![]() (The Dalai Lama recently said that the Panchen Lama is alive and having a normal education. Sources continue to suggest he’s still alive and well.” The question is: what’s become of the legitimate Panchen? He was arrested when he was 6 he is now 29 years old. What the Chinese essentially did by kidnapping the Dalai Lama’s candidate and then installing their own was to give China a role in identifying the next Dalai Lama. “These two lamas have traditionally played a role in the identification of the other. In 1995 the Dalai Lama identified the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, “a very senior, important figure in the Gelug tradition,” explains Bruno, who spent years living with Tibetans in exile. In 1991 the party for the first time issued a directive that said reincarnation is allowed, but the process has to follow strict controls. The most notorious story of China’s “reincarnation management” is the kidnapping of the Panchen Lama at the age of 6. Religions are protected under the constitution, but the CCP’s attitude seems to be, ‘If we protect them, we’ll do so to benefit the party, not the believer.’” The irony, of course, is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is atheist. “There have been around 870 tulkus that China has officially approved. “China has been stage-managing the selection of reincarnated lamas for some time,” notes Greg Bruno, author of Blessings From Beijing: Inside China’s Soft-Power War on Tibet. And the institution of the tulku has not been spared. Since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, China has perpetrated an increasingly brutal takeover of Tibetan life that has culminated in decades of totalitarian rule and egregious human rights abuses. ![]() They have destroyed religion wherever they’ve encountered it,” he said. They have robbed and destroyed monasteries, forcing the monks to join their armies or else killing them outright. “Already they have consumed much of Mongolia, where they have outlawed the search for the reincarnation of Jetsun Dampa, the incarnate head of the country. In 1932, the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, made a prescient prediction that warned against the Chinese Communist revolutionaries. Both bills had broad bipartisan support.Īttempts to interfere in the selection of lamas inside and outside of Tibet by the Chinese government go back decades. Bush, that binds the US government to take certain actions in support of the Tibetan people, as well as the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama in 2007. As examples of former acts of Congress on Tibet of particular importance to Tibetans, Mecacci named The Tibetan Policy Act, passed unanimously by Congress in 2002 and signed into law by George W. “This bill confirms that the decades-long support that the US Congress has provided to the Tibetan people is as strong as ever, and this is something the Chinese government will have to keep clearly in mind if they really decide to act and select the next Dalai Lama and to continue to interfere with religious freedom and basic human rights in Tibet,” Matteo Mecacci, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, told Tricycle. ![]() The bill states that the Senate “ expresses its sense that the identification and installation of Tibetan Buddhist religious leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama, is a matter that should be determined solely within the Tibetan Buddhist faith community, in accordance with the inalienable right to religious freedom.” It also marks “the 10th anniversary of a series of protests in Lhasa, which spread across Tibet, and which were suppressed by Chinese forces,” and notes the horrifying statistic that “since the 2008 protests, at least 152 Tibetans in Tibet are known to have self-immolated” in a desperate act of defiance against the status quo.Īt the center of the bill’s intent, however, is a defense of Tibetan Buddhists’ right to choose tulkus, the reincarnations of spiritual leaders, whose selection process is supposed to proceed on religious, not political, lines. The resolution, which passed on April 25, commemorates “the 59th anniversary of Tibet’s 1959 uprising as ‘Tibetan Rights Day’” on March 10. In a strong gesture of support for religious freedoms in Tibet, the US Senate has stepped in to affirm the right of the Tibetan people to choose the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama for themselves.
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