By Adele Tomlin
The Dalai Lama recently disclosed the identity of an eight-year-old US-born Mongol boy as the 10th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, but the announcement fell short of formal recognition. Prof. Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan academic based in North America observed in The Return of the Holy Emperor : “There was no indication of the boy having taken novice vows or having undergone hair-cutting ceremony during his several visits to Dharamshala.”
An official of the Dalai Lama’s Private Office, Yangteng Rinpoche said that the child had been selected from 13 candidates filtered from an initial list of 100,000 Mongol boys.
Shakya writes that the boy holds a US passport even though Mongolia does not allow dual citizenship. His father, Altannar Chinchulun, authored several books on Game Theory, and his mother, Monkhnansan Narmandakh is Chairman of Mongolia’s mining and construction Company, Monpolymet Group.
There has been a ‘mixed’ reaction in Mongolia. People took to social media to voice their skepticism and bewilderment. Certainly, all is not well with the 14th Dalai Lama’s actions. The Dalai Lamas claim that Jebtsundamba is an incarnation of the 16th century Tibetan Master Taranatha of the separate Jonang tradition in Tibet. So far, the Jonang School does not publicly endorse this enforced recognition of the Jebtsundamba by the Dalai Lamas, whose own Gelug tradition has a significant history of persecuting Jonang followers and its monasteries in Tibet from the 17th Century onwards.
The Mongols also are unhappy with the Tibetans anointing their ‘Holy Emperor’. Thus far only two Jebtsundamba were ethnic Mongols. The first was Lobsang Tenpey Gyaltsen (1635–1723) – a prince and a descendant of Genghis Khan, popularly known as Zanabazar (Gyana-Vajra). He visited Tibet in the late 1650s and studied with the 4th Panchen Lama.
Recent research suggests that the 5th Dalai Lama instead tried to undermine Mongol Buddhism with the help of the Qing Court. A scholar Uranchimeg Ujeed (2011) wrote that when a Mongol monk Neichi Toyin (1557-1653) tried to replace the practice of Shamanism with Buddhism, he faced persecution on the complaint of the 5th Dalai Lama in the Qing court.
Shakya writes that in the 1920s, the Mongols of Inner Mongolia refused unification of Mongolia on the grounds of a Tibetan born 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu being anointed as the Bogd Khan (Holy Emperor), and demanded that his authority should be subjected to new Mongolian legislation for the separation of church and state. In 1929, the Mongolian constitution banned the installation of any further Khutughtus.
Tibetan sources reveal that the 13th Dalai Lama and the 8th Jebtsundamba did not have a teacher-student relationship. In 1905, when the 13th Dalai Lama fled Tibet to Mongolia to escape the British invasion, his arrival was not welcomed by the Jebtsundamba who called him an “uninvited guest”.
In fact, Jebtsundamba was enraged by the presence of the Tibetan leader in Urga, then the capital of Mongols. Their courtiers feuded over who should have the higher throne, and the amount of gifts lavished by Mongol princes. It was not just with the Jebtsundamba, the Dalai Lamas had frequent conflicts with Changkya Khutukhtu as well. Yet, the practice of imposing an incarnate ‘emperor’ on the Jonang and Mongols by the Dalai Lamas continues to this day.
The 8th Jebtsundamba (1869–1924) was born in Lhasa in a family of the Dalai Lama’s close aide. The 9th too was found in Tibet and recognized in 1936 by Reting Rinpoche, the regent of Tibet. Because of the Communist sway in Mongolia, his whereabouts were kept secret until the Soviet collapse in 1990.
In 1959, the 9th Jebtsundamba fled Tibet to India and was recognized by the current Dalai Lama in 1991. Dharamshala enthroned him as the Holy Emperor of Mongolia in 2011. Jebtsundamba died in Ulaanbaatar after a prolonged illness in 2012.
During his visit to Mongolia in 2016, the Dalai Lama announced the rebirth of Jebtsundamba in Mongolia. It is not clear why the Dalai Lama has chosen to select the reincarnation of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu now. Some Tibetans claim that the recognition provoked the recent ‘Chinese-led attack’ on the Dalai Lama about the global outrage on his highly ‘inappropriate’ acts with an Indian boy recently.
The rebirth of Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, after an official ban by Mongolia in 1924, is going to become a controversial subject in the years to come, especially when the Dalai Lama’s own reincarnation is going to become a topic of international concern. The selection is possibly linked to the necessity of having a living institution of the Jubtsundamba Khutuktu who along with other high Tibetan Lamas will in turn recognize the next Dalai Lama, ostensibly vis-i-vis a Chinese chosen and approved candidate.
But, against the past background of Jebtsundamba’s incarnations, which is spiritually linked to the lineage of Jetsun Taranatha ( a renowned master of the Jonang School), the believers of Jonang as well as the followers of the Kagyu and Nyingma schools may be less likely accept the ‘unquestioned’ Gelug political supremacy in their internal religious affairs both inside and outside Tibet. Just as the Tibetans would challenge the Chinese government in picking and choosing the next Dalai Lama, the Jonang and the Mongols are unlikely to accept the Gelugs maintaining control over their monasteries, texts and the incarnation of Taranatha.
Although the 14th Dalai Lama did compose an aspiration prayer for the growth of the Jonang sect, some might reasonably argue that this was more a political move and that he should have learned from the past political ‘mistakes’ of the stealing of texts, monastic property and land, and imposing Gelug absolute power not only on the Jonang and Mongols, but also on the other Tibetan Buddhist lineages.
Adele Tomlin is a British writer, Buddhist practitioner and Tibetologist. She is the author of a translation of Taranatha’s Commentary on the Heart Sutra (2017), and recently translated the outline of Taranatha’s Collected Works .
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