Word: lamas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dalai Lama's very refusal to be dictatorial and his calm assurance that Tibetan Buddhist centers, unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, "have no central authority" and are "all quite independent" have left him somewhat powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy (a prominent lama was slapped with a $10 million sexual-harassment suit in California). And his wish to make peace among the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism has so infuriated a few that earlier this year three members of his inner circle were found murdered in their beds, apparently...
Though the Dalai Lama deals with such problems serenely, having endured insurrections for a half-century, the issues of delegating responsibility and authorizing the reincarnations of departed lamas take on particular urgency as he passes through his 60s. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly so two years ago, when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, by placing the Dalai Lama's six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate...
...response to this, the man trained for 18 years in dialectics has been canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said that "if I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a 15th Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because"--the logic, as ever, is rock solid--"the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life." So, he goes on, "the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation...
...ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lese majeste. (When I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, "No, no.") And even relatives have sometimes found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he once described Mao as "remarkable," has referred to himself as "half Marxist, half Buddhist," and has stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous "Zone of Peace"). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified...
When I left Dharamsala at dawn, the Dalai Lama was leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up behind the distant snowcaps. It struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day--exile, global travel and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture known as the "Forbidden Kingdom" now faces machine guns on the one hand and Chinese discos...