Seemingly undeterred, in a July interview with Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times the Dalai Lama hinted that he had in mind a referendum of some kind among Tibetans to clarify the question of his succession. In early 2015, at a press conference on the sidelines of the annual gathering of China’s two legislatures in Beijing, Zhu Weiqun 朱维群, the chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress’s Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee, accused the Dalai Lama of not showing a ‘serious or respectful attitude’ on the issue of reincarnation, and reiterated that ‘the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama has to be endorsed by the central government, not by any other sides’. The government’s chosen Panchen Lama now fulfills the public role of that position within China the Dalai Lama’s choice, the government claims, lives a guarded but more-or-less normal life somewhere in Tibet. When, in 1995, the Dalai Lama named a young Tibetan child as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama (the second most revered position in Tibetan Buddhism’s hierarchy), Beijing promptly took the child into ‘protective custody’, and named another. It was not the first time the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama had clashed over issues of succession. But as he approached his eightieth birthday in 2015, his words were clearly a shot across the bow of the PRC government, which has long claimed its authority to designate the Dalai Lama’s reincarnated successor, in line with its requirement that all religious practitioners inside China recognise the ultimate authority of the Communist Party. How the Tibetan people would make clear their choice, the fourteenth and longest-serving Dalai Lama did not explain. Whether or not he had an officially designated successor, he said, would be ‘up to the Tibetan people’, adding that, ‘the Dalai Lama institution will cease one day.
In a mid-December 2014 interview with the BBC, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader dropped a bombshell with his remark that his reincarnation was not a certainty.
China’s ongoing war of words with the Dalai Lama took a new turn in 2015.
0 kommentar(er)
