Tibetan monks bring Buddhism, teachings and culture from India to Northern California

Attendees closed their eyes and meditated to the sounds of sutra chants, Tibetan bells and cymbals ringing as five Tibetan monks performed a blessing.

About 40 people attended the opening ceremony of the Gaden Shartse Monastery Sacred Earth and Healing Arts of Tibet Tour on Friday in Placerville, the first stop amid a two-year journey where monks from a southern India monastic college travel around the United States to hold workshops, teachings and give blessings. They will be in town until Saturday.

Placerville Friends of Tibet, a volunteer group that organizes and hosts Tibetan cultural events in the area, has been coordinating the tours for 18 years.

They have been instrumental in helping the monastic administration raise money to help sustain daily operations at Gaden Shartse, which is free of charge and provides monks with education, food and accommodation. The duration of a monastic program is 24 years, according to the tour program.

“The more money we raise, the more we can help them to educate the next generation,” said Carolyn Grable, Placerville Friends of Tibet’s public relations and social media coordinator.

“His Holiness the Dalai Lama said the culture and tradition that we have been preserving until now is very precious,” said Tenzin Lekshey, one of the monks taking part in the tour. “You must spread it out to the world and it will be beneficial to mankind.”

Gloria Maldonado, a 30-year Buddhist practitioner, is volunteering for the third year. She’s drawn to the ancient traditions, colorful rituals and openness of Tibetan Buddhism.

“Being someone who has practiced meditation for a long time, I can really appreciate the blessing we just received,” she said. “If you can tune in to the sound of the vibration, even though we don’t understand the words, your body feels uplifting.”

The monks performed a cleansing and blessing ceremony to prepare for the daily work for constructing the sand mandala, which will be completed Saturday. They will lay down colored sand, one grain at a time – to construe the image of Green Tara, the goddess of compassion.

The hardest and most important part of the tour is to attend the dissolution ceremony – where the monks wipe out the sand mandala they painted, said Charles Schwend, who first attended the tour last year.

“Watching take that wonderful piece of hard work and then just turn it into a pile of sand ... but it is an important teaching about impermanence,” Schwend said. “The mandala when completed is not just flat, colored sand. It has depth and three dimensions to it and, when you really look at it, you can see how the colors are piled on top of each other and the topography ... they are really something to watch.”

The Garden Shartse Monastic College was founded in Tibet dating to the 15th century, according to Gaden Shatse Cultural Foundation’s official website. In the late 1940s, a group of elder monks and boys from the college fled Tibet across the border into India to escape the invasion by the People’s Republic of China. They settled in Mundgod, Karnataka, an area declared for Tibetan Buddhist Settlement by the Indian government. With mud and bamboo, the monks built another college there in 1969 as an effort to re-establish one of the monastic traditions of Tibet.

The college offers education covering Buddhist philosophy and practice. It has more than 2,000 resident students, teachers and scholars, with more than 70 percent ages 10 to 25 and most of them born in Tibet.

A day in life at the monastic college

The monks start their day at 5 a.m. at Gaden Shartse, according to Geshe Jampa Wangchuk, another monk from India. They have a two-hour prayer session before the monks pair up to debate on the opinions of the philosophical concepts, a “great way to understand and memorize the commentaries of great thinkers and masters,” Wangchuk said in Tibetan.

They then attend classes on Buddhist philosophy and teachings, Tibetan history, literature, English and mathematics in the afternoon, followed by an evening debate and a two-hour self-study period during which the monks memorize home books, philosophical concepts and commentaries and sutras.

“The monastery discipline we are doing every day preserves our religion starting from the sixth century until now,” Wangchuk said. “The education provided by the monastery is very special and helpful to preserve and understand our culture.”

Wangchuk noted the upcoming Tibetan Uprising Day on March 10, on which their government office in Mundgod will organize an event to commemorate hundreds of thousands killed in Laksa, Tibet, in March 1959. Thousands of Tibetans were a part of a resistance who surrounded the summer palace of the Dalai Lama to prevent him from accepting an invitation issued by the Chinese military officers to visit the army headquarters, as many feared it was a trap to kidnap the Tibetan spiritual leader.

While the Dalai Lama was evacuated to India, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army later cracked down on the resistance and killed thousands of Tibetans, causing many to flee to India.

The monks will head to Auburn on Monday and stay until March 4, then will spend March 15-28 in Grass Valley. The full tour schedule can be found on the group’s Facebook page.

This story was originally published February 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.