He Just Wants to Direct

You've heard Hollywood stars after successful careers say they "just want to direct" and not be a star anymore. Well, in a similar story, a kid chosen to be a reincarnated Buddhist lama has turned down the job. He just wants to direct:

"For the last time, I'm not your messiah," groans the title character in the 1979 comedy The Life of Brian. (They crucify him, anyway.) There's an echo of Brian's panicked renunciation in a shakeup currently underway in Tibetan Buddhism - in this case, nobody's laughing, although the ending will, no doubt, be happier.

Late last month, two Spanish media outlets confirmed that 24-year-old Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, one of the most renowned Buddhist "golden children" - toddlers determined through dreams, oracular riddles and their own "memories" to be tulkus, or reincarnations of high Tibetan Buddhist lamas - has abandoned his foretold identity. Instead of a Lama, he wants to be a filmmaker, and has reverted to his original Spanish name, Osel Hita Torres. (See pictures of the Dalai Lama at home)

The abdication of the anointed tulku is a significant embarrassment to the group he was supposed to head, the powerhouse Foundation for the Preservation of the Monastic Tradition (FPMT), the foremost Tibetan teaching organization in the West. It also challenges Westerners who have adopted Buddhism to find more sophisticated ways of understanding its magical side.

In 1989, with the approval of his Spanish convert parents, four-year-old Hita was tapped by FPMT monks as the reincarnation of the group's co-founder Thubten Yeshe. Their methods will be familiar to anyone who has seen Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha or the current documentary Unmistaken Child: The monks reportedly heeded some dreams; the Dalai Lama consulted an oracle; and the capper was that young Hita "recalled" the color of the dead lama's car.

Last month, however, the magazine Babylon confirmed that the shaggy-haired Hita had long-ago dropped out of his Tibetan University, and that he no longer even considers himself a Buddhist. He was quoted more pointedly in the newspaper El Mundo as saying, "I was taken away from my family and put in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie."

Next time the dead lamas need to be more careful into whom they reincarnate.