Tulku

A tulku is identified as the reincarnation of a deceased Tibetan Buddhist teacher through a search process combining several traditional methods: consultation of prophetic signs or a prediction letter the deceased teacher may have left indicating circumstances of his coming rebirth, oracular consultation, most famously through Tibet's State Oracle in the case of the Dalai Lama's own recognition, and practical tests in which candidate children are presented with a selection of objects, some belonging to the deceased teacher and some not, to see whether the child correctly identifies and shows recognition of his own previous possessions. Once identified, a young tulku typically begins an intensive education under senior tutors, combining standard monastic training with instruction intended to prepare him for the specific teaching role and institutional responsibilities his predecessor held.

The tulku system as an institutionalized method of religious succession is distinctively Tibetan, without close parallel in Theravada or East Asian Buddhism, and developed gradually from the twelfth century onward, with the Karmapa lineage generally credited as its earliest sustained example, well before the practice was extended to the many thousands of tulku lineages, of greatly varying prominence, recognized across Tibetan Buddhism by the modern era.

The tulku system has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent decades on several fronts distinct from the specific Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama succession disputes: the practice of removing a very young recognized child from his birth family to begin intensive monastic training has raised questions, including from some Tibetan Buddhist teachers themselves, about the psychological and developmental impact on children who have no independent capacity to consent to the recognition or the demanding life path it sets in motion, and a number of adult tulkus have, in recent years, publicly renounced or stepped back from their recognized status, describing the role as imposed rather than chosen.

The Chinese government has also asserted direct legal authority over the process since 2007, when it issued regulations requiring state approval for the recognition of reincarnated lamas within its territory, a measure widely understood, including by the tradition's own exiled leadership, as intended to give Beijing decisive future influence, most consequentially over the eventual selection of a fifteenth Dalai Lama, a political dimension layered onto what is, in its traditional form, a purely religious recognition process, and one that has made the tulku system a subject of geopolitical as well as religious significance in a way few other Buddhist institutions are.