Tulku

The tulku system transmits an office by identifying a child as the return of the person who held it. For most of its history the question of who could make that identification was internal to Tibetan Buddhism, a matter of the previous holder's instructions, of divination, of oracles, of senior lamas in the relevant lineage, and, for the largest lines, of confirmation by the Dalai Lama.

It is now a dispute between a religious tradition and a state.

The People's Republic of China issued State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5 in 2007, requiring that reincarnations of living Buddhas be approved by the government, and asserting that recognitions made outside that process are invalid. The instrument invoked as precedent is the golden urn, a lot-drawing procedure imposed by the Qing court in 1793, whose historical use was intermittent and whose relevance is contested by Tibetan authorities.

The case that shows what this means in practice is the Panchen Lama. In 1995 the Dalai Lama recognised Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, then six years old. The boy and his family were taken into Chinese custody within days and have not been seen publicly since; the Chinese government has stated he is alive and wishes to be left alone. The state installed a different candidate, Gyaincain Norbu, who is not recognised by most Tibetan Buddhists.

The stake is the next Dalai Lama, and both sides know it. The Dalai Lama has said the institution may not continue after him, that any successor recognised by China should not be accepted, and that the decision rests with the Tibetan people. Nothing about the succession is agreed, and the office described in this entry is one whose future is a matter of open political conflict rather than settled religious procedure.

The tulku system was not part of earliest Tibetan Buddhism but a specific institutional invention: the recognition of the second Karmapa in the thirteenth century as the reincarnation of the first is generally treated as the first fully developed case, devised precisely because monks bound by celibacy could not pass leadership to a son the way a hereditary lineage could, and recognising a rebirth offered a way to keep authority, property and teaching lineage together across a single monk's death without abandoning the vow of celibacy that made ordinary heredity impossible.

The system has occasionally recognised tulkus born outside Tibet altogether: Osel Hita Torres, a Spanish boy, was recognised in 1985 as the rebirth of the influential teacher Lama Yeshe and raised within the monastic system built around that recognition, before leaving formal monastic life as an adult to live outside the role, a widely reported case that illustrates both how far the recognition process can extend beyond its Tibetan origins and the real strain the office can place on a child raised from infancy inside so unusual an expectation.

Scholars estimate the number of recognised tulku lineages across the Tibetan Buddhist schools runs into the several hundreds, though no single comprehensive registry exists and estimates vary by how strictly a lineage is counted as still active; a number of historically recognised lines have gone multiple generations without a new incarnation being identified at all, quietly lapsing in practice even though no formal process exists to declare a tulku lineage extinct, so the system's own scale is considerably less precisely known than its central role in Tibetan Buddhist institutional life might suggest.