There’s a new
law in force in China these days that says the Chinese authorities in
future would choose reincarnating Tibetan lamas. Partly in anticipation
of such a move and mostly to keep pace with the changing times, His
Holiness the Dalai Lama said he has been toying with different methods
to choose his successor. This standoff between Tibetan Buddhism and the
Chinese Communist Party has brought international media spotlight on
this unique system of selecting Tibetan spiritual leaders and on one
culture’s spiritual beliefs and a state’s political ambitions.
Buddhists
believe that highly realized beings have the capacity to choose where
and when they want to be reborn. It’s a matter of putting the efforts
of a lifetime (or, in most cases, lifetimes) to adjust one’s internal
mechanism to reach the level when one could project one’s spiritual
qualities over time and space. These qualities enable highly realized
beings to manifest themselves simultaneously in several places, as the
historical Buddha did when he was seen teaching at several places at
the same time. Or, over many lifetimes, rebirth after rebirth, and in
different life forms, as the Buddha did and which forms the basis and
the moral of the classic book, the Jataka Tales.
The Chinese
authorities once considered all this voodoo, a leftover from Tibet’s
dark, feudal superstitious past. Back in 1954, Mao Zedong told His
Holiness the Dalai Lama, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” Later,
the Tibetans were told that there could not be “two suns in the same
sky: communism and Buddhism.”
This forthright Chinese attitude
to their culture cost the Tibetan people dear. At the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1969, Tibet had lost about 6,000 monasteries.
The inmates of these centres of learning had either fled or been
imprisoned or died. Tibet became a land of lost content. This is the
equivalent of saying that one fine day India finds all its universities
in ruins and nothing is seen or heard of all the promising students and
brilliant faculty members.
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