THE DALAI LAMA: The Presence looks to the future

The last time we heard the word referendum it was apropos something grey and European that few of us understand. So hurrah for the Dalai Lama for contemplating a far more entertaining plebiscite: whether he should be reincarnated or not. Yet, it should quickly be added, there is a serious political motive behind this slightly preposterous proposition: to thwart China’s plans to choose the next Dalai Lama, and thus tighten its hold on Tibet.

The Dalai Lama – birth name Lhamo Thondup, as his friends may or may not call him – is nothing if not a survivor. Born to a peasant family in a remote village, he was one of 16 children, of whom only seven survived. He wrote in his autobiography that “my family was one of twenty or so making a precarious living from the land there”.

“Recognised” as the Dalai Lama at the age of 2 – the title means Ocean of Wisdom, though Tibetans usually refer to him as The Presence – he posits that an early desire to sit at the head of the table could have been a hint of what was to come.

“My parents had no idea that I would be proclaimed Dalai Lama,” he wrote. “I myself, likewise, had no particular intimation of what lay ahead. My earliest memories are very ordinary.” These include repeatedly packing a suitcase and saying he was going to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and enjoying clucking at hens in the family’s hen coop.

His education as Dalai Lama included the study of philosophy, monastic discipline, metaphysics and logic, culminating in his becoming Head of State in 1950 at the age of 16. Four years later he went to Beijing for talks with Mao Zedong, but fled Tibet in 1959 for India and a life of being a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities.

Now 72, he has travelled the world in an attempt to promote respect for other faiths, as well as to keep awareness of Tibet’s plight in the public eye. Celebrities queue up to meet him, including the Hollywood actor Richard Gere, who said of him: “I think it is impossible not to be affected [by him] on every possible level of your existence. Your mind and heart are totally transformed.” And along the way there have been negotiations and UN resolutions, proposals and five-point peace plans and, in 1989, the Nobel Prize for Peace.

“One nation’s problems can no longer be solved by itself completely,” he has written. “Universal responsibility is feeling for other people’s suffering as we feel our own. It is the realisation that even our enemy is entirely motivated by the quest for happiness.”

This may come as news to the leaders of the People’s Republic of China – but there are few who wouldn’t at least applaud the sentiment.