Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday sparks concerns about his succession and the future of Tibetan Buddhism. His legacy of peace and compassion leaves a significant impact on millions globally, raising questions about the selection of his successor amidst geopolitical tensions
-By 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.”
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.
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. Click here to read more.
The post ‘The planet needs a Dalai Lama’ first appeared on Central Tibetan Administration.
The post ‘The planet needs a Dalai Lama’ appeared first on Central Tibetan Administration.
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