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By Venerable Tenzin Gache

As the IMI Team requested me to write a short article for the newsletter, I put together these reflections on being a monk in the modern world. Mainly I did so to help process my own thoughts, but perhaps there will be some small benefit for others who are also struggling with these ideas.

Sometime early last year, the Lharam classes visited the Sera Jey debates to give advice to the younger monks. Just as the class head started to speak, rain began to fall, so these monks, who usually stand and walk by seniority in an orderly manner, charged into the covered area nearby to allow the younger students to follow before getting wet. From my vantage point, a crowd hustled away from me and rumbled toward the altar in the back, almost shaking the stone ground with their swelling numbers—the population of these six senior classes was comparable to the total number of monks in the lower nineteen classes—and beckoning me to follow quickly before getting drenched. I briefly recalled advice that Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche had given some years ago in the garden behind Sera IMI House: something like, “the last ship is quickly sailing away; if we make effort, we can just catch it before it fades over the horizon.”

Next year I will join that class, along with perhaps forty of my ninety classmates who comprise the tail end of the great population surge at Sera that began in the early 1990’s and ended abruptly in 2008, just months after two-hundred and fifty of us had entered the debate program. Since that time, hardly any new arrivals have come from Tibet. Since the time of the first monastic settlement in India, at Buxa Duar in the early 1960’s, two full generations of monks have traveled the long path to maturity and passed beyond to whatever lies next. Sera has metamorphosized in that time, such that I wonder if the first batch that arrived from Tibet would even recognize it today. Even since I arrived in 2006, the environment has transformed. Back then there was little communication with the outside world—once a month I would sit in a phone booth to call my parents, and visit the occasionally functional internet café to correspond with a few select people. Nowadays I usually see monks carrying a phone where they were once carrying a text and reciting it. The old generation of Tibetans, at least some of whom seemed to have carried a sort of magic from the past, has been replaced by a mix of cultures from the surrounding “Himalayan regions” that are not politically part of Tibet (and, of course, with “foreigners” like me). My intention here is not to lament the loss of an idealized past, because many things have clearly improved—for example, the study program is more organized and less likely to let uninterested or misbehaving monks quietly go unnoticed. But it is a different world than the one that produced the teachers whose example inspired me to come here.

Meanwhile, the world outside has also gone through its inevitable fluctuations, adjustments that may not be fully understood until later generations can look back with the wisdom of hindsight. I left the USA in the last days of 2005, and my picture of life there is a snapshot of a world that no longer exists. I have been disconnected from American culture and media since that time, and for many years learned of the news only through hearsay. Baffled by some of the events of 2020, startled to find that my home country was now a foreign land, and feeling at a loss to offer a constructive contribution to the unfolding crisis, I opened up the bubble a bit and started to read more in-depth journalism, trying to understand where my world had gone. I’ve only been mildly successful and must admit that five years later I still don’t really understand the rather surprising news that comes out of my country. Sometimes I feel like a child of the twentieth century who woke up to find my world is now the past.

I am skeptical of the idea of universal or inevitable decline, a theme that is present both in Buddhist philosophy as well as in some assessments of contemporary times. One modern commentator pointed out that older people sometimes idealize the past because they remember how things looked when they were young and healthy; I think that is likely a fair appraisal in many cases, not the least in my own. At the same time, I do believe it’s important to maintain a sense of what may have been lost, and what the wisdom of past generations can bring to bear in a present where it may be in danger of fading away.

This year His Holiness the Dalai Lama will turn ninety. His extraordinary life has been an anchor for successive waves of great teachers who have come and gone in that time. The Tibetan community is hopeful that His Holiness will fulfill his past pledge to manifest a new embodiment this year, someone he himself can train to ensure that the tradition he has carried for so long does not scatter as the world moves forward. This tradition has provided stability and direction many of us, but maybe His Holiness will gently encourage us to discover a new response to a new world with new dilemmas. After all, His Holiness would not fulfill his role as a Buddhist teacher if he were to live the same life a second time. The psychologist Paul Ekman once mentioned that His Holiness displays more unique facial expressions in a short span of time than anyone he has ever met. Ekman attributed this ability to His Holiness not getting stuck in emotional states for even an instant but responding fluidly every moment. For most of us though, it takes time to come to terms with change.

The Christian monk Thomas Merton once wrote, “in the night of our technological barbarism, monks must be as trees which exist silently in the dark and by their vital presence purify the air.” Likely many readers were like me and ordained because they saw ordination as the best response to the sufferings of the world, the best contribution an individual could make. Although my views have evolved, passing as they have through the unpredictable and sometimes ruthless gauntlet of experience, I still come back to this axiom in my life as a monk. Although I cannot control the changes in the monastery or the outside world, and may not even be able to contribute in the way I sometimes fantasized in my youth, I feel at least a quiet dignity in the conviction that as a monk, I am one less person who is unquestioningly following delusion, and somebody at least trying to cultivate wisdom that will be of some benefit to the world. As I get older, I am less certain than I once was that I will be able to contribute in a broadly visible way. Yet I continue to follow the path of the student, allowing for the possibility that the opportunity to speak might manifest once I have something worthwhile to say.

In the meantime, the Geluk tradition, though transfigured, is still a presence in this world, and there is still a chance for some of us to heed Rinpoche’s advice and take hold of the boat.

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