Panchen Lama

Panchen Lama (abbr. Pandita Chen.po, ‘Great Teacher’). Holder of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic throne of Tashilhunpo in Shigatse, the religious nature of which has become inseparable from Sino-Tibetan political history. The office had been established by the third Dalai Lama as a position attainable by merit, until the Great Fifth Dalai Lama—who had become close to his contemporary Panchen Lama (Chokyi Gyaltsen, 1570–1662) who was also his tutor—predicted that the throne would be retained by reincarnation, from which time Chokyi Gyaltsen has been considered the ‘first’ Panchen Lama. In 1944 the seventh Panchen Lama, Chokyi Gyaltsen (whom the Chinese reckon as the tenth, thus increasing his status), was declared by the Chinese to have been discovered in China. It was not until 1951 that Chokyi Gyaltsen was recognized by the Tibetans, and only then as part of the seventeen-point agreement (signed with false Tibetan seals by a deserter and collaborator, Ngapo Ngawang Jigne, who held office in the Chinese government) forced on them after the 1950 invasion while the Dalai Lama was in exile. ‘Discovered’ by the Chinese, brought up in China, and given a Chinese education, Chokyi Gyaltsen toed the Chinese line until, in 1960, his seat at Tashilhunpo was ransacked and his entire corpus of 4,000 monks was either executed or sent to labour camps. In 1964, in a speech to 10,000 citizens of Lhasa, he asserted Tibet's right to independence. He was imprisoned, released in 1978, until, in 1988, at a speech in Tashilhunpo, he declared that ‘the detriments of Chinese rule in Tibet outweighed the benefits’. Three days later he suffered a fatal heart attack. The search for the Panchen Lama's reincarnation was then set in motion, and in 1995 the Dalai Lama recognized him in a 6-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. The Chinese authorities refused to recognize him. They held their own procedures at Jokhang at the end of 1995, producing a 5-year-old boy, Gyancain/Gyaltsen Norbu.