Over the past week, India’s lively (and often wildly irresponsible) media has been flogging a sensational story about a tax raid on the monastery housing a prominent Tibetan lama who is presently exiled in India. The stories concern a 25-year-old Tibetan named Ogyen Trinley Dorje. He is also known as His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, holder of one of Tibetan Buddhism’s oldest and most significant lineages in the Karma Kagyu school. Dorje was born in Tibet and identified as the reincarnation of the Karmapa as a young child, but left in 2000 in a daring escape worthy of a Hollywood film treatment. 

The significance of the Dorje’s exile was magnified by the fact that, although he was one of the few prominent reincarnations upon which the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama had both conferred their blessing, up to the time of his escape, Beijing had considered him a ‘patriotic’ lama – one they could depend on to help manage the fractious Tibetans living under their often oppressive rule. Other than his repeated, always denied, requests to visit teachers outside Tibet to receive vital religious instructions, the Karmapa had given the Chinese authorities little indication that he was unhappy with his situation. When he showed up in India, the Chinese first denied he had even escaped, then concocted a story – which they maintain to this day – that he was only in India to retrieve some religious relics (notably a ceremonial “black hat” worn by the Karmapas) that was housed in a monastery in Sikkim, a Himalayan state within the borders of present-day India (whose sovereignty over it is disputed by Beijing).