GRAAL -ARTHUR-EXCALIBUR - PAIX-LIBERTE-AMOUR DIVIN

PS: HH the Dalai Lama knows where he shall be reborn, no doubt, but is not going to tell the media and China…:) HH the Dalai Lama most probably is smiling about the whole thing and thinks it is all a waste of time, this *debating* where he might be reborn or not…it is up to him and no one else where and if he shall be reborn.

WHO WILL CONTROL TIBETAN REINCARNATION?

In Beijing this week, delegates to the National People’s Congress took a moment away from debating annual targets for consumer price inflation (3 per cent), unemployment (4.5 per cent), and cuts to carbon intensity (3.1 per cent), to reiterate their policy position on the migration of the soul. Not any soul, to be precise: the soul of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, and those of other high-ranking Tibetan Buddhist lamas.

Padma Choling, the chairman of the Standing Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Regional People’s Congress, explained to reporters that the power to determine the future location and durability of the Dalai Lama’s spirit properly resides with the Communist Party in Beijing. “It’s not up to the Dalai Lama,” Padma said. For the current bearer of that soul to suggest anything else is “blasphemy against Tibetan Buddhism,” he added.

The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures. After the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Tibetan authority, died, in 1989, the Dalai Lama picked a successor. But the Chinese government declared the appointment illegitimate. (The whereabouts of that child and his family is unknown.) The government announced the selection of a different boy as Panchen Lama. He is now twenty-five years old and served as a delegate to the recent meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, where he was seated, in his crimson and saffron robes, between a military officer in uniform and a prominent economist.

At the age of eighty, the Dalai Lama has begun to discuss a range of prospects for the future disposition of his soul. Traditionally, after he dies, a search party of senior monks would set out to locate his new incarnation, who is most often a boy toddler, who goes on to be trained as a monk and a leader. But the Dalai Lama has said that times have changed, and the old ways might not make sense; he has suggested that he could be reincarnated as a woman, or reincarnated while he’s still alive, a gradual migration that might give him more control over the process. In December, he told the BBC that the Tibetan public should decide if he reincarnated at all. “There is no guarantee that some stupid Dalai Lama won’t come next, who will disgrace himself or herself,” he said. “That would be very sad. So, much better that a centuries-old tradition should cease at the time of a quite popular Dalai Lama.”

The politics of reincarnation, which involves the occasional oddity of an atheist Communist Party pronouncing how and when a spiritual figure can be reborn, pose an increasingly urgent issue to Chinese officials. They are managing fraught relations between Beijing and China’s Tibetan population. Although the question is usually discussed in connection with the Dalai Lama, Beijing also asserts the right, under Order No. 5 of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, to govern the reincarnation of several thousand lesser-known incarnate monks, known as tulku lamas, who are understood to be reborn as great sages or saints.

And yet, in the frozen conflict between Beijing and its Tibetan critics, it can be important to distinguish between rhetorical artillery and the political events beneath. When the Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, some observers predicted an improvement in relations, in part because Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, had been friendly with the Dalai Lama in the nineteen-fifties; the monk had given him a watch, as a gift, which Xi’s father wore for many years. More than two years later, optimism has waned, in part because Chinese officials have continued to pressure foreign governments not to meet with the Dalai Lama, warning that their countries will face diplomatic and trade consequences if they do. (He met with only two national leaders in 2013, Dalia Grybauskaite, the President of Lithuania, and Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland, which was down from eleven such visits in 2001.)

An optimistic scenario for both sides would be that the recent barrage of criticism of the Dalai Lama is intended to show Beijing’s strength and firmness, as a prelude to improving relations. For months, Tibet-watchers have exchanged rumors that the Dalai Lama might be allowed to visit China. Robert Barnett, the director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, told me on Friday, “I think there may well be something behind the rumors.” But he cautioned, “I would guess that we are not yet even at the stage of talks about this yet, let alone on the cusp of an actual visit.” Barnett describes only “micro-signs” of change in Beijing, but he believes that a policy change would probably be abrupt, rather than telegraphed in advance by softening rhetoric. In his view, “the Party can afford to relax on its Tibet policies, because firstly it knows it faces much worse problems in Xinjiang”—the site of growing unrest among China’s Muslim minority—“and secondly, it has now instituted such draconian controls on movement and information in Tibet, way more than in the rest of China, that it must be fairly confident of controlling any situation there.”

The Politburo today faces, by its own description, a range of “unprecedented security risks,” including corrupt members of its own security forces, domestic political unrest over pollution and other complaints, and terrorism. If the Party can defuse tension on one of those fronts, it would take a crisis off the list. Under the current situation, the death of the Dalai Lama, when it comes (he calls it a “change of clothing”), will be a succession crisis that could lead to further instability. A few years ago, a senior Obama Administration official, in a conversation with me about Tibet, brought up the Avignon Popes, who were players in a fourteenth-century European struggle between Catholic authorities. “I think that’s what we’re heading for,” he said.