HIS HOLINESS EMERITUS

The Dalai Lama announced his retirement from his political role today, an event that will be duly recorded—and then all but ignored for the time being. It’s not that the many parties with an interest in this issue don’t agree with his decision to remove himself from the political hurly-burly of the Tibet movement. (In fact, that’s one of the few things on which both the Chinese and Tibetan government-in-exile might agree.) The problem is that, despite his persistent attempts to renounce his political functions and pave the way for a new generation of leaders who can govern without the emotional and religious baggage he represents, he simply looms too large over the Tibet conflict to be there and not there at the same time.

But the announcement is more significant than people might imagine: When it’s finalized, this will be remembered as the formal end of his five decades as head of state of the Tibetan government-in-exile. (Though, in fairness, no country in the world recognizes that government as such.) But he has always been known for far more than that. To his admirers, he is the icon of endurance, a guru, a post-political figure. To his critics: a manipulator, a ditherer, a “devil with a human face.” This announcement will not change the fact that he remains the senior religious leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and, as I wrote in a Profile last year, that neither he nor China nor Washington yet knows what will happen when he dies. (Chinese authorities recently reasserted their longstanding declaration that the Dalai Lama has no right to be reincarnated without the Communist Party’s approval.)

There has abundant speculation that his spiritual role might be filled in the years ahead by the Karmapa Lama, who was born in Tibet but fled to Dharamsala a decade ago. Now twenty-four, he has grown into a large, commanding figure who is often seated at the Dalai Lama’s side at public events. But when I interviewed the Karmapa last year, he was a surprisingly fitful figure: Internet-savvy, barred from traveling widely by Indian officials, some of whom suspect he is a Chinese spy, and deeply curious about the West. The notion that he might slip easily into the sandals of the Dalai Lama has always struck me as an unexamined proposition. (Further complicating the prospect of him taking over
is a swirl of controversy rooted in the fact that another man also
claims to be the Karmapa.)

The emerging reality is that the Dalai Lama will never truly be able to give his power away. It must be earned, gradually and meaningfully, by the next generation of leaders, people such as Lobsang Sangay, a Tibetan legal scholar at Harvard who is a frontrunner to be the next prime minister in exile. Eventually, a new generation of leaders might help break some of the logjam with the Chinese government, though I’m not optimistic. The transition will not be swift, and it will not happen entirely until the Dalai Lama’s “change of clothing,” as he calls his own death. But today is the next step toward a change that he has sought for years.

I’ve often wondered, watching the Dalai Lama tinker with his mechanical toys or geek out with a visiting scientist over the details of brain science, whether, in some other scenario, he might have had a happy life as a bench scientist at a lab in Jersey. Now he might get a bit more time to himself. “Retirement is also my human right,” he once told an audience. They thought it was charming, and they giggled madly, as people always do in his presence. But the comment always sounded painfully sad to me. “Since sixteen years old,” he added that day, “I carried this responsibility.”