Seventy-three years ago Tenzen Gyatso was born. A couple of years later ecclesiastical authorities following the advice of astrologers and their own investigations identified the young boy as the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama.
As a rationalistic Unitarian Universalist Buddhist my read on the tulku system is, frankly, suspicious. And when I see figures such as Steven Seagal get named as tulkus I find it hard to take it all very seriously. On the other hand there is a very intriguing system for identifying a child that does tweak my interest.
The tests (mainly featuring laying out a variety of objects between the senior authorities and the candidate who is then expected to pick out the ones that were owned by the late cleric) are designed, it strikes me, to find a very smart, intuitive people-pleaser. As I see it the child is someone who at a subliminal level can observe the hint of twitches in the older monks, can notice the slightest shift in their eyes, can even, perhaps, smell the changes in their body odor as he (almost always, but not absolutely he) contemplates one object or another. All of this, I’m sure, occurring right below the conscious level.
Whatever. The kid picks right. And then is packed off to twenty plus years of intensive training including academics and various spiritual disciplines.
And every once in a while, what a character the system produces. Tenzen Gyatso, for instance.
As a part of the non-Tibetan Buddhist community I am occasionally annoyed when the popular press or just well meaning conversationalists assume the Dalai Lama is the pope of Buddhism.
Little could be farther from the truth. Reaching for an analogy, the Dalai Lama is more like the Patriarch of Serbian Orthodoxy. (In a world lacking a Roman Catholic Church. There has never been a single principal organizing authority within world Buddhism…)
All this said, the Dalai Lama is one of the signal figures of our times. A wonderful spokesperson for the suffering Tibetan people and a guide for all of us seeking to live public lives.
Many of us worry about what will happen when he dies. The Chinese authorities are taking the long view in this regard. And they’ve already detained and dropped into their gulags the person who is by tradition charged with finding the next Dalai Lama…
So, my best wishes to his holiness on the occasion of his seventy-third birthday.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In