi Party, named Heinrich Harrer. Having escaped from a British internment camp in India, Harrer had fled to Lhasa, where he spent a little over six months in 1949 meeting with Gyatso on a weekly basis, talking about arithmetic, geometry, technology and current affairs. Gyatso also spent time in an observatory, where he realised that, contrary to Tibetan orthodoxy, the moon was not a light-emitting celestial body. He has often spoken fondly about his childhood love for taking apart and reassembling mechanical objects, and called himself a “half-scientist.”
Gyatso has also been burdened with an unusual political responsibility. He was still a
