![]() Despite his renown and celebrity friends, he remains a man aching for home and a leader removed from his people. Still, the Dalai Lama holds out hope for a return to his birthplace. Bush has made a point of meeting the Dalai Lama until Donald Trump, who is in negotiations with China over reforming its state-controlled economy. Even India, which has granted asylum to him as well as to about 100,000 other Tibetans, is not sending senior representatives to the diaspora’s commemoration of his 60th year in exile, citing a “very sensitive time” for bilateral relations with Beijing. Once the toast of capitals around the world, the Dalai Lama has not met a world leader since 2016. ![]() Beijing still sees the Dalai Lama as a dangerous threat and swiftly rebukes any nation that entertains him. In January, the CCP announced it would “Sinicize” Buddhism over the next five years, completing a multimillion-dollar rebranding of the faith as an ancient Chinese religion.Īlthough not, of course, the world’s most famous. Officially atheist, the party has proved as adaptive to religion as it is to capitalism, claiming a home for faith in the nationalism Beijing has activated under Xi Jinping. Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that drove him out of Tibet is working to co-opt Buddhist principles - as well as the succession process itself. Yet as old age makes travel more difficult, and as China’s political clout has grown, the Dalai Lama’s influence has waned. The cause of Tibetan self-rule remains alive in Western minds thanks to admirers ranging from Richard Gere to the Beastie Boys to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who calls him a “messenger of hope for millions of people around the world.” He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and was heralded in Martin Scorcese’s 1997 biopic. What’s more, the lowly farmer’s son named as a “God-King” in his childhood has been embraced by the West since his exile. But his prominence extends beyond the borders of his own faith, with many practices endorsed by Buddhists, like mindfulness and meditation, permeating the lives of millions more around the world. In the six decades since, the leader of the world’s most secluded people has become the most recognizable face of a religion practiced by nearly 500 million people worldwide.
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