The Dalai Lama issued a public apology Monday after video of him kissing a younger boy on the lips and asking the kid to “suck my tongue” prompted outrage on-line.
Over the weekend, footage circulated on social media exhibiting the Tibetan Buddhist chief interacting with the boy, first elevating his chin to kiss him earlier than audibly making the request for the kid to suck his tongue. The Dalai Lama then sticks his tongue out as different folks in attendance could be heard laughing.
“A video clip has been circulating that shows a recent meeting when a young boy asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he could give him a hug,” the apology statement learn. “His Holiness wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.”
The assertion continues to say that the Dalai Lama “often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras. He regrets the incident.”
The apology didn’t make clear which “words” he stated in the course of the interplay, and it didn’t disclose the place or when the incident occurred.
But media reports counsel the clip was really filmed in late February on the Dalai Lama’s temple in Dharamshala, India, the place about 100 college students attended an occasion after graduating from the Indian M3M Foundation.
According to the BBC, protruding your tongue is a standard greeting in Tibet courting again greater than a thousand years to the ninth century. Longer video footage of the Dalai Lama’s incident with the kid seems to present the boy not really going by way of with the non secular chief’s tongue-sucking request with the pair hugging afterward.
This isn’t the primary time the Dalai Lama has apologized for sparking uproar. In 2019, his workplace put out a press release saying he was “deeply sorry” after saying in an interview that if a girl was to succeed him, she needs to be “more attractive.”
The apology defined the Dalai Lama “has a keen sense of the contradictions between the materialistic, globalized world he encounters on his travels and the complex, more esoteric ideas about reincarnation that are at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist tradition.” “However, it sometimes happens that off the cuff remarks, which might be amusing in one cultural context, lose their humor in translation when brought into another. He regrets any offense that may have been given,” the apology learn.
The 87-year-old was enthroned because the 14th Dalai Llama in 1940 and assumed his full political duties in 1950 on the age of 15. Following the failed rebellion in Tibet in opposition to Chinese occupation in 1959, he has lived in exile in India.
