Why does China try to control who becomes the Dalai Lama?

because china really is quite um it's quite an enigma when it comes to faith and religion because on one hand they don't really have a state religion or and are seen by certain people to decry religion whereas simultaneously on the other hand they are incredibly superstitious incredibly beyond i mean beyond reason you know the whole thing of good energy bad energy chi the direction you know whether your front door is facing yeah feng shui whether you know your sunlight is coming in through this window that window

this number the number eight bar you know it can also mean death it can also mean i mean it's like uh it's just whoa the whole life so on like a big level so i bring that up because you may think okay that's an isolated thing that's just one interesting quirk in history and then you fast forward to again pulling us closer to like sinjan right is the way that the chinese government looks at tibet okay and how the chinese government you know and and and buddhism you know reincarnation things like that [Laughter]

they they actually uh created like you know government policy to legislate reincarnation no okay i like that one you know like to be reincarnated you have to have xyz like you got this here's the application you have to fill out for da da da da da da right this is in tibet is it this is in this is in tibet i think they were doing it in in mongolia because mongolia kind of had a similar tradition or something like that but tibet most often so it brings into things like the dalai lama brings into all these kind of big macro

uh things that we even as muslims kind of come into contact with like huh what's going on over there right and uh one of the things is that the you know the the the dalai lama is faced with you know he he left china um left tibet and went to india right and it's kind of held up in india um and there's kind of two steps to the next dalai lama right it's like one is there's a guy who has to be born and i i don't want to misquote but that guy has a role in either choosing the dalai lama right or starting the process to go find the dalai lama because when when the dalai lama passes he gets reincarnated

um and they kind of have to but they don't know where of course but they gotta look for like signs to see like maybe it's maybe it's that guy and then there's a process to go and like once they establish they'll go to a village look at all the newborn kids right and then put them through these tests with some of the dalai lama's possessions like do you recognize this do you recognize this do you recognize that do you recognize this and if the kid passes the test then they'll then they'll start to train him in his past life right so they'll bring him up to speed across all of the teachings of buddhism and all that stuff so he can be the leader of the nation um and the chinese recognize that and say look we need to hijack that

process so we're gonna we need to establish first this guy who picks the dalai lama so to speak and then we need to be able to kind of like i guess motion him to pick our version of the dalai lama so we want a dalai lama who's like cool with the chinese government and so it's like a spiritual coup d'etat super duper you know kind of fascinating in a government which is some people consider if not secular atheists or supposed to have atheistic kind of like ideologies but how are they interfacing with with not only islam but buddhism christianity this

standard third and what are they demanding as the head of state as the head of society the politic from their religious you know uh function of functionaries or organs in their country um and what are the lessons that can be like taken from that or what's happening and so i find that to be like super interesting when you're related to like muslim countries or related to islamic countries you see is you see the same as much as that sounds absurd yeah you see the same thing or pieces of it kind of yeah okay this is of it in pakistan you see pieces of it in america you see pieces of it everywhere where there's this

this this if it's not secular it's a different uh uh sect or version or family or ruling class um who has a certain relationship to the religion in a direct or indirect way uh coming up with how to use the religion how to present it how to to use it to promote itself how to use it to capture the the minds of the world or something like that so as much as china may seem like a basket case yeah once you learn the extent of how they go and you start to map that onto other places it seems like oh this is the thing with religion right religion is has always been used but seeing that you find that very