The older Dalai Lama assured supporters on Wednesday that at his death he would be reincarnated as the next spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and spelled a sequence that sets a renewed clash with China.
The eagerly awaited statement made days before the fragile Nobel Peace Prize winners are 90, set to rest speculation, started by the Dalai Lama himself that he may be the last of Tibet’s spiritual leaders to end a line that extends back centuries.
When we talked during a week’s party in the North Indian Bakke by Dharamshala to mark his birthday, the Dalai Lama said a non-profit institution he has created will have the only authority to identify his reincarnation and counteract China’s insistence that it will choose his successor.
Beijing repeated on Wednesday that it had to approve the reincarnation and that it had to be done in China for a centuries -old ritual. A spokesman for the US Department of State said it would continue to call on China to cease interference with the order and respect for religious freedom.
Beijing sees the Dalai Lama, who fled to India from Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, as a separatist. The Dalai Lama has said his successor will be born outside China and urged his supporters to reject anyone chosen by Beijing. In previous years he had also said that it was possible that there was no successor at all.
“I confirm that the Dalai Lama institution will continue,” the Dalai Lama said in a video message, putting out claps and cheering from more than 100 monks in Maroon clothes gathered in a library in Dharamshala.
The event participated in journalists from all over the world and an audience of long-standing supporters, including Hollywood star Richard Gere, sitting in a hall whose walls showed ornate paintings by Buddha and photographs of the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama added that the street Phodrang Trust, the non-profit organization he created to maintain and support the tradition and institution of the Dalai Lama, has the only authority to recognize his reincarnation in consultation with the leader of Tibetan Buddhist traditions.
“They should consequently conduct the procedures for search and recognition in accordance with past tradition … No one else has any such authority to interfere in this case,” he said.
Tibetan tradition claims that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk is reincarnated in a child’s body at his death.
Born as Lhamo Dhondup on July 6, 1935, to an agricultural family in what is now Qinghai Province, the 14th Dalai Lama was identified as such a reincarnation at the age of two of a search party based on several signs, such as a vision revealed to a seniormone, Dalai Lama’s site said.
He is now considered one of the world’s most influential religious figures with a subsequent far beyond Buddhism and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
‘Open to visit Tibet’
The Dalai Lama was in good health and has not yet given any written instructions on the order, said Samdhong Rinpoche, a senior official in the street Phodrang Trust.
He told journalists that the successor may be of any gender and their nationality would not be limited to Tibet
Penpa Tsering, head of the central Tibetan administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile in India, said the Dalai Lama would be open to visiting Tibet if his health allows, and if there were no restrictions from China. It would be his first visit to the country since 1959.
“It is completely dependent on China and the Chinese government,” he said, adding that Beijing had set a condition that if the Dalai Lama visits, he should stay.
“His holiness’-response is’ If I come to Tibet and China, I will go, but I will not live there because there is no freedom there ‘. This is also associated with the reincarnation where his holiness says’ I will be born in a free world’,” Tering said.
Spokesman for Chinese Foreign Ministry Mao Ning said China had the right to approve the successor of the Dalai Lama, as an inheritance from imperial times, and that Beijing practice a policy of freedom of religious beliefs.
A spokesman for the US Department of State said it would continue to call China to return to direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama, his representatives or democratically elected Tibetan leaders without prerequisites to “achieve meaningful autonomy for Tibetans.”
“We will also continue to call on China to cease its interference with the order of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist Lamas and respect the freedom of religion or belief in individuals in all faiths,” the spokesman said.
Tsering, head of the government in exile, said the United States had abolished some restrictions on funds to Tibetans in exile, and that the Tibetan government was also looking for alternative sources of financing.
A selection ritual where the names of possible reincarnations are drawn from a golden urn derived from 1793, during the Qing dynasty.
“The child’s reincarnation of a larger living Buddha such as the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama must be identified by drawing from a golden urn and approval of the central government,” Mao said at a regular news conference.
