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Christopher Michel  · CC BY-SA 4.0

Guided journey

A line that is not a family

Two successions — an office and a recognised incarnation lineage — and why neither may be drawn as descent.

  • 5 steps
  • Offices, Traditions, Figures
  • A note at each step
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  1. Ricardo Stuckert · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Step 1 of 5: Office

    Pope

    Bishop of Rome and head of the Roman Catholic church

    An office with one of the longest recorded sequences of holders anywhere. The line is drawn as a chain with arrowheads, never as a tree, and the drawing code cannot be handed a family mode — that is a property of the program rather than of anyone’s care.

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  1. Pope Office
  2. Tibetan Buddhism Tradition
  3. Gelug Tradition
  4. Tenzin Gyatso Figure

  1. Again First seen at step 1

    Step 2 of 5: Office

    Pope

    Bishop of Rome and head of the Roman Catholic church

    Look for the overlaps. Two holders with overlapping dates are marked contested and left side by side: the Western Schism is not a data error, and a sequence that tidied it away would be deleting the interesting part. Gaps are marked too, and labelled as what they are — a vacancy, an interregnum, or a hole in the record, with no guess about which.

    Open the profile Continue to Tibetan Buddhism
  2. Xiengyod · CC0

    Step 3 of 5: Tradition

    Tibetan Buddhism

    Form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet and Bhutan

    A tradition in which recognition itself is the contested thing. Every tenure on this site can carry the bodies that recognise it, and where none is recorded the page says that this is a hole in the data rather than a claim that nobody recognised the holder.

    Open the profile Continue to Gelug

  3. Step 4 of 5: Tradition

    Gelug

    One of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism

    A school, reached as a branch rather than as a descendant. Traditions overlap, split and re-merge; the relation is called “is a branch of” and it prints, underneath, that it does not imply a clean single-origin family tree.

    Open the profile Continue to Tenzin Gyatso
  4. Christopher Michel · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Step 5 of 5: Figure

    Tenzin Gyatso

    14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetans

    And a living holder. Offices held, teachers, and affiliation are three separate blocks on a figure’s page, because holding an office says nothing about who taught you and being taught by someone says nothing about inheriting anything. Merge those three and you have a chart claiming a lineage is a bloodline.

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