In a new development weaponising sacred Buddhist rituals for political control, the Chinese government-installed Panchen Lama conferred a major religious empowerment in Lhasa, involving monks and prominent Buddhist lamas from across Tibet.
On 9-12 October, Gyaltsen Norbu, Beijing’s appointed 11th Panchen Lama, led a four-day Kalachakra empowerment – one of the most sacred initiations in Tibetan Buddhist practice – at Tashi Lhunpo monastery in Shigatse.
The carefully choreographed event at Tashi Lhunpo monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama’s incarnation line, constitutes a deliberate step in China’s decades-long campaign to seize control of Tibetan Buddhism’s unique tradition of reincarnation, including the Dalai Lama’s, and erode Tibetan Buddhism through its policy of ‘Sinicisation.’ China has intensified its campaign to eliminate the Dalai Lama’s influence in Tibet, regarding control over his succession as a ‘protracted war’ crucial to maintaining its grip on a strategically vital region.
By requiring prominent lamas and monks from across the Tibetan plateau to attend and receive this empowerment, China is aiming to confer credibility on a state-imposed religious leader, and to forge teacher-student bonds that could prove instrumental in future when China attempts to install its chosen candidate as an imposter 15th Dalai Lama.
“China is setting a religious trap,” a Tibetan monastic source told Tibet Watch. “These sacred teachings create unbreakable bonds between master and student in Tibetan Buddhism. Beijing is forcing this ceremony now so that when they install their hand-picked Dalai Lama, Tibet’s religious leaders will be bound by their own spiritual commitments to remain silent.”
During the ceremony, attended by thousands of laypeople, monks and nuns, the Chinese-installed Panchen Lama Gyaltsen Norbu (Chinese transliteration: Gyalcain Norbu) provided “in-depth explanations of systematically promoting the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism and upholding the principle of adapting religion to socialist society”, according to the official newspaper Tibet Daily.[1] These euphemistic terms obscure Xi Jinping’s intensified policies focusing on forced assimilation of Tibetans and the creation of a single Chinese national identity.
Before his high-profile visit to Lhasa in August, Party Secretary Xi Jinping lectured Gyaltsen Norbu – who is not regarded as legitimate by most Tibetans – about the need to do more to promote “the principle that religions in China must be Chinese in orientation” and to further the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic objectives.[2]
Chinese state media reported that more than 100 high-ranking Buddhist lamas and 5000 monks and nuns from major monasteries across the Tibet Autonomous Region, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and Yunnan provinces attended the Kalachakra ceremony. Prominent religious figures included the Eighth Shartsang Rinpoche, head of Rongwo Monastery in Amdo and the Seventh Gungthang Rinpoche (Lobsang Gelek Tenpi Kechen).
Tibetan media reports have cited sources in Tibet as saying local Tibetans were forced to attend the ceremony, with each family in the area being required to send at least one member to boost the crowd even though it was a busy harvest season. Official reports stated that it was held on “a spacious grassland south of the Panchen Lama’s new palace, Dechen Gesang Podrang” at Tashi Lhunpo.
It is the second Kalachakra ceremony at Tashi Lhumpo conducted by Gyaltsen Norbu, who conferred the first empowerment in the Tibet Autonomous Region in July 2016. Although China promoted the latter as the first such ceremony to be held in Tibet since the Dalai Lama escaped into exile, some Kalachakra teachings have been permitted in Tibetan areas outside the TAR in recent years, attracting hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. In 2015, Jamyang Gyatso, a religious teacher at Labrang Tashikyil monastery in Amdo, who is a tutor to Gyaltsen Norbu, conferred a Kalachakra initiation which was attended by more than 110,000 people from across the Tibetan plateau.
