The Rinpoche and the Kumari

While the buzz on the Nepali online community was all about the PBS documentary, "The Buddha" for allegedly reporting that Buddha was born in India, I was much more taken in by the Independent Lens feature shown immediately afterwards in our local station.

The feature titled "Unmistaken Child" follows the story of Tenzin Zopa, a young Tibetan Buddhist monk from Kopan Monastary in Kathmandu, as he journeys to small villages and hamlets of Tibet in search of a little boy. Zopa's guru Geshe Lama has passed away due to old age and now the devotee is tasked with finding the reincarnation of his guru.

It is a arduous process of walking from village to village and performing tests on each little boy between the ages of one to one and a half that Zopa finds. While the villagers are generally helpful, the young boys, shy or even afraid of the stranger (and of course the camera crew of foreigners), only succumb to the test when bribed with balloons or toffee.

The test to determine true reincarnation, hence the "unmistaken," basically involves asking a boy to choose among a couple of prayer beads. Most children are more enamored of candy to pay much attention to the beads. So the Zopa continues his search to the next village and the next in the elusive search. When he finally finds a boy who he believes to be the reincarnation of his Guru, the story changes from a search to the tale of accommodating the little kid to his new role of a famous guru at the ripe old age of a year and a half.

It looked to me that the one characteristic that determines who gets chosen is the fortitude of character. The new Rinpoche shows a hardiness and fearlessness when he first meets the Zopa. He is curious and less shy that the other boys. And he wants the shiny beads, along with the toy cars and other trinkets.

Overall it is a good enough story, especially because of the exhaustive privilege of access enjoyed by the filmmakers (they get to film the scene where the Dalai Lama blesses the little boy as the new Rinpoche). The parts where the parents are asked to give up their young son to the monastery is so truly heart touching that no amount of invasion by the camera is able to cloak the basic grief in the mother and father's eyes.

At the end of the documentary, we leave the little boy, now about four years old, to his daily life of service and prayer and play, with the Lamas at Kopan, far away from his home in the tiny Tibetan hamlet, away from his mother, father and beloved grandma. Although he is too young to know it now, his whole life is changed merely by a chance encounter. I couldn't help feeling lonely for him.

The institution of the Kumari is much more well-known compared to the story of baby Rinpoche. When watching how the little boy was installed as the reincarnation of a Lama, I immediately made the connection to  the tradition of Kumari. (The journalist Deepak Adhikari elegantly describes one slice of that story in "The Goddess' Exam.") Of course, seen as the social and religious practice of installing a child to be a surrogate for a deity, the Rinpoche is the natural kin of the Kumari. So it is not surprising that both the traditions are linked to the Buddhist heritage in Kathmandu and Tibet.