The Dalai Lama says an attractive woman can succeed him
The Dalai Lama has repeated his controversial remark on a female successor during a BBC interview on a range of topics that included immigration and Donald Trump.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner told the BBC’s South Asian correspondent, Rajini Vaidyanathan, from his exile in Dharamsala in northern India that if his successor is a woman then she should be attractive.
“If female Dalai Lama comes, then she should be more attractive,” he said. “If female Dalai Lama, oh, oh... that people, I think prefer, not see her, that face.”
Vaidyanathan questioned the basis of his comments and asked, “It’s about who we are inside, isn’t it?” The Dalai Lama replied, “Yes, I think both.”
These statements are a reiteration of his past comments back in a 2015 interview with BBC journalist Clive Myrie, stating that a prerequisite for a female Dalai Lama would be physical appeal, or else she would be of “not much use.”
The spiritual guru has also doubled down on the US president, underlining Trump’s “lack of moral principle.” He stood firmly against Trump’s “America First” mantra, saying this isolationist mindset “is wrong.”
“One day he says something, another day he says something,” the 83- year- old Buddhist monk said of the US president. “But I think ( there is a) lack of moral principle.” “When he became president he expressed ' America First'. That is wrong. America, they should take the global responsibility,” the Dalai Lama said, adding that Trump's emotions are “also a little bit... too complicated”.
He also reiterated his views on immigration into Europe, saying that only a “limited number” of refugees should be allowed to stay.
“The European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and then aim at returning to their own land,” he said.
“But whole Europe eventually become Muslim country? Impossible. Or African country. Also impossible... Keep Europe for Europeans,” he said.
The Dalai Lama has made India his home since fleeing Tibet in 1959, and has been a thorn in Beijing's side ever since.
China brands him a “wolf in a monk's robe” and accuses him of trying to split China.
He told the BBC however that he believes China “is changing”, saying he has had contact “entirely privately” with retired Chinese officials and scholars who have connections with the Beijing government.
“I think the Chinese themselves is changing their attitude,” he said, adding that President Xi Jinping had “not yet” asked for a meeting.