The geopolitics of Buddhist reincarnation: contested futures of Tibetan leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In attending to a religion and a region often overlooked in critical geopolitics, this paper examines the intersections between issues of legitimacy, agency and authority, and the case ofTibetanBuddhism. Buddhist values and political policies are deeply intertwined in the Tibetan case, to the extent that the political philosophy ofTibet – both prior to 1959 and in exile – ischos srid gnyis ldan, or ‘religion and politics combined’. Central to this conflation has been the figure of theDalaiLama who, since 1642, has been the spiritual and political leader of Tibet. However, in March 2011, the current and 14thDalaiLama declared his retirement from political life and devolution of political power to the directly elected exilePrimeMinister (KalonTripa). Six months later, HisHoliness issued a statement on the future of his own successor, declaring that he has the ‘sole legitimate authority’ over the reincarnation of the nextDalaiLama. Within days theChinese Government responded by declaring that ‘the title ofDalaiLama is conferred by the central government and is illegal otherwise’. In historically contextualising and critically analysing these recent events, this paper challenges conventional transpositional mappings of secular modernity and religious traditionalism onto theChinese andTibetan leadership respectively. It concludes by making the case for a more sustained critical geopolitical engagement withBuddhist communities, leaders and politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".