Subhechcha Ganguly 
Unconfirmed rumours state that an eight-year-old kid who was the Tenth Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche in a previous life was anointed at a ceremony in Gandan Monastery at the end of February before being formally installed by the Dalai Lama on March 8 in Dharamshala. The ailing 14th Dalai Lama, who now presides over the influential Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, is an 87-year-old man who anticipates living to the biological age of 113. He has no urgent intentions to declare his reincarnation at this time. As President Xi Jinping pursues his Sinicization of Tibet programme and Beijing revokes the authority of official reincarnations of high lamas of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Communist Party of China despises him and labels him a “splittist.”
As the reincarnation of the head of the Gelugpa school in the landlocked nation of Mongolia and the third most senior lama or spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the cancer survivor was able to clean bowl the Xi Jinping government at this advanced age and bowl a googly to Beijing. About 600 Mongolians travelled to Dharamshala to witness the ceremony when the 14th Dalai Lama ordained the tenth Khalkha Jetsun Dhampa Rinpoche. This event has significant implications for the ongoing conflict between the Dalai Lama and the CPC as well as the future of Tibetan Buddhism.
Unverified claims state that the eighth-year-old child, who was born in the United States in 2015, was crowned the Tenth Khalka in a ceremony at Mongolia’s largest GandanTegchinlen Monastery at the end of February. The monastery’s abbot and senior Mongolian lamas were present for the ceremony. Experts in Tibetan Buddhism, however, assert that the eight-year-validity old’s came only when he was recognised as a reincarnation on March 8—the end of the process the 14th Dalai Lama engaged in during his visit to Ulan Bator in 2016.
