COLUMN ONE : Himalayan Hunt for Holy Heir : Spurred by a cryptic note and dueling prophecies, members of a Tibetan Buddhist sect are sparring over which of two boys is their reincarnated leader. There are rumors of fraud--even murder.

The mystery is as deep, and perhaps as impenetrable, as the snows of Tibet.

Its genesis was a dirty, sweat-stained piece of paper hidden for almost a decade. In rune-like handwriting and free verse, the riddle told believers where to find their reincarnated leader.

The place: where the “divine thunder” peals. The birth date: the year of “the one used for the earth.” Identifying characteristics: born to a father named Dondrup and a mother named Lolaga, to the “miraculous, far-reaching sound of the white one.”

At the end of that bizarre trail of hints, somewhere in the high, bleak plateaus of eastern Tibet, they would find the holy child.

Disagreement over the meaning of such Delphic clues--along with bickering over whether the note itself is a forgery--has created an unprecedented split between normally gentle Tibetans whose Karma Kagyu order of Buddhism reveres a high lama who wears a black hat.

The purity of the Karma Kagyu, one of the four main subgroups of Tibetan Buddhism, is at issue. But so, perhaps, is an unholy thirst for money and power. Murder may have been committed.

The secret services of the Chinese government could even be involved, at work to further suppress the people of Tibet, who have lived under Beijing’s boot since the People’s Liberation Army occupied their Himalayan peaks and valleys in 1950.

For the first time in nearly nine centuries, two rival boys have been produced to wear the bejeweled crown of blue-black brocade that distinguishes the leader of the Karma Kagyu order. High-ranking lamas (monks) disagree about which child is their reborn master, or karmapa.

One, an 8-year-old named Ugyen Trinlay Dorji, is in Tibet. The other, Tenzin Chentse, a 10-year-old, was brought to New Delhi, a center of Tibetan exile life, and kept under guard in a room filled with chocolates, Wrigley’s gum, videos of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Tom and Jerry” and a big brown teddy bear. His supporters say he has been moved to a location they will not reveal.

To present Ugyen Trinlay Dorji’s case to the world, his monastic champions rented a ballroom at one of Delhi’s ritziest hotels early this month for a news conference and engaged a public relations professional who normally handles clients such as Coca-Cola.

For those monks in their burgundy robes, some of whom have the shaved heads and beefy bodies of professional wrestlers, the villain of the story is the chief promoter of the competing child--and a reborn traitor from Tibet’s history.

“We believe in one thing as Buddhists: This is our karma (fate), the karma of everyone involved,” said Tai Situ Rinpoche, who is himself venerated as the 12th incarnation of a distinguished lama. “But karma doesn’t mean we have to give in.”

When three busloads of people pulled up last month outside a Buddhist temple in New Delhi to harass worshipers at a pomp-filled welcoming ceremony for the rival Tenzin Chentse, stones and bottles flew.

Since 1110, Tibetan Buddhists say, the karmapa has been reborn in an unbroken string. His lineage is a full three centuries older than that even of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of all Tibetans.

The karmapa claims the allegiance of about 20% of Tibetans, but also of a third to half of the Buddhists in neighboring Nepal, Bhutan and the Indian areas of Sikkim and Ladakh. The Karma Kagyu seat had been at the Tsurphu monastery in Tibet, but after the Communist Chinese occupation, its leaders fled and established their headquarters at Rumtek in Sikkim, which was a princely state before becoming part of India.

The order has nearly 200 monasteries in Tibet (many in ruins), plus 30 in India and Nepal and more than 200 meditation centers worldwide. It claims 100,000 foreign followers in Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

The succession drama began when the exiled 16th karmapa died of cancer in a small Chicago-area hospital on Nov. 5, 1981, at age 58.

Where and how would he reincarnate himself? The followers waited impatiently. Over the centuries, it had been customary for the karmapas to leave clues in letters that would lead believers to their rebirth.

Had the 16th karmapa done the same? On March 22, 1992, Tai Situ Rinpoche, one of his four regents, presented thrilling proof that he had. A yellow brocade talisman, two inches square, that the karmapa had given him as a gift in a Calcutta hotel 10 months before he died contained the dirty, creased paper bearing the enigmatic clues, Tai Situ announced.

Tai Situ says that on presenting the talisman to him, the 16th karmapa said, “It will confer great benefit.” For years, he asserted, he wore the amulet around his neck and on his belt before he finally realized the import of the karmapa ‘s words and opened it.

Armed with the strange clues, a search party set off from India. Linking up with monks from Tsurphu in Tibet, the searchers examined reports of unusual births as well as the claims of reincarnation that proliferate after the death of a karmapa.

In May, 1992, the monks’ travels led them to the village of Bakor in the eastern Tibetan district of Lhatog (“thunder god”).

There, a son had been born to a nomadic shepherd named Karma Dondup Tashi and his wife, Loga--names strikingly similar to those in the written clues--on June 26, 1985, the Tibetan Year of the Wood Ox. Just before the birth, the lamas were told, a beautiful songbird perched on the pole of the tent and burst into melody.

Clearly, in light of the written hints of thunder and other details, this was the karmapa. Tai Situ, who had remained in India, dispatched a happy fax to the Dalai Lama, who was traveling.

The excited searchers took the boy, Apo Gaga, to the Tsurphu monastery, where several aged monks recognized him as their reincarnated master. Big-eyed and unusually bright, Apo Gaga was so special that he had been invited by another monastery to become a monk at age 4.

The Dalai Lama, who had experienced a vision in which he saw a valley like the one where the child was born, gave his assent, and the red-cheeked boy, renamed Ugyen Trinlay Dorji, was enthroned as 17th karmapa in Tsurphu on Sept. 27, 1992.

“When the karmapa came to the window, the crowd went into an absolute frenzy of veneration,” wrote Brian Golden, a journalist who attended the ceremony. “All hands were immediately pressed together in a gesture of supplication, and the chanting of mantras permeated the air. Hundreds of scarves . . . of white, yellow and orange were thrown in the direction of the karmapa, covering everything at the front of the monastery.”

When the boy waved and threw handfuls of rice, joyful Tibetans dove to the ground to grab a few of the blessed grains.

It seemed wondrous. But was it?

Another regent, Shamar Rinpoche ( rinpoche is a title meaning precious one ) doesn’t think so. He calls the whole chain of events that began with the letter’s discovery a sham. To the dismay of Tai Situ and some other high lamas, Shamar, a nephew of the late karmapa, spearheaded his own search for a successor. He found Tenzin Chentse, born in May, 1983, in Tibet.

At age 3, this boy is said to have told his surprised parents, “Tsurphu was my monastery,” to have described its golden roof and to have recited an ancient Buddhist scripture as though recalling it from memory. It is he who should rightfully wear the black hat, Shamar maintains.

But what of the clues couched in verse? A fraud, charges 50-year-old Topgya Yulgyal, another nephew of the late karmapa and a cousin of Shamar.

“I was with the 16th karmapa since age 11,” he said. “I knew his handwriting. So the moment I saw this writing (on Tai Situ’s paper) I knew it was a forgery.”

To give his camp’s version of events, Yulgyal, dressed in a Western-style button-down shirt, met an American journalist at the New Delhi temple that was the site of the stone-throwing melee last month. In a droning buzz, monks inside the temple intoned their evening prayers.

The scene was peaceful, a reminder of the blissful calm that leads many Westerners to Buddhism. Yet before entering, visitors were frisked and screened with a metal detector.

“I think one reason for this is power, and the other is money,” Yulgyal said when asked why the dispute had broken out over the Karma Kagyu leadership. “But the main thing here is politics.”

Perhaps. The Chinese Communists dealt brutally with Tibetan religion. Before China’s occupation of the “land of snows,” prayer flags flew from homes and mountaintops, and monasteries flourished. The Chinese closed the temples, destroyed religious artifacts and writings and tore down the prayer flags.

But now, under intense scrutiny for its human rights practices, China has been trying to project a more tolerant image. Authorities in Beijing have decided that Ugyen Trinlay Dorji--the boy the Dalai Lama himself recognizes--is entitled to call himself the 17th karmapa. The officially atheistic press hails him as a “living Buddha.”

For Yulgyal, that is evidence of the hand of his homeland’s oppressors.

It is all “dirty politics in the disguise of holy dharma (law),” Shamar summed up. (And one American Buddhist who knows the major players remembers Shamar, who has a famously hot temper, reading Machiavelli’s “The Prince.”)

In the final analysis, there may be no perfectly clean hands in this saga. That is because all four regents, Tai Situ and Shamar included, seem to have willingly colluded in a lie in 1986. In February of that year, they announced that a packet containing letters written by the deceased karmapa had been found. Tibetans exulted.

“Actually, it doesn’t exist,” Tai Situ, 39, now acknowledges, smiling as he peers through his metal-rimmed glasses. The regents, he says, invented the story because they were under pressure by believers to find their reborn leader.

Another regent was supposed to lead the search party that went to Tibet in 1992. But a few days before the scheduled departure, he was killed when a new BMW he was riding in swerved and hit a tree. Some lamas, Tai Situ included, doubt it was an accident, because the engine, he says, was found 150 feet from the car.

There was at least one other odd death. The general secretary of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim was invited to lunch by Shamar’s cousin, Yulgyal, and died mysteriously within minutes of returning home. Yulgyal succeeded the dead man as head of operations and business affairs at the monastery, which he says contains treasures worth “millions.” He was later voted out.

What is especially ironic about the quarrel for the black hat is that its origins lie in a Tibetan institution that some scholars believe was developed expressly to eliminate rivalries of succession.

By transferring authority from one reincarnation to the next, those scholars say, monasteries were able to ensure continuity and prevent their vast holdings from being taken over or dissipated by rivals.

“If a monk has gotten rich and has a well-developed monastery and a treasurer and a manager, the treasurer and manager can certainly keep their jobs if they find a boy to replace the old one,” said Jeffrey Hopkins, director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia and author of books on Tibetan Buddhism.

In the Tibetan version of an appeal to the Supreme Court, Tai Situ and his allies called on the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to intervene. On March 30, his secretariat reaffirmed the spiritual credentials of Ugyen Trinlay Dorji, the boy still in Tibet.

Given the loose structure of Tibetan Buddhism, and the karmapa ‘s possession of a pedigree older than even the Dalai Lama’s, the latter’s intervention may not be enough to settle the issue. And what of karma, the core Buddhist concept that maintains that a person’s actions determine his fate in the next state of existence? According to some lamas, the current dispute was foretold centuries ago, and is foreordained.

First, Tibetan Buddhists regard Shamar as the reincarnation of a lama who once sided with the king of Nepal to invade and sack their land two centuries ago. The early Shamar was so hated that his red crown was buried in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, and searching for his reincarnations was forbidden. Only with the current bearer of the title was the lineage finally recognized again.

Second, and even stranger, is a prediction written in the 14th Century by the fifth karmapa. “From the north and the east, foreigners will invade, and Tibet will be encircled like a ring,” he wrote. China’s emperors will be deposed and others will rule in their place, and “machines made by foreigners will move through the skies.”

The fifth karmapa wrote that at the end of the 16th karmapa’s reign and the beginning of the 17th’s, a “demonic being will appear,” and “the karmapa ‘s doctrine will come close to destruction.”

The evil lama’s name would be Na-tha, a Sanskrit word that can be translated as protector , relative or nephew .

The last translation is not one Shamar Rinpoche or Topgya Yulgyal, nephews of the 16th karmapa, care for.