COLUMN ONE : Politics and the Panchen Lama : In a battle over spiritual sovereignty, China challenges Dalai Lama over who has right to proclaim the heir to No. 2 spot in Tibetan Buddhist pantheon.

Somewhere in a monastery deep in Tibet, surrounded by doting monks and religious teachers, a 6-year-old boy sits in the eye of a raging theological storm.

On one side of the religious dispute is the world’s last major Communist country, where the state religion is atheism. On the other side is the man many believe to be the world’s most perfect living Buddha, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled religious leader.

At stake is the Communist government’s determination to control all aspects of Chinese life, even if it means delving directly into religious controversies and theological questions.

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama has his own political agenda.

The boy’s earthly name is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. He was born April 25, 1989, to a perfectly terrestrial father and mother in Lhari district, Nagchu, Tibet, 200 miles northeast of Lhasa.

But according to signs carefully observed by teams of Tibetan priests--omens such as reflections in a holy lake, birthmarks discovered on the child’s body and revelations received in prayer--the boy is the 11th Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in the living pantheon of Tibetan Buddhism.

The boy was announced as the reincarnation of the controversial 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989, by the Dalai Lama himself in a May 14 news release.

“It is with great joy that I am able to proclaim the reincarnation of the Panchen [Lama],” the Dalai Lama said in a statement faxed to supporters around the world from his home in exile in Dharamsala, India.

Strangely enough, the Communist government in Beijing does not dispute the spiritual legitimacy of the boy.

In fact, he was on a short list of candidates compiled by a Beijing-backed search committee of Buddhist holy men from the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Shigatse, Tibet. Since 1570, Panchen Lamas have served as abbots of the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery.

“I’m sure it is the same candidate,” said Melvyn C. Goldstein, director of the Center for Research on Tibet at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “The Chinese government has not once said this is the wrong guy.”

What the Chinese government does dispute, however, is the Dalai Lama’s right to make the announcement. The government also accuses the Dalai Lama of violating the last Panchen Lama’s deathbed request by failing to perform an important rite using barley dough balls and a golden urn to verify the true reincarnation.

But underlying the government’s sudden rectitude on ritual procedure is official anger that the Dalai Lama once again preempted what it believes is state sovereignty over religious issues.

Although the Communist government long ago gave up trying to eradicate religion here and in the autonomous region of Tibet, it still does its best to manage religion through state religious agencies under the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

Protestant Christianity, for example, is tolerated as long as it is conducted under the auspices of the officially recognized church, known as the Three Selfs Movement. Likewise, Buddhism is supposedly regulated by the official Buddhist Assn. of China.

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The result is one of the strangest theological flaps--heavily mixed with political intrigue on both sides--ever to surface on the editorial pages of the People’s Daily and other Communist Party organs.

“I am very amused,” commented Jeffrey Hopkins, professor of religion and a specialist in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Virginia, “by the Communist government involving itself in religion in the first place, and in the second place involving itself in the recognition of an incarnation.”

After the Dalai Lama’s surprise May 14 announcement, the pages of the People’s Daily were full of detailed critiques of the living Buddha’s religious technique in making the choice.

The main criticism of the selection process was that the Dalai Lama failed to use a kind of lottery, involving a golden urn containing names of candidates wrapped in barley dough balls, that dates to Emperor Chien Lung of the Ching Dynasty in 1792.

A similar ceremony involving a lesser incarnation than the Panchen Lama was observed by Christine Chu, a reporter for the South China Morning Post newspaper, on a recent visit to the Tibetan monastery in Kumbum, Qinghai province.

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“Each name was written on a slip of paper which was buried in balls of barley flour dough,” Chu wrote. “The balls were carefully measured to ensure they were of equal weight. After prayers and ceremonies in a pagoda where Tsongkapa [founder of the Tibetan Yellow Hat sect headed by the Dalai Lama] was born, the balls were placed in a bowl. This was shaken and the balls fell out. The remaining ball contained the name of the reincarnation. The lottery was repeated several times to be certain.”

The Chinese government particularly likes the lottery technique because the name in the winning dough ball, according to the rules established 200 years ago by the emperor, “should be forwarded to the central government for approval.” This, of course, supports the Chinese assertion that the final authority, even over religious matters, rests with the secular state.

To support its case for the dough-ball lottery, the government summoned a man who claimed to have received the 10th Panchen Lama’s deathbed request: Zhao Puchu, president of the Buddhist Assn. of China.

“I remember,” Zhao said, “the Panchen Lama had proposed that, after his death, three infants should be sought who were potential reincarnations of the living Buddha.”

He said the late Panchen Lama suggested holding the lottery in front of the idol Sakyamuni, a powerful supernatural deity.

“If there is something wrong, Sakyamuni will intervene,” he quoted the Panchen Lama as saying.

“We can regard these words as an important deathbed testament of the Panchen Lama,” Zhao said.

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In his statement, the Dalai Lama defended his right to make the final selection. When the Dalai Lama dies, the final determination of his proper successor, in turn, traditionally falls to the Panchen Lama.

“I have taken upon myself this historical and spiritual task with a strong sense of responsibility,” the Dalai Lama said. “Over the recent years, I have with great care performed all necessary religious procedures for this purpose and have made supplications to the Infallible Three Jewels.”

The “three jewels” mentioned by the Dalai Lama are not gems but concepts that amount to a holy trinity of Tibetan Buddhism--devotion to sangha (congregation); dharma (duty), and Buddha and his incarnations.

Although he did not mention it, it was clear that the Dalai Lama had also consulted with some of the members of the selection committee formed by the Chinese government to come up with the same final candidate.

Part of the Chinese government’s anger, in fact, can be blamed on frustration that its handpicked committee reported first to the spiritual master.

One source said the government had planned to make an announcement of its own, possibly involving the same boy, in September.

The Dalai Lama’s preemptive move means that the government may be forced to come up with another candidate. Such an eventuality would set up a divisive showdown between rival candidates. In fact, multiple pretenders to important incarnations have existed in the past.

“This fully demonstrates,” a spokesman for the Bureau of Religious Affairs said in a particularly incensed statement, “the political plot of the Dalai clique in its continuous [divisive] activities by making use of Panchen Lama’s reincarnation after repeated failures in its acts abroad aimed at splitting the motherland.”

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There are even some supporters of the Dalai Lama, in fact, who believe that the religious leader went too far in tweaking the Beijing regime on the question of spiritual sovereignty.

Since the mid-1980s, the Tibetan exile community has been engaged in a highly successful propaganda campaign pleading its case against the Beijing regime.

The campaign has attracted the support of movie stars, such as Richard Gere, and thousands of other Americans. Recently, the Tibetans have been buoyed by particularly strong support in the new Republican Congress.

Bills in both the Senate and House foreign affairs committees, in fact, contain riders identifying Tibet as an “occupied territory” and approving the sending of a U.S. special envoy to the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Part of the Dalai Lama’s strategy is to build as much leverage as possible with the Chinese government before the succession struggle that is expected to follow the death of ailing senior leader Deng Xiaoping, who will be 91 in August.

Just as Tibetan Buddhists won back some rights when Deng took power in 1979, the Dalai Lama wants to negotiate with the new Chinese leadership from a position of strength in the post-Deng era.

But some contend that his chances to someday return to Tibet, the homeland that he fled in 1959, have been hurt by his jumping the gun on the Chinese in announcing the new Panchen Lama.

In making the announcement, the Dalai Lama did offer something of an olive branch to Chinese authorities.

The search for the Panchen Lama’s reincarnation, the Dalai Lama said, “is a religious matter and not political. It is my hope that the Chinese government, with whom I have kept contact regarding this matter through various channels over the recent years, will extend its understanding, cooperation and assistance to the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in enabling [the boy] to receive proper religious training and to assume his spiritual responsibilities.”

But the rage expressed by the Chinese government showed little return goodwill.

“This all could have been done quietly without making a political statement,” Tibet expert Goldstein said. “I see what he did as a Pyrrhic victory. It may have played well in New York or Los Angeles. But it made the Chinese angry and leads them to think that they can’t trust Tibetans.”

While the religious controversy rages between Tibetan Buddhism and the Chinese state, it seems to have little touched the orders of meditative lamas in schools and monasteries across China.

At the magnificent Yong He Gong Temple in Beijing, built in the late 17th Century by the Emperor Kang Xi, there was delight at the news that a new Panchen Lama may have been found. Who found him did not seem to matter.

One of the rooms of the sprawling temple is kept as a permanent resting place for the Panchen Lama. A young robed priest, his head shaved close to the scalp, smiled broadly when the Panchen Lama’s name was mentioned.

“I’ve heard the news,” he said. “I hope it is true.”