The Seventeenth Karmapa Dispute and State-Regulated Recognition

The tulku recognition Karma Pakshi began has not always run smoothly, and the succession to the sixteenth Karmapa, who died in 1981, produced the most public dispute in the line's history: two senior Karma Kagyu teachers each recognized a different child as the seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje and Trinley Thaye Dorje, and neither claim has been resolved to the satisfaction of the whole school, so the tradition today functions with two parallel claimants each maintained by a substantial following. The dispute intersects with a development external to the tradition entirely: in 2007 the People's Republic of China issued State Administration for Religious Affairs Order No. 5, formally requiring that the recognition of any reincarnated lama within its territory receive government approval, a measure widely read by scholars of Tibetan Buddhism as an attempt to control future succession disputes, including any eventual selection of a Dalai Lama successor, by inserting the state into a process the tradition had always managed internally. Historians of the institution note that the Karmapa dispute, unfolding just as this state framework emerged, demonstrates how a six hundred year old religious mechanism for continuity can become entangled with contemporary geopolitics once its outcome carries consequences beyond the monastery.