Word: hita
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...like living a lie.' OSEL HITA TORRES, the boy identified by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of a Tibetan spiritual leader, on his decision to abandon the Buddhist order...
...Last month, however, the magazine Babylon confirmed that the shaggy-haired Hita had long ago dropped out of his Tibetan University, and that he no longer even considers himself a Buddhist. He was quoted more pointedly in the newspaper El Mundo as saying, "I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living...
...Britain's Guardian then added the delicious factoid that at one point the only people Hita saw were Buddhist monks and Richard Gere. Last Monday, a statement attributed to Hita appeared on the FPMT website calling the press reports "sensationalized," and insisting "there is no separation between myself and FPMT." Still, his confirmation of his career change in the same posting in fact suggests a major rift...
...Josh Baran, a New York Buddhist who has facilitated the Western trips of several high lamas, suggests that Hita's defection shouldn't cause adherents to lower their prayer flags. The West, he says, "has a romantic ideal that these lamas have some kind of super-vision and can look at a child and say, he's the one." While signs and portents may play a role in monastic successions, he explains, so do more worldly considerations. Tulkus often inherit considerable wealth and influence, and powerful monks will jockey to place their own candidates. The political needs of their lineage...
...that logic, Hita simply weeded himself out. Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar, former monk and friend of the Dalai Lama, recounts that when told years ago that Hita was to receive a traditional Buddhist education in India he expressed concern. Thurman's argument: "If he wanted Tibetan traditional [education] he could have reincarnated in a Tibetan family in exile." The result of the misplacement, he says, is that Hita "has broken away in a full-blown identity crisis." Thurman thinks that after some time in our "busy postmodern world," Hita may see the value of the Tibetan tradition, "which...