The Old Chapel at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has stood on its rise above Hicks Way since the late nineteenth century, a granite-and-brownstone building that predates most of the campus around it. On the afternoon of October 26, 2026, from 4:30 to 6:30, it will host a conversation about a question that has no precedent in modern history: who gets to choose the next Dalai Lama.
The occasion is a visit to the Amherst area by His Eminence the 13th Kundeling Tatsak Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and teacher whose own lineage is bound up with the very institution under discussion. The talk, titled "The Dalai Lama's Reincarnation: Historical, Religious, and Geopolitical Implications," will be moderated by Stephen R. Platt, professor of Chinese history at UMass Amherst and the author of "Imperial Twilight" and "Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom."
The 14th Dalai Lama turned ninety on July 6, 2025. In early July of that year, he made a public statement affirming that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue and that there will be a 15th Dalai Lama. That affirmation, delivered at an age when the question of succession can no longer be deferred, set off a contest of authority that had been building for decades.
The Chinese government has asserted its own authority over the recognition of Tibetan Buddhist reincarnations, including any future Dalai Lama. In 2007, the State Administration for Religious Affairs issued Order No. 5, "Management Measures for the Reincarnation of Living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism," which took effect that September and requires state approval for reincarnations. Beijing has since said it has approved more than 1,300 living Buddhas under the system. The legal claim rests on a much older precedent: the Golden Urn, a method introduced by the Qing dynasty in 1793, after the Sino-Nepalese War, when the Qianlong Emperor promulgated the 29-Article Ordinance for the More Effective Governing of Tibet. The ordinance included regulations on selecting lamas, and the urn was ostensibly meant to prevent cheating and corruption in the process. It also positioned the emperor as a religious authority capable of adjudicating incarnations, a role Beijing now claims as its inheritance.
That history is not abstract for the Kundeling lineage. The Tatsag, or Tatsak, line traces its first member to Baso Chokyi Gyaltsen, born in 1402, who was appointed head of Ganden Monastery in 1463 and died there in 1473. Since 1794 the Tatsag has been the owner of Kundeling Monastery in Lhasa, one of the city's "Four Great Lings," at the foot of the Parma Ri southwest of the Potala Palace. According to the Treasury of Lives, the monastery was established by the Qing emperor in 1794 and offered to the Eighth Tatsak, Yeshe Lobzang Tenpai Gonpo, then Regent of Tibet, in celebration of the success of the Gurkha war. The Fifth Dalai Lama had earlier granted the Sixth Tatsag the properties of Pasho Gonpa and its subordinate monasteries, along with hundreds of households of farmers and herders, making the lineage both a religious and a temporal power.
Previous incarnations of the Kundeling line served as Regents of Tibet, Senior Tutors to the Dalai Lamas, and Ganden Tripa, the head of the Gelug school. The monastery itself was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in the 1980s. The current incarnation, the 13th Kundeling Tatsak Rinpoche, was born in Lhasa in 1983 and was recognized by the 14th Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the 12th. He enrolled at a very young age at Drepung Monastery, re-established at Mundgod in Karnataka, southern India, where he studied for many years. In 2013 he completed the scholastic phase of monastic training and took the Geshe degree; in 2014 he joined Gyudmed Monastery and completed tantric studies. He has since traveled widely to give teachings and to promote what he describes as love, compassion, peace, and the importance of upholding human virtues, urging audiences to strive to become good citizens of the world. He has spoken at Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Asia Center, and the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
That biography is itself an argument. A lama born in Lhasa, recognized by the Dalai Lama, educated in exile in India, and now teaching in the United States embodies the split that any succession will have to navigate. The questions the event poses are the ones that follow from it: Who has the authority to recognize the next Dalai Lama? How has the process worked historically? What happens if Tibetan religious authorities and the Chinese government recognize different successors? And what would such an outcome mean for Tibetans inside Tibet and abroad, for China, for India, where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile have been based since 1959, for U.S.-China relations, and for the wider region?
Platt brings a historian's vantage on those questions. A Yale PhD in Chinese history, he specializes in modern China, especially the nineteenth century and the Qing dynasty's foreign relations, and has written for The New York Times, ChinaFile, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. The Qing court's role in Tibetan Buddhist succession, including the Golden Urn, falls squarely within his period.
The event is organized by UMass Amherst and held at the Old Chapel, 144 Hicks Way. No ticket price or capacity limit is indicated on the university's event listing, and academic events of this kind are typically open to the public. For anyone in the Pioneer Valley interested in Tibet, in China, or in how religious authority and political legitimacy get sorted out when they collide, it is an unusual chance to hear the case made by someone whose own title was conferred by the man whose successor is in question.