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As an outsider, I was fascinated to observe the process of finding a new Pope through a combination of human negotiation and openness to divine inspiration. There’s no Buddhist Pope, but we have our own version of the issues of succession and legitimacy that affect every organisation and collective endeavour. These have a particular resonance today, Buddha Day, or Wesak, when Buddhists around the world celebrate our founder.

The ancient sources say the Buddha gained Enlightenment aged thirty-five and spent the next forty-five years teaching and establishing a community. He was a unique figure whose guidance others naturally followed. But towards the end of his life, when people asked him to name his successor, he refused. He told his followers to rely on themselves and the Dharma – the body of his teachings – and the community that supported their efforts. Even the teaching was merely a raft whose purpose was to help people cross a stream, not something to which they should become attached.

Putting this into practice wasn’t from straightforward. Preserving the Buddha’s words meant establishing a canon of scriptures and a system for reciting them. The challenge was combining fidelity to the letter of his teachings with the spirit of wisdom and liberation they expressed.

Buddhists responded in various ways. When Tibet’s Dalai Lama dies, his followers identify the child in whom he has been reborn. That’s one way to maintain a teacher’s inspiration, but the process has always been politically fraught, no more so than now, as the current Dalai Lama approaches his ninetieth birthday and the Chinese government demands involvement in choosing his successor.

In any case, the arrangement’s unique to Tibet, the Dalai Lama isn’t a Pope and Buddhism as a whole has no leader. Some schools affirm the transmission of a sacred spark from teacher to disciple, who is relatively free to innovate; others emphasise continuity. Some resist innovation while others embrace it. The result is that the Buddhist tradition is extremely diverse.

But there are sources of unity. All Buddhist schools share an understanding that life is transient, that actions have consequences and that we can follow a path of transformative understanding. The purpose of the various forms the tradition has taken is to help people do that. If Buddhist history offers a lesson about negotiating succession, perhaps it’s the need to continually rediscover the ends a tradition serves and bring them alive in every generation.

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