Word: karmapas
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Once a beacon drawing pilgrims and tourists from across the world, Tsurphu Monastery now sits in darkness. The crowds and the beggars have gone and only a few monks remain. Even for nonbelievers it's difficult not to conclude that when Ugyen Trinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa and the oldest reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism, jumped from a monastery window and ran to a jeep waiting in the darkness of night on Dec. 28, 1999, to begin a 1,350-km journey over the Himalayas to northern India, he took all the light from what was then Tibet's living spiritual...
Tsurphu, the capital of the Kagyupa (Black Hat) Tibetan Buddhist sect, is hidden at 4,480 m in the remote and desolate snow-capped peaks of central Tibet. Founded in the 1180s by the first Karmapa, it is a mere 50 km, but a rocky two-and-a-half-hour drive, from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. The road is little more than a path distinguishable from the rest of the moonscape by the occasional tire track. My Lhasa-born Tibetan driver has to stop twice to ask farmers the way. Finally we reach a rickety bridge over a fast...
...Tibetan exiles after he dies. The identity of Tibet's second-highest religious figure, the Panchen Lama, is disputed. The Communist Party is promoting one 10-year-old boy and detaining the Dalai Lama's choice, making him the world's youngest religious prisoner. Next in the ranks, the Karmapa, is 15 and stunned Beijing last year by trekking through the Himalayas to India, where he warned that "Tibetan religious traditions and culture now face the risk of total extinction." He has become the exile community's greatest hope for leadership...
Good thing for China that it doesn't depend on the consent of the Tibetans to rule Tibet. A 14-year-old boy recognized as the 17th Karmapa - a senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism - has fled to Dharmsala, the Dalai Lama's headquarters in India. It was reported Friday that the boy fled after the Chinese authorities, who had used their official relationship with the Karmapa as evidence of their tolerance of Tibetan Buddhism, broke promises to allow the boy access to his spiritual teacher in India. Beijing had officially recognized the boy, chosen by monks at the Karma Kagyu...
...Karmapa's flight caps a year in which the authorities in Beijing are facing growing discontent from religious believers of varied stripe. Besides the challenge represented by the widespread Falun Gong sect, which was banned amid national protests in the summer, Beijing has faced continued resistance from Islamic separatists in its westernmost provinces, and earlier this week China's leadership set a collision course with the pope by engineering the appointment of three officially approved bishops to the Chinese Catholic Church over the Vatican's objections. The Karmapa's defection may be a blow to Chinese efforts to legitimize...