Dalai Lama Amid Health Concerns As Succession Plan Looms

New Delhi:

The 14th Dalai Lama is not getting any younger and the lack of clarity over his succession seems to have worried his followers about his overall health and the future of Tibetan Buddhists without him. However, the spiritual leader believes that now is not the time to think of the future as he has dreamt that he’ll live beyond the age of 100. 

“According to my dream, I may live 110 years,” the Nobel laureate told news agency Reuters when asked about his health and how he was feeling following his knee surgery in New York in June. 

The knee surgery meant the Dalai Lama had to avoid audiences for nearly three months. But now the 89-year-old is back from New York to his Himalayan residence in Dharamshala town in northern India but is still walking gingerly with the help of aides, although for longer distances he is taken around in a golf cart. He resumed meeting his followers in September and now sees hundreds of people three times a week at his home surrounded by lush green and snow-topped hills.

 “The knee too is improving…Not much serious problem,” he said after blessing more than 300 visitors from India and overseas at a regular audience. 

Concerns Over Dalai Lama’s Succession

The spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhists has been disarming questioners about his successor with similar replies for years. Though Dalai Lama’s prediction of living for another two decades is reassuring for his followers, more clarity on his succession – including if and where he will be reincarnated – could come from him when he turns 90 in July, said Dolma Tsering Teykhang, the deputy speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, also based in Dharamshala.

“We are just lay people, we can’t fathom his wisdom, so we are waiting for his clear guidance,” Teykhang told Reuters in her parliament office about 2 km (1.5 miles) from the Dalai Lama’s residence.

Tibetan Buddhists believe that learned monastics are reincarnated after death as newborns.

Teykhang said that although even thinking of the current Dalai Lama’s demise brings tears to her eyes, there is a system in place for the Tibetan-government-in-exile to continue its political work while officers of the Dalai Lama’s Gaden Phodrang Foundation would be responsible for searching and recognising the next Dalai Lama.

The Zurich-based Gaden Phodrang Foundation was set up by the current Dalai Lama in 2015 to “maintain and support the tradition and institution of the Dalai Lama with regard to the religious and spiritual duties of the Dalai Lama”, according to its website. Its senior officers include monks living in India and Switzerland.

“We can’t take it for granted that he is going to live 113 years,” said Teykhang, referring to a lifespan the current Dalai Lama had earlier predicted for himself, and pointing out that the previous Dalai Lama died earlier than expected at 58.

“Without His Holiness, the struggle of Tibet, I don’t know where it will go. But then I put my hope in the administration that he has built in 60 years from nothing to this level.”

Born in 1935, the Dalai Lama was identified as the reincarnation of his predecessor when he was two years old. It is possible he will leave clues before he dies about where his incarnation would be born and to whom, said Teykhang.

While earlier a regent would take over temporarily once a Dalai Lama died, that system is longer in place, she said.

Dalai Lama And India-China Relations

His clarity over his succession plan becomes all the more important as his institution and persona go beyond Tibetan Buddhism into the realm of geopolitics and more pertinently to India-China relations. 

The 14th Dalai Lama, the best-known living proponent of Buddhism, fled to India along with thousands of Tibetans in early 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Beijing insists it will choose his successor, but the Dalai Lama has said it was possible his incarnation could be found in India and warned that any other successor named by China would not be respected.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for keeping alive the Tibetan cause. Beijing sees him as a dangerous separatist, although he has embraced what he calls a “Middle Way” of peacefully seeking genuine autonomy and religious freedom within China.

The Dalai Lama last month congratulated Donald Trump for his victory in the U.S. election and Teykhang said the incoming president could be good news for Tibetans “because he always was with Tibet, he was with human rights, he was with the fact that Tibet is not a part of China since antiquity”.

The prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Sikyong Penpa Tserin, has been in the US this month and met officials including Uzra Zeya, US special coordinator for Tibetan issues.

“Our Sikyong is there to figure out how the changes are happening,” said Teykhang.

“I think Tibetans are very fortunate because consecutive Republican or Democratic administrations…no matter how big their differences are, but on the matter of Tibet, they are always on board together.”