By Jeffrey Parker

TAIPEI, Jan 13 (Reuter) - The Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's exiled god-king, was reported on Monday to be planning to visit Taiwan as soon as March in a move that would be doubly provocative to communist China.

A visit by the Dalai Lama to the Nationalist-ruled island almost certainly would spark charges by Beijing of collusion between what it condemns as proponents of the secession from China of two major territories -- Taiwan and Tibet.

The head of Taiwan's private Chinese Buddhist Association, Chin Hsin, said Tibetan Buddhism's senior monk would visit as soon as March but would steer clear of the exiled Republic of China government.

"We will arrange one or two speeches and he will visit some temples," Chin Hsin said on state television. "He (the Dalai Lama) will have absolutely no official contacts or activities."

Even without official contacts, such a visit would doubly anger the Beijing government, which sees its struggles for the future of Taiwan and Tibet as core issues of China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Beijing assails the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India in 1959, as a "splittist" seeking to divide Tibet from China and accuses governments that allow him to visit of meddling in China's internal affairs.

Similarly, China regards Taiwan as a renegade province whose separation from the mainland since a civil war ended in 1949 can be resolved only through reunification under Beijing's rule.

In its quest to secure Taiwan, Beijing has been tightening a diplomatic embargo around the island, refusing formal ties to countries recognising its Nationalist republic and scorning even friendly countries that allow visits by Taiwan leaders.

Taiwan's ruling Nationalists and the Dalai Lama deny advocating independence for their territories, but both denounce Beijing's authoritarian rule and insist that reconciliation will oblige the communists to accept fundamental political reforms.

China has stood firm on both fronts.

In Tibet, Beijing has beefed up security and pro-communist propaganda across the ostensibly autonomous Himalayan region since a December bombing in the capital Lhasa that it has blamed on the "Dalai Lama clique."

Tibet has been under sometimes draconian, army-backed rule since an abortive anti-Chinese uprising in 1959 forced the Dalai Lama and thousands of followers into exile in India.

Beijing, which reserves a right to take Taiwan by force, mounted months of live-fire war games and missile tests in the Taiwan Strait after Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui's 1995 U.S. visit, seen by Beijing as evidence of his separatist stand.

President Lee was reported to have welcomed the Dalai Lama to Taiwan in a May 1996 exchange of letters.

Likewise, the Taiwan cabinet's Mainland Affairs Commission has said the Dalai Lama was free to visit Taiwan but only in his capacity as a religious figure.

Taipei's insistence that the Dalai Lama visit only as a monk suggests that Taiwan's government itself has reservations about the Buddhist leader's vision of Tibet's future.

Like their communist rivals, Taiwan's Nationalists regard Tibet as an inalienable part of China and oppose its secession as an independent state.