Osel Hita Torres, aka Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche, is now a film student in Madrid.
A boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the spiritual leader has caused embarrassment by turning his back on the Buddhist order. Osel Hita Torres, 24, who was put on a throne as a toddler, now sports baggy trousers and long hair, and is more likely to quote Jimi Hendrix than the Buddha, according to a report by The Guardian.
Dashing the high hopes of monks who treated him like a god, Torres is now studying films in Madrid instead of living the monastic life.
Torres recounts the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls. “They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,” said Torres, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India.
Movies were also forbidden except for a sanctioned screening of The Golden Child starring Eddie Murphy, about a kidnapped child lama with magical powers. “I never felt like that boy,” he said. He has now denounced the Buddhist order that elevated him to guru status. “It was like living a lie,” Torres told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
Despite turning his back to the throne, Torres is still known as Lama Tenzin Osel Rinpoche and worshiped by the Buddhist community. A prayer for his “long life” still adorns the website of the Foundation to Preserve the Mahayana Tradition. The website biography gushes about renegade guru’s peaceful, meditative countenance as a baby.
In 1986, his parents took the 14-month-old Torres to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. He was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually “enthroned”.
At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls ?” though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere’s cabin. By 18, he had never seen couples kiss. His first disco experience was a shock.
“I was amazed to watch everyone dance.
What were all those people doing, bouncing, stuck to one another, enclosed in a box full of smoke?” he said.
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