Divinity Atlas
A Government Order No Tibetan School Accepts
In 2007 the government of China issued an order requiring state approval before a Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation can be recognized. The atlas records three Tibetan Buddhist bodies taking a position on it, and every one of them refuses it.
A Bureaucratic Test for a Religious Question
Order No. 5, issued by China's State Administration for Religious Affairs, sets out the paperwork a reincarnation must clear: an application, a review, and a government approval before a recognized child or teacher can take up the title of a previous master. It treats the identification of a tulku, a reincarnate teacher, as an administrative matter with a state office as the final authority.
That is not how the tradition itself has settled the question. Recognition has historically rested with senior teachers, oracle consultations, and signs particular to the office, none of which involves a government registrar.
Three Schools, One Answer
The Gelug school, whose head is the office of the Dalai Lama, holds that the recognition of a successor rests with the institutions of the tradition and not with a state administration. The Karma Kagyu school, which has its own unresolved dispute over the recognition of its own head, refuses the state's claim to approve such recognitions on the same ground. Tibetan Buddhism is recorded taking the same position more broadly: the order makes state approval a condition of recognizing a reincarnate teacher, which the tradition holds to be a religious determination no government can make.
Three bodies, describing three different disputes of their own, arrive at the identical refusal.