The New York Times
Thursday, February 3, 2000
Lama's Escape Inflames Buddhist Rivalry
By BARRY BEARAK
RUMTEK, India -- Deshin Shekpa was born in the year of the male wood mouse (1384), and it is said he could be heard chanting a mantra and reciting the alphabet while still inside his mother's womb. At the moment of his birth, he boldly proclaimed himself to be the fifth incarnation of the Karmapa, one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest figures.
Ancient texts describe the fifth Karmapa as a conjurer of miracles, able to light the clouds with iridescent colors and summon flowers to fall from the sky. But his many teachings, while a source of soothing wisdom, also included a dark prophecy: centuries in the distance, during the time of his own 16th and 17th incarnations, the demonic power of "perverse aspirations" would bring the entire Karmapa lineage close to destruction.
This vision seems to have been eerily prescient, for now, as the world enters the Tibetan year of the male iron dragon, there is not one claimant to the title of Karmapa but two, both of them teenage boys whose mentors find the aspirations of the other wickedly perverse.
On Dec. 28, one of those boys, 14-year-old Ugyen Trinley Dorje, fled Chinese-controlled Tibet, enduring an overland journey across the snowbound Himalayas. On Jan. 5, he arrived in Dharmsala, the picturesque Indian hill station that is home to the Tibetan government-in-exile.
His sudden presence, while a ticklish matter between India and China, which have been working to overcome long-strained relations, has been a cause for rejoicing among most Tibetans. The Karmapa is usually considered the third most revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, and the newly arrived boy had the unusual distinction of having been endorsed as the 17th incarnation by both the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government.
But there has been significantly less joy in New Delhi, home to a rival faction that insists it is the one with the genuine Karmapa. Shamar Rinpoche, a high lama also known as the Shamarpa, has been championing this second contender since 1994.
At stake is not only the leadership of one of the oldest branches of Tibetan Buddhism but one of its richest monasteries as well. And that has kept the Shamarpa desperately busy denouncing the newly arrived teenager and his patrons as perpetrators of fraud.
"Buddha would not be laughing right now," the Shamarpa said. "This is all about politics. It's a story filled with many traitors and betrayals."
Such intrigue is hardly uncommon to the Buddhism of Tibet, which, before the Chinese occupation in the 1950's, was a theocratic state where spiritual passions often bumped up against worldly ambitions. The highest lamas are believed to be so spiritually advanced that while their physical form may perish, their superior consciousness lives on in other bodies and can be recognized. Rival disciples sometimes disagree about which child has become the new vessel.
Taking a rare precaution against such discord, the Karmapa often leaves a "prediction letter" with clues about where to find his next incarnation. This guiding document, however, sometimes can be hard to locate and stubbornly cryptic once found.
"This Karmapa dispute is sort of a medieval tragicomedy," said Tsering Shakya, a London-based scholar who has written a history of modern Tibet. "Who really knows who the Karmapa is? On one hand, there are these arguments about dreams and prophecies. On the other, there are the highly rational matters of controlling money and property."
There is international politics as well. The 14-year-old's escape from Tibet's historic Tsurphu Monastery is an embarrassment for China. In 1992, government officials had permitted the boy's enthronement as the 17th Karmapa, using him as a showpiece for a purported revival of religious tolerance. Chinese officials have now explained his departure by saying he was visiting India to fetch belongings of the 16th Karmapa and warned India against granting him political asylum.
At present, Tibetan authorities in Dharmsala are prudently keeping the teenager in seclusion as Indian and Chinese diplomats attend to the fractious matter of his status.
If he is allowed to stay, his eventual home is likely to be here in the village of Rumtek, where the 16th Karmapa, who fled Tibet in 1959, built a lavish monastery in the Himalayan state of Sikkim, which has since been annexed by India.
The Rumtek monastery has been this conflict's main battlefield, a place where religious gatherings have turned into brawls. The buildings are multilayered, with tiers of white, yellow and oxblood. The Karmapa's throne is centered in a grand assembly hall, where ornate wooden casements hold 1,000 Buddha statuettes and hundreds of ancient manuscripts.
Stored in a locked room are other treasured relics, most important the bejeweled Black Hat that has been worn by every Karmapa for 600 years.
Last week, the monastery's monks were ecstatic. Some recently had been to Dharmsala and seen the 14-year-old and were speaking of his aura, his calm and the ways he reminded them of his previous incarnation.
Dr. Ugyen Jigme, 62, wept, overcome with wonderment. He had been the 16th Karmapa's personal physician. And now he had met the boy. "I could tell he knew everything about me," he said. "He still has the same gestures, the same laugh."
A few miles away, however, the mood was dour, the monks disconsolate.
For six years, dozens of them -- they put their number at 115 -- have been outcasts, followers of the less-acknowledged Karmapa. Many of them live in shacks, tents and converted animal pens. Their small prayer hall has walls of corrugated metal and a floor of concrete.
Lungtok Dawa had lived in the Rumtek monastery for most of his life -- and claims to have been beaten up for his rebellious beliefs.
"There will come a day when the rightful Karmapa will live in the monastery and wear the black hat," he said mournfully. "But I don't know when this will be."
The 16th Karmapa left his physical shell in 1981, succumbing to cancer in a hospital near Chicago. His dead body, many followers believe, maintained its normal temperature for three days as if in gentle meditation. He was cremated in Rumtek, and when a charred part of the remains fell from the pyre, it was presumed to be the Karmapa's heart and has been preserved in a golden shrine in the monastery.
The responsibility for locating the next incarnation fell to four young regents, themselves incarnate lamas with titles that go back hundreds of years. They had been the 16th Karmapa's chief disciples, and two of them -- the 12th Tai Situpa and the 13th Shamarpa -- were rivals for the position of second in the hierarchy.
In recent times, the Tai Situpas had been emergent while the Shamarpas fell into disrepute. The 10th Shamarpa had been accused of starting a war between Tibet and Nepal, and, as punishment, his reincarnation as a high lama was forbidden. During the next 150 years, his embodiments lived in obscurity.
The 16th Karmapa himself resurrected the position. He may have had other reasons, but the boy identified as the 13th Shamarpa was also his nephew.
Tashi Delsapa, the secretary for culture in Sikkim, has known both the current Tai Situpa and Shamarpa since they were children and describes something like a sibling rivalry. "Jealousies crept in, and they involved mundane, not religious things," he said. "There was a lot of money to control. Shamar, being a nephew, may have thought that control of money and the monastery was his inheritance."
The Karmapa is the best-known figure among the Kagyupas, one of the four main orders in Tibetan Buddhism -- and one with a wide following across Asia and the West. Wild speculation is often made about the sums controlled by the Karmapa Charitable Trust and associated legal entities, but these estimates are largely guesswork.
During the 1980's, both Tai Situpa and the Shamarpa spent much of their time abroad.
No one had been able to find any memento with the deceased Karmapa's cryptic clues, let alone his incarnation. The faithful were frustrated.
Finally, at an extraordinary meeting of the regents in 1992, Tai Situpa announced he had found the guiding missive. To the astonishment of some, he said he had unwittingly worn the vital document for years folded inside a talisman attached to a string, a gift from the 16th Karmapa.
One translation of the letter reads:
From here to the north in the east of the land of snow
Is a country where divine thunder spontaneously blazes
In a beautiful nomad's place with the sign of a cow
The method is Dondrup and the wisdom is Lolaga
Born in the year of the one used for the earth
With the miraculous, far-reaching sound of the white one
This is the one known as Karmapa.
Three months later, Tai Situpa reported that a search party in Tibet had found the appropriate lad, the son of yak-tending nomads, Karma Dondrup and his wife, Loga. Wondrous songbirds had celebrated the child's birth and rainbows had hovered above the family's tent. The boy's greatness was apparent. He had entered a monastery at age 4.
The news was sent to the Dalai Lama, who, while a member of a different religious order, is the temporal head of the government-in-exile and generally considered the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. He added his approval.
After so much delay, the velocity of these blissful tidings was both dizzying and dismaying for the Shamarpa. From the start, he says, he considered the prediction letter an obvious forgery.
"I wanted forensic testing done," he said.
Bewilderment afflicted many monks in Rumtek. One of the four regents had died in a car wreck, and of the three who remained, two were telling them of a glorious discovery, while the other warned of a venal conspiracy.
On June 12, 1992, Tai Situpa addressed a crowd that had come to the monastery to hear of the Karmapa's manifestation. Near the end of the talk, the Shamarpa arrived unexpectedly with a small escort of Indian soldiers.
Amid so much tension, he said, the army had provided him bodyguards.
Monastery Becomes a Battleground
The appearance of rifle-toting men angered many in the courtyard. A group of women began to beat on the soldiers, witnesses said. A man with an iron rod tried to hit the Shamarpa. A microphone fell to the ground, sounding like a gunshot. People scrambled. Several were injured in the shoving. There were fisticuffs.
Stunned monks fell to their knees and fingered their prayer beads.
During the following year, the monks of Rumtek were split, some accepting the Karmapa, some not. Woefully, along the pathway to human perfection was an active rumor mill. Dissenters were hearing that thugs would be sent to evict them.
On Aug. 2, 1993, a second brawl broke out, far worse than the first. Versions of what occurred are as different as inner peace and outer space. What is certain is that the split within the monastery's walls had become irreparable. Dozens of monks slept in the woods that night -- or in a hospital or in jail.
The Shamarpa later provided them shelter. And, to their jubilation, within months, he rewarded their loyalty by sharing a stupendous revelation: a sagelike, clairvoyant boy born in 1983 was newly arrived from Tibet -- the bona fide Karmapa.
Actually, the Shamarpa would later say, he had secretly known of this remarkable child for eight years and had been sending discreet emissaries to observe him, weighing the evidence and interpreting his own pertinent dreams to be absolutely sure.
In March 1994, the alternative Karmapa -- Trinley Thaye Dorje -- was enthroned in New Delhi, where, predictably enough, yet another scuffle broke out.
The Shamarpa has since tried to assert control over the properties of the Karmapa through lawsuits filed against the state of Sikkim and the other regents.
Several times, he also proposed a compromise solution to this overabundance of Karmapas. Some enlightened beings have reincarnated into more than one body, and the Shamarpa has been willing to allow that one Karmapa could reign within the strictures of Communist China while the other held sway in India.
Until last month, that had been the Shamarpa's edge. His Karmapa was fully mobile -- indeed, the youth is currently among disciples in Europe -- while the other side's was not. But if India allows the recently escaped 14-year-old to stay, that advantage is gone.
Now furiously on the attack, the Shamarpa has been asserting that Tai Situpa and the Chinese are in league, and that the boy intends to sneak back to Tibet with the treasures of the Rumtek monastery. "The rumor in Katmandu is that when Karmapa leaves, they'll sell the big ruby pin from the Black Hat in Hong Kong for $28 million," he said.
This so-called "Trojan Horse theory" is taken seriously in India, where suspicions of China, which does not recognize India's control of Sikkim, are always ample. Seclusion has not kept the newly arrived Karmapa from being intensively questioned by Indian intelligence officials.
For his part, Tai Situpa, who has a monastery near Dharmsala, has been unwilling -- or unable -- to respond to the Shamarpa's attacks. He was once banned from India for unspecified "anti-Indian activities," and his permission to return in 1998 was conditioned on avoiding "the issue of succession of Karmapa."
Truly, the "agitation and fighting" forecast in Deshin Shekpa's 600-year-old prophecy is an unfolding reality. He spoke of the Buddha's teachings falling into decline as evilness "comes into fruition."
But the karmic wheel keeps turning. Over time, the prophecy said, the Dharma -- Buddha's teachings -- will triumph.
Resilient wisdom will bring back the peace of "swift blessings."
