Dalai Lama issue: India can’t be compliant to China or seen as insensitive to Tibetans, says Robert Barnett

STRAP: Just days before his 90th birthday on July 6, the Dalai Lama — the revered spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism — declared that he would have a successor. The announcement is more than a theological decision since China has long sought control over the succession process.

Neelam Raaj spoke to Robert Barnett, a leading Tibet scholar at SOAS, London, for insights into this high-stakes contest between faith and power.

As someone who has studied Tibet closely, were you surprised by the Dalai Lama’s recent announcement regarding his succession, especially given his earlier remarks suggesting he might be the last incumbent?

For many years, the Dalai Lama has been reminding the public that he can choose from innumerable options and alternatives in terms of his succession. Sometimes he expressed this in a light-hearted way, such as saying he might come back as a butterfly, while at other times he referred to not returning at all, or he listed little-known theological alternatives, such as transmitting his consciousness to another adult through a process called “trulwa” or emanation.

But all of these alternatives were reminders that in Tibetan Buddhism it is the individual lama, and the karma of that individual lama, which decides how or whether a lama returns. Of course, these have all been messages to China and its rulers that their claim to have the sole right to control reincarnations makes little sense in the religious context. The Dalai Lama had also always said that the decision about whether he returns would depend on the wishes of his followers, and his officials spent the last year or more getting written opinions from the wider Buddhist community about that request.

This process was partly ceremonial – it reflects a very traditional understanding that a lama reincarnates only if his or her followers request for him or her to do so. So, no one doubted that the community would ask the Dalai Lama to return, and his decision to reincarnate is not a surprise. But here again the Dalai Lama seems to be sending a message to China, namely that, unlike Beijing, his decisions and his legitimacy are not based on the use of force or the resort to traditional authority, but on processes of consent and consultation.

Tell us about the history of this contentious golden urn method of picking a successor.

Contemporary Chinese officials say that in 1792-3 an order was given by the then emperor of China requiring Tibetans to use a golden vase or urn as the final stage in deciding between three children identified as candidate reincarnations of a high lama. After reciting appropriate prayers, the winning name would be drawn from the urn. This claim is correct, and , , the golden urn system was used scores of times in Tibet and Mongolia and other areas to select reincarnations up until the early 1900s.

The current Chinese government claims that it is thus merely invoking a long-running legal precedent that requires Tibetans today to only use the same system and at the same time to recognise that only the Chinese government can authorize and select reincarnations. However, there are major weaknesses in this claim. Firstly, there had been scarcely any mention or use of the golden urn system for nearly 100 years before Beijing abruptly reintroduced it in 1995.

Secondly, the emperors in the past who were involved with reincarnations and the golden urn were not Chinese and their governments were not Chinese – they were Manchus and were Buddhist believers, and were regarded by Tibetans at the time in many cases as emanations of the Buddha. Thirdly, it is not clear that use of the urn had meant in the past that the government in Beijing was seen by Tibetans as a sign of imperial sovereignty; according to the pioneering work of the historian Max Oidtmann, the process seems to have been more one of cooperation between Tibetans and the Manchus rather than one imposed on the former by the latter.

And fourthly, the Manchu involvement in reincarnations seems to have been often understood by Tibetans as a kind of available option at times of dispute, rather than a law they were required to follow. And in general, religions and their believers tend to give priority to traditions and beliefs, rather than state laws. So, Beijing’s invocation of 18th-century Manchu-Tibetan religious relations as proof of Chinese sovereignty today describes a world that seems vastly different from the contemporary situation.

How do you anticipate Beijing will respond to this announcement? If China proceeds to name its own successor, are we looking at the possibility of two Dalai Lamas?

It seems very likely, now that the Dalai Lama has announced that there will be a 15th Dalai Lama, that China will feel required to assert its sovereignty in these matters by naming its own Dalai Lama. So we are looking at a future, after the lifetime of the present Dalai Lama, where there will be two competing Dalai Lamas. But this will not be like a medieval competition between two rival popes, because only one of these Dalai Lamas will have been selected according to religious traditions and with the imprimatur of the previous Dalai Lama – the one who will be selected by the exiles.

The Chinese candidate will have been selected by the Chinese state, whose rulers are by definition atheists if not, at times, outright enemies of religion. So, the Chinese candidate is at risk of having limited credibility among the Buddhist community and worldwide. Yet we might want to keep in mind that everything we are reading about is at some level a process of signalling to China. So the Dalai Lama’s announcement is also an indirect reminder that if China wished to, it could still offer him a settlement.

That settlement is actually easy to imagine, in theory: the Chinese could simply return to the position they took on reincarnation in the 1980s and the early 1990s, when they claimed only the right to confirm the choices made by the relevant lamas and did not claim any role in the reincarnation process or selection itself. But few people currently expect today’s Chinese leaders to make concessions.

The Dalai Lama has suggested that his reincarnation could be found outside China. If that successor emerges from the Tibetan diaspora in India, what kind of diplomatic and political challenges might this pose for New Delhi?

The succession of the Dalai Lama has become a controversy because of Beijing’s claim in 1995 to have sole authority over that process.

Why did it make that claim, which is clearly one that would lead to conflict and dispute? One theory is that Chinese foreign policy strategists see an advantage in using this issue to advance China’s aims abroad. According to this theory, the succession issue provides a new opportunity for China’s diplomats to seek compliance from other governments – it provides an entry-point for China to call on those governments to support its claims and to denounce any claims or actions by the Tibetan exiles.

If so, it’s a clever move, because most governments have few exiles and few Buddhists in their population. Such governments might feel it less costly to comply with China’s request than to refuse on what for them will seem a minor or obscure issue. But this is not, of course, the case for India, for whom such a request would have major implications in terms of soft power, international diplomacy, religious respect and even border negotiations.

Whatever happens, India will be the chief focus among all nations of China’s strategic interests in this matter, and will likely come under significant Chinese pressure. India’s policy makers and diplomats will certainly be deploying all their skills and resources in order to find a way to respond to those pressures without seeming compliant to China or insensitive to Tibetan or religious priorities.

How do you interpret China’s recent efforts in Tibet — including large-scale infrastructure projects, population resettlements, and the campaign to re-educate Tibetan children?

It used to be rather difficult for outside analysts to characterise Chinese policies in Tibet – they varied, being sometimes extremely harsh and in other ways and at certain times less so. But since 2014 a new policy has emerged under Xi Jinping which is clear: minorities, including the Tibetans and others, are to be gradually “integrated” (jiaorong in Chinese) into the larger Chinese “community” or nation (Zhonghua minzu).

It has also become clear that Xi Jinping has ordered this process to begin from early childhood, because since 2021 his government has required all kindergartens – and kindergarten attendance is more or less compulsory these days for children aged 3-5 or so – to teach primarily or solely in the Chinese language.

These schools and preschools increasingly teach children about Chinese or Communist history and values, rather than Tibetan ones. So there are serious concerns about the extent to which the next generation of Tibetans, Uyghur, Mongols and others within China will have substantive knowledge of their mother-tongue or their culture. At the same time, China has been moving many thousands of rural and nomadic Tibetans to settlements in or near towns, or to remote border regions, sometimes for very unclear reasons, and this too is likely to have a dramatic impact on cultural traditions and identity. There will be practical benefits for some of these relocated people, in terms of work, medical access and knowledge of Chinese, but there is much uncertainty about the overall effect of what is an ongoing process of massive social and cultural engineering.