Today is March 1. I've come to think of March as "Tibet month," since it marks the anniversary of the 1959 Tibet Uprising and the beginning of exile for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
I have been writing biographies of the Dalai Lamas and finally got to the 8th Dalai Lama. By all accounts the Eighth was a quiet fellow who liked to meditate and study and who preferred that other people run the government. So there's not much to say about him as a historical figure.
But it was during his tenure that the infamous "golden urn" lottery was introduced as a means for choosing the rebirths of high lamas. As you may know, today the government of China insists that it has the sole authority to identify the reborn Dalai, Panchen and other high lamas because Beijing has the golden urn, and the traditional way to choose those lamas is by a lottery, drawing slips with names written on them from the golden urn, which doesn't make mistakes. The golden urn, then, is something like the sorting hat in the Harry Potter books.
Anyway, beside being a weird thing for a government to claim, it's not accurate. It's widely agreed even among western historians that probably only one Dalai Lama was ever chosen by the golden urn, although there seems to be disagreement whether the chosen one was the 10th or 11th. The magic urn certainly couldn't have chosen any of them before the 9th, and its use had been discontinued by the time the 13th Dalai Lama came along.
But the back story of how the golden urn even came to be the Golden Urn is fascinating. In brief, some squabbling high tulkus who also happened to be brothers got into a disagreement that spun out of control. The squabble turned into a war between some Gurkhas and Tibet that was joined by China. The Emperor of China blamed the feuding brothers for starting the war, and before he withdrew his troops he got the Tibetans to agree to the golden urn lottery process for choosing high lamas. This was supposed to insure that not so many lamas were chosen from the same few influential families.
How that would stop future lamas from feuding, I'm not sure. But you can read the story in more detail in "The 8th Dalai Lama and the Golden Urn."
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