Chinese authorities have imposed new restrictions on Tibetan Buddhists: no identifying new reincarnations of Buddha without approval from Beijing.
Tibet’s living Buddhas have been banned from reincarnation without permission from China’s atheist leaders. The ban is included in new rules intended to assert Beijing’s authority over Tibet’s restive and deeply Buddhist people.
“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid,” according to the order, which comes into effect on September 1.
The 14-part regulation issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs is aimed at limiting the influence of Tibet’s exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, and at preventing the re-incarnation of the 72-year-old monk without approval from Beijing.
Worth remembering when all that 2008 Olympics paraphernalia comes on sale.
China already insists that only the Government can approve the appointments of Tibet’s two most important monks, the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama’s announcement in May 1995 that a search inside Tibet — and with the co- operation of a prominent abbot — had identified the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, who died in 1989, enraged Beijing. That prompted the Communist authorities to restart the search and to send a senior Politburo member to Lhasa to oversee the final choice. This resulted in top Communist officials presiding over a ceremony at the main Jokhang temple in Lhasa in which names of three boys inscribed on ivory sticks were placed inside a golden urn and a lot was then drawn to find the true reincarnation.
The boy chosen by the Dalai Lama has disappeared. The abbot who worked with the Dalai Lama was jailed and has since vanished. Several sets of rules on seeking out “soul boys” were promulgated in 1995, but were effectively in abeyance and hundreds of living Buddhas are now believed to live inside and outside China.
On Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, they pointed out that approval isn’t needed to reincarnate as an invertebrate, such as an earthworm, a jellyfish, or a Congressional Democrat.
Well, yeah. It’s China. It’s even traditional in the old imperial sense there.
They went from a xenophobic racist despotism that got buggered by the West for a century to a xenophobic Marxist-as-crazy-theocracy to a xenophobic pseudo-Marxist kleptocracy. Tolerance and compassion have been contrasurvival traits in China for centuries, maybe forever.