The prospect of a world without the Dalai Lama has created a new set of quandaries for the Tibetan community in exile, even as it still looks to him for guidance. A decade ago, I visited Dharamsala to research an article for this magazine about young Tibetans disaffected with the Dalai Lama’s leadership. They belonged to the 35,000-member Tibetan Youth Congress, a traditional advocacy group for independence. At the time, the most prominent among this new generation of Tibetan activists was the poet Tenzin Tsundue. He staged protests in Indian cities during state visits by Chinese premiers and was subsequently barred by the police from traveling in India. Lately, though, the pressures on him have come not from the Indian government, Tenzin Tsundue told me, but from the Tibetan establishment in Dharamsala, which discounts Tibetans demanding independence as ‘‘anti-Dalai Lama.’’ In Tenzin Tsundue’s assessment, the Dalai Lama is trying hard to signal to the Chinese that he speaks for all Tibetans in his bid for autonomy: ‘‘ ‘Independence is impossible,’ he has said. ‘Why should someone waste his or her energy on insisting on independence?’ ’’ Tenzin Tsundue told me that the T.Y.C. had split under the weight of this official disapproval.

The current president of the youth congress, Tenzing Jigme, is a rock musician who spent 15 years in the United States. I met him at the Moonpeak Cafe in Dharamsala. On the winding road before us, narrowed by carts vending turquoise and coral jewelry, was the cosmopolitan multitude that every visiting journalist rhapsodizes about: crimson-robed monks, longhaired travelers on motorcycles, Tibetan women in brightly striped chubas, Sikh day-trippers, Kashmiri carpet-sellers and English, German and Israeli backpackers. But the adventure of globalism, it emerged from my conversation with Tenzing Jigme, had curdled here no less than in Lhasa. Dharamsala receives fewer seekers of Eastern wisdom from the West than it did a decade ago. Mindfulness is now commonly accepted as a boost to corporate effi­ciency. And Indian real estate speculators seem to be thinking differently by covering the hills around the Dalai Lama’s residence with cement.

The flow of refugees from Tibet, once running into the thousands, has slowed to a trickle. Many exiles have returned to Tibet, where urban and rural incomes have risen. And life for ordinary Tibetans in Dharamsala remains a struggle. They still cannot own property, and an increasing number hope to emigrate to the West. (Many of the young T.Y.C. activists I interviewed in 2005 have scattered across the world.) The United States is a favored destination; some Tibetans are doing very well there, but many have ended up working as dishwashers and janitors. Others became vulnerable to visa racketeers.

Among the elite, accusations of corruption and nepotism have further roiled the close-knit Tibetan exile community. In the latest scandal, Gyalo Thondup accused his sister-in-law’s father of siphoning off the Tibetan government in exile’s gold and silver. His sister-in-law denied the accusations in a widely circulated Facebook post.

Tenzing Jigme did not blame the Dalai Lama for these setbacks. In fact, he credited him with ‘‘the democratic shift in the community,’’ the advent of elected leaders. ‘‘He keeps preparing us for the future,’’ he said. But there was no doubt, he added, that the Tibetans faced a political impasse. The possibility that many would lapse into violence after the Dalai Lama dies had only grown.

One institution that hopes to forestall this bleak future is the Tibetan government in exile, now known as the Central Tibetan Administration. At the Dalai Lama’s residence this spring, I met with Lobsang Sangay, who in 2011 was elected the political head of the C.T.A. An imposing figure in his late 40s, Lobsang Sangay is the first Tibetan to attend Harvard Law School, and also the first nonmonk to rise high in the Tibetan hierarchy. Once a member of the youth congress and an advocate of independence, he now performs the delicate job of emphasizing the advantages of the ‘‘middle way’’ — autonomy under Chinese rule.