Ram Bahadur Bomjan sit on fire

Although China’s ruling Communist Party is officially atheist, it has in recent months been laying down the law on reicarnation, tightening controls on who can call themselves the living rebirth of historical Buddhist holy men. It launched a database of 870 licensed “living Buddhas” in January. And last week, an abbot from Sera Monastery near Tibet’s capital told China’s rubber-stamp legislature that the highest level of living Buddhas must be approved by the central government, while “other living Buddhas must be approved by local governments.” The effort appears to be part of a broad attempt to control what happens after the death of the current Dalai Lama, Tibet’s enormously influential 80-year-old spiritual leader who lives in exile in India. Tibetans consider him to be the successor in a line of leaders who are believed to be reincarnated. He fled the Himalayan region in 1959 after a failed uprising; Chinese authorities revile him as a “separatist,” although he claims to want only increased autonomy for the Tibetan region, which China controls. From the point of view of Beijing, the whole apparatus seems to be about giving Beijing control over the appointment of the next Dalai Lama,” said Robbie Barnett, director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University. The Chinese term huofo, or living Buddha, refers to high-ranking religious figures in Tibetan Buddhism, but it has no true equivalent in the Tibetan language. “Communist policy on religion is: You run Tibet by … having a lama who is credible enough to be influential when he says you should follow the Communist Party,” he said. “They don’t have enough power to control Tibet without a lama to handle it.”