Sikkim Wants Centre To Resolve Karmapa Issue
(The Hindu | Gangtok | March 19, 2000)
The Sikkim Government wants the Centre to resolve the Karmapa controversy as the Tibetan Buddhism tangle of the Kagyu sect has become an international issue. "Earlier, we had requested New Delhi to instal the 16-year-old Ugyen Thinley as the 17th Karmapa at the seat of the Rumtek monastery near here, but now the situation has changed," the Sikkim Chief Minister, Mr. Pawan Kumar Chamling, told a group of visiting journalists here from Calcutta.
The Rumtek monastery, 28 km from here, is now the headquarters of the Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism since the 16th Karmapa fled the Tsurphu monastery in Lasha in 1960 to avoid Communist China's "repression" and made Rumtek his supreme religious centre in exile.
The 16th Karmapa died in 1981 and the eight-year-old shepherd boy, Ugyen Thinley, was identified as his reincarnation since 1992. The Tibetan Buddhist temporal head, the Dalai Lama, and two other heads of Buddhist sects also recognised Ugyen Thinley as the real inheritor of the Rumtek monastery.
But Shamar Rimpoche, one of the three Rimpoches of Rumtek, opposed Ugyen's stand, claiming Thinley Thaye Dorji was the real inheritor to the Kagyu sect. Addressing mediapersons, Mr Chamling said the latest position relating to Karmapa had become a "sensitive matter" and the Centre should resolve the tangle. The Chief Minister indirectly referred to the latest two opinions of the Rimpoches of Rumtek regarding the real inheritor, and the arrival of Ugyen Thinley from Tibet to Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh.
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