Tibet's third-highest lama, the only top lama approved by both China and the Dalai Lama, has escaped Chinese-controlled Tibet in an epic week-long flight across the Him-alayas and into India.
The religious leader, the 14-year-old head of the Karmapa Buddhist order, stole away from the Tsurphu Monastery, north of Lhasa, on Dec. 28, and walked and rode 1400km to Dharamshala, India, arriving unannounced and unexpected on Wednesday. The Dalai Lama welcomed him to freedom.
China's official Xinhua news agency has confirmed the boy left his monastery and went abroad, but did not say where he went or if he was expected to return.
PHOTO: AFP
The dramatic flight of the Karmapa Lama, born Ugyen Trinley Dorje, mirrored the Dalai Lama's own escape into exile in 1959 after an abortive and bloody uprising against nine years of Chinese rule.
"It is a joyful thing for all Tibetan Buddhists," said Robert Thurman, a leading US Buddhist scholar and professor of religion at Columbia University.
Thurman, a Buddhist who speaks Tibetan, said that the flight of the 17th Karmapa, who is venerated as a reincarnate by all major branches of Tibetan Buddhism, "is very embarrassing for the Chinese."
PHOTO: AFP
"This means that even the ones they try to promote as puppets want to leave anyway," Thurman said.
In 1994, the 17th Karmapa was the honored guest of President Jiang Zemin at Chinese National Day celebrations in Beijing. The Chinese government recognized the boy as the legitimate holder of the Karmapa title in 1992 and has been grooming him as a "patriotic" lama ever since.
"For the Karmapa to leave is really a big blow," Thurman said.
Followers in Taiwan yesterday welcomed their leader's escape to India and said they planned to invite him to visit Taiwan.
"We hope to invite Karmapa to visit Taiwan. We will also continue to offer him financial support," said Chuang Pi-hsun, director of the Karma Kagyu Monastery in Tainan.
The Hua Yu Foundation in Taipei said Karmapa had accepted its invitation to visit Taiwan last year.
The foundation, which has been supporting Karmapa and his temple, Tsurphu Monastery in Tibet, will now send the funding to Karmapa in India, a foundation spokeswoman said.
Melvin McLeod, publisher of The Shambhala Sun, a US Buddhist journal, called the reports of the Karmapa's flight "extraordinarily important news for the worldwide community of Tibetan Buddhist practioners."
"There is no longer any fear that one of the major leaders in the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy would be under the sway of the Chinese, but will return to the lineage of which he is so important," he said.
In Woodstock, New York, where the Karmapa Buddhists maintain their largest monastery outside the Himalayan region, the Karma Triyana Dharma Chakra center, Tenzin Chonyi, the monastery president, said that the escape seems miraculous.
"We are wondering, how could that even happen?" he said. "Millions of Buddhists outside of Tibet have been waiting for decades to receive his blessings."
Chonyi said that details of the Karmapa's flight from the Tsurphu Monastery were still sketchy, but that it appeared that he and four monks had walked across the Himalayas at the height of winter, and were later picked up by trucks or other vehicles in Tibet and Nepal.
Chonyi said that the Karmapa's escape underlined the worsening treatment of Tibetan Buddhist leaders by the Chinese.
"The situation in Tibet is not getting better any more for religious people," he said. "His own safety was also in danger."
Buddhist scholars said that the Karmapa was apparently persuaded into leaving because the Chinese did not deliver on a promise to let him visit his followers outside Tibet or invite his most influential teacher, Tai Situ of Rumtek Monastery in the Him-alayan state of Sikkim, to go to Tsurphu, the Karmapas' central religious seat.
Tsurphu was one of the monasteries most devastated by the Chinese, before and during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. With outside help and contributions, restoration began in the 1980s.
There was no immediate decision in India about the Karmapa's fate as an illegal entrant there, but the Indians have been lenient with fleeing Tibetans for decades.
The Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, fled Chinese control for India in 1959 with many followers. Less than two years ago another leading lama, Argya Rinpoche, who was based at the Kumbum monastery in Qinghai, a province of western China largely populated by ethnic Tibetans, also escaped and is now in the West.
The 17th Karmapa Lama was born in June 26, 1985, into a family of nomads in eastern Tibet. In 1992, when monks looking for the reincarnation of the 16th Karmapa, the little boy's parents told them that in the days after his birth, their valley had resounded with the sounds of bells, horns and sacred conch shells. After passing certain tests, he was duly enthroned at Tsurphu.
There were other contenders for the title of 17th Karmapa. The Dalai Lama at first recognized two, the Tibetan boy and a Bhutanese boy. More recently, however, the Dalai Lama declared that the Tibetan Karmapa was the primary reincarnate but that the Bhutanese contender could be accepted as a secondary reincarnate of the 16th Karmapa, Thurman said.
"People always say that the Panchen Lama is the second-highest lama in Tibet -- and that's true in the sense of perhaps the number of followers and size of his monastery," Thurman said. "But the Karmapas were widely beloved beyond the size of their order. They traditionally had very good relations with the Dalai Lama and many of them were great artists. They were tremendous painters, sculptors, poets, writers."
There are also two contenders for the title of Panchen Lama. Chinese authorities sequestered the boy endorsed by the Dalai Lama and refuse to reveal his whereabouts, and have replaced him with their own candidate.
Thurman said that the Chinese agreed to allow the 17th Karmapa to travel and receive teachers from abroad. He said he believes that the breaking of that pledge finally forced the maturing Karmapa, whom Thurman met five years ago, to flee Tibet.
Thurman remembers the Karmapa, then barely 9 years old, as "very sweet."
"He blessed everybody and smiled," he said. But Chinese security guards kept Thurman from talking with the boy.
"We had a very cordial and jolly lunch with his father," Thurman said. "His father, a hardy nomad, was wearing a big Dalai Lama button, and was going on and on with me about how he wanted to go to India." At Woodstock, Tenzin Chonyi said that the Karmapa's parents had apparently not fled with him into exile.
Thurman predicted that exile would benefit the 17th Karmapa.
"In Tsurphu he was of course isolated, and there were very few teachers from whom he could receive the appropriate initiations," he said. "Even though he is a reincarnation he has to receive teachings. Now he will be able to receive initiations from Dalai Lama, from senior Kagyupa lamas, from Nyingmas. He'll be able to have the fully rounded education Karmapas are expected to have."
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