It was a straightforward question, and the Dalai Lama had a ready answer.

At a packed talk this morning in Tokyo at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, a journalist asked the Dalai Lama whether and how he would reincarnate in the future.

“You said you might not return. My question to you is where are you going to go?”

“To hell,” the Dalai Lama retorted, bursting out in hearty laughter.

He then struck a serious note, saying that his favorite daily Buddhist prayer contains the line: “So long as sentient beings’ suffering remains, I will remain in order to serve, to share their suffering.”

Like all Buddhists, he said he is in a continual pattern of rebirth. Once he dies, he’ll be reborn in another body, “but where born I don’t know.”

“If something useful,” he continued in his slightly fractured English, “as I mentioned earlier, half joke, if something useful, some benefit, at least to some needy people or needy sentient beings, I’m ready to go there (to hell).

“If not much work, I’m going to heaven!” he said, to more guffaws.

Earlier in the talk, the Dalai Lama said perpetuation of his lineage is not set in stone. If future Dalai Lamas are not serving their followers, then Buddhists should not be disheartened when the line comes to an end.

“Dalai institution evolved 600 years ago. It happened. Then about 300 years ago, Dalai Lama institution became head of both temporal as well as spatial. At a certain time, it happened. At a certain time, it will go. It is not important,” he said.

The Dalai Lama seems to revel in the image that China paints of him as a troublemaker, and a demon.

At the end of the talk and a news conference, the head of the correspondents club announced that the Dalai Lama had been made an honorary member, a typical gift bestowed on high-level speakers.

“Media people are troublemakers so I want to join as one member of troublemakers (club)!” he said, laughing heartily.

In most countries of the world, lawyers have a direct say in matters relating to their profession, electing leaders to run a bar association.

That’s not true in China, though, where the Beijing Bar Association, like most professional guilds, is a Leninist-style top-down group run by the Communist Party, with its own interests paramount.

That is now coming under challenge. Some lawyers are seeking to bring open elections to the Beijing Bar Association, and the battle is getting downright nasty.

Last August, a group of 35 or so lawyers appealed on the internet for direct elections for the state-controlled association to make it more professional, independent and responsive to its members.

Almost immediately, the Beijing Bar Association lashed out, saying the appeal was “illegal” and a “total repudiation of China’s current lawyers administrative system, judicial system, and even political system.”

They also suggested that any effort to campaign for such a change might bring retaliation and criminal prosecution.

“Any individual who uses text messages, the web or other media to privately promote and disseminate the concept of direct elections, express controversial opinions, thereby spreading rumors within the Beijing Bar Association, confuse and poison people's minds, and convince people of circumstances that do not exist regarding the so-called ‘Call For Direct Elections For the Beijing Bar Association’ is illegal,” according to this English-language translation.

More recently, the government has taken taken punitive action, leaning on law firms to fire the lawyers who signed the appeal.

“Prominent rights defense lawyers Cheng Hai and Li Subin were asked to leave their positions at the Beijing Yitong Law Firm on Oct. 30,” a statement from Human Rights In China, a New York-based group, said a few hours ago. “Earlier, five other lawyers at the same firm were dismissed or left voluntarily.”

“According to Li, six or seven officials from the Haidian District Bureau of Justice went to the firm on October 30 to take photographs and questioned the staff about cases that the firm has taken on. Cheng and Li said that the director of their firm, which has accepted and represented many rights defense cases over the years, has expressed concern and feels strong pressure for the first time from the authorities to rid the firm of some of the rights defense cases as well as staff lawyers who support the direct election of the Lawyers Association officials.”

The government doesn’t seem to be quelling the push for direct elections. According to the New York group, 85 lawyers have now joined the appeal.

“Many signers or heads of their law firms have been summoned by their district bureaus of justice to report on the motivation of the group and on any "hostile external forces" that backed the appeal. Heads of firms were told that if their lawyers failed to withdraw their signatures, their firms would face problem with their annual licensing inspection,” the group said.

According to postings in September on the informative China Law Prof Blog, the 15,000 local lawyers in Beijing might have reason to be unhappy with the local bar association, which hits each one up for the equivalent of nearly $400 in fees per year but doesn’t provide a lot of useful services in return.

So the issues go beyond rule of law and local democracy to general pocketbook matters.