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This is a particularly vexed matter because Tibetan Buddhism is an unusually charged and esoteric set of practices uncommonly difficult to translate, "a unique blend," as the Buddhist scholar Christmas Humphreys once wrote, "of the noblest Buddhist principles and debased sorcery." Its core, as with all Buddhism, is a belief in suffering and emptiness, and the need for compassion in the face of those. But unlike the stripped-down austerities of Zen, say, Tibetan Buddhism swarms with animist spirits, vivid symbolic depictions of copulating bodies, and Tantric practices of magic and sexuality that, taken out of context or practiced without the right training, are inflammable.
The Dalai Lama's very refusal to be dictatorial and his calm assurance that Tibetan Buddhist centers, unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, "have no central authority" and are "all quite independent" have left him somewhat powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy (a prominent lama was slapped with a $10 million sexual-harassment suit in California). And his wish to make peace among the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism has so infuriated a few that earlier this year three members of his inner circle were found murdered in their beds, apparently by a breakaway sect.
Though the Dalai Lama deals with such problems serenely, having endured insurrections for a half-century, the issues of delegating responsibility and authorizing the reincarnations of departed lamas take on particular urgency as he passes through his 60s. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; but it became doubly so two years ago, when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, by placing the Dalai Lama's six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate of its own. (The Panchen Lama is the figure officially responsible for authorizing the Dalai Lama's own incarnation--and the maneuver suggested that the Chinese may have few qualms about coming up with their own puppet as the next Dalai Lama.)
In response to this, the man trained for 18 years in dialectics has been canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said that "if I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a 15th Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because"--the logic, as ever, is rock solid--"the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life." So, he goes on, "the reincarnation of the 14th Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation that disturbs, or is an obstacle to, that work. Quite clear, isn't it?" In any case, he says cheerfully, "at a certain state the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. That does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism will cease. But the institution comes and goes, comes and goes."