The Dalai Lama: Meaning, History and the Succession

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 June 2026 · Updated 13 November 2026

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The Dalai Lama is the title of a line of teachers in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, held to be one being reborn in succession and a manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion. There have been fourteen. The current holder, Tenzin Gyatso, was born on 6 July 1935, and in July 2025 he affirmed that the institution will continue after him.

He has lived in exile since 1959, and his public teaching centres on compassion and nonviolence, in lines such as “if you want to be happy, practise compassion”, “my religion is kindness”, and “if you cannot help, at least do no harm”.

What is the Dalai Lama?

In his office’s words, the Dalai Lama is “the spiritual leader of Tibet.” The title was given to the third in the line, Sonam Gyatso, by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan, whom he travelled to meet in 1578; dalai, writes Asha Kaufman in Tricycle, summarising the Treasury of Lives biography, “is Mongolian for ‘vast sea,’” and the Dalai Lama’s office says the title “literally means Ocean of Wisdom.” The Dalai Lamas are held to be one being reborn in succession since Gedun Drupa, born in 1391, and to be manifestations of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. By the 14th Dalai Lama’s account, they were Tibet’s political as well as spiritual leaders from 1642 until he ended that role in 2011. The current, 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was born on 6 July 1935, fled into exile in India in 1959 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. In a statement published on 2 July 2025 he affirmed that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue; China’s government says his successor must be approved by its central government.

The title and the office

For most of its history the office of Dalai Lama joined two kinds of authority that are often kept apart. The Dalai Lamas belong to the Gelug school, one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism: the first in the line, Gedun Drupa, became in 1416 a disciple of Tsongkhapa, “the founder of the Gelugpa School,” as the Dalai Lama’s office puts it. The Dalai Lamas belong to the school but are not its formal head. That is the Gaden Tripa, “Holder of the Gaden Throne,” which the Central Tibetan Administration calls “the title of the spiritual head of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.” It is “an appointed office, not a reincarnation lineage”; in 2017 the 14th Dalai Lama appointed its 104th holder. Political authority came with the Fifth Dalai Lama, who, in the 14th Dalai Lama’s words, “established the Gaden Phodrang Government in 1642, becoming the spiritual and political head of Tibet.” The name is Mongolian in origin: Altan Khan gave Sonam Gyatso a long Mongolian title, glossed in the Treasury of Lives summary as “wonderful Vajradhara, good, brilliant, commendable ocean,” that was “subsequently shortened to Dalai Lama.” The other half of the name, lama, is the Tibetan word for a spiritual teacher.

A line of reincarnations

What most distinguishes the institution is the belief that holds it together across the centuries: that the Dalai Lamas are not a series of different people but one being, reborn again and again. In Tibetan Buddhism a reincarnate lama is called a tulku, and in the 14th Dalai Lama’s account such rebirth “should take place either through the voluntary choice of the concerned person or at least on the strength of his or her karma, merit and prayers.” The Dalai Lamas are one such line. He dates it in a formal statement issued at Dharamsala on 24 September 2011: “For more than 600 years since Gedun Drub, a series of unmistaken reincarnations has been recognised in the lineage of the Dalai Lama.” When a Dalai Lama dies, a search is made for the child who is his rebirth, and the same statement describes the signs such a search looks for.

And there is a further dimension. The Dalai Lamas, in the words of the present Dalai Lama’s office, “are believed to be manifestations of Avalokiteshvara or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion and the patron saint of Tibet.” For those who hold this belief, the Dalai Lama is compassion in human form, returning in age after age to serve the world. He words the claim with care. Asked how he regards being Avalokiteshvara’s incarnation, he has answered, “It is difficult for me to say definitely,” and, of the four kinds of rebirth he goes on to describe, “Though some seem more likely than others, I cannot definitely say which I am.” In the same exchange he adds that “I have the karmic relationship to be in this role,” and in words his office quotes in its biography of him, he says he has “no difficulty accepting that I am spiritually connected both to the thirteen previous Dalai Lamas, to Chenrezig and to the Buddha himself.” (We say more in our guide to Avalokiteśvara and the wider family of buddhas and bodhisattvas; on the idea of the reincarnation lineage, see rebirth.)

The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

The present holder of the office was born Lhamo Thondup on 6 July 1935, to a farming family in the village of Taktser in Amdo, northeastern Tibet. At the age of two he was found by a search party sent out by the Tibetan government; in his own account he was recognised in 1939 as the rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, by the procedure the Regent of Tibet and the Tibetan National Assembly followed. In the winter of 1940 he was installed at the Potala Palace in Lhasa as Tibet’s spiritual leader, took the name Tenzin Gyatso, and began a monastic education drawn from the Nalanda tradition. He was still a teenager when the political upheavals of the 1950s thrust full responsibility upon him: on 17 November 1950, at the age of fifteen, weeks after news reached Lhasa that the People’s Liberation Army had crossed the Drichu river east of Chamdo, he was enthroned as Tibet’s temporal leader. Then came the decisive turn. In March 1959, with tens of thousands of Tibetans gathered around his palace in Lhasa in the uprising against Chinese rule, he left the city on the night of 17 March and reached the Indian border on 31 March. After a year at Mussoorie, he settled in 1960 at Dharamshala, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, which became the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile and remains his base. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, “for advocating peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people,” and in 2011 he stepped down as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, signing over his political authority to the democratically elected leadership on 29 May while keeping his spiritual role. He set out that step in his own words that September: the Dalai Lamas, he wrote, “have functioned as both the political and spiritual leaders of Tibet for 369 years since 1642. I have now voluntarily brought this to an end, proud and satisfied that we can pursue the kind of democratic system of government flourishing elsewhere in the world.”

A global voice for compassion

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s announcement of the 1989 Peace Prize said that in his struggle for the liberation of Tibet he “consistently has opposed the use of violence,” and that, in the Committee’s opinion, he had “come forward with constructive and forward-looking proposals for the solution of international conflicts, human rights issues, and global environmental problems.” His office sets out what it calls his principal commitments. As a human being, he “advocates the cultivation of warm-heartedness and human values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline,” values he calls “secular ethics or universal values” and from which, his office says, even people with no religious belief can benefit. As a Buddhist monk, he is committed to “encouraging harmony among the world’s religious traditions.” As a Tibetan, he is committed to “preserving Tibetan language and culture, the heritage Tibetans received from the masters of India’s Nalanda University, while also speaking up for the protection of Tibet’s natural environment.” His office adds that he has lately spoken of a commitment to the value of ancient Indian knowledge among young Indians. Since the mid-1980s, it notes, he has held a dialogue with modern scientists, “mainly in the fields of psychology, neurobiology, quantum physics and cosmology,” which, it says, has also resulted in “the addition of modern science to the traditional curriculum of Tibetan monastic institutions re-established in exile.” (On Buddhist movements that take up social and political causes, see engaged Buddhism; for a meditation practice that cultivates goodwill toward others, see loving-kindness meditation. For public figures who are or were Buddhist, see famous Buddhists; for Buddhist films, see Buddhist documentaries and films; on the Kālacakra initiations his office lists, see Kalachakra; and on the French monk who has been his interpreter since 1989, see Matthieu Ricard.)

On the politics, briefly

The Dalai Lama is, inseparably, a political symbol as well as a religious one: revered by Tibetans and honoured with awards abroad, while the government of China regards him as a separatist and opposes his influence. In July 2025 its Foreign Ministry described him as “a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities and seeks to separate Xizang from China under the cloak of religion.” This site is not the place to adjudicate that dispute, and we note it plainly and without taking sides. It is fair to record that the Dalai Lama’s own long-stated position is the Middle-Way Approach, as his office states it: Tibetans “do not seek independence for Tibet,” and what is sought instead is “a genuine autonomy for all Tibetans living in the three traditional provinces of Tibet within the framework of the People’s Republic of China.” When he gave up political authority in 2011, his office says, he meant “to resume the status of the first four Dalai Lamas in concerning himself only with spiritual affairs.”

The succession question

In 2011 the Dalai Lama wrote that “When I am about ninety” he would consult the high lamas, the Tibetan public and others, and “re-evaluate whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not.” He turned ninety on 6 July 2025. A statement signed on 21 May 2025 and published by his office on 2 July gives his answer: “I am affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue.” Recognising the next Dalai Lama “will rest exclusively with members of the Gaden Phodrang Trust, the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” who are to consult the heads of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions and “the reliable oath-bound Dharma Protectors who are linked inseparably to the lineage of the Dalai Lamas,” and carry out the search and recognition “in accordance with past tradition”; “no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter.” In Voice for the Voiceless (March 2025) he wrote, as Radio Free Asia and Al Jazeera report, that “the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world.”

China’s government takes the opposite view. On 11 March 2025 its Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, said the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, like that of other Living Buddhas, must “follow the process that consists of search and identification in China, lot-drawing from a golden urn, and central government approval.”

The two sides also tell the history differently. His 2011 statement says the golden urn, a procedure he says the Manchus imposed, was dispensed with for the Ninth, the Thirteenth and himself, and that “there has only been one occasion when a Dalai Lama was recognized by using this method”; China’s Foreign Ministry says that he himself was “approved by the then central government.”

As of October 2026 no fifteenth Dalai Lama has been recognised; we record both positions without adjudicating between them.

What the Dalai Lama represents

Whatever one makes of the institution and the politics that surround it, for Tibetan Buddhists who hold the belief described above, the Dalai Lama is a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in human form; bodhisattvas, his office explains, “have vowed to be reborn in the world to help humanity.” His public teaching, as his office sets it out, is addressed beyond Buddhism as well: human values such as compassion and forgiveness from which, it says, even people with no religious belief can benefit. (For other teachers across the traditions, see famous Buddhist teachers; for the tradition he belongs to, see Tibetan Buddhism; for a related practice, loving-kindness meditation.)