Taktser Rinpoche
Tibetan Tulku lineage
Taktser Rinpoche (Tibetan: སྟག་འཚེར་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་, ZWPY: Dagcêr Rinboqê; Chinese: 当彩活佛) was born in 1922 in "the small village of Taktser, meaning 'roaring tiger,' located in the Amdo region of eastern Tibet." He became a lama of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism and was named Thubten Jigme Norbu, the oldest brother of Tenzin Gyatso—the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet. Soon after birth, he was recognized by the 13th Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the previous Taktser Rinpoche, who was "one of the thirty or so reincarnated lamas who were a part of Kumbum's tradition." On September 5, 2008, Norbu, 86, died at his Indiana, US, home after illness for many years.
Taktser Lama
Thubten Jigme Norbu's predecessor as the Taktser Rinpoche, known as Taktser Lama, was Norbu's and his brother the 14th Dalai Lama's paternal grandmother's elder brother, in other words their great uncle. One of the 30 or so reincarnated lamas who were part of Kumbum Monastery's tradition, he had been recognised as the Taktser Lama some time in the 1860s, taken from his family and raised and educated at Kumbum. Kumbum is a monastery of the Gelugpa tradition.
"During the turmoil of the Manchu decline", Taktser Lama left Kumbum to live in Mongolia for several decades at the end of the 19th century. Mongolians being fervent devotees of the Gelugpa school, he "developed quite a devoted following there." Thanks to his Mongolian disciples' generous offerings, at the start of the twentieth century he returned to Kumbum Monastery a wealthy lama; he was said to have owned 10,000 camels.
Taktser Lama then utilised his newly accumulated wealth to benefit his family in Taktser village, including the parents of his eventual successor Thubten Jigme Norbu. He bought back 45 acres of land they had lost when Manchu troops, in quelling a late-nineteenth century rebellion had destroyed the entire village of Taktser and driven the family away to live in caves in poverty. They were also enabled to build a new, large home where Thubten Jigme Norbu as well as the future 14th Dalai Lama were eventually born.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Taktser Rinpoche” is tibetan Tulku lineage. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Taktser, Rinpoche and Tibetan, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2388230. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1922 and 2008.
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