The Fight for his Reincarnation

The Dalai Lama used to be as popular as a pop star and constantly on world tour. And today? Tibetans are still being oppressed. Now China wants to choose his successor

They wait, a little excited. They look at the ergonomic swivel chair that is placed in front of the
entrance of the residence. Someone has thrown a cloth over it. It is still empty.
The Buddhist nun from Australia closes her eyes and meditates. The tattooed
Jesus from Leipzig rearranges his amulets. The pilgrim from Vietnam does some final
her hair and arranges the boxes of chocolates she wishes to give as gifts. An old Tibetan man in a wheelchair enjoys the sunshine on his face.

Several hundred visitors have gathered, as they do every Monday, Wednesday and
Friday, a colourful group of people from all over the world.
Here in the park surrounding the residence, the hustle and bustle of the small town of
Dharamsala in the far north of India seems to have been swallowed up in an instant. Mighty pines.
Old cedars. Falcons circle in the sky, spiralling up towards the peaks of the
Himalayas, at the foothills of which Dharamsala lies. The visitors sit on the low wall
next to the driveway, further back they occupy the road. They wait, without posting this moment
posting it on the internet, commenting on it, or colouring it with a sepia filter – they have been
deprived of their mobile phones. People without distractions. People who just are.

At half past seven sharp, a golf cart pulls up. Everyone turns their heads to
the left. An old man gets out. Supported by monks, he takes a seat on the swivel chair,
his improvised throne: the Dalai Lama. Icon of non-violent resistance.
Nobel Peace Prize winner. Spiritual and once also political leader of all Tibetans. When he
was enthroned in 1940 at the age of four, Hitler’s army was preparing
to attack France. Charlie Chaplin was making The Great Dictator,
American president was called Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in war-torn China, Mao
Zedong’s communists were still far from coming to power.
They will soon be standing before him, one after the other. The Buddhist Australian. The
Jesus from Leipzig. The pilgrim from Vietnam. Sikhs in turbans, women in saris, Tibetan
farmers, Israelis, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, European students. The Dalai Lama lets
his eyes glide over them. What might it feel like to be someone from whom others
hope for comfort, encouragement, maybe even a miracle – day after day, for almost
ninety years of life? To be someone who knows: as soon as I die, the
fight for my succession will break out – a fight in which the fate of my
people is at stake.

Not so long ago, the Dalai Lama was omnipresent. He flew around, met
heads of state and government, gave speeches, held press conferences. Behind the residence, in
a museum, they have packed his century of life into a few rooms. The 80
honorary doctorates. The 22 honorary citizenships. Photos of his encounters with Pope
John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama. The Dalai Lama seemed to be on an endless world tour. Wherever he went, he spoke of love and forgiveness – and told of the suffering of his people.
It is a sad story, about how Communist China annexed Tibet in 1951, sending in soldiers and government officials and systematically wiping out an ancient culture. But the Dalai Lama, a ruler
without a territory, in exile in India since the late 1950s, rarely seemed
sad. Or bitter. Or angry.
He joked. He laughed his famous laugh. And people loved him for it.
Free Tibet stickers were stuck on countless cars, Tibetan prayer flags waved from countless balconies.
Especially in the 1990s, when global enthusiasm for Tibet
and everyone rushed to see the Dalai Lama, intellectuals, film stars,
pop stars. The Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other bands performed at
the biggest benefit concerts of the decade and donated the proceeds to the
Tibetans. Hollywood released two films, Kundun by Martin Scorsese about the
childhood and youth of the Dalai Lama and Seven Years in Tibet, in which Brad Pitt plays an
Austrian who befriends him.
Hardly any other oppressed people have ever had a leader who is as
popular. One might think that the Dalai Lama has achieved everything.

Has he achieved anything at all?

Dharamsala, the residence of the Dalai Lama in northern India, is the centre of the
Tibetan diaspora. The Tibetan government-in-exile and the television station Tibet TV are based here,
there is a library with important Tibetan books and old manuscripts,
as well as monasteries, temples, schools and several hospitals. Around 8,000 Tibetans live
here. One of them is a 37-year-old woman named Phenthok; like so many Tibetans,
she has only one name. Twelve years ago, she left her homeland,
which has long since become part of the People’s Republic of China, and came here. Her
story sheds light on the situation of this people, more than half a century after
the escape of the Dalai Lama.

Phenthok grew up in eastern Tibet. She is an only child of parents who
ran a grocery store there in the 1990s. It was a time of benefit concerts and Free Tibet campaigns
around the world. She was very good at school, Phenthok says, so
the Communist Party took notice of her and sent her to boarding school far away
from home. Phenthok later went on to a renowned Chinese university.
A place at a university there would be a dream come true for many young Chinese, and Phenthok was also offered opportunities for advancement: she was to serve the People’s Republic of China in Tibet as a high-ranking civil servant. To do that, she had to leave the past behind. Her own. And that of her people. ‘Even at boarding school,’ she says, “they constantly said: you are retarded. Savages.
Barbarians. We’re bringing you progress.” In Tibet, bringing progress means not only
investment and economic growth. But also this: the party sends its cadres to
villages and monasteries. Urging Tibetans to spy on each other. Arresting all those who
for self-determination, drives the subjugation of faith, the
education system, and the whole of society. As a Tibetan, she had to
go through special security checks at the airport or at the train station, says Phenthok.

The state security service took revenge by imprisoning her parents for two weeks. This was intended to
force Phenthok to return. But she broke off all contact with home.
To this day, she does not know how her family and friends are doing – any attempt to
break the silence would be too dangerous for those left behind. Phenthok is now using
her knowledge of Chinese to analyse China’s policy
in Tibet for the Tibet Policy Institute, a think tank.

The Communist Party’s interest in Tibet is huge simply because of geography.
The Himalayas form a natural barrier to the south and west – without Tibet,
China’s national border would run much further inland. The Tibetan
plateau is the source of some of Asia’s most important rivers and contains precious
minerals. And China is a multi-ethnic country with dozens of ethnic minorities.
The majority Chinese from the Han ethnic group make up 91 percent of the total
population. But 60 percent of China’s territory is traditionally settled by
other ethnic groups.
The party fears nothing more than the disintegration of this empire, with ethnic conflicts
and wars like those that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. The policy of repression arises from
this fear. ‘They want Tibet to become Han Chinese territory,’ says Phenthok. ‘We
Tibetans are supposed to speak Chinese, live Han culture, but continue to wear our traditional costumes
and dance. We are supposed to be a tourist attraction.’

The Dalai Lama, says one of his advisors about his status as a global icon, has won a world.
But he has lost his country.

The Chinese state leadership sees him as a potential troublemaker, an obstacle
on the path to the assimilation of the Tibetans. The party press regularly condemns him as a
separatist. They compared him to Hitler, called him a feudal slaveholder, a ‘wolf
in monk’s clothing,’ a man with ‘the face of a man and the heart of a
beast.’
And he, the Dalai Lama? Says sentences like these: ’We can understand our enemy as a teacher.
We should venerate him for giving us the precious opportunity to
patience.’ Time and again, he has sworn his people to non-violence. Just like
Mahatma Gandhi, whom the Dalai Lama calls his role model and whom he once met in a
dream, as did Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
The Dalai Lama is the latest in a series of great role models of peaceful resistance.
And the Tibetans have followed him: when some of them could no longer muster patience,
they did not attack the Chinese state or its servants, but themselves. Since 2009, 169 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest against Chinese foreign rule.

Would a different strategy have achieved a different result? Would the Dalai Lama have been able to
change Tibet’s fate at some point? You can’t talk to him about it, he
doesn’t give interviews anymore; because of his advanced age, says a colleague. But in
Dharamsala there are others who can tell us something about him.

Tenzin Geyche Tethong calls back his German shepherd and opens the door to his
living room. There is a lot of wood, an open fireplace, and on the wall a view of the Potala Palace in
Lhasa, where the Dalai Lamas resided for centuries. Tenzin Geyche Tethong, 81,
was born in Lhasa and is one of the few people who still experienced the old Tibet. After
After fleeing, he became the Dalai Lama’s private secretary and remained so for more than forty years.
What does he remember when he thinks of home? There is not much left, answers
Tethong. ‘Above all, the landscape, the mountains.’
To understand why the Tibetans, despite the fame of the Dalai Lama, found it so
difficult for the Tibetans to win back their country, despite the Dalai Lama’s fame, you have to be aware of how they lost it. Tenzin Geyche Tethong says: ‘It was also our fault.’

A hundred years ago, the 13th Dalai Lama, predecessor of the present one, ruled over a Tibet that
was de facto independent after the collapse of the last Chinese empire.
After the collapse of the last Chinese empire, it has preserved its unique Buddhist culture, but it is
very poor and organised in a strict hierarchy. There are almost no paved roads. Not a
single proper hospital. Very few inhabitants can read and write,
and a great many live in monasteries; at times, it is estimated that as many as one in three do. The country is ruled by a small upper class of monks and aristocrats, with the Dalai Lama at
the top.
The 13th Dalai Lama observed how new ideas were taking hold across the mountains in China.
Nationalism, socialism. He feared a Chinese invasion, and in his
will at the time he wrote: ‘If we do not take precautions to defend ourselves,
defend ourselves, we have very little chance of survival. Then our
spiritual and cultural traditions will be extinguished.’ He wants to change Tibet, wants to
build a modern school system, a modern army. But the elite of nobles and
monks, concerned about their privileges, prevent change. ’Old Tibet, the
conservative forces persisted,’ says Tenzin Geyche Tethong.
At the end of 1933, the reformer, who was not allowed to be one, died. A few years later,
several teams of monks set out to travel the empire. They were search parties,
sent to find the next Dalai Lama.

‘Lama’ is what Tibetans call their spiritual masters. The word “Dalai” means ocean.
The Dalai Lama is the highest of all Lamas. Tibetans believe that he has graced the world with his presence since the year 1391: wisdom as vast and deep as the sea, in constantly
changing mortal shells. He was born for the last time so far in the summer of 1935
in a small village far from Lhasa, as the son of a farming family. The boy is two years old
when one of the search parties reaches the village – the embalmed head of the deceased
13th Dalai Lama had been pointing to the northeast, thus showing the monks the direction. They
are sitting in the house of the farming family. The highest-ranking monk, who is posing as a servant to his companions takes one of the 13th Dalai Lama’s prayer beads in his hands. Then the
toddler approaches and wants it.
This is how the Dalai Lama himself would later describe it. After further signs and tests,
it is certain: this boy is the right one.
At first, regents take over secular power in his place. In China, the Communists establish the People’s Republic. When tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers
initially invade eastern Tibet in 1950, a member of the Tibetan government explains: ‘We
are a country of high lamas. The Chinese cannot harm us.’ In this
crisis, the Dalai Lama, a teenager of 15 years, is
transferred to the Dalai Lama, a teenager of 15 years, the affairs of government. The Tibetans implore for support abroad, ask for help from the United Nations. But in vain. Only small El Salvador supports their
concern.
A Tibetan negotiator finally signs an agreement under pressure, with which
all of Tibet becomes part of China – against the explicit will of the Dalai Lama, who only
learns about it from the radio. The Tibetans have lost their country. The
People’s Liberation Army quickly takes control of it.
A guerrilla war against the occupiers ensues. While the Dalai Lama
calls for non-violence, his brother maintains contact with the Tibetan fighters. China’s army
drops bombs on monasteries and forces people to dance on the bodies of the executed. Soon 97 per cent of the monasteries have been destroyed. According to the government-in-exile,
more than a million Tibetans will die of hunger or violence
in the following two decades.

In March 1959, the situation in the capital Lhasa is also threatening to escalate. An angry
crowd surrounds the palace where the Dalai Lama is holding out, fearing the Chinese
Chinese could kidnap him. The People’s Liberation Army took up position. Disguised
as a simple soldier, the Dalai Lama managed to escape from the palace and, after a
two-week tour through the Himalayas, made it to India. His escape became a big
media story, and he became world-famous overnight.
‘The extent of our popularity surprised even us,’ says his former
private secretary Tenzin Geyche Tethong. ‘In 1973, we made our first trip to Europe,
followed by one to the United States in 1979.’ They consciously address global civil society: the
strategy of non-violent resistance is based on making the cost of a system of oppression
too high because the citizens of other countries recognise the moral injustice
and push for change. The international community imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa, which ultimately contributed to the end of the oppression.

And didn’t China open itself to the world at the end of the 1970s? A poor country,
dependent on foreign capital and Western technology – isn’t this a
means of applying pressure to demand a different policy towards Tibet?
Yes, it does. But Western governments have never really used it. Because
the Chinese Communist Party also has a threat and a lure – one that
the Dalai Lama cannot counter. The party is beginning to understand how effective it is: the size of its own population.
China is not just any market. China
is a market with more than a billion potential consumers. Whoever controls access to it
can bring governments and multinational corporations into line.

1998: For an advertising campaign with the slogan Think different, the
computer manufacturer Apple designs a poster with the face of the Dalai Lama. It is
not used, allegedly because the Dalai Lama was not well enough known. Three years later,
Apple began having its products manufactured in the People’s Republic.

2007: German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama for a ‘private
exchange’ at the Chancellery. She had herself photographed wearing the white welcome scarf that
he presented her with. Her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, publicly criticises the
meeting, saying it was just ‘window-dressing politics for a quick headline’. Now it remains to be seen
how the broken porcelain can be repaired.

2019: Hollywood is finally releasing a film about Tibet. This time as a co-production
with a Chinese studio. In Everest – A Yeti Aims High, a girl
from Shanghai discovers a yeti on the roof of her house and brings him back to Tibet. In the
film, however, not a single Tibetan can be seen, and the word Tibet is not mentioned
once – as desired by party propaganda. The preferred term is Xizang.
It means ‘western treasure trove’.

Today, the Dalai Lama rarely travels abroad. It has become too exhausting for the old man,
and fewer influential people are willing to be seen with him.
And this despite the fact that the Dalai Lama has long since given up his claim to independence for Tibet.
He only demands what the invaders had promised in that 1951 agreement
: real autonomy and religious freedom in a Chinese state. He has
now handed over his political duties to the elected representative of the 150,000 Tibetans in exile
worldwide. Currently, this is a man in his mid-fifties named Penpa Tsering.
When the Dalai Lama visited Berlin a decade and a half ago, he travelled in a motorcade
with a police escort to the Brandenburg Gate. There he took to the stage, cheered by
tens of thousands. Tibetan flags, balloons, a huge banner: ‘Freedom – Germany
for Tibet – Tibet for the world’. When his political successor visits Berlin today, he can be
met in the lobby of the Motel One on Alexanderplatz, where he stands unrecognised among
business people and tourists, holding a paper cup of coffee that he got from
Dunkin‘ Donuts. “I’m just a simple Tibetan,” says Penpa Tsering. “So
I have to do a lot more leg work.” He sees himself not only as a spokesperson for Tibetans in exile,
but also as a representative of the six million people at home who are not allowed to vote
. He is about to drive to an office building near Potsdamer Platz. He
will smoke another cigarette at the entrance and then enter the Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development. He does not want to reveal who he will be meeting there.
His discussion partners fear the reaction of the Chinese government.

The residence of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala is a yellow-painted building, simple and
elegant. In the courtyard, there is a small basketball court. Did the Dalai Lama ever play here?
throw hoops here? On a table, monks display the items that people from all over the world
have sent for the Dalai Lama to bless. Buddha statues, incense sticks,
Tibetan scarves.
The elegant head of protocol gives a signal. The line of visitors begins to move.
One by one, they step in front of the swivel chair where the Dalai Lama is sitting, bowing down to
him. The head of protocol reads out the name and nationality, two photographers take
photos, which are later sent to the guests. The Dalai Lama grants each guest a few
moments of his time. The tattooed Jesus from Leipzig. The pilgrim from Vietnam, who
presents him with her chocolate box. The old Tibetan in a wheelchair.
There are no visitors from China.

Early morning in Dharamsala: a woman with cropped hair and glasses leaves a
nunnery. She dodges a speeding car, squeezes past a cow
and turns onto the pilgrimage route that leads around the residence of the Dalai Lama.
The view extends far into the valley. It is still quiet here. Tibetan prayer flags, strung on ropes,
wave in the wind.
The woman is in her mid-fifties, wearing the claret-coloured robe of Tibetan nuns and
sneakers in the same colour. Her name is Kelsang Wangmo. In a previous life, she was
her name was Kerstin Brummenbaum, and she has retained the Rhineland accent she had back then.
She was 20 when she decided to become a Buddhist nun. For almost two
decades she studied Buddhism, as the only foreigner among Tibetan
monks. She was the first woman ever to obtain the ‘Geshe’ title, the doctoral degree of
Tibetan Buddhism. This makes her the right person to talk to about the question
around which a political power struggle has already developed – and which could be decisive
for the future of the Tibetans: What will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama leaves his current
mortal shell behind? When will he be reborn? Where? In which body?

The tradition of having monks interpret miraculous signs to find the right child
was always susceptible to manipulation. In the 19th century, for example, the ninth,
tenth, eleventh and twelfth Dalai Lamas all died young and under mysterious circumstances.
Today, the atheistic Communist Party, of all people, is trying to control this deeply
mythical and seemingly alien process. Will it succeed in
installing its own Dalai Lama? A puppet who can be guided by the Party and who
can at the same time guide the Tibetan people?
In 2007, the Chinese State Administration for Religious Affairs published a document
called ‘Measures for Handling the Reincarnations of Living Buddhas,’
also known as Order Number Five. Only the Chinese government can
authorise the search for a reincarnated lama, it says. Yes, a lama may
only be reincarnated with the permission of the party. According to Robert Barnett, Tibet
expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the government has already
begun to make preparations for the selection of its candidate. A 25-
member high-level commission has been set up, headed by the party secretary in Tibet.
The government has already shown how serious it is about this. In the 1990s,
the Dalai Lama had identified a six-year-old boy as the so-called Panchen Lama,
second-highest spiritual master after himself. The government had the boy kidnapped
and installed its own Panchen Lama. The new one’s parents were party members, he
grew up in Beijing from an early age and has direct access to Xi Jinping, the
President. Among Tibetans, however, his influence remains limited. The kidnapped boy
has not reappeared to this day.
There will probably be two Dalai Lamas one day. One that the Tibetans
have identified and one that the Chinese Communist Party has chosen. The
current Dalai Lama remains vague on this point in his public statements. He has said that perhaps
his successor will be a woman. Or that tradition will come to an end with him.
Only one thing is certain: a new Dalai Lama will not be born in China
. But in a free country.

A handful of exiles have gathered in an old British colonial building in Dharamsala.
Academics, activists, a film director. Tonight they are guests
in the shared home of the poet Tenzin Tsundue. Outside, a
downpour is raging, the drops patter on the roof, frogs croak. Every now and then the
lights go out, then they light candles. Most of the people here are in their
twenties and thirties and are the second generation in exile; Tenzin Tsundue, at
50, is the oldest. He has dedicated his life to the struggle for the cause of his people.
‘My grandmother always talked about Tibet, a country we never
seen. We have inherited the memory. But also the responsibility. We live in
a kind of guilt.’ So many have not managed to flee from the Chinese. ’We are
free. So we have to do something.’
The question is what. Will the message of non-violence outlive the Dalai Lama? Or
will the Tibetans resort to other, more radical methods?
No one in the house knows a time without him. The Dalai Lama was always there, like a fixed star.
In some ways, Tenzin Tsundue and his guests go further than he does. They reject the
so-called Middle Way policy propagated by the Dalai Lama – they do not want
autonomy within the People’s Republic of China, they want an independent Tibet. But almost
all here agree with Tenzin Tsundue when he says: ‘If we resort to violence,
the principles by which we have acted for more than a thousand years no longer count.
The significance of the Tibetan people lies in the fact that we have developed an entire system
based on love and compassion. Everything we do, we do because we
believe in: love and compassion. This is what we can give to humanity.’

A man loses his country. He has to flee and watches from afar as the cultural
and religious heritage of his homeland is destroyed. But he does not despair. Instead,
he creates a place in northern India where this heritage can survive and thrive.
He gives his people cohesion and hope, and he inspires people on all
continents in a way that reaches far beyond the political. If in Europe or
North America today so much is spoken of mindfulness, if meditation is a
mass culture and the perception of one’s own feelings is no longer something to be ashamed of,
then it has a lot to do with the Dalai Lama. He has opened the spiritual treasure of Tibet to
opened up this treasure for people. Opened it up for this treasure.
It is not just about the spiritual well-being of individuals. It is also about the
progress of science, and thus of all. For decades, the Dalai Lama has been in close
contact with researchers, and he has often exchanged ideas with them about insights into the human brain.
The interest on both sides is still enormous. For a long time, there was a
belief that our brain is static and unchangeable. The Dalai Lama has witnessed at close hand
how a new idea gained strength: the brain is plastic. It can change its
structure; we can transform it. This has led to a focus on
systematic mental training, as taught by Buddhism.
The Dalai Lama has spoken to thousands upon thousands of
scientists, at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, at
Stanford, Zurich, Strasbourg. He has repeatedly emphasised how important it is to him to
share the benefits of Tibetan heritage with those who do not believe in Buddhism
.
A man loses his country. And gains a world.
An Austrian student steps aside. And suddenly you are standing in front of him. His face is narrow,
with wrinkles as fine as cobwebs. He takes the visitor’s hands
into his, strokes her hair, remains silent. He looks without turning away,
without haste. There is an unusual intimacy in the process of looking at someone – at him –
into the eyes for a long time. His eyes are very clear. There is something wide in them, something for
which one could use a great many words or very few. Compassion. The experience of a
monk who practised this gift in decades of meditation, a monk who, in the
89 years of his life, has encountered so many people with their sadness, their longing,
their hope.
Afterwards, the tattooed Jesus from Leipzig stands at the water dispenser, drinks his glass in one
go and says, ‘Phew.’ He shakes his head, smiles. ‘Wow.’
A little excited. Glances at the ergonomic swivel chair in front of the
entrance to the residence. Someone has thrown a cloth over it. It is still empty.
The Buddhist nun from Australia closes her eyes and meditates. The tattooed
Jesus from Leipzig adjusts his amulets. The pilgrim from Vietnam performs the last
maintenance work on her hair tower and organises the boxes of chocolates that she
wishes to present. The old Tibetan in the wheelchair lets the sun shine on his face.
Several hundred visitors have gathered, as they do every Monday, Wednesday and
Friday, a colourful group of people from all over the world.
Here in the park surrounding the residence, the hustle and bustle of the small town of
Dharamsala in the far north of India seems to have been swallowed up in an instant. Mighty pines.
Old cedars. Falcons circle in the sky, spiralling up towards the peaks of the
Himalayas, at whose foothills Dharamsala lies. The visitors sit on the low wall
next to the driveway, further back they occupy the road. They wait, without posting this moment
posting it on the internet, commenting on it, or colouring it with a sepia filter – they have been
deprived of their mobile phones. People without distractions. People who just are.
At half past seven on the dot this morning, a golf cart pulls up. Everyone turns their heads to
the left. An old man gets out. Supported by monks, he takes a seat on the swivel chair,
his improvised throne: the Dalai Lama. Icon of non-violent resistance.
Nobel Peace Prize winner. Spiritual and once also political leader of all Tibetans. When he
was enthroned in 1940 at the age of four, Hitler’s army was preparing
to attack France. Charlie Chaplin was making The Great Dictator,
American president was called Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in war-torn China, Mao
Zedong’s communists were still far from coming to power.
They will soon be standing before him, one after the other. The Buddhist Australian. The
Jesus from Leipzig. The pilgrim from Vietnam. Sikhs in turbans, women in saris, Tibetan
farmers, Israelis, Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, European students. The Dalai Lama lets
his eyes glide over them. What might it feel like to be someone from whom others
hope for comfort, encouragement, maybe even a miracle – day after day, for almost
ninety years of life? To be someone who knows: as soon as I die, the
fight for my succession will break out – a fight in which the fate of my
people is at stake.
Not so long ago, the Dalai Lama was omnipresent. He flew around, met
heads of state and government, gave speeches, held press conferences. Behind the residence, in
a museum, they have packed his century of life into a few rooms. The 80
honorary doctorates. The 22 honorary citizenships. Photos of his encounters with Pope
John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, Barack Obama. The Dalai Lama seemed to be on an

endless world tour. Wherever he went, he spoke of love and
forgiveness – and told of the suffering of his people.
It is a sad story, about how Communist China
annexed Tibet in 1951, sending in soldiers and government officials and
systematically wiping out an ancient culture. But the Dalai Lama, a ruler
without a territory, in exile in India since the late 1950s, rarely seemed
sad. Or bitter. Or angry.
He joked. He laughed his famous laugh. And people loved him for it.
Free Tibet stickers were stuck on countless cars, Tibetan prayer flags waved from countless balconies.
Especially in the 1990s, when global enthusiasm for Tibet
and everyone rushed to see the Dalai Lama, intellectuals, film stars,
pop stars. The Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and other bands performed at
the biggest benefit concerts of the decade and donated the proceeds to the
Tibetans. Hollywood released two films, Kundun by Martin Scorsese about the
childhood and youth of the Dalai Lama and Seven Years in Tibet, in which Brad Pitt plays an
Austrian who befriends him.
Hardly any other oppressed people have ever had a leader who is as
popular. One might think that the Dalai Lama has achieved everything.
Has he achieved anything at all?
Dharamsala, the residence of the Dalai Lama in northern India, is the centre of the
Tibetan diaspora. The Tibetan government-in-exile and the television station Tibet TV are based here,
there is a library with important Tibetan books and old manuscripts,
as well as monasteries, temples, schools and several hospitals. Around 8,000 Tibetans live
here. One of them is a 37-year-old woman named Phenthok; like so many Tibetans,
she has only one name. Twelve years ago, she left her homeland,
which has long since become part of the People’s Republic of China, and came here. Her
story sheds light on the situation of this people, more than half a century after
the escape of the Dalai Lama.
Phenthok grew up in eastern Tibet. She is an only child of parents who
ran a grocery store there in the 1990s. It was a time of benefit concerts and Free Tibet campaigns
around the world. She was very good at school, Phenthok says, so
the Communist Party took notice of her and sent her to boarding school far away
from home. Phenthok later went on to a renowned Chinese university.
A place at a university there would be a dream come true for many young Chinese, and Phenthok was also offered
opportunities for advancement: she was to serve the People’s Republic of China in Tibet as a high-ranking civil servant. To do that,
she had to leave the past behind. Her own. And that of her people.
‘Even at boarding school,’ she says, “they constantly said: you are retarded. Savages.
Barbarians. We’re bringing you progress.” In Tibet, bringing progress means not only
investment and economic growth. But also this: the party sends its cadres to
villages and monasteries. Urging Tibetans to spy on each other. Arresting all those who
for self-determination, drives the subjugation of faith, the
education system, and the whole of society. As a Tibetan, she had to
go through special security checks at the airport or at the train station, says Phenthok.

If she booked a hotel in the Tibetan capital Lhasa, a man from the
state security for interrogation. The state that Phenthok was supposed to represent did not trust her.
‘And if it’s like that for me, what are the others supposed to say?’
Tibetans in the civil service, like Phenthok, are important for
China. They are supposed to give the population the feeling that this is not about colonial
project of domination, but rather something that is good for everyone. A close friend of hers,
Phenthok says, actually became a civil servant. ‘After only a year in this post, she looked ten
years older. She was just waiting for her pension.’ Phenthok, on the other hand, decided
to flee to India. There she began writing as a journalist about the repression in Tibet
.
The state security service took revenge by imprisoning her parents for two weeks. This was intended to
force Phenthok to return. But she broke off all contact with home.
To this day, she does not know how her family and friends are doing – any attempt to
break the silence would be too dangerous for those left behind. Phenthok is now using
her knowledge of Chinese to analyse China’s policy
in Tibet for the Tibet Policy Institute, a think tank.
The Communist Party’s interest in Tibet is huge simply because of geography.
The Himalayas form a natural barrier to the south and west – without Tibet,
China’s national border would run much further inland. The Tibetan
plateau is the source of some of Asia’s most important rivers and contains precious
minerals. And China is a multi-ethnic country with dozens of ethnic minorities.
The majority Chinese from the Han ethnic group make up 91 percent of the total
population. But 60 percent of China’s territory is traditionally settled by
other ethnic groups.
The party fears nothing more than the disintegration of this empire, with ethnic conflicts
and wars like those that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. The policy of repression arises from
this fear. ‘They want Tibet to become Han Chinese territory,’ says Phenthok. ‘We
Tibetans are supposed to speak Chinese, live Han culture, but continue to wear our traditional costumes
and dance. We are supposed to be a tourist attraction.’
The Dalai Lama, says one of his advisors about his status as a global icon, has won a world.
But he has lost his country.
The Chinese state leadership sees him as a potential troublemaker, an obstacle
on the path to the assimilation of the Tibetans. The party press regularly condemns him as a
separatist. They compared him to Hitler, called him a feudal slaveholder, a ‘wolf
in monk’s clothing,’ a man with ‘the face of a man and the heart of a
beast.’
And he, the Dalai Lama? Says sentences like these: ’We can understand our enemy as a teacher.
We should venerate him for giving us the precious opportunity to
patience.’ Time and again, he has sworn his people to non-violence. Just like
Mahatma Gandhi, whom the Dalai Lama calls his role model and whom he once met in a
dream, as did Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
The Dalai Lama is the latest in a series of great role models of peaceful resistance.
And the Tibetans have followed him: when some of them could no longer muster patience,
they did not attack the Chinese state or its servants, but

themselves. Since 2009, 169 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest against
Chinese foreign rule.
Would a different strategy have achieved a different result? Would the Dalai Lama have been able to
change Tibet’s fate at some point? You can’t talk to him about it, he
doesn’t give interviews anymore; because of his advanced age, says a colleague. But in
Dharamsala there are others who can tell us something about him.
Tenzin Geyche Tethong calls back his German shepherd and opens the door to his
living room. There is a lot of wood, an open fireplace, and on the wall a view of the Potala Palace in
Lhasa, where the Dalai Lamas resided for centuries. Tenzin Geyche Tethong, 81,
was born in Lhasa and is one of the few people who still experienced the old Tibet. After
After fleeing, he became the Dalai Lama’s private secretary and remained so for more than forty years.
What does he remember when he thinks of home? There is not much left, answers
Tethong. ‘Above all, the landscape, the mountains.’
To understand why the Tibetans, despite the fame of the Dalai Lama, found it so
difficult for the Tibetans to win back their country, despite the Dalai Lama’s fame, you have to be aware of how they
lost it. Tenzin Geyche Tethong says: ‘It was also our fault.’
A hundred years ago, the 13th Dalai Lama, predecessor of the present one, ruled over a Tibet that
was de facto independent after the collapse of the last Chinese empire.
After the collapse of the last Chinese empire, it has preserved its unique Buddhist culture, but it is
very poor and organised in a strict hierarchy. There are almost no paved roads. Not a
single proper hospital. Very few inhabitants can read and write,
and a great many live in monasteries; at times, it is estimated that as many as one in three do. The country is
ruled by a small upper class of monks and aristocrats, with the Dalai Lama at
the top.
The 13th Dalai Lama observed how new ideas were taking hold across the mountains in China.
Nationalism, socialism. He feared a Chinese invasion, and in his
will at the time he wrote: ‘If we do not take precautions to defend ourselves,
defend ourselves, we have very little chance of survival. Then our
spiritual and cultural traditions will be extinguished.’ He wants to change Tibet, wants to
build a modern school system, a modern army. But the elite of nobles and
monks, concerned about their privileges, prevent change. ’Old Tibet, the
conservative forces persisted,’ says Tenzin Geyche Tethong.
At the end of 1933, the reformer, who was not allowed to be one, died. A few years later,
several teams of monks set out to travel the empire. They were search parties,
sent to find the next Dalai Lama.
‘Lama’ is what Tibetans call their spiritual masters. The word “Dalai” means ocean.
The Dalai Lama is the highest of all Lamas. Tibetans believe that he has graced the world with his presence since the year
1391: wisdom as vast and deep as the sea, in constantly
changing mortal shells. He was born for the last time so far in the summer of 1935
in a small village far from Lhasa, as the son of a farming family. The boy is two years old
when one of the search parties reaches the village – the embalmed head of the deceased
13th Dalai Lama had been pointing to the northeast, thus showing the monks the direction. They
are sitting in the house of the farming family. The highest-ranking monk, who is posing as a servant to his companions

takes one of the 13th Dalai Lama’s prayer beads in his hands. Then the
toddler approaches and wants it.
This is how the Dalai Lama himself would later describe it. After further signs and tests,
it is certain: this boy is the right one.
At first, regents take over secular power in his place. In China, the
Communists establish the People’s Republic. When tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers
initially invade eastern Tibet in 1950, a member of the Tibetan government explains: ‘We
are a country of high lamas. The Chinese cannot harm us.’ In this
crisis, the Dalai Lama, a teenager of 15 years, is
transferred to the Dalai Lama, a teenager of 15 years, the affairs of government. The Tibetans implore for support abroad, ask for
help from the United Nations. But in vain. Only small El Salvador supports their
concern.
A Tibetan negotiator finally signs an agreement under pressure, with which
all of Tibet becomes part of China – against the explicit will of the Dalai Lama, who only
learns about it from the radio. The Tibetans have lost their country. The
People’s Liberation Army quickly takes control of it.
A guerrilla war against the occupiers ensues. While the Dalai Lama
calls for non-violence, his brother maintains contact with the Tibetan fighters. China’s army
drops bombs on monasteries and forces people to
. Soon 97 per cent of the monasteries have been destroyed. According to the government-in-exile,
more than a million Tibetans will die of hunger or violence
in the following two decades.
In March 1959, the situation in the capital Lhasa is also threatening to escalate. An angry
crowd surrounds the palace where the Dalai Lama is holding out, fearing the Chinese
Chinese could kidnap him. The People’s Liberation Army took up position. Disguised
as a simple soldier, the Dalai Lama managed to escape from the palace and, after a
two-week tour through the Himalayas, made it to India. His escape became a big
media story, and he became world-famous overnight.
‘The extent of our popularity surprised even us,’ says his former
private secretary Tenzin Geyche Tethong. ‘In 1973, we made our first trip to Europe,
followed by one to the United States in 1979.’ They consciously address global civil society: the
strategy of non-violent resistance is based on making the cost of a system of oppression
too high because the citizens of other countries recognise the moral injustice
and push for change. The international community imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa,
which ultimately contributed to the end of the oppression.
And didn’t China open itself to the world at the end of the 1970s? A poor country,
dependent on foreign capital and Western technology – isn’t this a
means of applying pressure to demand a different policy towards Tibet?
Yes, it does. But Western governments have never really used it. Because
the Chinese Communist Party also has a threat and a lure – one that
the Dalai Lama cannot counter. The party is beginning to understand how effective it is: the size of its own population.
China is not just any market. China
is a market with more than a billion potential consumers. Whoever controls access to it
can bring governments and multinational corporations into line.

1997: At the height of the pop-cultural enthusiasm for Tibet,
the two Hollywood films Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet are showing in cinemas. Kundun was
produced by Disney. Soon all of the company’s businesses in China come to a
come to a standstill. The head of Disney has a private conversation with the Chinese
Prime Minister, the content of which later becomes public. ‘We made a stupid mistake,’
he says. “This film was an insult to our friends. The bad
news is that the film was made. The good news is that no one saw it.
I want to apologise. This will not happen again.” Other planned
films about Tibet, including those of other studios, are not made. Sony, responsible
for Seven Years in Tibet, sends its managers on an apology tour of China
and speaks out in favour of the country’s admission to the World Trade Organisation.
1998: For an advertising campaign with the slogan Think different, the
computer manufacturer Apple designs a poster with the face of the Dalai Lama. It is
not used, allegedly because the Dalai Lama was not well enough known. Three years later,
Apple began having its products manufactured in the People’s Republic.
2007: German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Dalai Lama for a ‘private
exchange’ at the Chancellery. She had herself photographed wearing the white welcome scarf that
he presented her with. Her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, publicly criticises the
meeting, saying it was just ‘window-dressing politics for a quick headline’. Now it remains to be seen
how the broken porcelain can be repaired.
2019: Hollywood is finally releasing a film about Tibet. This time as a co-production
with a Chinese studio. In Everest – A Yeti Aims High, a girl
from Shanghai discovers a yeti on the roof of her house and brings him back to Tibet. In the
film, however, not a single Tibetan can be seen, and the word Tibet is not mentioned
once – as desired by party propaganda. The preferred term is Xizang.
It means ‘western treasure trove’.
Today, the Dalai Lama rarely travels abroad. It has become too exhausting for the old man,
and fewer influential people are willing to be seen with him.
And this despite the fact that the Dalai Lama has long since given up his claim to independence for Tibet.
He only demands what the invaders had promised in that 1951 agreement
: real autonomy and religious freedom in a Chinese state. He has
now handed over his political duties to the elected representative of the 150,000 Tibetans in exile
worldwide. Currently, this is a man in his mid-fifties named Penpa Tsering.
When the Dalai Lama visited Berlin a decade and a half ago, he travelled in a motorcade
with a police escort to the Brandenburg Gate. There he took to the stage, cheered by
tens of thousands. Tibetan flags, balloons, a huge banner: ‘Freedom – Germany
for Tibet – Tibet for the world’. When his political successor visits Berlin today, he can be
met in the lobby of the Motel One on Alexanderplatz, where he stands unrecognised among
business people and tourists, holding a paper cup of coffee that he got from
Dunkin‘ Donuts. “I’m just a simple Tibetan,” says Penpa Tsering. “So
I have to do a lot more leg work.” He sees himself not only as a spokesperson for Tibetans in exile,
but also as a representative of the six million people at home who are not allowed to vote
. He is about to drive to an office building near Potsdamer Platz. He
will smoke another cigarette at the entrance and then enter the Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development. He does not want to reveal who he will be meeting there.
His discussion partners fear the reaction of the Chinese government.

China has become a world power that is able to suppress debate and criticism even in a
country like Germany. But the representative of the Tibetans is not giving up. He
travels for six months of the year. ‘At least,’ says Penpa Tsering, ‘now that China
is more aggressive geopolitically than ever before, more governments are willing to
listen to us.’ Military manoeuvres off Taiwan, intimidation of neighbours like the
Philippines, the new confrontation between the power blocs: for the Tibetans, there is also a
little hope. Hope that the West will take a more committed stand for them.
The residence of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala is a yellow-painted building, simple and
elegant. In the courtyard, there is a small basketball court. Did the Dalai Lama ever play here?
throw hoops here? On a table, monks display the items that people from all over the world
have sent for the Dalai Lama to bless. Buddha statues, incense sticks,
Tibetan scarves.
The elegant head of protocol gives a signal. The line of visitors begins to move.
One by one, they step in front of the swivel chair where the Dalai Lama is sitting, bowing down to
him. The head of protocol reads out the name and nationality, two photographers take
photos, which are later sent to the guests. The Dalai Lama grants each guest a few
moments of his time. The tattooed Jesus from Leipzig. The pilgrim from Vietnam, who
presents him with her chocolate box. The old Tibetan in a wheelchair.
There are no visitors from China.

The strategy of peaceful resistance is never directed only outwards, to the
world public. It is always directed also to the citizens of the perpetrator state. They should
recognise that their government is doing the wrong thing: Mahatma Gandhi’s message moved
the British to work for an end to colonial rule over India. Martin Luther
King got white Americans to join the civil rights movement. Nelson
Mandela inspired white South Africans in their fight against apartheid.
It is not that such people do not also exist in China. Tibetan Buddhism
has been part of China for many centuries, and the rulers of several imperial dynasties were devoted
to it. Even today, many Han Chinese venerate the Dalai Lama, and until a few years ago,
they also paid their respects to him here in Dharamsala. But because of the geopolitical
tensions between India and China in the Himalayas, it has become almost impossible for them
to get a visa.
In their home country, these people have no say anyway. Unlike in Great Britain
the 1930s, the USA in the 1960s and South Africa in the 1980s, any
public criticism is suppressed by the Chinese leadership at the very outset. This is how it comes about
that the party can still further intensify its Tibet policy and
need not fear any contradiction.
In China, four out of five Tibetan children now attend boarding school, where they mainly
learn Chinese. The Chinese leadership has sealed off the border with India so well that
few Tibetans still manage to escape. And censorship makes communication between
Tibetans in exile and their homeland more difficult than ever. ‘Breaking the descent, the roots, the
connections, the origin break’ – as described by a politician named Chen Quanguo.
From 2011, he served as party leader in Tibet for five years. Later, he had
mass camps built in Xinjiang province to intern Uyghurs. The tactic of putting pressure on
relatives who stayed at home, like the parents of Tibetan Phenthok,used in Xinjiang as well. For the party, Tibet was a blueprint for
taking action against other ethnic minorities in the multi-ethnic empire.
Early morning in Dharamsala: a woman with cropped hair and glasses leaves a
nunnery. She dodges a speeding car, squeezes past a cow
and turns onto the pilgrimage route that leads around the residence of the Dalai Lama.
The view extends far into the valley. It is still quiet here. Tibetan prayer flags, strung on ropes,
wave in the wind.
The woman is in her mid-fifties, wearing the claret-coloured robe of Tibetan nuns and
sneakers in the same colour. Her name is Kelsang Wangmo. In a previous life, she was
her name was Kerstin Brummenbaum, and she has retained the Rhineland accent she had back then.
She was 20 when she decided to become a Buddhist nun. For almost two
decades she studied Buddhism, as the only foreigner among Tibetan
monks. She was the first woman ever to obtain the ‘Geshe’ title, the doctoral degree of
Tibetan Buddhism. This makes her the right person to talk to about the question
around which a political power struggle has already developed – and which could be decisive
for the future of the Tibetans: What will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama leaves his current
mortal shell behind? When will he be reborn? Where? In which body?
The tradition of having monks interpret miraculous signs to find the right child
was always susceptible to manipulation. In the 19th century, for example, the ninth,
tenth, eleventh and twelfth Dalai Lamas all died young and under mysterious circumstances.
Today, the atheistic Communist Party, of all people, is trying to control this deeply
mythical and seemingly alien process. Will it succeed in
installing its own Dalai Lama? A puppet who can be guided by the Party and who
can at the same time guide the Tibetan people?
In 2007, the Chinese State Administration for Religious Affairs published a document
called ‘Measures for Handling the Reincarnations of Living Buddhas,’
also known as Order Number Five. Only the Chinese government can
authorise the search for a reincarnated lama, it says. Yes, a lama may
only be reincarnated with the permission of the party. According to Robert Barnett, Tibet
expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the government has already
begun to make preparations for the selection of its candidate. A 25-
member high-level commission has been set up, headed by the party secretary in Tibet.
The government has already shown how serious it is about this. In the 1990s,
the Dalai Lama had identified a six-year-old boy as the so-called Panchen Lama,
second-highest spiritual master after himself. The government had the boy kidnapped
and installed its own Panchen Lama. The new one’s parents were party members, he
grew up in Beijing from an early age and has direct access to Xi Jinping, the
President. Among Tibetans, however, his influence remains limited. The kidnapped boy
has not reappeared to this day.
There will probably be two Dalai Lamas one day. One that the Tibetans
have identified and one that the Chinese Communist Party has chosen. The
current Dalai Lama remains vague on this point in his public statements. He has said that perhaps
his successor will be a woman. Or that tradition will come to an end with him.
Only one thing is certain: a new Dalai Lama will not be born in China
. But in a free country.

‘The Dalai Lama will be reincarnated as a woman?’ Kelsang Wangmo laughs. “Tibetan society is not that advanced yet.” According to Tibetan teachings,
the Dalai Lama does have some leeway when it comes to his reincarnation.
‘A being with such spiritual development can manifest itself in two, three or many bodies
manifest itself in two, three or many bodies.’ For example, he could transfer his spirit to one or more successors during his lifetime.
Or present an adult –
although Kelsang Wangmo believes that many Tibetans would find this difficult to accept.
In her view, the traditional method would be more popular: monks identify the
reincarnation in the body of a child. The disadvantage of this would be that the child would first have to grow up
would have to grow up first. The Tibetans would have to wait years for a 15th Dalai Lama to be able to take action.
Good for their opponents.
Kelsang Wangmo enters a modern building and hurries to an interpreter’s booth. This is where
she will be sitting in a moment while the Dalai Lama addresses
the Tibetan youth in the Great Temple of Dharamsala. His teaching will be about how people
can change their minds so that they suffer less and find inner peace. ‘The
way to achieve this is to avoid faulty states of consciousness and
increase helpful states,’ the Dalai Lama will say in his still deep,
powerful voice. Kelsang Wangmo will follow his words intently and translate them into
German.
She greets the other interpreters. The Dalai Lama’s appearance will be broadcast over the internet
to people all over the world, in more than a dozen languages. Before
Kelsang Wangmo says goodbye and closes the door to her cabin, she pauses for a
moment. ‘Periods of vacuum were always dangerous for Tibet,’ she says.
A handful of exiles have gathered in an old British colonial building in Dharamsala.
Academics, activists, a film director. Tonight they are guests
in the shared home of the poet Tenzin Tsundue. Outside, a
downpour is raging, the drops patter on the roof, frogs croak. Every now and then the
lights go out, then they light candles. Most of the people here are in their
twenties and thirties and are the second generation in exile; Tenzin Tsundue, at
50, is the oldest. He has dedicated his life to the struggle for the cause of his people.
‘My grandmother always talked about Tibet, a country we never
seen. We have inherited the memory. But also the responsibility. We live in
a kind of guilt.’ So many have not managed to flee from the Chinese. ’We are
free. So we have to do something.’
The question is what. Will the message of non-violence outlive the Dalai Lama? Or
will the Tibetans resort to other, more radical methods?
No one in the house knows a time without him. The Dalai Lama was always there, like a fixed star.
In some ways, Tenzin Tsundue and his guests go further than he does. They reject the
so-called Middle Way policy propagated by the Dalai Lama – they do not want
autonomy within the People’s Republic of China, they want an independent Tibet. But almost
all here agree with Tenzin Tsundue when he says: ‘If we resort to violence,
the principles by which we have acted for more than a thousand years no longer count.
The significance of the Tibetan people lies in the fact that we have developed an entire system
based on love and compassion. Everything we do, we do because we
believe in: love and compassion. This is what we can give to humanity.’

Published in February 2025 in DIE ZEIT

Translated by deepl.com