That is the opening line for an article which seems to come from a satirical paper, except that it does not.
"HONG KONG — Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama
will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials
repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms.
Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama,
who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him
as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the
annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing.
Officials
have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the
proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate
process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks,
visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.
Party
functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent
speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate.
That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a
succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts
China’s presence and policies in Tibet. Their anger welled up on Wednesday, as it had a day earlier.
Zhu Weiqun,
a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told
reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially,
no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the
Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.
“Decision-making
power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, and over the end or
survival of this lineage, resides in the central government of China,”
said Mr. Zhu, formerly a deputy head of the United Front Department of
the Communist Party, which oversees dealings with religious and other
nonparty groups. He now leads the ethnic and religious affairs committee
of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory
body that meets at the same time as the Legislature, or National
People’s Congress.
Mr. Zhu accused the Dalai Lama of trampling on sacred traditions.
“In religious terms, this is a betrayal of the succession of Dalai Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism,” he said.
“The
14th Dalai Lama has taken an extremely frivolous and disrespectful
attitude toward this issue,” Mr. Zhu continued. “Where in the world is
there anyone else who takes such a frivolous attitude toward his own
succession?”
The
idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of
reincarnation and hurling accusations of heresy at the Dalai Lama might
have Marx turning in his grave. The party is committed to atheism in its
ranks, though it accepts religious belief in the public. And President
Xi Jinping has declared his fealty to Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism.
But
the dispute over reincarnation has profound implications for Beijing
and its hold over Tibetan areas, where protests and self-immolations
have brought into focus simmering discontent. The Chinese government is
determined to manage all aspects of Tibetan Buddhist tradition,
including the most sacred rituals of succession, to ensure that the
restive region remains firmly under Chinese control.
Party
leaders would prefer to insert themselves surreptitiously into a
succession process that carries the full weight of Tibetan tradition
than to install a new Dalai Lama by fiat, which would almost certainly
undermine the new religious leader’s credibility inside Tibet.
So
if the incumbent Dalai Lama, who remains revered in Tibet more than
half a century after he fled into exile in 1959, uses his clout to
nullify the historic selection process, China faces the prospect of
continuing discontent there after his death. It would in essence be a
last act of defiance by the Dalai Lama.
“I don’t think the Dalai Lama would mind if you saw this through the prism of Monty Python,” Robert Barnett,
director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University,
said in a telephone interview. “But he is reminding the Chinese that,
from his perspective and the perspective of probably nearly all
Tibetans, the Chinese don’t really have a credible role in deciding
these things.”
The Dalai Lama has not commented on the latest warnings from China. But Lobsang Sangay,
the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, based in
Dharamsala, in northern India, was scathing on Tuesday, after the
governor of the Tibetan autonomous region, Padma Choling, told reporters that the Dalai Lama had profaned the Tibetan Buddhist faith by suggesting that he might not be reincarnated.
“It’s
like Fidel Castro saying, ‘I will select the next pope and all the
Catholics should follow.’ That is ridiculous,” Mr. Sangay told Reuters
on Tuesday. “It’s none of Padma Choling or any of the Communist Party’s
business, mainly because Communism believes in atheism and religion
being poisonous.”
The
Dalai Lama turns 80 in July, and as he has advanced in years, he and
the Chinese government have both probably kept in mind the example of
the succession of Panchen Lama, another senior figure in Tibetan
Buddhism. After the 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama
confirmed a boy in Tibet as the next reincarnation in 1995. But the
Chinese government hid away that boy and his parents and installed its
own choice as the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama has indicated that he
does not want to experience the same fate.
“Whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not is up to the Tibetan people,” the Dalai Lama said in an interview
with the BBC in December. “There is no guarantee that some stupid Dalai
Lama won’t come next, who will disgrace himself or herself. That would
be very sad. So, much better that a centuries-old tradition should cease
at the time of a quite popular Dalai Lama.”
Since
1995, the Chinese authorities have claimed an increasingly active role
in the succession of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist leaders,
Mr. Barnett said. Under the Qing dynasty, he said, the Manchu emperors
who ruled China maintained a limited role in confirming the succession
of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist leaders, but the Communist
Party has demanded an increasingly hands-on role in intricate rituals of
succession.
“They
finally ended up with the state deciding whether people could
reincarnate,” he said. “The lamas are left with a role that is in a way
token in that process.”
Tibetans
are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese
government, Dicki Chhoyang, the head of the Department of Information
and International Relations of the Tibetan government in exile in
Dharamsala, said in an interview.
“The
person selected by the Chinese government is just as much a victim of
the situation as anyone, so there’s nothing personal held against that
person,” she said. “Communism, in theory, is atheist, so we’re just
like, ‘This is too much.’ ”
Tibetans,
however, remain convinced that the Dalai Lama will ultimately continue
his lineage of leading monks of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, a
succession that dates from the 14th century, Mr. Barnett said. The
Dalai Lama’s warnings on succession, he said, are best understood as a
way of encouraging Tibetans to focus on the issue and the options.
“The Tibetan people would never have faith in a so-called reincarnation appointed by the Chinese government,” Tsering Woeser,
a Tibetan author based in Beijing who is critical of Beijing’s policies
in her homeland, said in an online interview. “But I believe that the
Dalai Lama will reincarnate.”
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