Life without a Dalai Lama? Disbelief at spiritual leader's suggestion
The incumbent's recent suggestion that he could be the last incarnation of the spiritual leader has sparked disbelief and outrage inside and outside Tibet. Dinah Gardner reflects on life without Tenzin Gyatso
He's not your average 79-year-old. The Dalai Lama looks strong and moves with purpose. He's a powerful, towering presence. Last week, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet delivered Buddhist teachings day after day to thousands of people at his temple in Dharamsala, in northern India, in sessions lasting four hours at a time.
He has predicted that he won't die until he's 113 - that's another 34 years - and so it seemed rather premature, back in September, when he told German media that he was thinking of making himself the last of the line. There might be no 15th Dalai Lama.
"We had a Dalai Lama for almost five centuries," he told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. "The 14th Dalai Lama now is very popular. Let us then finish with a popular Dalai Lama."
His comments sparked headlines around the world, an outcry of disbelief from Tibetans and fury from Beijing. So why did he make such a statement, and if he was serious, what would that mean for Tibetans inside and outside Tibet?
While some scholars believe he was speaking in earnest and that it is a strategy for dealing with China, the end of the Dalai Lama institution might not cause as many waves as some fear. It is actually not unheard of for lineages of incarnate lamas to be stopped and, sometimes, restarted - the Shamarpa line, for example, was banned by the Tibetan government at the end of the 18th century and then brought back in the 1960s.
But the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is such a revered figure among Tibetan Buddhists that many Tibetans in Dharamsala dismissed the news story outright. He was misquoted, said some. Others claimed he was just being mischievous - after all, the Dalai Lama is known to enjoy a joke from time to time.
"I don't think he was being serious," says 25-year-old Kunga Jampa, a Tibetan teacher in Dharamsala. "He was just joking … At school we were taught that His Holiness is our father and our mother, ahead of our real father and mother. Without him we are nothing."