Lama

Lama is the Tibetan word for a spiritual teacher: Himalayan Art Resources, the standard iconography database, catalogues portraits of Tibetan masters under the subject heading “Teacher (Lama)”. What the title carries in practice can be seen in Yukhok Chöying Rangdrol’s explanation of the Longchen Nyingtik preliminaries, translated by Adam Pearcey. Under the heading “The Outer Spiritual Teacher” he tells the practitioner to “invoke the lama while considering him as the embodiment of all the gurus, the buddha and the dharmakāya”, and calls him “the teacher who reveals to us the path of liberation and omniscience, our kind root master”. The same text keeps a second teacher inside the student: “The inner spiritual guide is our mindfulness, awareness, conscientiousness and six transcendent perfections.”

A lama is not by definition a recognised reincarnation. In his 2011 statement on reincarnation the fourteenth Dalai Lama writes that “the title of Tulku is given to reincarnate Lamas either on the grounds of their resembling enlightened beings or through their connection to certain qualities of enlightened beings”, and discusses separately the case of “a Lama who is an ordinary being”. He dates the practice to “the early 13th century with the recognition of Karmapa Pagshi as the reincarnation of Karmapa Dusum Khyenpa”, notes that it “gradually spread to other Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and Bon, in Tibet”, and points out that “the system of recognizing and numbering their reincarnations did not occur in India” — it is a Tibetan institution rather than an Indian Buddhist one. He is blunt about its failures too: among recognised tulkus “there may be many who are truly qualified Incarnate Emanation Bodies of the Buddhas, but this does not necessarily apply to all of them”. Read further on Tibetan Buddhism.