"The decision to leave my homeland, monastery, monks, parents, family, and the Tibetan people was entirely my own. No one told me to go and no one asked me to come," Ugyen Thinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, said in a statement issued ahead of his first news conference.

The Karmapa is one of the highest-ranking monks in Tibetan Buddhism, and the only senior lama to be recognized by both Beijing and the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

His critics and senior Indian security officials claim he is an agent of the Chinese government, speculation that the Dalai Lama has criticized.

The Karmapa arrived in Dharmsala, the northern Indian home of the Tibetan government-in-exile, in January 2000 after an 875-mile (1,408-kilometer) journey through the snowbound Himalayas.

Indian officials say his escape was aided by Chinese authorities, who helped him clear the rugged and heavily guarded frontier to India through Nepal in only eight days.