Recognizing A Reincarnate Teacher

A tulku is identified as the reincarnation of a deceased Tibetan Buddhist teacher through a search process combining several traditional methods: consultation of prophetic signs or a prediction letter the deceased teacher may have left indicating circumstances of his coming rebirth, oracular consultation, most famously through Tibet's State Oracle in the case of the Dalai Lama's own recognition, and practical tests in which candidate children are presented with a selection of objects, some belonging to the deceased teacher and some not, to see whether the child correctly identifies and shows recognition of his own previous possessions. Once identified, a young tulku typically begins an intensive education under senior tutors, combining standard monastic training with instruction intended to prepare him for the specific teaching role and institutional responsibilities his predecessor held.

The tulku system as an institutionalized method of religious succession is distinctively Tibetan, without close parallel in Theravada or East Asian Buddhism, and developed gradually from the twelfth century onward, with the Karmapa lineage generally credited as its earliest sustained example, well before the practice was extended to the many thousands of tulku lineages, of greatly varying prominence, recognized across Tibetan Buddhism by the modern era.