Lama No More

I didn’t hear about it when it happened because I have been out of the loop for a month or so. Now I have just finished reading the Time magazine article about it as well as several other accounts, and I am making a heroic effort not to say 'I've told you so!' The much promoted and a lauded Lama Tenzin Osel Rimpoche has renounced his role as the reincarnation of the much loved Lama Yeshe. So it seems that all the prophetic dreams foretelling where he would be reborn were wrong, all the oracular signs were misread and all the wonders pointing to him being the lama reborn were just imagination. And how now are we to explain all the claims that when he was young Osel could clearly 'remember' incidents in his earlier life? Imagination again or did truth fall foul to over-enthusiasm? When they bought him to Singapore when he was four or five years old, someone who had been a disciple of Lama Yeshe told me that he had clearly recognized all his old teacher's mannerisms in the young child. Imagination again, apparently. Two former Western dropout from Tibetan Buddhism then studying at Sera Monastery told me the FPMT had to make a huge 'donation' to the monastery before the monks there would 'recognize' Osel as the genuine reincarnation. If true, this too raises a few serious questions about the whole tulku thing.
The Time article says. 'The abdication of the anointed tulku is a significant embarrassment to the group he was supposed to head, the powerhouse Foundation for the Preservation of the Monastic Tradition (FPMT), the foremost Tibetan teaching organization in the West. It also challenges Westerners who have adopted Buddhism to find more sophisticated ways of understanding its magical side'. No Time, I must correct you there. It challenges those Westerners who have adopted Tibetan Buddhism. It neither challenges or threatens me or any Westerner who has adopted the Buddha's Dhamma, as opposed to its various cultural expressions in Asia.
The former Lama Osel apparently does not even consider himself a Buddhist anymore. He was quoted in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo as saying, 'I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie'. A medieval situation! What a perfect description of the atmosphere that has surrounded the poor kid for the last 20 years. It will be interesting to see if Osel returns to being a 'reincarnated' teacher and if he does what his motives for doing so might be.
Don’t get me wrong. I'm not glad this has happened. My heart goes out to the really nice and dedicated people at the FPMT who must be feeling rather confused and let-down right now. But this is what happens when you confuse Dhamma with its various traditional and cultural expressions. If my understanding is correct, the whole tulku concept is a fairly recent one in Tibetan Buddhism (15th century ?) and it had no antecedence in Indian Vajrayana or in other countries where Vajrayana was practiced, like Japan. And I seem to remember that the Buddha said, 'No one is born a brahmin' (Sn.136), which in effect is what the tulku concept says, that a lama is worth listening to because he is supposedly the reincarnation of an earlier lama, whether he has anything profound to say or not.
Don’t practice Tibetan Buddhism, or Thai Buddhism, or Japanese Buddhism. Practice the Buddhism that is not culturally specific, the Dhamma that is timeless, that transcends culture and that is applicable everywhere and always.

A little ditty with apologies to Ogden Nash.

A one l lama he's a priest
A two l llama he's a beast
And I will bet a silk pyjama
That you can't really 'recognize' a reborn lama.