Dalai Lama wants to discuss succession

- The Dalai Lama wants this year already talked to high Buddhist monks about his succession. The spiritual leader said Saturday in India that it is for the Tibetan people to decide whether to remain in his position.

TAWANG

'If people now feel that this institution is no longer relevant, then it stops automatically cease to exist,' the 82-year-old Dalai Lama said at a news conference in the remote town of Tawang. He therefore wants to launch a debate already about whether there will be a new Dalai Lama.

China, which holds sway in Tibet, believes that tradition should just go ahead and that Beijing has the right to approve the successor to the Dalai Lama. Tibetan Buddhists believe that important lamas reincarnated after death. They then return as a child.

The communist leaders see the current Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist. The spiritual leader lives in India, where his followers have a small government in exile. The Dalai Lama has already suggested that he could well be the last.