My successor could be a woman: Dalai Lama

[Ahimsa]

The Times of India, Dec 7, 2007

MILAN, Italy – Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Thursday suggested that his successor could be a woman.

“If a woman reveals herself as more useful the lama could very well be reincarnated in this form,” the 14th Dalai Lama told reporters in Milan, where he arrived for a private visit on Wednesday.

The 72-year-old Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959, said last week that his successor could be chosen outside of Tibet if he were to die abroad.

He also mooted the possibility of choosing the 15th Dalai Lama himself. According to centuries of tradition, high-ranking monks in Tibet choose the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation after the death of the incumbent.

China, which has ruled Tibet since 1951 and has violently crushed protests there, recently announced that so-called living Buddhas in Tibet needed permission from the government, officially atheist, to be reincarnated.

There have been female Buddhas in Tibet in the past, but none have yet been positioned in such a locus of power as the office of the Dalai Lama.

 

[Steadfast]

Maybe its mostly the Western outgrowths but I was always under the impression that Buddhism was pretty egalitarian.

Many (maybe most) Zen centers are either owned and run by women or at least have women teachers on staff and of course the Bhikku can be a female as well as a male.

I think I read that Siddharttha had some doubts about women but that he changed his mind. Maybe there is a story in the Pali…

It’s been so long since I’ve been studied up on it…anyhow, I am not surprised.

 

[Ahimsa]

Maybe its mostly the Western outgrowths but I was always under the impression that Buddhism was pretty egalitarian.

Many (maybe most) Zen centers are either owned and run by women or at least have women teachers on staff and of course the Bhikku can be a female as well as a male.

I think I read that Siddharttha had some doubts about women but that he changed his mind. Maybe there is a story in the Pali…

It’s been so long since I’ve been studied up on it…anyhow, I am not surprised.

The Buddha himself didn’t have doubts about woman’s ability to realize enlightenment, but the Pali indicates that the Buddha wanted the women themselves to demonstrate how much they themselves wanted to be ordained. So the Buddha ordained them (at the urging of Ananda, his closest disciple). The Jains also ordained women, too.

 

[Kitty_Chan]

China, which has ruled Tibet since 1951 and has violently crushed protests there, recently announced that so-called living Buddhas in Tibet **needed permission **from the government, officially atheist, to be reincarnated.

I thought this part was interesting. If there was reincarnation I wonder just how they figure the reincarnated would wait on the governments word.

So the government obviously doesnt believe its a religious event, or something like that, I dont know how to describe it. Interesting.

 

[inthecloud]

What was the name of the CC nun that when to study Zen and reached the enlightement in 3 years and is now venerated as a Buda in her host temple? She died in Tailand in a car crash.

 

[Ahimsa]

What was the name of the CC nun that when to study Zen and reached the enlightement in 3 years and is now venerated as a Buda in her host temple? She died in Tailand in a car crash.

Are you sure she was a nun?

In 1979 Maura O’Halloran left a waitressing job in Boston to begin her study of Zen in Japan. One thousand days later she received the dharma transmission of her Roshi. Six months after achieving enlightenment, she was killed in a bus accident in Thailand at the age of 27. In her small Buddhist monastery in northern Japan there stands a statue erected to her memory.

As her mother asks in the Introduction, how did this daughter of an American mother and an Irish father, educated at convent schools and Trinity College, Dublin, become not only a Zen monk but a Buddhist saint? This book, excerpted from notebooks and journals kept during her three years’ training in Zen at Toshoji Temple in Tokyo and Kannonji Temple in Iwate Prefecture, tells the story. It is a fascinating record of a monastic novitiate and rapid progress toward soshin: a pure heart, and of her practice of both meditation and sacrifice. Her own Roshi comments: “She had achieved what took the Shakjamuni Buddha eighty years in twenty-seven years…Then she left this life immediately to start the salvation of the masses in the next life!”

It seems that monks–male or female, Zen or Catholic, Japanese or American–speak heart to heart and discover the same end to their contemplative prayer: oneness with all creation and compassion for all fellow travelers. This journal demonstrates how much spiritual seekers have in common.

 

[Ridgerunner]

As a western Christian, this whole reincarnation business is so strange and alien in itself that, to me, nothing they could add to it would make it a bit stranger.

 

[Ahimsa]

As a western Christian, this whole reincarnation business is so strange and alien in itself that, to me, nothing they could add to it would make it a bit stranger.

“Reincarnation” is simply becoming associated with another body. The resurrected body in Christianity won’t be exactly the same as the body you have now, so one can speak of resurrection as becoming associated with another body (or “reincarnation”) as well.

 

[Kitty_Chan]

“Reincarnation” is simply becoming associated with another body. The resurrected body in Christianity won’t be exactly the same as the body you have now, so one can speak of resurrection as becoming associated with another body (or “reincarnation”) as well.

In reincarnation you dont know what you will be, God said we will still be us. I cant see it being the same.

 

[Ahimsa]

In reincarnation you dont know what you will be, God said we will still be us. I cant see it being the same.

In reincarnation, you might “appear” differently (different physical body, different mental capacities, etc.), but your soul is the same.