‘The planet needs a Dalai Lama’: Claude Arpi

In the midst of the present planetary chaos, one man preaches love and compassion to his fellow human beings. This man is Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, who turns 90 on July 6.

For the last 66 years, he has lived as a refugee in India, where he is considered the leader of all the Tibetans (including those in the Land of Snow), as well as of nearly one million Indian Buddhists in the Himalayan belt, from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh.

Following an uprising on March 10, 1959, the Dalai Lama left Lhasa in the dead of the night in dramatic circumstances. A week later, he reached Lhuntse Dzong, a couple of days’ march from the McMahon Line, the border between India and Tibet, from where he wrote to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, seeking asylum in India.

Four days later, he reached the first Indian post at Chuthangmu, north of Tawang, then part of Kameng Frontier Division of the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA). A letter from Nehru was waiting for him: “We shall be happy to afford the necessary facilities for you, your family and entourage to reside in India. The people of India, who hold you in great veneration, will no doubt accord their traditional respect to your person.”

Since that day, the Indian government and people have considered the Dalai Lama an honoured guest in the Land of the Buddha.

Was it a coincidence that soon after his arrival in India, the India-Tibet border became tense? At the end of August 1959, the first serious incident took place at Longju in Subansiri Frontier Division. Several Indian jawans lost their lives. This marked the beginning of a protracted dispute between India and China about the northern borders of India; it still continues today, as we have witnessed in Ladakh in May 2020.

For the Eastern Sector, there was an agreed map of the border (known as the McMahon Line); it was signed in 1914 between British India and the government of free Tibet in Lhasa. After walking onto the Tibetan plateau in 1950, Beijing not only refused to recognise the 1914 agreement, but also started to claim the entire NEFA, down to the foothills in the south, as its territory.

In October 1962, a war erupted when the People’s Liberation Army marched into the Tawang sector, the very place where the Dalai Lama had entered three years earlier. Was it again a coincidence? The conflict rapidly spread to other areas like Walong in the Lohit Valley and Ladakh. The scar it left on India’s psyche still endures.

For years, the young Dalai Lama lived peacefully in Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, taking care of the education of the young Tibetans and preserving their culture; it was only in 1973 that the Tibetan leader travelled to Europe for the first time. During the following decades, he would be instrumental in giving a concrete shape to the prophecy of the great Indian master, Guru Padmasambhava: “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red faces.”

As the Dalai Lama tirelessly travelled over the five continents to spread the Buddha’s message of love and compassion, his focus widened and he became a global leader.

A turning point was an address to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington, DC, in 1987, when he presented his Five Point Peace Plan; the first point was: “I propose that the whole of Tibet, including the eastern provinces of Kham and Amdo, be transformed into a zone of Ahimsa.”

It was an interesting proposal for India, as a demilitarised Tibet could have been a solution to the border dispute. But the Tibetans were soon told by Beijing that it was unacceptable to China.

In the following years, the Tibetan leader continued to travel abroad and to India’s northern frontiers, where he brought new life to Tibetan Buddhism.

Interestingly, the Dalai Lama always refers to his faith as “the Nalanda Tradition”, simply because several Indian gurus of the ancient Nalanda University visited Tibet to teach the Buddha Dharma.

This old relation is especially important at a time when all contacts between the Indian Himalayas and Tibet have been cut, and the Tibetan monasteries in Tibet are subjected to what the Communist Party calls the ‘sinicisation of Tibetan Buddhism’, which in fact aims to obliterate the Indian origin of the Buddha and his Dharma and replace it with the diktats of Karl Marx.

Today, the Dalai Lama’s followers are worried about his succession. What will happen if he departs for the Heavenly Fields? Will a 15th Dalai Lama replace him? Who will select him? These are still unanswered questions.

The Dalai Lamas traditionally ‘reincarnate’ in a young boy, who is then groomed to take over as the next Dalai Lama.

The fact that the Dalai Lama has recently announced that his successor will be from outside China makes Beijing extremely nervous; the communist regime fully realises the importance of controlling the next Dalai Lama.

Already in February 2023, the Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, asserted that religious rituals for the selection of a new lama “have [for centuries] been supervised by the Chinese Central Government”; this is simply not true.

The Global Times also hides the fact that the boy recognised by the Dalai Lama as the Panchen Lama (the second highest hierarch in the Dalai Lama’s Yellow Hat School) was arrested in 1995 and, 30 years later, he remains in the custody of the Chinese government somewhere in China.

India is deeply concerned by the Dalai Lama’s succession, as he has nearly one million followers in the Indian Himalayas… and Buddhism was born in India, not in China. It is also a fact that the Tibetan leader’s presence has always been a stabilising factor for the northern borders.

Today, in the midst of wars and conflicts, the planet needs a Dalai Lama. We can only pray for a smooth succession.

The author is distinguished fellow, Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, Delhi-NCR.