Word: lamas
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...Lowdown on the new arrival had been that he was brilliant but austere. "He's not jolly like the Dalai Lama," warned an American devotee. "He's a bit stiff." But the baby-faced 22-year-old who may be Tibet's next great hope seemed perfectly relaxed in his room at New York City's Waldorf Towers hotel, none the worse for his first intercontinental flight. Encountering a laptop-bearing reporter, Ogyen Trinley Dorje inquired eagerly about the computer; like his mentor, he's apparently a Mac fan. Asked if he'd managed to sleep on the plane...
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...
Your choice of the dalai lama was most intriguing; the irony of it made me question your according him such a rank. What influence does a man have when his deepest desire remains unfulfilled, when his influence fails him at the very point on which he would want it to have an impact? Sadia Khan, NEW DELHI...
...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...