Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Lhamo Thondup was born in 1935 to a farming family in Taktser, a village in the northeastern Tibetan region of Amdo, and was identified in 1937, at age two, by a search party that had followed a series of visions and omens reported by the regent following the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, including a vision seen in the sacred lake Lhamo Latso.

Tested against a set of the previous Dalai Lama's possessions mixed among decoys, which he is said to have correctly identified as his own, the child was recognized as the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama lineage and taken to Lhasa, where he was formally enthroned in 1940 and given the name Tenzin Gyatso, ocean of wisdom upholding the teaching. He began the traditional intensive monastic education of a Dalai Lama, memorization, logic, Buddhist philosophy and eventually the Geshe Lharampa degree, the highest level of Tibetan Buddhist scholarship, which he completed with distinction at age twenty-three under sharply deteriorating political circumstances, as Chinese Communist forces had already entered and were consolidating control over Tibet through the 1950s. He assumed full political authority earlier than usual, at age fifteen in 1950, precisely because of the crisis the Chinese entry into Tibet had created for the young Tibetan state.

Following a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule in Lhasa and its violent suppression, Tenzin Gyatso fled across the Himalayas into India, where the Indian government granted him asylum and he established a government in exile at Dharamsala, a hill town that has since become the effective capital of the Tibetan diaspora and the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration. Over the following decades he built an international profile unmatched by any previous Dalai Lama, traveling constantly, meeting with world leaders, religious figures and scientists, and presenting Tibetan Buddhism to global audiences in terms that stressed compassion, non-violence and a stated commitment to genuine autonomy for Tibet rather than full independence, a position, the Middle Way approach, that has drawn criticism from more separatist voices within the exile community even as it earned him the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy.

In 2011 he took the historically unprecedented step of formally transferring the Dalai Lama's traditional political authority to a democratically elected Sikyong, or political leader, of the Central Tibetan Administration, retaining only the religious dimension of the office and stating explicitly that this separation was meant to secure democratic continuity for Tibetans regardless of what happens with the search for a future Dalai Lama, a succession question complicated further by the Chinese state's own competing claim to authority over recognizing his reincarnation.