Tibetan Buddhists affirm the existence of tulkus: realised teachers who, out of compassion, deliberately take rebirth to continue guiding beings, and who can be recognised in a new child after death. Understood as the conscious reappearance of an enlightened or highly advanced practitioner rather than ordinary karmic rebirth, the tulku is identified through signs, testimony, divination, and traditional tests, then educated to resume the predecessor's role and lineage. The Dalai Lamas and many other lines are held to be such successions.
The tulku institution is usually traced to the Karmapa line of the Karma Kagyu school, whose second holder, Karma Pakshi (1204 to 1283), is regarded as the first deliberately recognised reincarnate lama, making it centuries older than the Dalai Lama institution. Recognition is not always uncontested: since 1992 the seventeenth Karmapa succession has been disputed between two rival claimants, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, recognised by the Tibetan government-in-exile and the regent Situ Rinpoche's faction, and Trinley Thaye Dorje, recognised by another senior lama, Shamar Rinpoche's faction, a schism within Kagyu leadership that remains unresolved and illustrates that the tulku system depends on human testimony and institutional politics that can themselves become divided.