"He was just a toddler when... his father brought him and his twin brother into a room where they and seven other boys were given a secret test...."

"Some of them refused to leave their parents’ sides. Others were drawn to the colorful candy that had been placed as distractions. This boy, A. Altannar, ... picked out a set of prayer beads and put it around his neck. He rang a bell used for meditation. He walked over to a monk in the room and playfully climbed on his legs. 'These were very special signs,' said Bataa Mishigish, a religious scholar who observed the boy with two senior monks. 'We just looked at each other and didn’t say a word.' They had found the 10th reincarnation of the Bogd... the spiritual leader of Mongolia... a symbol of Mongolia’s identity, a position dating back nearly 400 years to descendants of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, who embraced Tibetan Buddhism and helped it spread across China and other conquered lands.... When someone sneezes, Mongolians say 'Bogd bless you.'..."

From "The 8-Year-Old Boy at the Heart of a Fight Over Tibetan Buddhism/He may have to defend the faith in Mongolia against pressure from China’s ruling Communist Party" (NYT).

The boy, a third-grader with a fondness for TikTok and video games, now faces decades of theological training, a lifetime of celibacy, and the grave responsibility of having to defend Mongolian Buddhism against Chinese pressure.... 

The team pulled 80,000 names from the list of boys born in Ulaanbaatar in 2014 and 2015, the years after the last Bogd died. They followed an ancient custom of parsing mystical visions and astrology to winnow the selection down to 11 to take the secret test — though the families of only nine boys responded. 

That afternoon, the objects that A. Altannar picked up — the necklace and the bell — had belonged to the Ninth Bogd. The monk he climbed on was the Ninth Bogd’s assistant.... 

The phone call to the boy’s family with the news of his selection came from none other than Mongolia’s then-president, Tsakhia Elbegdorj.... But Ms. Munkhnasan, A. Altannar’s mother, said her immediate response was a flat-out rejection....

“We said, ‘This can’t happen,’” Ms. Munkhnasan said. “My kid was still a baby at the time, and there was no sort of pre-warning or any communication about what was about to unfold.” 

Ms. Munkhnasan and her husband, Altannar Chinchuluun, wrote to the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, appealing for help. The reincarnation process, they argued, had robbed their son of his rights. The family rushed to Ulaanbaatar after the call with the president and demanded the monks find another boy. The monks said they would try, but the Dalai Lama said no.... 

And it is not just his own life that has changed; it’s his brother’s, too. The twins dress identically and receive the same religious training as if both were the Bogd. Ms. Munkhnasan said she didn’t want to “sacrifice” one child for the other — having one twin live in the shadow of his brother.....

What would you do? Suddenly the highest authorities in your country are exalting your little child and saying that all along he's been this other person, an eminent person much older than you, and they're ready to sweep him into the life where, to them, he properly belongs. You think you have a right to your child and your child has a right to his life as a child, with his family, in his familiar surroundings. But it's your religion too. You believe in the system, the one in which somebody's child is Bogd.