Who Is the Dalai Lama? A Reincarnated Monk and the Politics of Tibet
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In 1937 a search party of monks arrived at a farmhouse in north-eastern Tibet, showed a two-year-old boy a set of objects, and watched him pick out, from among the copies, the rosary, the drum and the walking stick that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had died four years earlier. The boy was Tenzin Gyatso, he was enthroned in Lhasa at four, fled to India at twenty-three when the Chinese army put down the Tibetan uprising of 1959, and has lived in exile since, the most recognised Buddhist in the world. He is the fourteenth of a line that began in the fifteenth century, and the question of who will be the fifteenth is a matter of state in Beijing.
The office
Dalai is Mongolian for ocean, and the title, ocean of wisdom, was given in 1578 by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan to a lama of the Gelug school, the reformed order founded by Tsongkhapa in the fourteenth century whose monks wear yellow hats; the lama took it as the third, counting his two predecessors backward. The Dalai Lamas are held to be successive rebirths of the same person and, beyond that, manifestations of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, who is Tibet's patron deity. The fifth Dalai Lama, in the seventeenth century, united Tibet under his rule with Mongol backing and built the Potala Palace in Lhasa, and from then until 1959 the office combined the spiritual headship of the Gelug school with the temporal government of Tibet.
How the next one is found
When a Dalai Lama dies, the search for his rebirth follows a procedure that mixes oracle and examination:
- •The direction of the search is taken from signs: the way the body's head turned, visions seen by senior lamas in a sacred lake, the state oracle's pronouncements
- •Boys born around the time of the death in the indicated region are visited, and candidates are tested with the previous lama's possessions mixed among copies
- •The chosen child is confirmed, sometimes by drawing lots from a golden urn, a Qing dynasty method that China insists upon, and brought to Lhasa to be educated by tutors for twenty years
- •A regent rules until he comes of age, which is why the death of a Dalai Lama has usually meant a decade or two of weak government
The fourteenth
Tenzin Gyatso assumed full power at fifteen, in 1950, as the People's Liberation Army entered eastern Tibet, and spent nine years attempting to coexist with a Chinese government that regarded Tibet as a province it had reclaimed. The uprising in Lhasa in March 1959 was crushed, he crossed the Himalaya on foot to India, and Nehru gave him and the eighty thousand who followed a home at Dharamsala, where the Tibetan government in exile has sat since. He has spent the decades since as a teacher, travelling the world, writing on compassion and on the meeting of Buddhism with science, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for a non-violent campaign for Tibetan autonomy, and giving up the political side of his office in 2011 to an elected prime minister, so that the exile government is now a democracy whose head of state is a monk with no formal power. His position on Tibet, the Middle Way, asks for genuine autonomy within China rather than independence, and China has refused to talk to him since 2010.
The succession
The Chinese government, which is officially atheist, asserts the right to approve the next Dalai Lama through the golden urn, and it demonstrated the intention in 1995, when the Dalai Lama recognised a six-year-old boy as the rebirth of the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking lama of the school; the boy was taken into Chinese custody within days and has not been seen since, and Beijing installed its own candidate. The Dalai Lama has said that his successor might be found outside Chinese control, might be a woman, might be recognised while he is still alive, or might not be recognised at all, since the institution exists to serve and could end; in July 2025, at ninety, he confirmed that the line would continue and that his own foundation alone would have the authority to recognise the rebirth. Two Dalai Lamas, one chosen in exile and one in Beijing, is the expected result, and a struggle between them for the loyalty of six million Tibetans is the shape of the coming decades.
What he represents
To Tibetan Buddhists he is the presence of compassion in a human body and the symbol of a nation whose religion, language and monasteries were devastated in the Cultural Revolution and are tightly controlled now; to the wider world he is the best-known face of Buddhism, whose books on happiness sell in millions and whose meetings with presidents draw protests from China each time. He has described himself as a simple monk, and the description is accurate about his life and misleading about his role, which has been to hold together, from a hill town in India, a people and a religion whose homeland he has not seen since 1959.
The takeaway
The Dalai Lama is the head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, held to be the fourteenth rebirth of a single being and a manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, found as a child by signs and tests, and from the seventeenth century until 1959 the ruler of Tibet. The current holder fled to India after the 1959 uprising, gave up political power to an elected exile government in 2011, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and faces a succession in which China intends to choose a rival fifteenth.