Lama

The most common Western error about the lama is to equate the title with recognised reincarnation; the office is defined by something else, the authority to transmit teaching.

Empowerment

A lama is a teacher qualified to give instruction and, crucially, to confer tantric empowerment. The Tibetan word translates the Sanskrit guru, and the office is defined by transmission: a lama holds a lineage of teachings received from his own teachers and is authorised to pass them on. The empowerment function is what separates a lama from a monk who is merely learned, and it is why the relationship with a lama in Vajrayana practice is treated as more binding than an ordinary teacher-student one.

Lama is not tulku

A lama need not be a monk; married lay lamas with full teaching authority are ordinary in the Nyingma and Sakya traditions, where certain lineages descend within families. Not every lama is a recognised reincarnation, and not every recognised reincarnation, or tulku, is a competent lama; conflating the two is the standard error. Women hold the title, with the honorific Jetsunma, though the number of women in senior teaching positions is small, for reasons that connect directly to the restricted state of full ordination for women in the tradition.

The office of lama gained an unusual second dimension in Tibet when the Fifth Dalai Lama, with military backing from a Mongol khan, established the Ganden Phodrang government in 1642, uniting the religious authority of a recognised high lama with direct temporal rule over most of Tibet, a fusion of spiritual and political office that lasted, with interruptions, until the mid twentieth century and that has no real equivalent in the other traditions covered in this atlas, where religious and political authority are at most historically entangled rather than formally united in one person.

The Chinese takeover of Tibet and the flight of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama into exile in 1959 scattered a great many senior lamas into India, Nepal and eventually the West, and the dharma centres these exiled teachers founded from the 1960s onward are now the primary route through which Tibetan Buddhism, and the lama-disciple relationship at its centre, has become established well outside the Tibetan cultural region, so that a great many Western students today encounter the office of lama entirely within institutions built in exile rather than in Tibet itself.

A comparable succession dispute, distinct from the Dalai Lama case covered elsewhere in this atlas, has divided the Karma Kagyu school since 1992, when two rival boys, Ogyen Trinley Dorje and Trinley Thaye Dorje, were each recognised as the seventeenth Karmapa by different senior lamas within the same lineage, a division that has never been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides and that has left Karma Kagyu institutions and centres worldwide effectively split between two parallel lines of recognition and authority, each with its own considerable following.