“The new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world”
In a new book, the 14th Dalai Lama gives further details about his succession
The 14th Dalai Lama has released a new book in which he addresses some of the key challenges facing his occupied country Tibet, including the matter of his succession.
The book, Voice of the Voiceless, was released last week and includes a defiant and clear statement that there will be a 15th Dalai Lama, who will be born outside of China, and that the succession is a matter for Tibetans, not the Chinese government.
Referring to his upcoming 90th birthday, the Dalai Lama writes that given his age, a growing number of Tibetans are thinking ahead, regarding both religious matters and Tibet’s political struggle.
On what he calls “the political front of our campaign for the freedom of the Tibetan people”, the Dalai Lama notes that “we now have a substantial population of Tibetans outside the free world, so our struggle will go on, no matter what.” He notes that elected officials now lead a Central Tibetan Administration and Tibetan Parliament in exile in northern India, institutions that he played a key role in establishing.
On the matter of the lineage of the Dalai Lama, he notes that since the 1960s, he has expressed that it is a matter for the Tibetan people whether or not it continues, and that the institution will cease when its work is done. However, he also reveals the support that he has received from numerous sources:
“For more than a decade now, I have received numerous petitions and letters from a wide spectrum of Tibetan people—senior lamas from the various Tibetan traditions, abbots of monasteries, diaspora Tibetan communities across the world, and many prominent and ordinary Tibetans inside Tibet—as well as Tibetan Buddhist communities from the Himalayan region and Mongolia, uniformly asking me to ensure that the Dalai Lama lineage be continued.”
Referring back to a statement he made in 2011 about the future of the Dalai Lama lineage, he states that it would “totally inappropriate” the Chinese Communist Party “to meddle in the system of reincarnation of lamas, let alone that of the Dalai Lama”, given its rejection of religion and core tenets of Tibetan Buddhism such as past and future lives. “Such meddling, I pointed out, contradicts their own political ideology and only reveals their double standards.”
Chinese officials have repeatedly stated that when the time comes to identify the 15th Dalai Lama, it will be the Chinese government that will impose its candidate on Tibet and the wider Buddhist world. CCP officials have even contradicted the Dalai Lama when he raised the possibility that his lineage might end with him and that there will be no 15th Dalai Lama.
In 2015 Zhu Weiqun, then the Chairman of China’s Committee for Ethnic and Religious Affairs, gave an insight to why an atheist government, whose party members are forbidden from religious practice, are so interested in the lineage of the Dalai Lama.
Writing in the state-run Global Times, Zhu stated that the succession “is first and foremost an important political matter”, that “whoever has the name of Dalai Lama will control political power in Tibet”, and that Beijing “has never given up, and will never give up, the right to decide the reincarnation affairs of the Dalai Lama.”
This is vigorously refuted in Voice of the Voiceless. The Dalai Lama ends the chapter on the future of the institution by pledging that his successor will not be born under CCP control.
“(S)ince the purpose of a reincarnation is to carry on the work of the predecessor, the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world so that the traditional mission of the Dalai Lama — that is, to be the voice for universal compassion, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and the symbol of Tibet embodying the aspirations of the Tibetan people — will continue.”
For the past decade, Free Tibet has been urging the UK government to issue a public position or legislation recognising support for the 14th Dalai Lama and recognising his authority over his succession. Free Tibet and its movement allies have also insisted that this statement should be clear that any Dalai Lama imposed by Beijing will not be recognised by the UK government.
The US government already has legislation recognising Tibetans’ unique right to oversee the succession, threatening sanctions on officials that interfere.
The closest the UK has come so far came in a parliamentary debate in December 2023, when Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Minister of State for Indo-Pacific responded to a question on China’s interference by saying that the succession of the Dalai Lama was a matter for “the relevant religious authorities”.
