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Two-year-old Osel Iza Torres to be enthroned as head lama of Kopan Buddhist monastery

The world's littlest lama is not amused. Divinity is round the corner: two-year-old Osel Iza Torres will be enthroned as head lama of the Kopan Buddhist monastery on March 12 in Nepal.

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Osel

The world's littlest lama is not amused. Divinity is round the corner: two-year-old Osel Iza Torres will be enthroned as head lama of the Kopan Buddhist monastery on March 12 in Nepal. But he clings to his mother tighter, clutching at his father's hair (his own has been shorn in the tradition of the Buddhist monks) when he is not picking his nose, busy sucking on his water bottle or examining the green ink squiggles on his pudgy hands. And all the while he glares at the cameramen assembled on the roof of the Tushita Mahayana Meditation Centre in Delhi's West Patel Nagar.

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Osel is certainly big news, international news. The cameras click unceasingly - even while there is quiet disbelief in the Tibetan community in Delhi; a few even consider the "reincarnation" a move to gain control over the Kopan monastery and its nearly 30 meditation centres throughout the world.

The Spanish reincarnation of Lama Yeshe (who founded the Kopan monastry in 1969) is also suffering from jet lag, as his father says before he whisks him away to join his four brothers and sisters in the room below. From Osel-Ling, the isolated and quiet Buddhist mountain retreat in the mountains of Grenada, the Delhi centre with the loud strains of Hindi film music blaring out and the flashy huge hoardings with Tomahawk villains who peep up behind the roof, must seem more than a world away. Those small dark brown eyes, almost hidden by the chubby cheeks, can't take in any more.

But his mother, Maria Torres, 33, and a treasurer of the retreat centre, has no such sense of displacement. She wants to share her wonderment about being the mother of the incarnation of Lama Yeshe. The relationship is ambivalent: the guru-son does need the occasional spanking, but there are times when the mother-in-her recedes in front of the little master.

Lama Yeshe

Maria's account is an oft-told tale. Two and a half months after the death of Lama Yeshe she had a dream: "I was in a big cathedral, a Catholic one. There were 1,000 people inside. Lama Yeshe called me to him. He led me to a fountain and put my head under water. Water came inside me: into my nose, my mouth. I had a strange feeling. And when I woke up I felt that Lama Yeshe had been near me. Some days later I realised that I was pregnant."

Lama Thubenzopa. a close disciple of Lama Yeshe, now the regent for the toddler lama and in whose care he will be left, considered this initial proof of Osel having been his master during his previous life. Lama Yeshe died of a heart ailment in California on March 3, 1984. Soon after Lama Tenzopa began the search for his successor.

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He, too, had a dream. Lama Tenzopa saw a western child playing in a big space. And when he saw seven-month-old Osel "doing the same thing in the same place", he asked Maria and her husband, Paco, a construction worker, to take special care of the child. Piero Cerri - an erstwhile Italian monk who helped Lama Yeshe found many of the centres abroad and now runs the Delhi centre - says that Lama Tenzopa used divination to find the successor.

"During the funeral ceremonies, Lama Tenzopa saw certain signs in the fire: he saw how it burned. He also saw some signs in the ashes. By March, 1986, he was convinced about Osel but he gave the Dalai Lama 10 names. The Dalai Lama selected Osel."

But before this Osel had to undergo many tests. Lama Tenzopa called them to India in May last year and took them to Dharamshala. "He asked Osel to choose his past mala from many others; this was Lama Yeshe's mala. Osel does not speak Spanish; for him to understand English is unimaginable. He took the correct mala and put it on his head. The next day he was asked to choose Lama Yeshe's belt."

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Maria saw other signs as well: her son kept prostrating when they met the teacher of Lama Yeshe in Wisconsin. He watched, entranced, a 90-minute video about the Dalai Lama, then put his palms together in the manner of the Buddhists.

So while the bubbling Torres - the five Torres children in tow and a few Spanish Buddhists - make their way to Kopan and the enthronement there of the little lama through Bodh-Gaya and Kathmandu, ripples of surprise and dismay go through the Tibetan community. Doubts and disappointments are expressed in private.

little Lama with parents: succession by reincarnation

To begin with, they can not understand the fuss. "There are hundreds of reincarnations. There is so much publicity about this case only because he is a westerner," says a Tibetan source. Adds another: "Doordarshan shows this little western boy but they hardly show the Dalai Lama."

Osel is also not the only western incarnation of a lama; there are at least three others. Moreover, Lama Yes he was only a geshe: geshe's are Buddhist scholars with the equivalent of a doctorate. What hurts the Tibetans is that nobody talks of the really significant reincarnations: Tri Chang Rimpoche, a tutor of the Dalai Lama, re-born in Dalhousie in a Tibetan family some years ago.

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Another Tibetan is even more blunt: "Just as you have established houses in business like the Tatas and the Birlas and then suddenly there are newcomers like Ambani, we have these new western reincarnations." He is also disturbed about publicity being sought by the family of the incarnates: many Tibetans are convinced that the Dalai Lama did not even help choose the new lama.

Little Osel has no doubt a lot of responsibilities. Lama Yeshe. who studied in the Sera monastery in Karnataka and is considered by the Tibetans as a brilliant scholar who really specialised in teaching and communicating with the Europeans and Americans, also established the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition in 1971. It has a network of Buddhist colleges, monasteries, meditation retreats round the world which are supposed to, according to their own publication, "integrate the teachings of the East with the Western approach." Spain, interestingly enough has four centres: India has only two.

The western turn to Buddhism was probably foreseen. When young Tibetan monks are asked why they keep going to the West, they often quote Padmasambhava, the eighth century Indian saint who introduced Buddhism to Tibet. "When iron birds fly and horses run on wheels, Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth and the Dharma shall come to the land of the red man." The red man in this case, since it was well before Marx, is the red Indian of the Americas.

REINCARNATION: THE PROCESS

The methods to locate an incarnate of a Buddhist lama are complicated. When a venerated guru dies, his disciples collect the names of children born nine months after his death, as per indications left by him such as the direction and surroundings of the house where he will be re-born. The disciples use oracles (a deity enters the medium's body and answers questions), divinations (emanations from deities), meditation and other tests once the child is located. He is made to select articles the dead lama used.

These days the search takes place overseas as well. In 1975, an American boy was discovered as the reincarnation of a Karmapa teacher, the highest religious order in Sikkim. He is now 18 and studies in Sikkim's Rumtek monastery. Similarly, a Canadian boy, now in Karnataka, is considered to be the reincarnation of a Sera abbot.

The search is imperative when a high seat in the religious hierarchy is involved: succession is by reincarnation, not by birth. When the present Dalai Lama, the temporal and religious head of the Tibetans, had to be found, there were many clues. The body of the 13th Dalai Lama was kept facing the south, but it shifted east. A star-shaped fungus, facing the north-east, grew on the wooden pillar near his body. Strange cloud formations also occurred in the same direction.

The regent later meditated and saw three letters: Ah, Ka and Ma, and an image of a monastery with roofs of jade green and gold, and a house with turquoise roof tiles. The first letter stood for the north-eastern province of Amdo, the second the Kumbum monastery near which the present Dalai Lama's family lived. The child picked the walking-stick, calling drum and rosary which belonged to his predecessor.

- VIJAY KRANTI