The Dalai Lama gives a religious talk in Dharamsala, India, on Thursday. Photo: AP

Beijing: Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama is profaning Buddhism by suggesting he will not be reincarnated when he dies, the Chinese-appointed governor of Tibet said on Monday, in some of China's strongest comments to date on the subject.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that the soul of a senior lama is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death. China says the tradition must continue and it must approve the next Dalai Lama.

But the Nobel peace laureate, who fled his homeland in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule, has said he thinks the title could end when he dies.

Padma Choling, chairman of the People's Congress of Tibetan Autonomous Region, in the Tibet Room of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday. Photo: Reuters

He has also stated that he will not be reborn in China if Tibet is not free and that no one, including China, has the right to choose his successor "for political ends".

Advertisement

Speaking on the sidelines of the annual meeting of parliament, Tibet governor Padma Choling accused the Dalai Lama of flip-flopping with his various pronouncements on the issue, and of hypocrisy seeing as he himself was reincarnated.

"If the central government had not approved it, how could he have become the 14th Dalai Lama? He couldn't. It has a serious procedure," Padma Choling, an ethnic Tibetan himself, told reporters.

Activists with a poster of the Dalai Lama take part in a rally to support Tibet in Taipei on Sunday. Photo: Reuters

Originally posted here:
Dalai Lama 'profanes' Buddhism by doubting his reincarnation, says China