Kundun opens its account of the 14th Dalai Lama's life with the search that identified him, and the film dramatizes the process with unusual care for a Western feature. A search party of monks, following signs read from the previous Dalai Lama's embalmed body and from visions reported at a sacred lake, travels through Tibet testing candidate children against a set of criteria Tibetan Buddhist tradition holds mark a genuine reincarnation, chiefly the ability to correctly pick out possessions that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama from among decoy objects.
The child who would become Tenzin Gyatso was found in 1937 in a farming village in the Amdo region, and the film stages his recognition and the subsequent journey to Lhasa, along with the years of intensive monastic education in Buddhist philosophy, ritual and statecraft that followed before his formal enthronement. Scorsese, working from Melissa Mathison's screenplay, shot much of the ritual material with a documentary-like attention to procedure, consulting extensively with the Tibetan exile community and with the Dalai Lama's own office during preproduction.
The institution the film dramatizes, a single lineage of recognized reincarnations serving as both spiritual and political head of Tibet since the seventeenth century, is unique among the world's major religious offices, and the film treats the mechanics of that recognition process as worthy of the same careful, matter-of-fact attention it gives to the political crisis that follows.