From: TIN News Update / 25 October, 1995

Hardline leaders have been appointed to run Tashilhunpo, one of Tibet's most powerful monasteries, replacing moderate figures who have been either arrested or deposed by the Chinese authorities in a purge designed to regain Chinese control of the selection of the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most senior lama.

The new leaders of the monastery include a monk who last ruled the monastery during the Cultural Revolution as well as a hardliner committed to a crackdown on anti-Chinese dissent. Both are under the leadership of Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen, a long-time opponent of the previous Panchen Lama, who died at Tashilhunpo in 1989.

Two lamas who are regarded as sympathetic to the deposed abbot have been retained on the management committee, apparently because the authorities need them to give credibility to religious rituals which are planned by the Chinese authorities to endorse their choice of the Panchen Lama's reincarnation.

The Panchen Lama was the highest ranking lama to have remained in Tibet after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 and was the only one of two Tibetans to be promoted by the Chinese to the level of a national leader. A dispute over the identification of his successor has already led to demonstrations, 48 reported arrests, and a major vilification campaign by the Chinese authorities.

On 14th July the local Religious Affairs Bureau in Shigatse, Tibet's second city, issued an order appointing eight Tibetans to the leading positions on the Democratic Management Committee at Tashilhunpo, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama.

At the 14th July meeting the acting abbot, Chadrel Rimpoche, was formally removed from his positions as head of the Tashilhunpo Management Committee and as head of the Search Committee for the Panchen Lama's reincarnation, as well as from his membership of China's Political Consultative Conference.

The former abbot has been in detention in China since May, reportedly on suspicion of passing information to the Dalai Lama in exile. The information is said to have enabled the Dalai Lama to confirm on 14th May the recognition of Gendun Choekyi Nyima, a 6 year old boy from Lhari, as the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama.

The 14th July order also announced the dismissal of another distinguished Tashilhunpo lama, Gyaltrul Rimpoche, from his position on the monastery's Management Committee. Gyaltrul Rimpoche has been in prison since a police raid on the monastery on 12th July. The raid followed the disruption by the monks of a high-level meeting the previous day at which officials read out a 15 page condemnation of the abbot.

- New Committee at Tashilhunpo -

At the head of the new Committee is Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen, a lama originally from the Tashilhunpo area who is a vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and of the People's Congress in Tibet.

Day to day running of Tashilhunpo will be carried out by Lobsang Tsering, a monk newly appointed as senior leader of the committee. Lama Tsering, as he is also known, is regarded as a hardliner who is said to support rigorous punishment of political dissent and to have been seeking the position of Chadrel Rinpoche. He is associated with a faction opposed to Chadrel Rinpoche and to any co-operation with the Dalai Lama, and which is therefore committed to supporting the Chinese device of using a lottery to select the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.

The second new appointment to the leadership is another hardliner, Jamyang, who becomes a deputy chairman of the Committee. Jamyang, who was head of the same committee during the Cultural Revolution, is said to have been widely disliked by the monks at Tashilhunpo but after 1979 lost his position to Chadrel Rimpoche when the Panchen Lama insisted that the monks be allowed a free vote to chose their leaders. He retained official status in the monastery by gaining the position of head of the Work Committee for the Panchen Lama's Tombs.

The second new deputy chairman is Bilung, a high ranking lama regarded by some as an opportunist. A former head of the Dechen Podrang, the Panchen Lama's personal residence and headquarters in Shigatse, Bilung is said to have created a new faction based at the Decehn Podrang which is currently preparing a new biography of the last Panchen Lama. An unofficial biography published in Beijing in 1989 was withdrawn by the Chinese authorities reportedly because it included too much criticism of ultra-leftists.

Two other lamas, Choeden and Ngagchen Rimpoche, seen as having no involvement in politics, have been promoted from committee members to deputy chairmen. Regarded as sympathetic to Chadrel Rimpoche and the Dalai Lama, they are retained on the committee because of the religious respect they enjoy from the monks, and because, more significantly, they are the only two lamas to have survived the purge who are of sufficient status to carry out the religious rituals involved in the arcane ceremony of "shaking the Golden Vase", the lottery system which the Chinese authorities insist must now be used to select the reincarnation.

Ngagchen Rinpoche led one of the search parties to the oracle lake of Lhamo Latso last year at which visions are said to have indicated the birthplace of the child recognised by the Dalai Lama as the correct reincarnation. "We believe that the Panchen Lama as recognised by the Dalai Lama is the true re-incarnation and there are many signs which support this as evidence," Ngagchen Rimpoche is reported to have told officials of the Religious Affairs Bureau on 4th June at a meeting which they had convened in Tashilhunpo monastery to denounce the Dalai Lama, according to unofficial reports.

- Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen Replaces Panchen Lama -

Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen, who takes over the former Panchen Lama's position as "nominal leader" of the monastery, has not remained a monk and so, like the Panchen Lama himself, cannot be a full member of the monastery or its committee. According to religious tradition, this also means the Chinese cannot use him to carry out the lottery system of "shaking the Golden Vase" to endorse the Chinese candidate as the reincarnation.

"Kyi ke yang de chen gi du - It is the old dog barking again", commented a source in Lhasa on the appointment, using a Tibetan phrase that means an old trick is being repeated. Sengchen, whose own monastery is a branch of Tashilhunpo, was pushed to prominence by the Chinese authorities in the 1960s when the Panchen Lama began to criticise Beijing and fell from power, spending 10 years in prison and four in internal exile. Sengchen was one of the principal Tibetan lamas actively involved in the famous six week denunciation meeting or "struggle session" against the Panchen Lama held in Lhasa in September and October 1964, over a year before the Cultural Revolution began. The meeting formally concluded that the Panchen Lama was "anti-Party, anti-people and anti- socialism", labels which were not formally removed until May 1988.

In a rare interview in March 1993 with a western journalist, Sengchen said that he was a Buddhist rather than a communist. "There is no contradiction or conflict. I believe in Buddhism. In terms of "isms", Buddhism is idealism, while Marxism is materialism. However, I am not opposed to Marxism," he told a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. Only a fraction of the Tibetan clergy supported independence for Tibet, he said. "The majority of that tiny number of lamas do this out of ignorance or deception. Most of the lamas detest their activities," he said.

In 1989, a few months after the death of the Panchen Lama, Sengchen called for the administration committees of all monasteries to be brought under stronger political control, as has now happened with his appointment to Tashilhunpo. "It is imperative to tighten the management of monasteries in Tibet and to consolidate them," he told Xinhua on 29th September 1989, in a report published by the BBC's Summary of World Broadcasts on 3rd October 1989.

Sengchen was among the first of the Tibetan lamas to make a statement supporting the Chinese view on the Panchen Lama succession, and used stronger terms than his colleagues to attack the Dalai Lama, including the pejorative form "Dalai", according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. "The Dalai, currently in exile, made an unauthorised declaration ... His act has seriously disrupted the normal process of the task of searching for the reincarnated child. The Dalai has openly violated religious rules to suit his political purposes, and his act has hurt the feelings of the broad masses of Buddhist worshippers," Sengchen said on 19th May, two days after Beijing called for a vilification campaign against the exiled Tibetan leader for announcing the identity of the new Panchen Lama. ---end----