By: Rani S
The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Dalai Lama says in a new book “Voice for the Voiceless” that his successor will be born outside China.
Tibetans worldwide want the institution of the Dalai Lama to continue after the 89-year-old’s death; Dalai Lama had previously said the line of spiritual leaders might end with him. This is the first time the Dalai Lama has specified that his successor would be born in the “free world”, which Tibetans describe as outside China.
The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, fled at the age of 23 to India with thousands of other Tibetans in 1959 after a failed uprising against the rule of Mao Zedong’s Communists China. Beijing insists it will choose his successor, but the Dalai Lama has said any successor named by China would not be respected.
China brands the Dalai Lama, as a “separatist”. Dalai Lama notably won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for keeping alive the Tibetan cause. When asked about the book at a press briefing on Monday, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said the Dalai Lama “is a political exile who is engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion. Beijing said last month it hoped the Dalai Lama would “return to the right path” and that it was open to discussing his future if he met such conditions as recognising that Tibet and Taiwan are inalienable parts of China, whose sole legal government is that of the People’s Republic of China.
This proposal has already been rejected by the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in India. Supporters of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause include Richard Gere, a follower of Tibetan Buddhism, and Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
In his book, the Dalai Lama says he has received numerous petitions for more than a decade from a wide spectrum of Tibetan people, including senior monks and Tibetans living in Tibet and outside, “uniformly asking me to ensure that the Dalai Lama lineage be continued”.
Tibetan tradition holds that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death. The current Dalai Lama was identified as the reincarnation of his predecessor when he was two.