It is one
of the most sensitive political issues in China: who has authority
in Tibet? Many Tibetans revere the Dalai Lama and support his goal
of greater autonomy from Beijing.
But to Chinese officials, the exiled spiritual
leader is a traitor.
The role of Dalai Lama has been filled for centuries
through "reincarnation". The current Dalai Lama, the 14th, turns 80
this year, and Beijing is keen to control the process of finding
the 15th.
But the present Dalai Lama has said the role will one day end. Better
to have no Dalai Lama than "a stupid one".
So, will he reincarnate? The BBC World Service's The Inquiry
programme hears from four expert witnesses.
Chonpel Tsering is the Dalai Lama's
representative in northern Europe.
"I genuinely don't know [whether he will
reincarnate]. Tibetan Buddhism believes that everybody is reborn,
but not everybody can choose how and when they are
reborn.
"The lamas - the senior religious figures - are able
to determine firstly whether they are reborn, and if they are going
to be reborn, where they'll be reborn.
"The present carnation, the present Dalai Lama, can
decide. The rebirth is his choice.
"First, he is going to consult the Tibetan people
and others that follow Tibetan Buddhism to find out whether they
think that there should be a 15th Dalai Lama.
"If the decision is, 'Yes,' then he will set out
clear instructions about the process, so that there is no
ambiguity, so that the reincarnation process isn't manipulated or
misused by anybody for their own personal or political
interests.
"The Chinese and the Communist Party have set up
systems where reincarnations such as his holiness the Dalai Lama
have to be recognised and approved by the Communist
Party.
"Maybe [they] feel that if they pick their own 15th
Dalai Lama, somehow that authority will transfer on to the [one]
lama they have picked.
"His holiness has said that the 15th would be born
outside of Tibet, outside of China, because this 15th Dalai Lama
would have to continue the work of the present Dalai
Lama.
"If there is no genuine religious freedom inside
Tibet, then it's very hard for him to continue that
work."
Jia Xiudong is senior research fellow at the
China Institute of international studies in
Beijing.
"I believe that the tradition will be maintained
[and] the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated.
"There's a role for the current Dalai Lama to play
for the reincarnation, but I believe he should not exaggerate that
role.
"For example, he just cannot stop the tradition
individually.
"It is tradition passed from centuries
ago.
"The sovereign issue is the number one issue behind
all the differences and dispute.
"So, it's not actually China's argument with the
Dalai Lama.
"It's not about the freedom of religion.
"It is about sovereignty - whether Tibet can remain
part of China.
"When he talks about reincarnation, many people in
China believe that the Dalai Lama is playing a political
game.
"The 14th Dalai Lama and those people around him who
call for the independence of Tibet, they have made the issue of
reincarnation, in a way, a political issue.
"He doesn't use the word 'independence', he says the
'highest autonomy', but to the ears of people here in China, when
they look at the specific demands by the Dalai Lama, people believe
that actually behind all those words of 'highest autonomy' it
actually means 'independence'. So that is the problem.
"The government is concerned by the stability in
Tibet because we believe that our experiences have shown that
without stability you just cannot enjoy economic development,
improvement of life.
"If the [reincarnation] tradition is followed, and
then people see this tradition is still there, I think it will
contribute to stability in Tibet."
Robert Barnett is director of the Modern Tibet
Studies Programme at Columbia University in New
York.
"Traditionally, at least in the last couple of
hundred years, there was a role for both sides in this
process.
"What's happening now in China is instead of just
confirming the decision made by lamas about which child is a
reincarnation, now the Communist Party is effectively saying it
wants to decide whether a lama reincarnates at all, and even
sometimes which child gets chosen. So this is a kind of mission
creep for the state."
In 1995, the Dalai Lama named a six-year-old boy as
the reincarnation of the second most important leader in Tibetan
Buddhism, the Panchen Lama. But he was hidden away by the Chinese
authorities and replaced by a boy of their choosing.
"They forced Tibetans to worship a certain child as
the 11th Panchen Lama, when it's almost certain that no Tibetans
actually believe that child is the 11th Panchen Lama.
"This is one of the most fascinating issues in the
whole story: nobody in the Communist Party seems to have ever
considered the possibility that they could rule Tibetans without a
lama to be their intermediary.
"[It] seems to come out of an unquestioning idea
that because Tibetans are often religious, they're therefore not
susceptible to rational arguments about how wonderful Communism is
and you have to persuade them through religion.
"So they have invested huge resources into trying to
find a tame lama.
"They make films about the lama who supported the
party in the 1930s, they made a TV series about another lama who
supported the Communist Party and then they tried to develop these
children who would become their supporters.
"Every time
they've tried to do that it's failed. The children, when they grow
up and become adults, either they flee to India to join the Dalai
Lama or else they've turned into critics of the Communist Party
from within the system.
"I think we have to look at all of this as negotiating moves on
both sides. So the Dalai Lama is making these speculative,
philosophical statements about, 'I might be coming back, I might
not. I might come back as a woman.'
"This is his normal method as a Buddhist teacher of
the kind that he is to make people think. But it's also a
negotiating move with the Chinese to expose them to the kind of
ridicule that they've put themselves in now by claiming to be able
to arbitrate on matters like religion and reincarnation.
"This Dalai Lama has been so effective as a
religious leader, even more so than as a political leader, that
there's going to be huge force among his followers for him to come
back. So it's quite likely that it's going to happen."
Tibetan writer and activist Jamyang Norbu fell
out of favour with the present Dalai Lama when he criticised his
"softly softly" approach to China.
"He doesn't have much of a choice. The
lama's reincarnating is a political institution.
"It'll have to be the choice of the Tibetan
government in exile and of the people.
"China will have their candidate up and
running, and you can be 100% sure that they will.
"They'll just pick some Tibetan kid who
looks cute enough and they'll put him up there and they'll say,
'This is the Dalai Lama.'
"If we don't have our own candidate from
the general Tibetan Buddhist world, then they win by
proxy.
"They could have him repeating their party
policies, saying, 'President Xi Jinping is a wonderful person,'
that Tibetans must not aspire to any kind of freedom of expression
or even independence, that they must be good Chinese and give up
all their aspirations.
"The ideal place for the [next] Dalai Lama
to be born is in the Himalayas on the Indian side of the border,
where the people are ethnically Tibetan, where there are Tibetan
Buddhists, [and] they're very loyal to the Dalai Lama, to the
Tibetan spiritual world.
"So if he's born there, it would drag in the government of India.
They would be obliged to protect him.
"A revolution is certainly coming to Tibet.
We've had series of uprisings since the 1980s, and it's culminating
now. So I cannot predict what will happen, when it'll happen but I
know, it's a gut feeling - and you can see it through the
progression of uprisings and acts of opposition to China - that a
big revolution is surely overdue."