Gwynne Dyer: Dalai Lama moves with the times

The Dalai Lama wants Tibet's political decisions made by an elected prime minister. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, recently said: "The Dalai Lama equals non-violence, and without him there would be violence."

In Beijing, Chinese writer Wang Lixiong agreed: "If ... the Dalai Lama does not return to Tibet before he dies, the moment that he dies will see general riots across the Tibetan areas of China." And he is going to die, probably fairly soon.

The Dalai Lama will be 74 next month, and he has been in hospital three times in the past year. He presumably believes that he will immediately be reborn as soon as he dies, but the traditional search for the child who is his next incarnation could take years.

Waiting for that child to grow up and become the Tibetans' next leader will take several decades. That is a big political problem.

One measure he has already taken to ease the difficulties is to announce that he is most unlikely to be reborn in Chinese-ruled Tibet, which greatly narrows the search area for his successor. There are only 120,000 Tibetans in the diaspora, mostly descendants of the 1959 refugees.

Three-quarters of them live in India, and most of the rest live in Nepal (15,000), the United States (5000), Canada (3000) or Switzerland (2000).

But this almost guarantees what was already quite likely - that the Chinese authorities will "find" a rival reincarnation within Tibet and promote him as the next legitimate Dalai Lama.

Even if that does not happen, the 20-year gap while the current Dalai Lama's successor matures leaves a political vacuum that must be filled one way or another, and he long ago suggested that he might name a regent to exercise his authority during that period.

The core of the problem is that his role as defined by tradition embodies both political and religious authority. Religious questions rarely require instant answers, and Tibetan Buddhism has flourished for many centuries despite these recurrent 20-year gaps in the highest leadership job.

Political decisions, on the other hand, need to be made promptly - so maybe the solution is to separate those two roles.

The Dalai Lama has been raising this possibility for years, only to have it repeatedly rejected by his adoring followers. He brought it up again at a congress of the Tibetan exile community not long after last year's bloody anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, saying that his moderate, "middle-way" approach to the Chinese authorities in Beijing, seeking only autonomy and not independence for the country, was having no success.