Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama [Tibetan,=oceanic teacher], title of the leader of Tibetan Buddhism . Believed like his predecessors to be the incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, 1935-, was installed in 1940. In 1959, following a Tibetan revolt against Chinese rule (see Tibet ), he fled into exile. He has traveled widely, pleading the Tibetan cause. Recipient of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote an autobiography, Freedom in Exile (1990).

Bibliography: See P. Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dali Lama (2008).

Dalai Lama the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism and, until the establishment of Chinese communist rule, the spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet. Each Dalai Lama is believed to be the reincarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, reappearing in a child when the incumbent Dalai Lama dies. The present Dalai Lama, the fourteenth incarnation, escaped to India in 1959 following the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The name is from Tibetan, literally ‘ocean monk’, so named because he is regarded as ‘the ocean of compassion’.

Dalai Lama (Grand Lama) Supreme head of the Yellow Hat Buddhist monastery at Lhasa, Tibet. The title was bestowed upon the third Grand Lama by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan (d.1583). In 1642, the Mongols installed Ngawang Lopsang Gyatso (1617–82), fifth Dalai Lama, as political and spiritual ruler of Tibet. Dalai Lamas thereafter retained political leadership, but spiritual supremacy was later shared with the Panchen Lama. In 1950–51, Tenzin Gyatso (1935– ), 14th Dalai Lama, temporarily fled Tibet after it was annexed by the People's Republic of China. Following a brutally suppressed Tibetan uprising (1959), he went into exile in India. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is revered as the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. When a Dalai Lama dies, his soul is believed to pass into the body of an infant, born 49 days later.

http://www.dalailama.com