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- Boy lama can trace his lineage
to 1283
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- The teenage head of one of the four great sects of
Tibetan
Buddhism has escaped from Chinese Communist rule to India after
a trek
through the Himalayas, sources said yesterday.
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- The 17th Karmapa
stumbled with four attendants into Dharamsala,
the seat in exile of the
Dalai Lama, after an epic journey at the worst
time of the year. The
14-year-old is now recovering from his ordeal. It
is not clear how he
started his 900-mile journey from his remote monastery
home, 30 miles
north-west of the capital, Lhasa.
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- He completed the last week on
foot, crossing mountain
passes in heavy snow, before arriving at
Dharamsala at 10.30am on Wednesday.
"He's extremely
exhausted," a source in Dharamsala said last
night.
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- The Karmapa is being
shielded from visitors and the Chinese
authorities, who will be enraged
at losing a religious leader they had
been rearing as a
"patriotic" tool in their 50-year campaign
to suppress
Tibetan independence. So delicate is the situation that the
Tibetan
government-in-exile has yet to confirm that the Karmapa is in Dharamsala,
though an announcement is expected in the next two days.
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- The young Karmapa is
the head of the powerful Kagyupa
sect, often nicknamed the "Black
Hat" sect, which was one of
the first to gain Western devotees in
large numbers. There are major monasteries
and centres in places as far
apart as Woodstock, in America, and Eskdalemuir
in Scotland. The
president of the North American branch of the sect, Tenzin
Chonyi, said
yesterday that the news of their leader's escape was "like
a
miracle".
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- Tenzin Chonyi, who was the personal attendant of the
16th
Karmapa and fled with him from Tibet in 1959, received "reliable
information" on Wednesday from disciples in Dharamsala that the
Karmapa
had arrived with four companions. "We have received
information that
he has met the Dalai Lama," added Tenzin Chonyi,
who has met the 17th
Karmapa several times.
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- He described the young priest
as a great religious leader
and the reincarnation of his former master.
He said: "From the first
time I met him, when he was eight years
old, you could tell."
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- The boy met the 14th Dalai Lama, the effective leader
of all four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, on the day he arrived, said Tenzin
Chonyi. The two would almost certainly have never met if the Karmapa had
not risked his life to cross the Himalayas. The Dalai Lama is reviled as
a "terrorist" by the Chinese authorities, who routinely beat
and detain monks for displaying his picture inside Tibet.
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- The Dalai has not set
foot in his mountain homeland since
he fled during a failed uprising in
1959, eight years after his capital
Lhasa was "liberated" by
Chinese forces. In contrast, the 17th
Karmapa had seemed a valuable
puppet of Beijing until his escape. The boy,
Ugyen Trinley Dorje, was
the first high lama ever to be officially approved
in 1991 by the
Chinese authorities.
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- He has been a guest at state ceremonies in Beijing. In
1995, his remote monastery was declared outstandingly patriotic and
law-abiding
by the authorities. The young Karmapa appears to have left
his family behind
in Tibet, unlike the Dalai Lama, whose long years of
exile were eased by
the presence of his mother and siblings in
Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama's
brother, Tenzin Choegyal, who is know as
TC, still runs a guesthouse in
the small Indian hilltown.
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- The 17th Karmapa was
born in 1985 to nomadic parents
in the Lhathok region of Tibet. He was
nicknamed Apo Gaga, or "happy
brother" by his older sister.
His early life was divided between his
family and a monastery, where he
was given the special education of a boy
believed to be the
reincarnation of a previous lama. In 1992, a party of
monks, using a
letter handed down by the 16th Karmapa before his death
in 1981,
reputedly found him with his parents in a camp he had chosen.
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- The letter had been
lost but was mysteriously found inside
an amulet 11 years after the
death. It was the centre of a bitter dispute
over the child's
authenticity. However, in a gesture of co-operation that
has never been
repeated, the Dalai Lama and Beijing both approved the boy.
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- The Dalai Lama's
blessing has been conspicuously withheld
from Beijing's other chosen
boy-priest, the Panchen Lama, who is widely
dismissed by many Tibetans
as a fake.
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- The Karmapa's authenticity in the eyes of the Tibetans
made him
a hugely valuable weapon in Beijing's fight to destroy the Dalai
Lama's
authority, by aggressive "atheism campaigns", and by raising
their own "patriotic" lamas under Communist control. When the
Dalai Lama, who is 64, comes to die, there will be a fierce battle over
his rightful reincarnation. The row will probably dwarf anything seen
before,
as Beijing strives to find its own credible candidate.
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- However, the Dalai
Lama has already said that he will
not be reborn in territory under
Chinese control. Leading lamas like the
Karmapa, and the Panchen Lama,
will carry immense sway. The 14-year-old
who staggered into Dharamsala
this week is a prize that Beijing will regret
losing for a long time to
come.
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