THE BUDDHA'S DAUGHTER.(Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo)(Interview)

I never met the tenth Panchen Lama, who died at his monastery in Tibet in 1989, but I was introduced to his family in Beijing in the mid-nineties, and recently I went to Washington to see his daughter, Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo, a twenty-year-old political-science student at American University who likes to be called Renji. She met me at Dulles airport, slightly flustered, thinking that she was going to be late. She had attended a conference on Tibetan medicine that morning, she explained, and had had to go home to change her clothes. Renji, whose mother is Chinese, uses the title "princess." It's on her calling card. The Chinese government--bizarrely for a country that still thinks of itself as Communist--not only permits the royal honorific but endorses it. Renji's role carries certain obligations, among them the self-imposed discipline of wearing Tibetan national dress on formal occasions. She had spent the morning in a traditional chuba, the long robe worn by both men and women in Tibet. Now she was wearing a white knitted top over a black shirt and black trousers.

We walked out to Renji's car, a metallic-beige Mercedes. A fluffy holder on the dashboard contained one of her two mobile phones. There was a blowup toy on the back seat--a replica of a Japanese cartoon bear--and a heart-shaped cushion. Two squishy zip-up cases shaped like hamburgers concealed her CD collection. A photograph of her father dangled from the rear-view mirror, a small version of a formal picture that is given out to pilgrims and other believers. It shows him in a yellow chuba, serious, already fat--although not as fat as he became later--his gaze remote. On the reverse side was an image of the Buddha that reminded me of photographs I had seen of the gilded and embalmed body of Renji's father, which is interred in a mausoleum in Tibet. The pictures were encased in plastic and hung alongside a dharma wheel attached to a tasselled gold cord. As Renji drove, she often touched the pictures or smoothed out the cord in a quick, reflexive gesture.

Renji's father was the tenth incarnation in a line of lamas who became powerful in Tibet in the seventeenth century, when the Gelugpa school of Buddhism was established as the country's ruling sect. The Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama are twin pillars of the Gelugpa hierarchy. The Dalai Lama rules as a king, but the Panchen Lama, who has no formal political role, has, for some believers, greater spiritual authority. They are both bodhisattvas--highly evolved beings who have chosen to return to the mortal world to help others find enlightenment. The Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion. The Panchen Lama is a reincarnation of the Buddha of Boundless Light. They are spiritual brothers.

Renji has never lived in Tibet, but in 1990, a year after her father died, her mother took her to the old Tibetan province of Kham, which has been largely absorbed by the Chinese province of Sichuan. Hundreds of people set up tents by the roadside, waiting for a glimpse of her as she passed. "They told me that there were people lining the road for fifty miles," Renji said, in fluent, American-accented English. "Thousands and thousands of people, all wanting to touch me. I was little, only seven years old. I just thought, Oh shoot, it means I can't go to sleep in the car."

There is, religiously speaking, no reason that Renji should attract devotion. Her father's position as an incarnation of the Buddha is not hereditary. Nevertheless, large numbers of Tibetans treat her as an object of reverence in her own right. "As long as I can remember, people have been interested in me," she said. "People love me and want to be with me because of my father. I have to tell them that I am not a religious leader and that I never will be."

When Renji was seventeen, she went back to central Tibet--which was designated an autonomous region of China in 1965--for the first time since the death of her father. "I wanted to pay my respects to him just before I became an adult," she said. "It's a serious moment." She spent three days in Shigatse--Tibet's second-largest city and the site of the Tashilhunpo monastery, the traditional seat of the panchen lamas--and two days in Lhasa, the capital. Again, huge numbers of people turned out to see her. Renji showed me photographs of long lines of people waiting, carrying khatags, the white scarves that Tibetans use on formal occasions. "I would get totally dehydrated," she said. "I tried to say something to each one. They had waited for hours, just to greet me, and some of them went back and joined the line again.

"It's tiring," Renji went on. "After a few days, my arms hurt because of putting the khatags around people's necks. People seem to think that I am like some kind of Buddha statue. They run into me all the time with their heads. They take my hand and they put it on their heads for a blessing. I tell them I am not a religious teacher, but they want it anyway. I can't complain, because it makes them so happy to see me and to touch me. The only thing that I ask my bodyguards to stop is when they lift up my skirt."