The 17th Karmapa, one of Tibet's holiest monks, remains confined to the top floor of a monastery in northern India, looking wistfully out through a picture window at the snowcapped Himalayan peaks above him, over 16 months after duping his Chinese captors and escaping their clutches.
"I feel slightly better here than I did in Tibet, although I am still waiting for the main transformation of my situation," 15-year-old Urgan Trinlay Dorje said in an interview at the Buddhist Gyuto Tantric monastery in the Himalayan foothills at Sidhbari, 360 miles north of New Delhi.
In the 30-minute interview, the politically astute Karmapa, speaking through an interpreter, deftly side-stepped questions on the political and diplomatic sensitivity of his situation with regard to the Chinese and Indian governments by answering delicate questions in spiritual generalities.
"I consider this a critical time in human history, when a lot is going on and people's emotions are heightened," he stated.
But the goal of the second-most important Tibetan Buddhist leader, after the Dalai Lama, is to travel to the Rumtek monastery in north-east India's Sikkim state and officially install himself as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 16th Karmapa, by retrieving and wearing the jewel-encrusted Black Hat, or priceless "wisdom crown".
The hat was presented in the 14th century by the Chinese emperor Chengzu as tribute to his spiritual guru, the 5th Karmapa and installed alongside other Tibet an treasures in the monastery built by his predecessor, who fled Tibet after China's occupation in 1959.
But the Karmapa is prevented from claiming this symbol of his ecclesiastical office by the Indian government, sensitive to Beijing's anger over the monk's dramatic escape from his monastery at Tsurphu in central Tibet in December, 1999.
The Karmapa escaped in a jeep across the Himalayas into neighbouring Nepal before arriving at the Dalai Lama's headquarters in Dharamsala, eight days later.
Having spent his first 14 years as a virtual Chinese prisoner, the Karmapa's life now is only marginally different. Today he is guarded around the clock by 60 armed Indian commandos and Intelligence Bureau personnel, who severely restrict his movements, frisk all his guests and escort them to him. He also has two personal armed Tibetan bodyguards from the Dalai Lama's security staff.
The teenage monk is confined mostly to the sparsely furnished room on the monastery's third floor and allowed only to move around inside the building, rising at dawn to attend lectures on Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in a ground-floor classroom.
One of the many disciplines he is reportedly engaged in is the ancient Yogic one of "modulating and calibrating" his prophetic dreams which are regularly relayed to an artist for portrayal in vivid colours as a Tibetan-style painting depicting Buddhist folklore.
The first of the Karmapa's dream sequences will be completed over the next six months.
The Buddhist monk also holds private and public audiences in the monastery's huge assembly hall during which he intones mantras and at times even delivers a sermon. But he is not at liberty to walk down the monastery steps for even a stroll in its grounds without permission from his "minders" who refer all his request back to the federal authorities in New Delhi. The only exercise he gets is walking on the terrace outside his room or pacing the long corridor outside it.
Although the Karmapa was granted refugee status by India three months ago, following extensive political and diplomatic activity, and escorted to holy Buddhist spots across northern and eastern India, he still has to obtain clearance from the local police chief to visit the Dalai Lama, 10 miles away. The Karmapa's first press conference after his arrival was also cleared by New Delhi.
