NEW DELHI – The 87-year-old Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, apologized on Monday after footage emerged of him asking a boy to “suck my tongue” at a public event.
“Recently a video clip is going viral showing a boy asking His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he can hug him,” he said. Report The exiled leader’s Twitter account has 19 million followers.
“His Holiness wishes to apologize to the boy and his family and to his many friends around the world for the hurt his words have caused.”
In the statement, the leader, the Dalai Lama, “often teases people he meets in public and in front of cameras, in an innocent and playful manner. He regretted the incident.
Sticking out one’s tongue is a sign of respect or agreement, and is often used as a greeting in traditional Tibetan culture, according to the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
According to Tibetan folklore, a cruel 9th-century Tibetan king had a black tongue, so people stick out their tongues to show that they are not like him, the company said. Website. There is no mention of tongue suction on the site.
The video, which has over 1 million views on Twitter, shows the Nobel Peace Prize laureate trying to peck the boy on the lip in front of an audience. The crowd is heard clapping and laughing, while a man captures the moment on a phone.
The Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed rebellion against Chinese rule in Tibet, is considered a dangerous separatist by Beijing.
He has worked for decades to gain global support for linguistic and cultural autonomy in his remote mountainous homeland.
He now lives in the northern Indian city of Dharamshala in a compound next to a temple ringed by green hills and snow-capped mountains.
