life after the dalai lama

The spiritual leader of the Tibetan people is now 71 - and finally talking about retirement. But his successor is likely to face the same life of exile as China's persecution continues. Peter Popham reports

      Published: 15 May 2007

 

He seems always to have been around. Was there ever a time when the Dalai Lama's chuckling, roly-poly form was not on television or in the magazines and newspapers, as familiar as Father Christmas or Terry Wogan or the Queen? And now we hear he's going to retire. It's hard to believe.

"Old friends pass away, new friends appear," the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, said once. "It's just like the days. An old day passes, a new one arrives." But in the case of the Dalai Lama himself it is not easy to be so phlegmatic. He has become part of the world's furniture, happy to attend the opening of an envelope if the word "Tibet" is written on it, available equally to be made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool University, an honorary citizen of Canada, and recipient of the Life Achievement Award of the Hadassah Women's Zionist Organisation if it gives oxygen to the cause of Tibet's liberation.

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