Why the Dalai Lama says reincarnation might not be for him

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http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-...story.html

EXCERPT: Adherents of Tibetan Buddhism believe the Dalai Lama, the religion’s highest spiritual authority, has been reincarnated in an unbroken line for centuries. But the current Dalai Lama says he may be the last.

In an interview with the BBC this week, the 79-year-old Nobel Peace Prize recipient said that he may not reincarnate after he dies.

"There is no guarantee that some stupid Dalai Lama won't come next, who will disgrace himself or herself,” he said. “That would be very sad. So, much better that a centuries-old tradition should cease at the time of a quite popular Dalai Lama."

But what does reincarnation mean, and why would the Dalai Lama not want to have a successor? [...] Almost certainly to prevent the Chinese government from inserting itself into the process for political ends....

[Magical Realist]

Reincarnation is a affront to the natural egotism of human nature. We like to think that the person we are in THIS life is who we are. But whose to say if you were born in the past or even in the future that THAT isn't the person you really are. In the end I envision having been so many contradictory things, from a white gay man to black straight woman, from a poor hispanic youth living in Santiago to a rich asian mogul of some multibillion dollar corporation, that all hope of identity with a self will eventually be gone. And is that not the point of this cycle of karma? To having become so burned out on this "being a self" game that you give up and just become nothing/everything? How many lifetimes will it take to learn that? Just one if we're really lucky!

[Yazata]

But what does reincarnation mean, and why would the Dalai Lama not want to have a successor? [...] Almost certainly to prevent the Chinese government from inserting itself into the process for political ends....

China currently occupies Tibet and insists that Tibet is part of China. The communists tried to destroy Tibetan Buddhism duing the 1950's-1980's period. Every monastery in Tibet was shut down and in most cases physically destroyed, with incalculable loss of historical and artistic artifacts and rare texts. But the communists eventually realized that Buddhism was too deeply engrained in Tibetan culture to simply stamp out.

So Beijing changed direction and started allowing a few selected monasteries to reopen in Tibet. They are mostly sad little places, with a few newly rebuilt buildings amid the empty shells of what had stood there until the cultural revolution. In most cases these places seem to have about 1/10th the number of monks they had before the holocaust. And there's far fewer monasteries today than there once were. (The exception is the big tourist-destination sites in Lhasa.)

The thing is, it's only possible to become a monk in "Chinese" Tibet with approval from the communist party. All monks must denounce the Dalai Lama and acknowledge the legitimacy of Chinese rule. Many monastic aspirants do so as a formality, without really believing what they say. But all of the monasteries contain Chinese informers, so they have to be very careful. The wrong word, and monks dissappear into a labor-camp, often never to be seen again.

And what's more, Beijing has passed a law that a new Dalai Lama can only be named with their approval. (Ironic, since they aren't even Buddhists.) Given the fact that they have reestablished a stooge-hierarchy of carefully chosen monastic abbots, they are in a good position to dictate who the next Dalai Lama is.

Or so they think.

The thing is, there's a very active Tibetan community in exile, based in India. The Dalai Lama and many thousands of often senior monks managed to escape the destruction of Tibet and have reestablished a number of famous monasteries in India.

This community will probably name its own new Dalai Lama when the current one dies. There's talk that they might already be grooming one in an old and historic Tibetan monastery that happened to be on the south side of the Himalayan ridge-line in territory claimed by Britain in the 19th century and subsequently included in Indian territory, protecting it from the communist holocaust.

That will result in two rival Dalai Lamas.

There will be the Chinese-dictated one, resident inside Tibet in a tourist-showcase monastery in Lhasa. The Chinese will insist he's the legitimate one because he's in Tibet and was chosen by the Tibetan (stooge) hierarchy.

And there will be one in India, who will almost certainly be recognized by Tibetan Buddhists in the diaspora outside Tibet and probably (very secretly) by the great majority of Tibetans inside Tibet.

     

[C C]

[...] This community will probably name its own new Dalai Lama when the current one dies. There's talk that they might already be grooming one in an old and historic Tibetan monastery that happened to be on the south side of the Himalayan ridge-line in territory claimed by Britain in the 19th century and subsequently included in Indian territory, protecting it from the communist holocaust. That will result in two rival Dalai Lamas. [...]

Yah, no matter what the Dalai Lama says about ending his supposed psychological lineage here and now, his exiled community can't afford to allow a faux successor via China to gain respectability from lack of an opposing, traditional Dalai Lama.

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Reincarnation is a affront to the natural egotism of human nature. We like to think that the person we are in THIS life is who we are. But whose to say if you were born in the past or even in the future that THAT isn't the person you really are. In the end I envision having been so many contradictory things, from a white gay man to black straight woman, from a poor hispanic youth living in Santiago to a rich asian mogul of some multibillion dollar corporation, that all hope of identity with a self will eventually be gone. And is that not the point of this cycle of karma? To having become so burned out on this "being a self" game that you give up and just become nothing/everything? How many lifetimes will it take to learn that? Just one if we're really lucky!

Even in the worldview of materialism and presentism, one's original identity was "not even nothing" -- a lack of any personal consciousness and stored events / thoughts. What has been added and modified since then (in the course of being alive) would be like a castle built on sand, ready at any moment to be washed away and return to the original emptiness. Sort of akin to getting engrossed in and lost in the characters of a good movie, then "The End" comes and it's back to the starting point (a living room or theater for film-watchers, but a sheer absence of everything which all non-experiencing entities have as their common provenance).

Given that so many physicists believe that time-flow is not objective (may be a property of cognitive relationships) and that some "multiverse" version of QM is probably going to have to merge with spacetime conceptions eventually.... It appears that "reincarnation" or generic subjectivity is the "afterlife" that has the best chance of being possible (in the context of a naturalist or anti-transcendental ontology).

IOW, one would appear illusion-wise to be reliving the same life over and over again with branching multiverse variations; and / or be every particular instance of consciousness found throughout space and time, with each specific brain's memory constraints forcing the limited awareness of only belonging to a single body's moment or lifetime. An EM field pervades the whole universe, and it seems electromagnetism would have to be the fundamental, sub-neural correlate for / enabler of experience. [Which is to say, let's face it: The idea of a strictly mechanical computer (a la Charles Babbage) producing phenomenal manifestations seems absurd (as Leibniz famously contended).] The next level substrate as a correlate for experience would be electrochemical and electrical -- what respectively makes the functioning of neural connections and modern microprocessor circuitry possible.