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As the Dalai Lama Turns 91, India and China Are Fighting for the Future of Buddhism

With the revered Tibetan leader over 90 years old the rivalry between New Delhi and Beijing over who speaks for the Buddhist world is entering its most consequential phase.

The 14th Dalai Lama drives in a mini-bus from his residence to the teaching platform to attend celebrations in honor of his 91st birthday in Leh, Ladakh, India on July 6, 2026.

On July 6, the 14th Dalai Lama turned 91. In Dharamshala, the Himalayan town that has served as his home in exile since 1959, the day was marked, as it was last year, with long-life prayers, khata scarves, and delegations of devotees from across Asia and beyond. But the birthday of the Dalai Lama is no longer merely a religious observance. It has become an annual reminder of a clock that is ticking on one of Asia’s most combustible questions: who will choose the 15th Dalai Lama. Behind that question lies a broader contest between India and China over which of Asia’s two giants can credibly claim custodianship of Buddhism itself.

That contest has been building for decades, but the past year sharpened it dramatically. At his 90th birthday celebrations in July 2025, the Dalai Lama ended years of speculation by affirming that the institution will continue after his death, and that his Gaden Phodrang Trust holds sole authority to recognize his reincarnation. It was a pointed exclusion of Beijing, reinforced by his long-standing suggestion that his successor will be born in the “free world,” outside Chinese control. Within hours, China rejected the plan, insisting that any reincarnation must comply with Chinese law and “historical conventions,” a reference to the Qing-era Golden Urn ritual that Beijing codified in its 2007 State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5, which requires state approval for all reincarnations of living Buddhas.

The world has seen this movie before. After the 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year-old boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as his reincarnation in 1995. Within days the child disappeared into Chinese custody; he has not been seen in the three decades since, a case United Nations human rights experts formally raised with Beijing last year. In his place, the Chinese Communist Party installed its own candidate, Gyaltsen Norbu, who remains largely unrecognized by Tibetans but is now being deployed as an instrument of Chinese religious statecraft. Gyaltsen Norbu pledged loyalty to Xi Jinping in a rare 2025 audience, and nearly traveled to the Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini, Nepal, in 2024 before Indian and American diplomatic pressure helped scuttle the visit. 

A rerun of the Panchen Lama playbook – two rival Dalai Lamas, one chosen in exile and one anointed in Beijing – is now the baseline expectation of most Tibet watchers.

Beijing’s Bid for Buddhism

For China, the succession fight is the sharp end of a much larger soft power project. Over the past decade, the officially atheist state has spent lavishly on temples, Buddhist universities, relic loans, and monk exchanges across Asia, marketing a state-managed version of the faith. The flagship is the World Buddhist Forum, which in its 2024 edition drew roughly 800 monks, scholars, and religious figures from more than 70 countries. Former Indian ambassador to China Ashok Kantha argued that the forum was designed to “project China as the center of the Buddhist universe,” as Bloomberg paraphrased it, and to quietly erode India’s status as the faith’s ancestral home.

Nepal has been a particular target. Chinese-backed institutions have proliferated around Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha located a short drive from the Indian border. New Delhi reads this as an attempt to relocate Buddhism’s sacred geography northward, away from India.

For Beijing, Buddhist diplomacy serves three purposes. First, it softens China’s image in the Theravada belt – Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia – where Belt and Road infrastructure has generated both dependence and unease. Second, it builds a constituency of foreign monasteries and sanghas that may one day be induced to recognize, or at least not reject, a Beijing-appointed Dalai Lama. Third, it serves the domestic project of “sinicizing” Tibetan Buddhism, folding a unique faith into the party-state. 

Yet China’s Buddhist diplomacy comes with a built-in paradox: the party that claims exclusive authority to certify reincarnation is itself staunchly atheist and insists that all faiths subordinate themselves to “Xi Jinping Thought.” China’s government bans images of the Dalai Lama inside Tibet, surveils monasteries, and restricts the use of Tibetan language, including a new insistence on calling Tibet “Xizang.” The disappeared Panchen Lama remains, for Buddhists worldwide, the most eloquent rebuttal to Beijing’s........

© The Diplomat