Person · Gelug spiritual leader
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama
Also known as Dalai Lama, 14th Dalai Lama, Lhamo Thondup, Gyalwa Rinpoche
Born in Amdo in 1935 and recognised as the fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1939, he has lived in India since fleeing Lhasa in 1959 — longer than he ever lived in Tibet. From Dharamshala he rebuilt the Gelug monastic colleges in south Indian settlements, seated a civil administration, and in 2011 devolved its political authority to an elected leadership, ending a temporal role the office had held since the fifth Dalai Lama. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
- Date
- b. 1935
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The title is not Tibetan. It was given in 1578 by Altan Khan of the Tümed Mongols to Sönam Gyatso, and “dalai” is the Mongolian for ocean — a translation of the Tibetan gyatso in his name. The first two holders were named to the lineage retrospectively. The sixth was born in 1683 at Urgelling, in what is now Arunachal Pradesh, so the fourteenth crossed into India in 1959 within a few kilometres of where one of his predecessors had been born.
Connections (15)
- Life routeDharamshala
The exile seat since May 1960, and the reason the town is what it is. The residence, the Namgyal monastery and the Tsuglagkhang stand above McLeod Ganj; the Central Tibetan Administration, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives he opened in 1970, and the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts sit below. A Kangra hill station became the working capital of a polity with no territory, which is why it is called Little Lhasa.
- Life routeLhasa
The 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso left Lhasa on the night of 17 March 1959 after two Chinese artillery shells landed near the Norbulingka during the 1959 Tibetan uprising against the People's Republic of China's occupation of Tibet, and has not returned. The Potala and the Norbulingka were the winter and summer seats of the office from the fifth Dalai Lama onward, so the flight severed a three-hundred-year connection between the lineage and the city it governed. Photographs of him were banned in Tibet from March 1959 until after 1976.
- Life routeTawang
The party crossed into India on 30 March 1959 through the Tawang salient and rested at Tawang monastery before continuing to Bomdila and Tezpur, reached on 18 April. Tawang was the first Indian ground he stood on, and it is Gelug country of long standing: the monastery is the largest in India, and the sixth Dalai Lama was born a few kilometres away at Urgelling in 1683. The frontier he crossed is still disputed by China.
- Patronage networkErdene Zuu, Karakorum
The office exists because of Mongol patronage. Altan Khan conferred the title on Sönam Gyatso in 1578 in exchange for the legitimacy a Buddhist hierarch could confer, and Erdene Zuu was raised seven years later out of the stones of Karakorum as that conversion took hold. The priest-and-patron relation between Gelug Lhasa and the Mongol khans made the Dalai Lamas temporal rulers, so a monastery in Mongolia stands at the head of the lineage.
- Teaching lineageBuddhism
He is the most widely recognised living Buddhist teacher, and the exile has made India the working centre of Tibetan Buddhism: the great Gelug colleges of Drepung, Ganden and Sera were re-founded in settlements in Karnataka, and the Kalachakra is given at Bodh Gaya. His Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and his dialogues with scientists from 1987 carried the tradition into arguments — non-violence, mind, ethics — that reach well past its own adherents.
- AnalogueRumtek Monastery, Sikkim
Two Tibetan hierarchies rebuilt on Indian ground within a few years of each other. The sixteenth Karmapa left Tsurphu and raised Rumtek in Sikkim in the 1960s as the Kagyu seat in exile, as the Dalai Lama made Dharamshala the Gelug one. Both re-created a monastic establishment from memory and refugees, and both then faced the harder question of how a recognised successor can be found when the lineage is outside Tibet.
- PilgrimageBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple
He has given the Kalachakra initiation at Bodh Gayā more often than anywhere else, drawing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, Mongolians and Himalayan Buddhists to the place of the awakening. For a diaspora that cannot go to Lhasa, the winter teachings under the Mahābodhi tree substitute the oldest Buddhist site for the lost one, and turn a pilgrimage India had long since ceased to be the destination of back into a living one.
- Life routeHappy Valley, Mussoorie
The 14th Dalai Lama’s first Indian residence after his flight from Lhasa — Birla House at Happy Valley, Mussoorie — where he arrived on 20 April 1959 (two days after reaching Mussoorie by road from Pathankot) and lived with his family and cabinet-in-exile until the Central Tibetan Administration moved to Dharamshala on 29 April 1960. The adjoining Shedup Choepelling Buddhist Temple is the first Tibetan monastery built in India after the exodus.
- Life routeJokhang Temple, Lhasa
The Jokhang in central Lhasa — the holiest temple in Tibetan Buddhism — is the Dalai Lama's primary ritual temple; he presided over the Great Prayer Festival (Mönlam Chenmo) here every January from his enthronement in 1940 until his flight in 1959.
- Life routeDrepung Monastery, Lhasa
Drepung was the primary seat of the Dalai Lamas before the fifth Dalai Lama shifted to the Potala in the 1640s; the 14th Dalai Lama received his main scholastic training at Drepung Loseling college in the 1950s.
- Life routeSera Monastery, Lhasa
Sera is one of the three great Gelug seats; the 14th Dalai Lama took his geshe lharam examination at Sera's debating courtyard in 1958, the year before the flight to India.
- Life routeGanden Monastery, Lhasa
Ganden is the senior Gelug monastery and the formal seat of the Ganden Tripa, the scholastic head of the Gelug school; the Dalai Lama is the hierarchical head but defers scholastic authority to the Ganden Tripa.
- Historical linkErdene Zuu, Karakorum
The 14th Dalai Lama has conferred Kālacakra initiations at Erdene Zuu and other Mongolian monasteries.
- Founder ofDharamshala
After the Chinese suppression of the Lhasa uprising, the 14th Dalai Lama crossed the Himalaya into India in March 1959. From 1960 he has lived at Dharamshala in the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh, from where the Central Tibetan Administration runs the civil, educational, medical and religious institutions of the Tibetan diaspora.
- Founder ofMen-Tsee-Khang, Dharamshala
The 14th Dalai Lama re-founded Men-Tsee-Khang at Gangchen Kyishong, Dharamshala, in 1961 — in exile from the 1916 Lhasa institute. The institute has since trained thousands of amchi over its seven-year programme, run 54 branch clinics across India, and manufactured the classical Tibetan compound medicines of the Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi) for a global patient community.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “14th Dalai Lama”, “1959 Tibetan uprising”, “3rd Dalai Lama”, “6th Dalai Lama” and “Gelug”; the Dalai Lama’s own memoir Freedom in Exile.
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