Word: karmapa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bodes well for Dorje that he is able to make light of turbulence. As the Karmapa, Tibetan Buddhism's third-ranking personage, he has carried the immeasurable burden of his people's expectations, supernatural and worldly, since he was first recognized at age 7 by a religious search party. The delegation was following the directions in a "prediction letter" left in a locket by the previous Karmapa when he died in 1981; it included Dorje's birth year, parents' names (Dondrub and Loga) and a location. According to followers of the Kagyu branch of Buddhism, the child persuaded his nomad...
Just how perilous was confirmed in 1995, when the Chinese government forcibly replaced the second-ranking personage, the Panchen Lama, with its own nominee. Most Tibetans rejected Beijing's choice, and many worried that the Karmapa might suffer a similar fate. But in 1999, the 14-year-old, in disguise, clambered out of a monastery window and was spirited on foot and by horseback and helicopter to India, becoming the Tibetan diaspora's teen hero in the process. A nervous Indian government refused to let him travel abroad for eight years...
...that time, the Dalai Lama has personally prepped the boy for a leadership role far beyond the Karmapa's Kagyu lineage. Although an active 72, the senior monk knows that after his death it may be years before his reincarnation is identified and then groomed to adulthood. Until then, the mantle of leadership could well rest with the Karmapa...
...Robert Thurman, an expert in Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University who knows the Dalai Lama well, has had repeated contact with the Karmapa and will soon publish a book titled Why the Dalai Lama Matters, worries that "if [the Karmapa] is pressured by devotees to travel and teach too much at too young an age at the expense of his studies," it could prevent him from "manifesting his full strength." But if he is allowed to mature, says Thurman, "50 years from now my son may have to write a book saying Why the Karmapa Matters...
...Meanwhile, for the head of a major Tibetan lineage to spend a sixth of every year in the United States would be a tremendous boost for the Buddhist community here. The Karmapa's p.r. representative claims he has attained a near sell-out of 21,000 seats at teachings he will give here (starting with one Saturday at Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom) almost solely on the strength of e-mail chains. Many in the audience will be his age. When a reporter noted that the Kagyu lineage is known for its stress on practice and that his own generation...