DHARAMSHALA, India — Days ahead of his 90th birthday, Tibetan Buddhism's top spiritual leader said the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue.
The Dalai Lama made the statement in a pre-recorded video that aired at the start of a three-day religious conference in Dharamshala, the Himalayan town in India where he has lived in exile since China thwarted an uprising in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in 1959. The elderly leader looked frail; he read slowly and paused often while reading out the statement in Tibetan.
The English translation published on his website said the search for his successor will be carried out by The Gaden Phodrang Trust, a religious body of Buddhist monks who are part of the office of the Dalai Lama in India.
In what appears to be a nod to China, the statement adds that "no one else has any such authority to interfere in the matter." China has stated that it alone has the authority to appoint the next leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet is an autonomous region controlled by China.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that the Dalai Lama is reincarnated after his death. Originally named Lhamo Thondup, the current Dalai Lama is the 14th in the line of leaders, and was born in a family of farmers in 1935. When he was 2 years old, a search party of the Tibetan government identified him as the reincarnation after showing him several possessions that belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama.
"In every case, the infant correctly identified those belonging to the 13th Dalai Lama, saying, 'It's mine. It's mine,'" his official website says. "This more or less convinced the search party that they had found the new incarnation."
It is unclear when the search for his successor will start, though the process can take several years. The Dalai Lama has only said it would be "in accordance with tradition."
The Tibetan spiritual leader had previously speculated that his successor might be an adult, could be an "attractive" woman, or there might not be one at all. In his recently released book Voice for the Voiceless, he said that the new Dalai Lama will be born "in the free world" and outside of China.
China attempts to control the succession plan
China's government considers the Dalai Lama, in the words of China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, as a "political exile engaged in separatist activities under the guise of religion." Mao says the spiritual leader "has absolutely no right to represent the people" of Tibet.
At a press conference, Mao commented that reincarnations of high-ranking lamas must have "approval by the central government, follow religious rituals and historical customs, and be handled in accordance with national laws and regulations."
China passed legislation in 2007 that says the search for reincarnated lamas must take place within China, and that the government has the final say in recognizing them. It insists on the use of a ritual in which the names of final candidates for the Dalai Lama's are put in a golden urn, and whoever's lot is drawn from the urn is then considered the reincarnation.
But Tibetans argue that not all Dalai Lamas have been born in China, and not all have been selected using the urn.
China claims authority to approve the selection of clerics in other religions as well. And it points to areas of historical continuity.
For example, some Manchu emperors of China's final dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), chose Tibetan lamas as their spiritual teachers and portrayed themselves as patrons of Tibetan Buddhism, to assert authority over large swathes of Tibet, Mongolia, and current-day Russia, while largely leaving these distant regions to govern themselves.
"If you realize that Lhasa is 1,500 miles from Beijing and that it's separated by the highest plateau in the world, it makes sense," notes Gray Tuttle, Leila Hadley Luce Assistant Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.
"This is how empires work. They allow the local elite to rule their own region under the framework of an empire," he says.
But in Tibetan Buddhism, "the basic idea is that these leaders, unlike the rest of us, can control where and when they reincarnate," says Cameron Warner, an associate professor of anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark, and chairperson of the Leadership and Reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas Research Network.
"So in that sense," he says, "if the Dalai Lama, who's alive now, says, I'm not going to reincarnate in China, from a religious sense, there's nothing China can do about it."
Once the Dalai Lama dies, a search team of high-ranking lamas, often under the supervision of a regent, searches for the "soul child" with the aid of omens, dreams and apparitions. Regents and tutors oversee the child's education and training to become a spiritual leader.
If this process produces two competing incarnations of the Dalai Lama, one backed by the Tibetan government in exile and another by China's government, it would not be an entirely new situation.
Tibetan Buddhists believe that high-ranking lamas can have multiple "emanations" or reincarnations at the same time. The Dalai Lama himself is believed by his followers to be an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist god of compassion.
There are multiple claimants to the Panchen Lama and the Karmapa Lama, the second- and third-highest ranking clerics, respectively, in Tibetan Buddhism.
In 1995, the Dalai Lama announced the discovery of a 6-year-old boy as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama. China felt the Dalai Lama's announcement had challenged its authority. Days later, authorities took custody of the Dalai's pick for Panchen Lama, and Beijing later chose its own.
China's government insists that the Panchen Lama will play a key role in picking the next Dalai Lama. Tibetan exiles say the Panchen Lama has input into the selection, but is not the sole decider.
For Tibetans, dealing with rival claimants to spiritual authority, "is a matter of faith. It's something personal, something deep from your heart," says Lobsang Sangay, a senior visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, and former Sikyong, or president, of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
"So, yes, the Chinese government will have a fake Panchen Lama appointing a fake Dalai Lama and Tibetans will see that boy — unfortunately a Tibetan — as a fake one," Sangay says.
But most Tibetans and foreigners, Sangay argues, will recognize and respect the reincarnation selected according to the current Dalai Lama's instructions.
"In some sense, it's not that big of a deal because most of the religious leaders for the Buddhists in Tibet are all living outside of Tibet already" in exile, says Aarhus University's Cameron Warner.
But he also notes that in their poems and songs, Tibetans express profound sadness that their spiritual leaders are absent from Tibet, creating a spiritual void, as if the sun and the moon were missing from the sky.
A delicate time for the Tibetan community
The announcement of the Dalai Lama's succession plan comes at a delicate time for the Tibetan community. President Trump's cuts to USAID slashed support to the Tibetan government-in-exile by more than a third.
There are concerns around the health of the Dalai Lama. And there seems to be no resolution in sight of the Tibet dispute: the exiled Tibetan leaders and China haven't had formal talks since 2010.
Instead, China intensified patrolling around the borders following the 2008 Tibetan unrest, squeezing the flow of Tibetan refugees coming to India every year to a trickle. It also built a network of border villages and moved millions of Han Chinese into them, which critics say is an attempt to change Tibet's ethnic makeup. Geopolitical analysts say the villages are meant to double up as China's eyes and ears.
Pempa Tsering is the current Sikyong, or president, of the exiled government.
"When I visit different countries, I jokingly ask them, do you have good brain surgeons? If you have one, we will bring Chinese leaders one by one, do surgery, put common sense and send them back," he told NPR in an interview in April. "That's all they need."
The succession plan has also prompted a reckoning of the middle-ground policy adopted by the Dalai Lama starting the 1980s, which called for Tibetan autonomy from China instead of complete independence.
Namgyal Dolkar Lhagyari, a member of the Tibetan parliament, said the conciliatory approach has led to China taking them "for granted."
"I believe that it's time the Sikyong becomes much more vigorous and let them know that if you don't respond to the memorandum of Tibetan autonomy within the timeframe, we will take a decision where it won't continue to be that. It will change to self-determination," she says.
Exiled Tibetans prepare to celebrate
Even as they jostle with the bigger questions, the exiled Tibetan community is gearing up to celebrate the Dalai Lama's 90th birthday. In Dharamshala, his followers have put up posters and billboards along the streets.
Tens of thousands are expected to attend the days of cultural events the community plans to hold this week. This includes Buddhist leaders of various sects, prominent politicians from India's ruling Hindu nationalist party and longtime devotees like actor Richard Gere.
At the marketplace outside the Dalai Lama temple, hawkers like Sonam Tsomu have stocked their carts with Tibetan trinkets: bangles and necklaces made of colorful beads and bobbleheads of little Lamas. But on the Dalai Lama's birthday, she says she will shut her shop and go to the temple.
"I will wear new clothes and attend prayers, like every year," she says. "After all he is our mother, father, everything."
Sonam is among the generations of Tibetans who have found refuge in Dharamshala. In the decades after the Tibetan uprising in 1959, tens of thousands of Tibetans braved frostbite and Himalayan avalanches to live in the proximity of the 14th Dalai Lama.
"Back in the day, most Tibetans who came in worked as mountain porters or at road construction sites," says Tenzin Tsundue, a prominent Tibetan activist in Dharamshala. "It's what my mother did too."
Over the years, the Indian government helped Tibetans settle in two mountain towns: Dharamshala in the north and Kollengel in the south. Today, the community of more than 50,000 runs schools and hospitals, sells Tibetan food and art, elects their own lawmakers and president.
Some like Tsundue have dedicated their lives to advocating for freedom and a safe return to their homeland.
"I knew early on that I wouldn't make a lot of money," he says. "So I simplified everything in my life. I own two pairs of clothes, two shirts, two shorts, two jeans. I am a vegetarian because it's cheaper. I have no drinking habits, no smoking habits, no gambling, no disco."
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