Dalai Lama says successor will be chosen by Tibetan tradition

Tenzin Gyatso is the 14th Dalai Lama. He was born into a farming family in 1935 in what was then northeastern Tibet and is now Qinghai Province in China. He was recognized at age 2 as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama and afterward began monastic training and Buddhist philosophical studies.

Dalai Lama vows he won't be the last leader of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has announced that he will have a successor after his death, continuing a centuries-old tradition that has become a flashpoint in the struggle with China's Communist Party over Tibet's future.