Long live the Dalai Lama, but who is next?

The whole business of succession would be a lot simpler if the Dalai Lama could just regenerate, like Doctor Who — a long-running British science fiction series.

- Gwynne Dyer

When the time comes for The Doctor to stop looking like David Tennant and start looking like Matt Smith, there's flame coming out of his head and gushing out of his sleeves, and then he explodes. When the smoke clears, there's the new Doctor.

There's no delay and no doubt. Once you accept (temporarily) the show’s basic premise that Doctor Who is a benevolent immortal alien who periodically “regenerates” from one human form to another, not even being consistent in ethnicity or gender from one body to the next, you know instantly that it's the same Doctor in there despite appearances.

With the dear old Dalai Lama, it's different. Reincarnation still happens, but the souls of the dead migrate into the bodies of the newborn and retain no memory of their previous lives.

This becomes a problem when the soul of your religion’s leader has to be tracked down in one of those thousands who were born around the same time the leader died.

That is exactly the problem facing the Gelug “Yellow Hat” tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, whose leader, the Dalai Lama, turned 90 on Sunday.

He will therefore soon be leaving his current incarnation, and it will be the task of his closest associates to track down the young child in whom his soul has taken up residence — who will then become the next Dalai Lama.