U.S. foreign policy experts may view China's tussle with the Dalai Lama as small potatoes compared to the crisis over democracy in Taiwan. But the stakes have to do with who will claim leadership of a Buddhist revival currently sweeping Asia. And in that battle, China has just won a major round by discrediting the Dalai Lama with Japanese Buddhists. PNS associate editor Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, formerly editor of the Japan Times Weekly, is a Tokyo-based journalist.

TOKYO -- China's tussle with the Dalai Lama seems like a sideshow compared to the Taiwan crisis. But Beijing is waging a political contest for the hearts and minds of Asia's Buddhists that could prove far more significant than its battle over the future of democracy in Taiwan.

Last week, as the U.S. dispatched two Navy carrier battle groups to the waters off Taiwan, Chinese leaders introduced their candidate for the second highest post in Tibetan Buddhism -- the Panchen Lama -- to the People's Consultative Congress delegates in Beijing. By parading the six-year-old boy monk, Beijing was making clear its rejection of the Dalai Lama's selection, another six-year-old boy. In a further effort to back their candidate, Beijing launched a psychological missile at the exiled Tibetan leader's moral authority.

The March issue of the government sponsored "China Tibet" magazine features an expose of His Holiness holding five meetings with Shoko Asahara, the head of Aum Shinrikyo, the sect accused of gassing the Tokyo subways last year. The magazine also quotes from two letters written by the Dalai Lama to the Japanese guru, one of which acknowledges receipt of a $100,000 donation from Aum.

How the Chinese gained access to papers that were seized by Tokyo Municipal Police in raids on the sect remains a mystery. These same papers were leaked to Japanese news media only after the Beijing magazine appeared.

The Dalai Lama has been trying to disassociate his movement from Asahara ever since his visit to Tokyo last April, just after the Tokyo subway gassing. Relations between the two, while cordial, have been strained for some time. As early as the spring of 1990, Asahara had complained that the Tibetan representative in Tokyo was publicly accusing Aum of commercializing religion.

Letters published in China Tibet magazine portray Asahara as variously pledging to do whatever he could to return Tibet to Tibetans and claiming that his infant son was the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.

In an accusation clearly aimed at mainstream Japanese Buddhists, the magazine also accuses the Dalai Lama of using Asahara as a "detached force" to reform Japanese Buddhism and, ultimately, to destroy Japan's Buddhist clergy who have close ties to China.

These ties have deep historical roots. Most Japanese sects trace their origins to temples founded in China. This includes the Lotus Buddhist sect in which the Japanese cultural and political movement Soka Gokkai is based. Soka Gokkai boasts some 15 million members worldwide. At a Soka Gokkai meeting in Tokyo in 1989, the sect's head noted that the Chinese Premier Li Peng's first name means "roc," the mythical giant bird which is the protector of the Buddha. Li Peng replied that in contemporary China, the Buddha is "the people and I consider myself the guardian of the people."

It may seen paradoxical that a secular Beijing government takes a positive stance towards East Asia's largest religion while at the same time relentlessly challenging the power of the Dalai Lama. But it's not paradoxical if one recalls that during the Cold War, militant conservative Buddhists were an important force in the Taiwan-led World Anti-Communist League, and a buttress in Asia against Chinese Communist influence.

Today, in a drive to reestablish China's centrality, Beijing is tapping into a growing Buddhist revival across Asia. Moreover, many of Japan's sects belong to a tradition deeply hostile to the Tibetan clergy, a stance rooted in the 13th century Mongol rule when Tibetan prelates suppressed Lotus sect temples in southern China. The Lotus sect, in turn, organized the peasant guerrilla movements that ultimately smashed the Mongol regime, established the Ming Dynasty, and sent the Tibetan monks packing to Lhasa.

This tradition of religious rebellion did not disappear under communism. Rather, it continued under an ideological guise. Mao Zedong's utopian vision that drove both the Cultural Revolution and the suppression of intellectuals in Tiananmen Square bears striking resemblance to the populist Buddhist policies of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming Dynasty and himself a Lotus sect Buddhist priest.

Many Japanese Buddhists anticipate a Buddhist revival of China -- one in which Mao's populism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms will combine with Buddhist values of family and community to create a vision of an earthly utopia. After a recent trip to China, the head of a Buddhist temple in Nara beamed his satisfaction over that country's commitment to agriculture, education and health care.

Beijing clearly looks to a Buddhist revival to fill the spiritual void in the Asian heartland so long as it does not challenge the nominally secular authorities. Such a revival could provide the major impetus into the Pacific Century. Like all Utopias, it could also be fraught with disaster.