The Dalai Lama issued an apology after a video recently emerged showing him kissing a child on the lips before asking the boy to "suck my tongue" during an in northern India earlier this year.
The office of the spiritual leader said he "regrets" the incident and "wishes to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends across the world, for the hurt his words may have caused,” in a statement obtained by CNN on Monday (April 10).
“His Holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras,” the statement said.
The video, which recently went viral on social media, showed the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, the best known Buddhist figure in the world, having an exchange with a young boy during a February event with the M3M Foundation in event in Dharamshala, where the spiritual leader resides.
The child is seen approaching the Dalai Lama and asking, "Can I hug you?" The 87-year-old invites the boy on stage before pointing to his cheek and saying, "first here," telling the child to give him a hug and a kiss.
The Dalai Lama then points to his lips and says, "then I think finally here also" while pulling the boy's chin and kissing him on the mouth before adding, "and suck my tongue" and sticking out his tongue seconds later. The child was not publicly identified.
The Delhi-based child rights group, Haq: Center for Child Rights, issued a statement to CNN in which it said it condemns "all form of child abuse" in response to the incident.
“Some news refers to Tibetan culture about showing tongue, but this video is certainly not about any cultural expression and even if it is, such cultural expressions are not acceptable,” the group said.
The Dalai Lama is the principal spiritual leader of the "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism and is viewed to be the reincarnation of his 13 predecessors by his millions of followers, having fled from Tibet to India in 1959 amid an unsuccessful Tibetan uprising against China's occupation forces. The spiritual leader has faced controversy in recent years, which included telling the BBC that a hypothetical female Dalai Lama successor "should be more attractive" during an interview in 2019 and suggesting Europeans should be kept for Europeans while discussing the rising number of African refugees in the continent in 2018.