KEY POINTS:
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? 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, 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.
He has been excoriated by Christopher Hitchens, bitterly attacked, but only in private, by Tibetan exiles who wish that he would press their cause with more aggression, damned by Qi Xiaofei of China's religious affairs administration as "a saboteur of ethnic unity and a pursuer of splittism".
Mr Burns once gave Homer Simpson the task of splatting a cream pie in his face. But Homer funked it. And who can blame him?
And now, aged 71, he plans to fade away.
The news emerged at the weekend from Brussels, where Tibet support groups from all over the world are meeting the exiled community's prime minister, Dr Sandhong Rinpoche, and other members of the government to discuss the difficult months before Beijing's Olympics.
Beijing had promised greater freedom of expression before the Games, and for the first time in Tenzin Gyatso's 47 years of exile, he has been in negotiations with the Chinese.
Yet increasingly, Tibet supporters see China's emollient words as exactly that, designed to lull the West into complacency while inside China, and in Tibet, the state repression intensifies. And now this: no Dalai Lama at the helm.
"He will keep his spiritual role but wants to lessen his political burden as he moves into retirement," the report went.
This week Tibetans denied that they were taken aback by the news. They point out that recently in the US, he told a group of students he was already "semi-retired" and would "retire completely" within a few years.
Chhime Rigzing, the Dalai Lama's private secretary, explained from Dharamsala, the Himalayan headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile: "The political leadership will be transferred over a period of time.
"But he will continue to be the spiritual leader, because as the Dalai Lama the issue of relinquishing the post does not arise. The temporal part he wants to transfer but you can't transfer spiritual leadership in Buddhism, you can't change that."
Of course that begs the question, where exactly do you draw the line? As 13th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, like his predecessors, was Tibet's head of state as well as its religious leader. The unique presence he has established in the West since fleeing from China has been the result of this dual role - he spoke for the Tibetans as a people and for their suffering at the hand of the invader, and no one except the Chinese Government challenged his right to do so.
At the same time, and with startling directness, he told the truths of Buddhism. The trampling of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army, the trashing of its monasteries and the brainwashing of its monks and nuns, the colonisation of its towns and cities by Chinese settlers - all of which continues - were outrages on which the Dalai Lama spoke with unique eloquence.
Because the outrage was so stark, he found a huge audience everywhere.
And then, almost without us being aware of it, he was telling us about values, about morality, about happiness, in the simplest words. And because of the way he did it, most of us lingered to listen to that message, too. Tibetan Buddhism is a fabulously exotic construct, as remote and strange a religious tradition as any in the world. Yet Tenzin Gyatso has a way to make it simple, without cheapening its truths.
"Happiness is not something ready made," he will say, "it comes from your own actions." "In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher."
"His Holiness has expressed his wish to retire," said Yael Weisz-Rind, director of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, "and the Tibetans say they wish he will remain ... It's not the first time we are hearing this message about semi-retirement. This is in his long-term vision, so that on the day he dies the Tibetans will be able to carry on, both those in Tibet and those in exile. There will be no need for emergency procedures."
But who on earth will take his place? The Tibetans have an answer to that, too. Tenzing Tsundue, a Tibetan dissident, said, "His Holiness has been making such statements [about retirement] for quite some time and he has been doing a lot to empower the Tibetan community, to democratise it. He will hand over to the directly elected prime minister, elected by Tibetans living around the world.
"His Holiness has been nurturing this process of becoming independent from within for a very long time. The arrival of democracy is the biggest thing that has happened to the Tibetan community in the past 50 years."
The prime minister, Sandhong Rinpoche, 70, is a doctor of Buddhist philosophy but he is not a monk. Neither does he have any kind of a profile outside his own community.
The Dalai Lama's authority - like that of the pope - derives from the universal acceptance by Tibetans of his legitimacy. A democratically-elected prime minister, however desirable, does not come with quite the same mystique. The Tibetans will still need their high lamas.
And that is where the Chinese have presented the Tibetans with a grave dilemma. The Dalai Lama is number one in the Tibetan religious hierarchy; number two is the Panchen Lama. It is the Dalai Lama's job to help identify, with the help of dreams and visions, the newly reincarnated Panchen Lama; and vice versa, so the hierarchy of reincarnated religious leaders leapfrogs down the ages.
By abducting the newly identified Panchen Lama in 1995, and keeping his whereabouts secret ever since, the Chinese tried to hijack this process; the puppet Panchen Lama they appointed in his place is expected to name a puppet Dalai Lama, once Tenzin Gyatso dies, and the People's Republic will then have the whole arcane system in its pocket.
But it might not be that easy for them. The Dalai Lama himself has said clearly that, because of the oppressive conditions prevalent in Tibet, he expects his own reincarnation to appear outside, among the exiles. There remains the problem of who will identify him.
"The absence of the Panchen Lama is one of the areas of anxiety in the Tibetan community," conceded Yael Weisz-Rind. "The Chinese are aware of this, and that's probably why the Panchen Lama was abducted."
But all is not lost. Third in the hierarchy is the 17th Karmapa Lama, unique in that he is recognised by the Chinese and by the Dalai Lama.
Although he was believed by many in the Tibetan community to have come unhealthily under Chinese influence in his teens, he redeemed himself dramatically in 1999 by fleeing with a few companions from Tsurphu monastery and travelling hundreds of miles along unmarked tracks to avoid detection before turning up in Dharamsala.
The "Black Hat Lama", Ugyen Trinley Dorje, has yet to establish a name in the West because the Indian government has yet to let him leave the country. But his supporters in Dharamsala believe it won't be long before that happens.
"He turns 22 next month, he now speaks six languages, and he's becoming more and more of a magnet here," said Jane Perkins, author of Tibet in Exile, from Dharamsala.
"Even mainland Chinese are coming over to hear him speak - 90 came to his last appearance in southern India. There's absolutely no doubt that he is the new star: dynamic, powerful, full of young energy but with tremendous discipline and dignity, enormously sage for his age. We hope he will be free to go overseas soon, in which case he could take some of the load off His Holiness's shoulders."
She added as an afterthought, "Every teenage girl is in love with him ... "
Something not even Tenzin Gyatso can claim.
- INDEPENDENT
