An Identity Prescribed & Non-Negotiable: The Childhood of Tibetan Tulkus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A lama is a spiritual leader or guider of the dharma in Tibetan Buddhism. When a lama dies their spirit is said to move into the body of an infant born shortly after their death, and this child is called a tulku. The word tulku translates to the Sanskrit word nirmanakaya. This means "pure physical body," and is in reference to a fully enlightened being. In the following essay, I engage in a discussion about the childhood experiences and notions of individuality of Tibetan tulkus. Due to the shortage of academic material on this topic, I draw on personal written accounts of specific tulkus and from these make my own inferences and conclusions. By exploring notions of discipline, familial relationships, personal autonomy, identity, and exploitation, I argue that the recognition and identification as a tulku does not allow one to experience an ordinary childhood and deprives one of pursuing a normative or undisturbed upbringing. In this essay, I utilize the term ‘normative’ to mean any version or rendition of childhood that the child would have experienced had they not been identified as a tulku. I hope my findings will be useful in further discussions about whether a child’s putative identity changes their right to access a typical childhood characterized by family, leisure, and personal exploration, or whether their tulku status overrides and reconditions this right.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".