Well, first, his life starts as a young boy in a remote farming village of a few dozen houses, who mainly survived on subsistence farming. The place hadn’t been farmed for long because of its unpredictable weather. They mostly grew barley, buckwheat and potatoes

He was not born to a rich and powerful family. It’s a system we don’t have anywhere else, where there is no connection by birth, genetics or anything we would recognize with previous Dalai Lamas. The Tibetans think he has a connection through reincarnation with the previous Dalai Lama. Which doesn’t mean at all that he is the “same person” any more than you are the same person as you were as a child of 2. Indeed different Dalai Lamas have had very different characters, likes and interests.

He was recognized as the Dalai Lama at the very young age of two. You can read the story here: The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama

He was brought up in Lhasa. He was expected to become a monk, like all the previous Dalai Lamas except the sixth, who never took his monk’s vows and lead a very different lifestyle.

But this current Dalai Lama turned out to have a keen interest in Buddhist teachings. He has mastered all the teachings of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism - which is rather unusual. Most Buddhist teachers in Tibet only master the teachings of one or two of the schools. You need a very flexible mind to be able to follow them all.

He took his examination as Geshe as a young man (this requires many years of study), and everyone was impressed by his erudition. This involved answering questions fired at him in quick succession and his interrogators were amazed at how well he fielded them. So he can be regarded as an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, as someone who has studied it thoroughly and has a very deep knowledge of it.

He is not a Pope. We don’t have leaders like that in Buddhism. The Buddha when he died made it clear that we shouldn’t take on anyone else as a leader since then. So when he is asked to lay down the law about what Buddhists in Tibet should or should not do - that’s based on a misunderstanding. He just can’t do that. He’s not a spiritual leader in that sense at all. He can talk about his own understanding of the teachings, and suggest things to think about. When it comes to specific recommendations like suggestions of what to do in a particular situation - well Buddhists would ask their personal teacher for advice, and in the end, the decision is one you make yourself. Your teacher if he or she advises you on something is doing it as a way to waken up your own internal wisdom. In the end in the Buddhist teachings, we are totally responsible for the things we do, and the idea is to develop our own understanding of situations.

With that background, it’s just not possible for any Buddhist leader, if he follows the guidelines of the Buddhist sutras, to make proclamations of the type a Pope can do. Some “rogue Buddhists” may ignore this, for instance some Westerners who claim they are Buddhist and also some traditional Buddhists too who follow a rogue path like that. They are only human, and we have issues like this in all religions and also in those who don’t follow any religion at all. But if so they are going against the teachings of the Buddha himself. These are very extensive, and recorded in many sutras. Indeed it’s like an entire encyclopedia of teachings. And all the way through they stress this point, that you are responsible for yourself, that you need to develop your own understanding and wisdom - based on listening to those you consider wise, but not just Buddhists either, all sources of wisdom.

Anyway the Dalai Lama certainly follows that guideline and though he is often asked to make proclamations about what Buddhists in Tibet or elsewhere should or should not do, he always refuses to do so. Which often leads to frustration and claims that he is being deceitful by people who think of him as being a kind of a Pope. “Why won’t he denounce x y z or make clearer statements about what Tibetans should or should not do?” But he never has been such a figure. That’s not his role. He would be going against some of the central teachings of Buddhism if he were to try to take such a stance - and he would be rightly ignored too if he did.

He had a political role in Tibet, as a political leader of the country. He has now resigned from this role. His spiritual role is more of an inspiration. He teaches as any Buddhist teacher does, expounding his understanding of the Buddhist teachings on compassion, wisdom, meditation and so on. He is regarded widely as one of the top experts in Tibetan Buddhism by Tibetan Buddhists. This is not because of his birth as a Dalai Lama but because he has engaged in scholarly study and thoroughly understood the material, and also engaged in many meditation practices and thoroughly mastered those as well, and is an acknowledged line of transmission of many practices in Tibetan Buddhism in all four schools.

As well as that, many Tibetan Buddhist see him as “Avelokiteshvara” the “deity of compassion”. This is also much misunderstood by Westerners. It doesn’t mean he is a deity in our sense at all. Doesn’t mean he has special powers or special understanding. It just means that they see him as embodying compassion, a deep and extensive compassion, that’s open to suffering of all beings everywhere, not just to particular people. And this compassion is one that any of us can find in ourselves. So it’s not exclusive. They will say also of someone else. If you do something compassionate, then you are Avelokiteshvara too in that moment of compassion. There can be many “embodiments of compassion” in this sense. And the reason it is treated as a “deity” is not that it’s some external being other than us in the Western sens of a God. Rather - it’s because this kind of open unending compassion is something that it’s hard to see as something we are already. When first encountered, it seems external in the sense that it is other than what we normally think of ourselves as being. It’s vaster than anything we think is possible. So - it’s external to our ordinary way of thinking about ourself. So it seems like a deity - like something way beyond us. But the Buddhist teaching on compassion is that it’s actually our true nature indeed if we can but see it. First as glimpses, moments of compassion, but eventually our whole life can be an embodiment of compassion, everything we do is rooted in compassion.

So, the Dalai Lama is thought by many Tibetans to have some kind of a blessing of compassion associated with him. It doesn’t mean that he does extraordinary acts of compassion all the time in any obvious sense at least. But that he somehow has an inspiration of compassion through his life as a whole. It’s like many other figures who we may think of as being inspiring for their compassion, and inspire others towards compassion too from their example.

And according to their ideas of reincarnation this is something that has been transmitted through reincarnation from one Dalai Lama to the next right through to the present day. Not the only person with this blessing though. Many have this blessing. Including many who belong to other religions or none, who show acts of compassion. They also have this “blessing of Avelokiteshvara” shining through in their acts of compassion. Not some kind of strange deity with four arms - that’s just one particular iconography in some branches of Buddhism. That’s like a visual poem that for some with the right connection inspires compassion when they think about it. But - true compassion which can take many forms, and be expressed in poetry and images in many ways.

For many Tibetan Buddhists then the Dalai Lama is one of these expressions of compassion.

As for his reputation in the West, well he has had many discussions with scientists and others world wide. And many have been impressed by his erudition, understanding, and indeed the messages from the Buddhist teachings. He helps to show how the Buddhist teachings actually can work in our modern world - that they aren’t archaic. He has a keen interest in science particularly and has had many discussions with scientists on these topics.

And he is of course keen to do something to help with the plight of Tibetans in China. He is a moderate there. He no longer thinks that the way forward is for Tibet to break free from China. He thinks that the way forward is a Tibet as part of China with autonomy for such matters as education, prisons, management of the ecology and so on. He is also interested in communism, not in the sense of Maoism but in the more general sense. It’s complementary to Buddhism which can be followed in many different political systems and the Dalai Lama has a particular interest in communism, as well as in democracy and many other approaches - not in an exclusive sense but from what he’s said on the topic, I think he is interested in how a communist Buddhist country can develop.

The Chinese I think, if they were to engage more with him, more in dialog, try to understand better, would hardly find a better person to act as an intermediary to help lead Tibet to a future that is mutually beneficial for both Tibet and China.