WASHINGTON, March 9 -A website is offering a 22,000-dollar reward for information leading to contact with the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, who has been missing since 1995.
Glenn Freeman of Grand Rapids, Michigan — who helps run the website for the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama — said the reward is being offered because, to date, there have been “no results in terms of actually locating where he is.”
“The United Nations has tried, the Red Cross has tried, so the monastery and others concerned about the Panchen Lama have come up with this idea in the hopes that it may lead to making contact” with him, Freeman, a 39-year-old musician, told AFP Tuesday.
He noted that the young man is “reaching the age where his religious trainings are becoming somewhat jeopardized if he’s not allowed to pursue his religious studies” and said that, while the group still supports other methods of trying to locate Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who turns 15 in April, “nothing to date has worked.”
“It’s been difficult, but we have hope,” Freeman added.
He said the press was being targeted in an e-mail campaign touting the reward, noting that he has sent messages to some 20,000 media contacts in the United States, to coincide with the monks’ tour of North America.
Monks from the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery are scheduled to visit Washington next week, Freeman said. They have already made stops in Indiana, Michigan, New York and parts of New England.
The campaign, launched at the end of January, solicits additional donations in a bid to boost the amount of the reward, which was funded through contributions from individual donors.
But Freeman said donors’ identities “are being kept secret, because the whole basis of this is to find the Panchen Lama,” rather than to focus on who is donating.
He said the group was not aiming for a specific dollar figure, because “we have no idea even whether the amount of money has any correlation with success. But if we just do nothing, then there’ll be no results.”
China, meanwhile, has named another child, Gyaincain Norbu, as a replacement for the Panchen Lama, saying the six-year-old chosen by the Dalai Lama in 1995, in accordance with ancient tradition, “is not the incarnated soul boy.”
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, viewed as the world’s youngest political prisoner by rights groups, was seized by Chinese police shortly after being chosen by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the previous Panchen Lama, who died in 1989.
The Panchen Lama, deemed a living god, is an important figure in Tibetan Buddhism because he is tasked with leading the search for a reincarnated Dalai Lama.
