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.