Between renewal & rebirth: The Dalai Lama succession

Hindustan Times

16 hours ago

In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the space between lives — a liminal zone where the soul hovers, neither here nor there, waiting for its next embodiment. It is a place of uncertainty, transformation, and reckoning.
Since 1950, Tibet has lived in such a state.
That year, Chinese forces entered Tibet, marking the start of a profound shift in the region's political and cultural landscape. In the years that followed, many Tibetans left their homeland, facing dislocation and uncertainty. Religious institutions were restructured, traditional ways of life transformed, and the Tibetan language and identity came under increasing strain. The Dalai Lama sought refuge in India in 1959, followed by thousands of his people. Around the world, there was sympathy, but little action. Tibet — never formally recognised as an independent State by the major powers — drifted into a kind of political bardo: Not entirely forgotten, but no longer central to the world's attention.
Today, that suspended state is once again being tested.
The 14th Dalai Lama, turning 90 today, has signalled that his successor will be born in exile, and identified through traditional methods — not selected by any government. Beijing, predictably, has other plans. It has codified its authority to approve all reincarnations of Tibetan lamas and declared that the next Dalai Lama must be chosen according to Chinese law. The State even claims the right to employ the Golden Urn, an 18th-century ritual once used to select high-ranking reincarnate lamas, to give its candidate a supposed veil of legitimacy.
The stage is set for a metaphysical standoff: One Dalai Lama born of visions, dreams, and ritual recognition; another produced by committee, installed by fiat. It is less a theological debate than a collision between historical memory and statecraft — between a displaced people's spiritual continuity and a powerful nation's political choreography.
At the heart of this drama lies India.
India has, for more than 60 years, hosted the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamshala. It has given sanctuary, but not much more. In 2003, India formally acknowledged the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of China. The tension in that duality has always been there — between a moral responsibility to a people it sheltered and a geopolitical calculation to avoid provoking Beijing.
This next chapter will test the limits of that careful ambiguity.
If, as expected, the next Dalai Lama is born in India, the country will become more than host — it will become caretaker of the lineage. The young reincarnate's education, his monastic training, his symbolic authority — all of it will unfold on Indian soil. India may say little. It may issue no declarations. But it will be, in every meaningful sense, the ground on which the Tibetan tradition stakes its future.
And this is where the past comes back to haunt the present.
In recent years, the Dalai Lama has spoken with quiet pain of Tibet's abandonment. Of how, in those pivotal moments after 1950, when things might still have been altered, most nations — India among them — chose silence. For Tibetans, exile became not a temporary waiting room but a permanent geography. 'We are those in-between people,' the Tibetan poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa has written, 'making up the rules as we go along, because there is no guidebook to living in exile.'
The longer exile lasts, the more it becomes an elusive inheritance.
Among the Tibetan diaspora, the idea of return has grown quieter. A generation has come of age for whom Tibet is not a place on a map but an idea passed down in language, in prayer, in the particular geometry of the mandala. In place of a homeland, they have built a spiritual architecture — held together by teachers, temples, and the enduring magnetism of the Dalai Lama.
The Chinese State understands this, which is precisely why it wants to insert itself into the metaphysics. A reincarnation is not merely symbolic; it is a line of continuity, a claim to legitimacy. If Beijing can appoint the next Dalai Lama, it can assert control not just over territory but over the meaning of Tibet itself.
India is unlikely to challenge China directly. It shares a volatile border, has a history of military conflict with Beijing, and remains locked in a delicate geopolitical ballet. But there are other forms of resistance — quieter, less visible, no less significant. India can allow the monastic institutions in Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Ladakh to conduct the traditional search. It can ensure that the child chosen by Tibetan lamas is educated freely, without pressure or constraint. It can create, through silence and space, the conditions for authenticity to survive.
This moment is not only about succession — it is about the layered architecture of belief, and whether it can withstand the heavy hand of power.
When the child is found, there may be no headlines. The world may offer polite interest, followed by forgetfulness. China will move swiftly, naming its own candidate, embedding the chosen child in ritual, surrounding him with legitimacy devised by decree. And yet the real question will not be who claims the next Dalai Lama — but who allowed the tradition itself to breathe.
Recognition, in this case, may not come with public endorsement. It may come through the soft gestures of refuge: a door left ajar, a temple left untouched, a people left free to remember who they are.
India's choices may remain unspoken. But the Tibetan people have always understood the weight of silence. They have lived in it, made meaning inside it, and carried it with them through generations of exile. Now, on the edge of another transition, they wait once again in the bardo — not just for a leader, but for the world to remember.
Nirupama Rao is a former foreign secretary. The views expressed are personal.