Dalai Lama

The title Dalai Lama, from the Mongolian for Ocean, meaning teacher of vast wisdom, was first bestowed in 1578 by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan on Sonam Gyatso, the third head of the Gelug reincarnation lineage; two earlier teachers were recognized retroactively as the first and second Dalai Lamas, so continuity was asserted backward as well as forward. The office combined spiritual and, from the seventeenth century, political authority: the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, unified much of Tibet under his rule in 1642 with Mongol military backing and founded the Ganden Phodrang government that administered Tibet, with interruptions, until the mid twentieth century.

Within the Gelug school, the largest of the four principal schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is regarded as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, though the office's religious authority is distinct from, and traditionally subordinate on strictly doctrinal questions to, the Ganden Tripa, the Gelug school's elected head. Politically, Chinese forces took control of Tibet in 1950 and 1951, and the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed 1959 uprising, since which the office has functioned as a government in exile and a global religious and diplomatic presence rather than a ruling government inside Tibet.

A new Dalai Lama is identified as the reincarnation, or tulku, of the previous holder, typically a child found some years after the death of his predecessor. Search parties of senior lamas historically relied on visions at the oracle lake Lhamo Latso, prophetic signs left by the deceased Dalai Lama, and tests in which candidate children were asked to identify possessions belonging to their predecessor. Under Qing dynasty oversight in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some recognitions were also confirmed by drawing lots from a golden urn, a procedure the Chinese state has since invoked as precedent for its own claimed authority.

The fourteenth and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was recognized in 1937 and enthroned in 1940 while still a child, decades before his exile. He has stated publicly that any future reincarnation, should the institution continue at all, would be recognized in accordance with Tibetan Buddhist tradition and outside the control of the Chinese government, and has raised the possibility that the office might not be reincarnated in the traditional sense. The People's Republic of China maintains that state approval is legally required for the recognition of any reincarnated lama under regulations it issued in 2007, and has indicated it intends to select a successor through that process. Tibetan religious authorities in exile and the Chinese state hold irreconcilable positions on which recognition, if the two diverge, would be legitimate, a dispute this record states without adjudicating.