TF59 Newsletter

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TIBET FOUNDATION

Tibet Foundation is a registered charity (no. 292400), founded in 1985, which works towards creating greater awareness of all aspects of Tibetan culture and the needs of the Tibetan people. !e Patron of the Foundation is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Aims

communities and

greater awareness of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s message for peace.

Tibet Foundation Newsletter is a publication of Tibet Foundation. !e newsletter is sent to all supporters of Tibet Foundation for a yearly subscription of £15 (£20 overseas). Please make cheques payable to ‘Tibet Foundation’.

The views expressed in Tibet Foundation Newsletter do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Tibet Foundation Trustees: Susan Burrows, Patrick Ga"ney, Tsering D. Gonkatsang and Phuntsog Wangyal.Secretary: Gary Hawkins.

Advisors to the FoundationLama Doboom Tulku, former director of Tibet House in New Delhi and former assistant private secretary to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Sean Jones, Asia expert and travel consultant. Stephen Marshall, solicitor in the law firm Ormerods. Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan scholar and the director of the Amnye Machen Institute, Dharamsala.

Newsletter Editorial BoardTsering Dhundup Gonkatsang, Nick Swann, Tsering Shakya and Phuntsog Wangyal.

TIBET FOUNDATION, 2 ST JAMES'S MARKET #o" Haymarket$ LONDON SW1Y 4SB, UKTelephone: 020 7930 6001 Fax: 020 7930 6002 [email protected]

©Tibet Foundation 2011

Cover picture: Survivors of the Yushu earthquake receiving aid from Tibet Foundation.

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CONTENTS

OUTLOOK

At the time of writing this newsletter, we are commemorating the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that struck Yushu (Kyekudo), a Tibetan town in east Tibet, causing the loss of so many lives and massive destruction of almost all of the buildings. We have witnessed the courage of the people of Yushu, showing unity and resolution to rebuild their shattered lives, and the immediate response of supporters in sending donations towards our Yushu Earthquake Relief Fund.

We were very pleased that with the generous support of so many people

worldwide, the Foundation was one of the first UK Tibetan charities to deliver much needed emergency relief aid within weeks of the disaster. !is was followed by successful negotiations with the government and the setting up of a long-term sustainable project to help the people of Yushu. More information can be found in this newsletter and on our website.

In exile, mainly in India, we had the opportunity to revisit many of the areas where our projects are benefitting the Tibetans and to produce an eight-part documentary series entitled Call of the Snow

continued ➥

TIBET FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER NO. 59 • SPRING 2011

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Lion. We hope many of you will have seen the film highlighting the changes experienced by the Tibetan refugees and the progress they have made over the past 50-plus years. !e documentary also outlines the uncertain situation of the Tibetan Diaspora and the need for continued support.

Later in the year we will be publishing two unique books. !e first is an Introduction to Buddhism written in simple Tibetan language for school children in India and, hopefully, also for those in Tibet. !is is volume 1 of a 3-volume book and is based on a similar publication that the Foundation produced three years ago for secondary school children in Mongolia. (See the report in Newsletter no. 57.) !e second book is of Mongolian Buddhist Art, showing rare paintings and appliqués preserved in Mongolian national museums, with descriptions in three languages – Mongolian, English and Tibetan, sometimes in Chinese too. Two dedicated teams of Tibetan and Mongolian experts and scholars collaborated on these projects for a number of years. !e book on Mongolian Buddhist Art is the result of extensive work over a five-year period in cooperation with the Cultural Heritage Centre of the Mongolian government.

Two long-standing and dedicated members of the Foundation sta" - Karma Hardy, the Director, and Lucy Cawthron, the Sponsorship Coordinator - have recently resigned from their respective posts for personal reasons. We are extremely grateful to them both for their extraordinary commitment and service to Tibet Foundation over a long period. !ey will be very deeply missed, but I’m sure we will remain in

Message of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the Fourteenth Assembly of the Tibetan People’s Deputies

close contact and that they will continue to support the Tibetan people and their culture. We wish them every success in whatever the future may hold.

Most of you already know Gary Hawkins. He will become the main contact person at the Foundation, and Alison Foster will deal with all matters related to sponsorship.

In this Newsletter you will see some of our projects in progress. Like all other organisations Tibet Foundation is not free from the impact of the global recession. However with the continuing generosity of our very committed supporters and the help of dedicated volunteers, we are fortunate that ongoing projects are not facing any significant diFculties or interruption.

Spending the minimum on administration, we are trying our best to maximize services in order to fulfill our commitments to the Tibetan communities both in Tibet and in Exile.

In so doing we need whatever help and support our members are able to o"er. We thank you, as always, for your kindness, understanding and cooperation.

Phuntsog WangyalChairman of the Board of Trustees

To the members of the Fourteenth Assembly of the Tibetan People’s Deputies,

It is common knowledge that ancient Tibet, consisting of three provinces (Cholkha-sum) was ruled by a line of forty-two Tibetan kings beginning with Nyatri Tsenpo (127 BCE), and ending with Tri Ralpachen (838 CE). !eir rule spanned almost one thousand years. During that time, Tibet was known throughout Inner Asia as a powerful nation, comparable in military power and political influence with Mongolia and China. With the development of Tibetan literature, the richness and breadth of the religion and culture of Tibet meant that its civilisation was considered second only to that of India.Following the fragmentation of central authority in the 9th century, Tibet was governed by several rulers whose authority was limited to their respective fiefdoms. Tibetan unity weakened with the passage

of time. In the early 13th century, both China and Tibet came under the control of Genghis Khan. Although Drogon Choegyal Phagpa restored the sovereignty of Tibet in the 1260s, and his rule extended across the three provinces, the frequent change of rulers under the Phagmo Drupas, Rinpungpas and Tsangpas over the next 380 years or so resulted in a failure to maintain a unified Tibet. !e absence of any central authority and frequent internal conflicts caused Tibet’s political power to decline.Since the Fifth Dalai Lama’s founding of the Ganden Phodrang Government of Tibet in 1642, successive Dalai Lamas have been both the spiritual and temporal leaders of Tibet. During the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, all the 13 myriarchies or administrative districts of Tibet enjoyed political stability, Buddhism

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 10th March 2011Photos : www.dalailama.com

E!"#$%’& N$#':We wish to inform you that in future we will publish two newsletters every year instead of four. !is is due to our limited editorial resources. Nevertheless the content and quality of the publication will remain unchanged. We trust you will understand and continue to enjoy each issue.


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flourished in Tibet and the Tibetan people enjoyed peace and freedom.During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Tibet not only lacked adequate political governance, but also missed the opportunity to develop e"ective international relations. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama assumed temporal power in 1895, but was compelled to flee to Mongolia and China in 1904, due to the invasion of British forces, and to India in 1910, when the Manchu China invaded. Once circumstances allowed him to return to Tibet, the !irteenth Dalai Lama re-asserted Tibetan sovereignty in 1913. As a result of what he had learned in exile, the !irteenth Dalai Lama introduced modern education and made reforms to strengthen the government of Tibet. Although these steps produced positive results, he was unable to fulfil his overall vision, as is evident from his last political testament of 1932, the year before his death. Despite the lacklustre political leadership and short-comings of the regents and their administrations, the Ganden Phodrang Government has on the whole provided stable governance for the last four centuries.Since I was young, I have been aware of an urgent need to modernize the Tibetan political system. At the age of sixteen, I was compelled to assume political leadership. At that time I lacked a thorough understanding of Tibet’s own political system, let alone international a"airs.However, I had a strong wish to introduce appropriate reforms in accordance with the changing times and was able to e"ect some fundamental changes. Unfortunately, I was unable to carry these reforms any further due

to circumstances beyond my control.Soon after our arrival in India in April 1959, we set up departments with Kalons (Ministers) in charge of education, preservation of culture and the rehabilitation and welfare of the community. Similarly, in 1960, aware of the importance of democratization, the first Commission of Tibetan People’s Deputies was elected and in 1963 we promulgated the Draft Constitution for a Future Tibet. No system of governance can ensure stability and progress if it depends solely on one person without the support and participation of the people in the political process. One man rule is both anachronistic and undesirable. We have made great e"orts to strengthen our democratic institutions to serve the long-term interests of the six million Tibetans, not out of a wish to copy others, but because democracy is the most representative system of governance. In 1990, a committee was formed to draft the Charter for Tibetans-in-Exile and a year later the total strength of the Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputies (ATPD), the Tibetans in exile’s highest law-making body, was increased. In 1991, the Eleventh ATPD formally adopted the Charter for Tibetans-in-Exile and assumed all legislative authority. Given the limitations of our life in exile these are achievements of which we can be proud. In 2001, the Tibetan people elected the Kalon Tripa, the political leader, directly for the first time. Since then, I have been in semi-retirement, no longer involving myself in the day-to-day administration, but able to dedicate more time to general human welfare.

The essence of a democratic system is, in short, the assumption of political responsibility by elected leaders for the popular good. In order for our process of democratization to be complete, the time has come for me to devolve my formal authority to such an elected leadership. !e general lack of experience and political maturity in our democratic institutions has prevented us from doing this earlier.Given that the line of Dalai Lamas has provided political leadership for nearly four centuries, it might be diFcult for Tibetans generally and especially those in Tibet to envisage and accept a political system that is not led by the Dalai Lama. !erefore, over the past 50 years I have tried in various ways to raise people’s political awareness and encourage their participation in our democratic process.In my 10th March statement of 1969, for instance, I stated, “When the day comes for Tibet to be governed by its own people, it will

be for the people to decide as to what form of government they will have. !e system of governance by the line of the Dalai Lamas may or may not be there. In particular, the opinion of the forward-looking younger generation will be an influential factor.”Similarly, in my 10th March statement of 1988, I stated, “As I have said many times, even the continuation of the institution of the Dalai Lama is for the people to decide.” Since the 1980s, I have repeatedly advised the Kashag, ATPD and the public that Tibetans should take full responsibility for the administration and welfare of the people as if the Dalai Lama were not there.I in formed the Cha i rman o f the Thirteenth ATPD and the then Chief Justice Commissioner that I should be relieved of functions related to my political and administrative status, including such ceremonial responsibilities as the signing of bills adopted by the legislative body. However, my proposal was not even considered. On

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 10th March 2011 Photos : www.dalailama.com


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31st August 2010, during the First Tibetan General Meeting (organized by ATPD), I explained this again in detail. Now, a decision on this important matter should be delayed no longer. All the necessary amendments to the Charter and other related regulations should be made during this session so that I am completely relieved of formal authority.I want to acknowledge here that many of my fellow Tibetans, inside and outside Tibet, have earnestly requested me to continue to give political leadership at this critical time. My intention to devolve political authority derives neither from a wish to shirk responsibility nor because I am disheartened. On the contrary, I wish to devolve authority solely for the benefit of the Tibetan people in the long run. It is extremely important that we ensure the continuity of our exile Tibetan administration and our struggle until the issue of Tibet has been successfully resolved.If we have to remain in exile for several more decades, a time will inevitably come when I will no longer be able to provide leadership. !erefore, it is necessary that we establish a sound system of governance while I remain able and healthy, in order that the exile Tibetan administration can become self-reliant rather than being dependent on the Dalai Lama. If we are able to implement such a system from this time onwards, I will still be able to help resolve problems if called upon to do so. But, if the implementation of such a system is delayed and a day comes when my leadership is suddenly unavailable, the consequent uncertainty might present an overwhelming challenge. !erefore, it is the duty of all Tibetans to make every e"ort to

I would like to begin by saying that it really is a tremendous pleasure and privilege for me to take part in Tibet Foundation’s Silver Jubilee year, and to celebrate their 25th anniversary.It is true to say that Tibet Foundation has made an extraordinary contribution over the last 25 years. As a Tibetan, I am both moved and grateful to see just how much they have achieved, not only in helping the Tibetans in exile and in Tibet, but also in making so many people aware of the message and vision of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and the many aspects of Tibet’s rich and unique culture.How auspicious it is that today, December 10th, is also the 21st anniversary of the day when His Holiness the Dalai Lama was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize, in Oslo in 1989. I had the privilege to be there with His Holiness on that momentous occasion. His Holiness is the patron of Tibet Foundation, and it is his spirit of altruism, compassion and social engagement which we can all see at the very heart of the Foundation’s work.I have always been struck by the imagination and long-term vision behind Tibet

Understanding the Mind: !e Key to Peace and Happiness

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Foundation’s projects. Take for example, their Tibetan Peace Garden, Samten Khyil: “!e Garden of Contemplation”, constructed next to the Imperial War Museum. In fact the Foundation’s remarkable achievements are too numerous for me to list, but let me single out just a few of the more recent ones, which have a particular resonance for me.I would especially like to mention the amazing work done this year by the Foundation with the Yushu Earthquake Relief Fund, as well as in fundraising for the other natural disasters in Tibet and Ladakh. Tibet Foundation has a special long-term plan for reconstruction in Kyegundo, and the Silver Jubilee events have all been dedicated to those who su"ered in this tragedy. I have urged the Rigpa Sangha, and people everywhere, to donate to the Foundation to help the earthquake victims. Turning to the Tibetan community in exile, the Foundation has just now produced a unique and fascinating series of films, entitled Call of the Snow Lion, showing the lives and experiences of Tibetans in exile. I encourage everyone to see them. The Foundation’s work in Mongolia has been truly historic, and now their ground-breaking Mongolian

prevent such an eventuality. As one among the six million Tibetans, bearing in mind that the Dalai Lamas have a special historic and karmic relationship with the Tibetan people, and as long as Tibetans place their trust and faith in me, I will continue to serve the cause of Tibet. Although Article 31 of the Charter spells out provisions for a Council of Regency, it was formulated merely as an interim measure based on past traditions. It does not include provisions for instituting a system of political leadership without the Dalai Lama. !erefore, amendments to the Charter on this occasion must conform to the framework of a democratic system in which the political leadership is elected by the people for a specific term. !us, all the necessary steps must be taken, including the appointment of separate committees, to amend the relevant Articles of the Charter and other regulations, in order that a decision can be reached and implemented during this very session. As a result, some of my political promulgations such as the Draft Constitution for a Future Tibet (1963) and Guidelines for Future Tibet’s Polity (1992) will become ine"ective. !e title of the present institution of the Ganden Phodrang headed by the Dalai Lama should also be changed accordingly.With my prayers for the successful proceedings of the house, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama11th March 2011

Note: Translated from the Tibetan original, which should be considered final and authoritative.


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school textbooks about Buddhism have been translated into Tibetan, which will have an enormous impact in schools among the Tibetan community at large.On a personal note, through the Foundation’s Aid to Tibet program, Rigpa has been able to help children from my home village in Kham, East Tibet, to attend school, and now we are supporting Gyalten School, an award-winning primary school founded by Gyalten Rinpoche, who was here in London this summer. All of these achievements have been made possible because of my old and dear friend Phuntsog Wangyal, chairman of the Tibet Foundation trustees, someone who has devoted his entire life to serving the Tibetan people and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. To my mind, he is one of the most capable Tibetan leaders and brightest lights of our generation, someone who has always championed the eternal virtues and values of Tibet’s culture of compassion. It is also thanks to Riga, his wife, who is a great favourite of everyone here at Rigpa, and the extraordinary dedication of Karma Hardy, the Foundation’s director, as well as Gary Hawkins, Gianpaolo Vetturini, Tsering Dhundup, Susan Burrows and Patrick Ga"ney, and so many loyal and committed volunteers.Tibet Foundation’s success stands as a tribute to their energy, vision and hard work over these last 25 years. !ey have made Tibet Foundation into one of the most prominent, active and effective charities in Europe concerned with Tibet and the Tibetans. Whatever the aims you had in mind when you first started the

Foundation, and whatever His Holiness’s wishes and aspirations have been, I am certain that they have been fulfilled. Let me take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your extraordinary and selfless work. What you are doing is a tremendous example of compassion in action, and I pray that Tibet Foundation continues, flourishes and goes from strength to strength.

I(('% P'2)' 2(! C$(#'(#*'(#Regardless of who we are, the main purpose of our life—you could call it the heart of being human—is to be happy. All of us share the same wish and same right, to seek happiness and to avoid su"ering.We all wish for happiness, peace and satisfaction, and we spend nearly all our time and energy trying to find them. Yet we are often blind to the fact that the real source of happiness and well-being lies within our own mind, and not in the ever-changing conditions of the outside world. As the great saints of the past used to say, it is the foolish that look for happiness outside of themselves, because once you go looking for happiness outside of yourself, then you no longer have any control. Whereas the wise and the learned know that happiness, and the causes of happiness, are all present within our mind and heart.In the modern world, this idea can be diFcult for us to accept, because from the moment we are born, the idea that happiness is to be found outside ourselves is constantly forced onto us from every direction. Our consumerist society o"ers an endless array of

seductive messages that advertise happiness in money, possessions, fame and good looks. !e trouble is that none of them seems to lead to lasting happiness. At the same time, we only need to look around us to see how prevalent anxiety, depression, stress and loneliness have become, as well as how our constant hunger for more and more things is threatening the very survival of our planet. In times like these, there is an increasingly widespread thirst for spiritual answers and for wisdom that can lead to inner peace and happiness. If we look closely, we can see that there are two kinds of happiness. One is based more on physical comfort—you could call it the happiness of pleasure, or the happiness of the senses. !e other is founded on a deeper, mental contentment (chokshé in Tibetan). !e first one is very expensive and often does not satisfy, but the second one will really bring you lasting happiness and contentment. As the Buddha said in !e Dhammapada:

Contentment is the most excellent wealth.Many people spend all their time and energy trying to accumulate and maintain material or ‘outer wealth’. !is leaves them very little opportunity to cultivate ‘inner wealth’, qualities such as compassion and patience; and this imbalance makes them particularly vulnerable, and unable to cope when faced with many of the challenges or crises of life. But if we have this deeper, inner peace and contentment, this inner wealth, then even when we go through su"ering, our minds can still be happy. As His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, this explains how there are some people who can have every material

advantage, and yet remain dissatisfied and discontent; while there are others who are always satisfied and content, even amidst the most diFcult of circumstances.

E92*"("(0 W.2# W' R'2331 N''!Of course, basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, health and education are crucial for all of us to live healthy and happy lives. Beyond these, however, we need to ask ourselves honestly: how many things really deserve our life’s precious time and energy? Many of the things in our life are there just to satisfy temporarily our latest craving, but they only serve to strengthen our habit of grasping. !e more e"ort we make to accumulate mundane pleasures, the more fiercely we want to chase after more.

In the Lalita Vistara Sutra, the Buddha advises:

Your enjoyment of the pleasures of desire,Like drinking salt water, will never bring satisfaction.

In fact, you could say that “the principal characteristic of genuine happiness is inner peace and contentment.” If you have contentment and inner peace as your basis or your ground, your mind will be relaxed and at ease. If the mind is relaxed and at ease, then no matter what diFculties or crises you encounter, you will not be disturbed. Your basic sense of well-being will not be undermined. As a result, you will be able to carry on your everyday life, your work and your responsibilities more eFciently, and your mind will have the wisdom to discern what to do and what not to do. In turn, your life will become happier, and when


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diFculties arise, you will even be able to turn them to your advantage. So, for your own inner peace and stability, taking care of your mind and heart is crucial. Once your own mind is more at peace, then both inner and outer harmony will automatically follow.

T.' E&&'()' $: #.' B7!!.2’& T'2)."(0The entire teaching of the Buddha can be summed up into this one single line: “To tame this mind of ours”; or “to tame, transform and conquer this mind of ours.”Our mind is like a crazy elephant, trampling everywhere. It follows past habits, anticipates the future, and gets caught up in present destructive emotions, lost in whatever arises. Left to its own devices, it can lead us into intense su"ering. But if we can tame the mind then nothing can frighten us, because all fear comes from a mind that is untamed. !e Buddha explained in the sutras that all anxiety, fears and su"ering arise from minds overpowered by delusion and distraction. So, there is nothing to fear except our own untamed mind.According to the founder of cognitive therapy, when we have a strong outburst of emotion, anger for example, we mask reality by up to 90%, adding to it all our prejudices and our distorted view of things. When we see situations from the point of view of anger, we can say that there is 90% mental projection and only 10% that really corresponds to reality. On the other hand, if we have a calm and serene mind, it will be much easier for us to be objective and see reality as it is.

!e mind is the root of everything: the creator of happiness and the creator of su"ering; the creator of samsara and the creator of nirvana. Samsara is the cycle of existence, birth and death, characterized by su"ering, and determined by harmful emotions and our actions (karma). I find this quotation from Shantideva very moving:

!ough longing to be happy, in their ignorance,!ey destroy their own well-being, as if it were their worst enemy.Although they long to be rid of su"ering,!ey rush headlong towards su"ering itself.

Nirvana is, literally, the state beyond su"ering and sorrow; it can be said to be buddhahood itself, the state of enlightenment.As the poet John Milton said in ‘Paradise Lost’:

!e mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

T.' A44'2%2()' 2(! E&&'()' $: M"(!As one great master said:

Samsara is mind turned outwardly, lost in its projections; Nirvana is mind turned inwardly, recognizing its true nature.

In fact, the main advice for this life is to purify the appearances of the mind (our projections), and realize the nature of mind.When we speak about the mind, it has two main aspects: the appearance of mind, our

thoughts and emotions; and the essence or nature of mind. !oughts and emotions are like the sun’s rays, whereas the nature of mind is like the sun itself. We are always trying to understand the mind by understanding our thoughts and emotions, but they are always changing. !ey are endless. !at is why the great master Padmasambhava said:

Don’t seek to cut (or investigate) the root of phenomena:Cut (or investigate) the root of mind.Once the mind’s root has been found,You’ll know one thing, yet all is thereby freed (or resolved), But if the root of Mind you fail to find,You will know everything, but nothing understand.

!e crucial point is the direction in which our mind is turned: whether it is outwardly looking, lost in thoughts and emotions; or inwardly seeing, recognizing its true nature. Inwardly seeing does not mean becoming introverted, and getting even more involved in your thoughts and emotions. !e key point is not to look into the thoughts and

emotions, but to look into the essence of mind, directly.Unfortunately we don’t leave our mind alone. We always fabricate and contrive, by thinking. We don’t allow the mind to just be. !e main thing is to turn your mind inwardly, to bring your mind home. When you really learn meditation on the highest level, there is a way to find balance, to leave your mind in a state of detached equilibrium, a spacious abiding. Slowly, there’s a deep settling and a deep peace; clarity, insight and wisdom dawn, and you begin to find your own ground, your own nature, beyond your thoughts. !en you realize that thoughts are not you, emotions are not you. You are much bigger than your thoughts and emotions, and you are not limited by them. !ey can come and go.If you tame, transform, and conquer your mind, then you will transform your own perceptions and your experience. Thereby even circumstances and outer appearances will begin to change and appear di"erently.


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At the time of writing this newsletter, we are commemorating the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that struck Yushu (Kyekudo) in east Tibet on the 14th April 2010. ;e earthquake caused the destruction of eighty percent of the town, killing more than 2,000 people and leaving the overwhelming majority of survivors homeless. Tibet Foundation was one of the first Tibetan charities from the West that immediately sent emergency relief aid worth £59,000. (Details can be found on the Foundation’s website and in our Newsletter no.58.)

An agreement for a long-term sustainable health initiative for the people of Yushu was signed in August 2010 with the Yushu Prefecture Tibetan Hospital and with the full support of the Prefecture Health Department.

Yushu Prefecture Health Initiative

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!is is a joint undertaking between the Department of Health, the Yushu Prefecture Tibetan Hospital and Tibet Foundation. !e duration of the programme is for five years at an estimated cost of £1,000,000 – one-third to be paid by the Health Department and Tibetan Hospital, and two-thirds by Tibet Foundation.

A!*"("&#%2#"$( $: #.' P%$0%2**' !e programme is under the supervision of a three-member committee consisting

Lhasa in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Xining in the Qinghai Province. Also included will be other experts in preventive health care and modern medical care systems related especially to mothers and babies, and the health of women in general.

Due primarily to logistical diFculties and language barriers, hampered also by the severe weather conditions in Yushu over the past couple of months, it has taken longer than expected to finalise the details of the programme. More time is still needed to verify the cost of the necessary machinery, and to assess the desired and expected outcomes.

Whilst these tasks are being carried out and the building construction work is in progress, Yushu Hospital would like Tibet Foundation to help begin the first stage of the Advanced Medical Training project in June this year.

T"+'#2( M'!")"('!e history of Tibetan medicine goes back thousands of years. A unique and highly developed tradition, it is practised all over Tibet. In most remote areas it continues to be the medicine that the Tibetan people trust and that ordinary people can a"ord.

Yushu has material and human resources readily available within their own prefecture. Based on our assessment of the situation on the ground and in consultation with the local people and authorities, we have agreed to support their project to produce Tibetan medicine by replacing all the machinery that has been destroyed.

P%$!7)#"$( $: T"+'#2( M'!")"('!e hospital needs to buy new machinery in order to produce a suFcient amount of medicine. An estimated budget of £419,585

of its leader Mr Lang Shi Ching (Deputy Chairman of the Yushu Prefecture) and two assistants, Mr Lo !inyi (Deputy Director of the United Front Work Department) and Mr Tsewang Gyatso (Director of the Yushu Prefecture Tibetan Hospital).

It is to be administered by a working committee comprising the Deputy Director of the hospital, Mr Tashi, and two assistants, Dr Phubu Tsering and Dr Gelek Gyatso.

Tibet Foundation will be consulted at every stage of the programme. Yushu Hospital is responsible to the Foundation for all funds donated by the charity. Eight highly qualified Tibetan doctors will take an active part in supporting this work: Dr Karma Gelek, Dr Karma !upten, Dr Gudrak, Dr Ledhar, Dr Zamlha, Dr Karma Gyal, Dr Phubu Tsering and Dr Jadrak.

In addition, two more Tibetan doctors with specialist knowledge of the Tibetan medical tradition will be invited from


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to manufacture Tibetan medicine has already been received by the Foundation. Machinery specifications and costs are still to be checked and verified. Once this is completed we would like to begin this particular project, hopefully by the end of the year.

C73#"52#"$( $: %2%' *'!")23 .'%+&A draft project proposal to cultivate medical herbs has also been submitted to the Foundation, with an estimated budget of £519,357. Further information will be available as soon as details have been finalised.

F7%#.'% %'&'2%). 2(! !'5'3$4*'(# $: T"+'#2( *'!")"('Details of this will become available in due course as and when the project develops.

A!52()'! M'!")23 T%2"("(0 During the 2010 Yushu Earthquake we witnessed an acute shortage of qualified Tibetan health workers and doctors in the prefecture who could instantly meet the demand to treat thousands of patients. Many hundreds of skilled doctors and health workers had to be brought in from outside Tibetan areas. !ose who came did a great job of addressing the immediate needs of the local people, but this was not without diFculties due to a lack of knowledge of the local language and culture.

Such problems highlighted the necessity and provided an opportunity for the hospital to establish long-term measures to address the situation. It would like to begin training and improving the skills of local doctors and

health workers so that the hospital will be able to provide adequate healthcare for the local people in the future.

!e plan is to provide the necessary skills and training to 450 existing Tibetan doctors and health workers in the prefecture over a five-year period. Yushu Hospital would like to start the first course of this Advanced Medical Training in June 2011.

It will provide a three-month course for 46 Tibetan doctors and health workers selected from five counties in the Yushu Prefecture. Many of them are self-taught, ‘barefoot’ doctors, or health workers approved by the government to work as health professionals. All of them are selected on the basis of their commitment to the healthcare profession and long-standing service to the local people, representing major Tibetan-populated areas in the prefecture.

!e objective is to improve their existing Tibetan medical knowledge and to train them in appropriate modern health care systems so that they can provide a better service. As a result the hospital will no longer need to depend solely on resources from outside the prefecture. After receiving training, these Tibetan doctors and health workers will all return to their respective areas and continue to serve the local population for a minimum of ten years.

At the end of the initial project, achievements will be assessed by the administration in the field and also by an independent committee appointed by the Foundation in London. Based on this, Tibet Foundation will then consider a plan to continue further courses over the next five years.

Estimated budget calculated in Chinese RMB for a period of 3 monthsPound Sterling at the rate of 10.59 RMB = £1

Chinese RMB £ SterlingStethoscopes at 35 x 46 students 1,610 152Blood pressure monitors at 90 x 46 students 4,140 391Doctors’ gowns at 90 x 46 students 4,140 391First aid kits at 200 x 46 students 9,200 869Writing pad and books at 500 x 46 students 23,000 2,171Utilities at 85 x 46 students 3,910 370Travel costs at 200 x 46 students 9,200 869Rent at 900 x 46 students 41,400 3,909Training stipend at 1,800 x 46 students 82,800 7,819Meals at 900 x 46 students 41,400 3,9093 cooks at 4,500 for 3 months 13,500 1,275Rooms for 3 teachers at 9,000 for 3 months 27,000 2,550Tuition fees for 462 lessons at 35 16,170 1,527Honorarium for 3 teachers at 2,000 each 6,000 567Meals for 3 teachers at 4,500 each 13,500 1,275

296,970 28,044Contingency 8% 23,758 2,243Cost of monitoring the project 15,000 1,416

Total 335,728 31, 703

T%2"("(0 P%$<')# B7!0'#!e estimated budget for the first three-month Advanced Medical Training project is £31,702. !is will cover a wide range of needs for 46 students, including: stethoscopes, blood pressure monitors, writing pads, instruction manuals, board and lodging, travel and training stipends, plus tuition fees and honorariums for three course teachers. Details are attached. !e hospital itself will pay all field administration costs.

At this juncture we are appealing to all our supporters to help the Tibetan people in Yushu by making a donation to this project.

For your convenience figures are given in pounds sterling (approximate) to enable you to donate, as you would wish, to any one of the fifteen categories mentioned.

Whatever you choose to support and any amount you are able to give will make a big di"erence. Please, your help is needed now.!ank you, as always, for your continuing and generous support.

Phuntsog WangyalFounding Trustee of Tibet Foundation


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!is page: School children with blankets and clothing provided by the FoundationFacing page, survivors of the earthquaketop right: a child survivor cared for by one of his relativesBottom: a mother and daughter just after the earthquake


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I(#%$!7)#"$( !is is a 15 day outdoor field trip cum pilgrimage tour to Bodh Gaya, Varanasi and many other buddhist places from December 30, 2010 to January 13, 2011 for 65 children of Tibetan Homes Foundation. !e children were from grade VI to X. !is year the project was implemented for larger number of children as there were 20 additional children from another holiday program which could not be organized.

Tibetan Homes Foundation Mussoorie

S7**2%1!e highlight of this pilgrimage tour has been the increase in the number of children from 45 to 65 (one student could not participate as he was sick at the last moment). On the whole the tour was successful and especially for the children it was an extremely enriching and once in a life time experience.

The tour start date was December 30th and preparations had begun much earlier. !e selection of children, briefing, organizing of bus and accommodations at the places of visit were all done before hand. Early morning the group of 64 students and 5 sta" members left with a warm farewell

from sta" and students. !e first destination was Bodhgaya and the group reached safely there on the next day. Like previous years the group checked into the large rooms of the Mahayana guesthouse.

The group stayed in Bodhgaya until January 4th during which they visited temples in and around Bodhgaya - The Mahabodhi temple and the Bodhi tree under which Prince Siddhartha sat and attained enlightenment to become the Supreme Buddha, Buddhist temples of Japan, Bhutan, ;ailand, Burma, Rajgir, (in Tibetan we called it Gyalpoe khab) the holy place where Lord Buddha gave second teachings to his followers, Big stupa built by Japanese people at the hill top in Rajgir, the Nalanda University and Noranjna (in

Tibetan we called it lodruk kawa) believed to be the place where Lord Buddha practiced austerities for six years.

!e highlight of visit to Bodhgaya was the personal audience and blessings the children received on January 2, 2011 from Gyalwa Karmapa. During their stay at Bodhgaya the children also participated in a candle-light vigil expressing support to ‘Tibetans for a Vegetarian Society’ and as a group concerned on environment and cleanliness they also ran a cleanliness drive cleaning the campus of Mahabodhi Temple.

Early morning on January 5 the group left Bodhgaya and headed to Vaishali (the place where Lord Buddha gave third turning wheel of Dharma) Here they also visited the great

Left: at the Japanese Stupa - World Peace Stupa at Rajghir

Right: for most students from Tibet, the first ever boat ride on the holy Ganges river in Benaras

A((723 P"30%"*20' 2(! E!7)2#"$(23 P%$0%2* - R'4$%#, /-,--,,


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Approaching HH Gyalwa Karmapa I was very nervous as I was the first to o"er a scarf. He wished us all Happy New Year and expressed His wish to visit Mussoorie”

—Boat ride over the Ganges “ I have never been on a boat before. It was an unforgettable experience.”

—“It’s more like a dream to have an audience with Gyalwa Karmapa at Bodhgaya. !anks

to all for their support who have made this possible for us” - Dawa Dolma, Home no. 5

—During the pilgrimage tour, we came across many Indians staying in very poor conditions with very basic shelter and food. I consider myself very lucky to be blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and thank all the supporters of THF for providing us

An audience with HH the Karmapa XVII at Bodh Gaya,2011

Sixty-five boys and girls go on the pilgrimage tour of holy Buddhist sites in Bihar 2011

INCOME Amount (Rs)1 Receipt from EX- MUSSOORIE ASSOC. NEPAL (Rec no. 8750) 159,1252 Receipt from TIBET FOUNDATION, UK (TO BE RECEIVED) 181,265 TOTAL 340,390

EXPENSES1 Food charges @ Rs. 110/- per day for 64 students 105,6002 Pocket money @ Rs. 40/- ped day for 64 students 38,4003 Bus Hiring Charges @ Rs. 80,000/- per bus for 2 buses 160,0004 Sta" food and DA @Rs. 4,125/- for 5 sta" members 20,6255 Miscellaneous Expenses (Books / photos / Entry tickets etc.) 15,765 TOTAL 340,390

S7**2%1 $: I()$*' 2(! E94'(&'&

pillar made by King Ashoka and di"erent temples of Srilanka, Japanese and !ailand. Later the group visited Kaushinagar, the holy place where Lord Buddha breathed his last and entered Mahaparinirvana.

On Jan 6, 2011 the group reached Varanasi. Here they were accommodated in a Indian School with the help of ex-students studying at Varanasi. !is time the group spent more days at Varanasi as His Holiness the Dalai Lama was visiting on January 10, 2011. During their stay the group visited the place where Lord Buddha gave first dharma teaching to his followers, the national museum, deer park and the Central Institute for Tibetan Higher studies. !e group also visited the holy river Ganga at Varanasi and was able to get a boat ride over the Ganges which was beautiful. On January 10th the group was blessed with a glimpse of His Holiness the Dalai Lama who was visiting Varanasi. !e students returned back home on January 13 safely.

!e group takes this opportunity with much gratitude to thank everyone involved in making this tour happen. This trip has been very special for the children as they enjoyed, learnt and were blessed in many ways. A special thank you to Tibet Foundation, UK for sponsoring this project and we hope they will continue to support this project in future.

S$*' I*4%'&&"$(& $: #.' &#7!'(#&—Tashi Choedon of grade VI wrote in her dairy: “Hello! My dear diary. For last two days we have been travelling on the bus and I have had headache and I was in no mood to write. Today I feel better. First of all, my heartfelt thanks to our sponsors – Tibet Foundation, UK, and Ex-Mussorie Association, Nepal. And then to Tibetan Homes Foundation for this wonderful opportunity to go to Buddhist holy places and learn about the life of Lord Buddha.


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Four High School pupils even ran their own Performance workshops in Drama, Dance and Music working with younger Year 5 pupils at the nearby Highfield Middle School.

Year 9 star fundraiser Kate Cairns said “ I felt guilty that other children are su"ering and it was simple and fun to do something to help”. Wesley Proctor commented “I watched a film about how a Tibetan girl had to escape through the mountains – I found it very moving that she had to go through so much just to get an education”. Adam Roberts said “ It was really interesting and sad to learn about why these children are

Prudhoe Community High School Top Fundraisers

refugees and why they need to escape from their own country.” Heather Patton thought “I enjoyed learning how they live in other cultures. I was sad that they have no contact with their families and wondered how I would cope in the same situation”.

Funds raised so far by the school have been used to buy a wood-burning stove, hot water boiler, warm quilts and pillows, basic furniture, and washing and cooking equipment for the school, where 80% of the pupils are refugees.

To round o" the week pupils had the chance to enjoy a proper Tibetan school dinner with a percentage of sales also going

children a secure life and good education in exile. - Penpa Chungtak of Class VI from Home no. 7

—I felt nostalgic on seeing the deer and other animals at the Deer park in Sarnath. She said, “It made me miss my parents in Tibet” - Dawa Lhamo, Home no. 30

C$()37&"$( On behalf of Tibetan Homes Foundation

we take his opportunity to thank the Tibet Foundation, UK and Ex-Mussorie Association, Nepal for their support towards this Annual Special Pilgrimage Project for our children.

to the funds raised. !e school flies the Tibetan flag every Losar, and pupils learn about human rights issues through the link between the schools in Northumberland and in the Himalayas.

Tibet Foundation would like to thank Yvonne Clark for organising the fundraising event and the pupils who took part in raising amazing £500 (about 36,000 Rs). This money has been donated towards the expenses of a group of students in the Tibetan Homes Foundation in Mussoorie who had no homes to go for their holidays went on an educational tour to Buddhist holy places. See pages 16-19

Your financial support to our children here gives them a special reason to smile and to experience something extremely holy and spiritual. !is support from you has been tremendous and we take great pride in letting you know that with the success of this year’s program we would very much want to continue this project again and take this opportunity to request you for your continued support to the program. !ank you once again for everything.Sonam T Khorlatsang, March 23, 2011 General Secretary

Enterprising Year 9 pupils at PCHS celebrated Tibetan New Year (Losar 5th March) this week by raising an amazing £500 pounds. Each pupil was loaned £1 and the challenge was to make as much profit as possible, with all funds raised going to help pupils at the Tibetan School in Mussoorie in the Himalayas. Organiser of events Yvonne Clark, Head of Drama at PCHS, said “It is rewarding how in these times of financial diFculty, our pupils and local community are still determined to do something to help others”.

Pupils raised the money in all sorts of ways, from dog-walking to car-washing.


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After the Chinese invasion and just before 1959, my parents fled Tibet to the settlements of Southern India. I was born in Mundgod, India. It was from here that I obtained a scholarship to attend a school in East Sussex and have now lived in London for over 20 years.

In the summer of 2010 I decided to fulfil my dream to embark on a journey to the land of my fathers’, or ‘phayul’. I travelled alone, and with great expectation, exhilaration and anticipation. Prior to leaving, I made contact with the Tibet Foundation who I knew had aid programs in that area. It was my intention to experience my ‘fatherland’ by connecting with the everyday concerns and realities of my country.

Kardze1 or ‘beautiful white land’, situated in north-west of Sichuan province, is predominately a Tibetan area and it is supposedly a 15-hour drive from Chengdu, passing through the historical border town of Dartsedo or Kangding.

With no Mandarin and a limited knowledge and understanding of the local

1 Kardze also spelled Kandze, Garzi or Gansi is the name of a town, the capital of Kandze County as well as the name of a Prefecture – Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture that has 18 counties.

Tibetan dialect of ‘kham-khay’, I set out on my journey. I soon realised there was a vast di"erence between the local Tibetan dialect and that spoken by my parents, commonly spoken in Lhasa. As expected, asking for directions or bartering a seat on a 4x4 was a major challenge. !e art of gesticulation, applicable internationally, proved useful in getting the desired outcome. Much to my amusement (and confusion) a Tibetan friend from London had arranged for me to meet up with a local contact living in Chengdu to act as a guide to the stranger I had become in my fatherland. She was from Amdo and her dialect was even more unfathomable than the ‘kham-khay’ I had earlier been exposed to with great inadequacy. By now, I had become reasonably skilled in the art of gesture and facial expression, and could eventually communicate my intentions through dinner and the accompanying Tibetan singing and dancing that are regular events in the local tea-houses. It left me thinking about how travellers communicated in old Tibet. Could this language barrier have hindered communication to the point where it led to the country’s eventual downfall?

Bruised and battered by the rough, pot-holed road to the dusty town of

Kardze in our 4x4, fifteen hours slowly turned to eighteen. Our vehicle was tossed and vibrated by the large and seemingly endless oncoming construction vehicles, indicative of a land in transition under Chinese occupation. The streets were piled high with rubble and the dust would swirl in devils against the backdrop of a fading sun. Sprinklings of conspicuously, colourful traditional Tibetan wooden houses were interspersed amongst the backdrop of the more serious, concrete, Chinese architecture. It felt like the encroaching concrete was attempting to su"ocate the Tibetan spirit that had laid its roots here thousand years ago.

!e more expensive shops were mostly run by Chinese traders, the rents being too high for the slightly more relaxed and apparently less industrious Tibetans. !e Tibetans in Kardze were renowned for being vocal in their protests against the assimilation policies of the Chinese occupation. In March 2008, the vitriolic diatribe against the Dalai Lama and the continued indoctrination of Chinese cultural imperialism enraged this once small and sleepy town to breaking point. !ey called for Tibetan independence and the return of the Dalai Lama. !ey waved the Tibetan national flag, banned in Tibet, and many were arrested, beaten and imprisoned. As a result of careful Chinese

A Journey to My FatherlandB1 D.$(!74 N2*0123

Chengdu, Capital of Sichuan ProvinceYa’an, Sichuan

Rongbatsa, Garze County, Ganzi PrefectureKangding (Dardo), Capital of Garze Prefecture, Sichuan

Dhondup started his journey from Chengdu, passing through Ya'an, Kangding, Garze to Rongpatsa where the school is.

India

ChinaTibet


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suppression, there were no images or video clips of these protests like Tiananmen Square so much went unreported.

On visiting Kardze, this suppression was clear. Tibetans survived by running small businesses and fed their families by growing their own food, toiling the land as they had done for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Chinese. Most families supplemented their crops of barley and soya beans by tending to livestock for milk and other dairy products. My extended family in ‘Lhanying nga’ village were typical of this region. Here, my father and uncle grew up as children before being sent to the local monastery of Dhargye Gonpa some ten kilometres away. !is

Top: !e library

Middle: Mr Riga administrator in front of old and new o#ce

Bottom: Teachers’ study room

was the local tradition where it was expected that boys either joined the monastery or farmed the land. In the mid-fifties they left home to join the large Drepung monastery in Lhasa. When the Lhasa uprisings erupted in 1959, they decided to seek refuge in India.

Some fifty-one years later, I am here in Dhargye monastery. Before my journey, I arranged links with a local Tibetan school, the Gyalten School, to obtain a snapshot of the state of education in Tibet. !e Gyalten School is one of the few private Tibetan schools in Rongpatsa in Kardze County. It was founded in 1992 by Gyalten Rinpoche, one of the eight reincarnated Lamas of Dhargye monastery. !e land was donated by the local government and the school was developed gradually over the years with money provided by private individuals and non-governmental organisations such as the Tibet Foundation. !e Tibet Foundation provides the school with an annual donation of £12,000. In addition, the Foundation contributes towards clothing, furniture and sta" salaries. !e Gyalten School is a primary school for 350 children and 30 sta". It is privately run and relies heavily on funding from the Tibetan Foundation.

!e school has a reputation for providing a first class education to its students and is the only school in the region where English is taught as a third language; the second being Mandarin. In the past three years, the school has managed to build accommodation for the small number of boarders that live too far for the daily commute. !e local government has the means to provide one meal a day for 100 of the school’s students,

whilst the Tibet Foundation provides food for the remaining 250. The school has ambitions to provide 3 meals a day, subject to additional funding. !e school also acts as a centre for the practice and study of traditional Tibetan medicine, providing free primary health care to the local population. Traditional painting also flourished at the school, producing the artists that decorate the temples and monasteries in the area. Despite what appears to be the last Tibetan outpost in this remote area, the migration of many of its students continues to the very place in India where my parents made their home and where I was born.

It was an honour to see how these students can excel even under greatly challenged circumstances. As a Tibetan, having travelled through my country and being challenged by the language barrier, I know now that the future for Tibet lies not only in that one fundamental human right of a good education, but also in a shared language which transgresses borders and unifies us in a collective vision for enabling the potential of Tibetan children. I remain honoured and optimistic to have witnessed at firsthand the continued struggle and everyday challenges of Tibetans in order to preserve their very separate identities in a diFcult yet dignified coexistence with Chinese. As I returned to London, I felt closer to land that was once my fathers’.

Dhondup Namgyal is a Science Teacher in an English school in London


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An Update of Gyalten School and Tibetan Medical School, Kandze +1 G123#'( R"(4$).' ,

1 * Ven. Gyalten Rinpoche is the spiritual Director of Dhargye monastery and founding Director of Gy-alten School in Kandze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. As a major religious figure, Gyalten Rinpoche is an Executive Member of the Buddhist Association of China, Vice Chair of the Buddhist Association of Sichuan Province, Chair of the Buddhist Association of Kandze, TAR and Vice Chair of the Political Consultative Committee of Kandze Tibet Autonomous Prefecture.

It was a great pleasure to be able to visit the UK at the invitation of Tibet Foundation and to meet old friends and make new ones... I’m particularly delighted to have been able to participate in inter-faith dialogues and discussions in England and Scotland in the summer of 2010.

Today let me introduce myself and our work that is supported by many sponsors through Tibet Foundation, UK. I’m the head of the Dargye Gonpa whose full name is Gedhen Samten Jangchub Choeling Tashi Dargye Gon. At present there are 326 monks. !is is an historically well known monastery. We preserve and maintain the traditional curriculum of scriptural studies, debates, contemplation studying both the sutra and tantra texts as well as ritual practices, religious music, thangka painting, meditational retreats and so on.

The people in the local area freely participate in the religious events and ceremonies of the monastery such as reading scriptures from the library, joining prayer recitals, making butter-lamp offerings, prostrations and circumambulating holy

shrines, stupas and the monastery. !e local populace comprising of both farming and nomadic communities but the majority are subsistence farmers.

!ere are programmes to help alleviate the poverty and suffering of the poorer sections of the community. But there is always scope for private initiative to help the poor and needy. On 1st October 1994 I took the initiative to establish the Gyalten School as a result of my long standing ambition to do something practical to benefit the local people on a long term basis. Realizing that the proper education of the children is the best way to guarantee health, knowledge, broadmindedness, skills and independence, the school was established with the approval of the Kandze Prefecture People’s Government. !e school was named Gedhen Samten Jangchub Chophel Kandze Gyalten Getsa School.

During the course of seventeen years (1994-2010) a total of 3,921children have passed through the school, many of whom had gone on to secondary and higher education, and are now gainfully employed

in professional positions. About 250 of the students have embraced vocational training such as tailoring, embroidery, arts and crafts and are now able live independent lives. Every child who has come to this school has gone out as a responsible, literate and socially contributing and law abiding citizen and as such the school has received much appreciation from the public.

As for the teaching sta", we have recruited over the years 7 Tibetan language teachers, 9 Chinese language teachers, 13 English language teachers, 4 Arts and Crafts teachers, 2 Maths teachers, 7 Tibetan medicine teachers, and 2 Embroidery teachers.

!e school textbooks used are the very texts prescribed for the five regions for the Primary school levels in Tibetan, Chinese and English languages, Maths, Arts, PE, Biology, Botany and chemistry.

In July 2010, 37 students passed their County School Examinations. 28 students went to middle school in Kandze, one to a middle school in Lhasa and another to Chengdu. One student joined the Tibetan medicine course and the remaining 6 students could not continue their further studies and returned to their families in their respective villages. On 15th of August 2010, 37 new students were admitted to the school.

C."3!%'( 3'2%("(0 T"+'#2( !is year, 2011, after the winter break the new academic year starts on the 8th of March with 373 students (175 boys and 198 girls). !e school has 12 classes including classes for painting, Tibetan medicine and tailoring.

From top to bottom:Gyalten Lobsang Jampa Rinpoche (2010)A Chinese language classA maths class in progress


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Gyalton School!is pageTop: One of the new school buildings Above: School Jeep donated by Tibet Foundation, UKLeft: Children learning TibetanOpposite page top: Dhondup Namgyal with Tibetan doctors from Gyalten ClinicMiddle: Dhondup Namgyal with Gyalten School childrenBottom: School children


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B$2%!"(0 S).$$3We are happy to announce that on 21st of March 2011, the school has opened its boarding accommodations for 256 students (127 boys and 129 girls). Gyalten School has now become a Boarding School. Students are no longer need to walk long distances to and from school especially during the rainy season and bitter cold winters. !ey have regular morning exercises, assembly and two sessions of homework periods in the evening. !eir families feel that the financial burden has been reduced considerably and they are happy that their children are safely looked after and their behavior and studies are properly supervised.

I()$*'From September 2005 Tibet Foundation UK has been o"ering for two terms £5,964.60 (RMP 64,000) towards school meals (one meal a day) for 200 students and a set of clothing for 300 students. From 2010 the Foundation has increased its contribution to £7,455.73 (RMB80, 000). !e Kandze County government has offered £1,521 (16,320) for 170 students. Generally, the school has to provide lunch for their 373 students and breakfast and dinner for 256 students.

E94'(!"#7%'Each term consists of four and half months. Excluding Sundays, there are 109 days during which the Foundation provides funding for lunch for 229 students and sta". £0.20 (RMB 2.10) is provided for each meal, which is short of 50 cents per meal amounting to a total of £1,157 (RMB12, 418).

Since 2003, a Tibetan medical teaching school has been established after obtaining oFcial approval. It’s named Gyalten Phende Hospital. Initially we had 14 Tibetan medical doctors but currently there are 6. It is administered by a Management Committee with the help of Accounts oFce, Managers and an Accountant.

Tibet Foundation, UK has been most generous in extending help to our school and medical school whilst they were providing relief aid to the victims of the sever snow storms that devastated areas of Dzachu ka in Kandze prefecture. In particular, since15th Sept 2005, Tibet Foundation has been providing midday meals for 200 day scholars of our school as well as funding the construction of the hostels, dining room and all the relevant amenities.

Tibet Foundation has also provided funding help for the buildings project of the Tibetan medical school, procurement of herbs and medicines and so on. Phuntsog Wangyal, the founding Director of Tibet Foundation, UK has visited us several times and inspected the facilities, met with the members of sta" and o"ered valuable advice and guidance.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been supporting the various charitable projects of Tibet Foundation, and as beneficiaries here in Kandze, I would like to thank you all for your kind and generous help and support. I must also acknowledge here the far sighted policies of the local, regional and central government for allowing us to run all these socially useful and productive programs with the help of Tibet Foundation. !ank you all.

N7*+'% $: &#7!'(#& 2(! )32&&'& "( G123#'( S).$$3 - /=#. D')'*+'% /-,-Class Names Male Female Single parent Orphans Kindergarten 78 32 46 3 1st Year 44 21 23 8 12nd Year 40 23 17 13rd Year A 32 16 16 53rd Year B 32 18 14 4th Year A 31 9 22 64th Year B 30 13 17 35th Year 30 13 17 4 16th Year 27 15 12 2Medicine 4 4Painting 22 22Tailoring 2 1 1TOTAL 373 183 190 32 2

Gyalten School dining hall

Tibet Foundation would like to thank all those who are supporting the Gyalten School, especially Sogyal Rinpoche and Rigpa International; Tove Larsen, Friends of Tibet, Norway; and Geshe Pema Samten, Dhargye Foundation in Germany.


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Mira, a Chemical Engineering student from Malaysia, responsible co-ordinating the Central Asian Languages, contacted Tibet Foundation for a Tibetan to introduce Tibetan language and culture. I participated in the language festival to talk about and introduce the nature of Tibetan language as well as the charitable work of Tibet Foundation, both inside and outside Tibet in promoting and preserving Tibetan language, culture, as well as extending help to Tibetans in the areas of health, education and poverty relief.

B2)60%$7(!:!e founder of the International languages festival is Dennis Keefe, an Esperanto Speaker. !e first Language Festival (LF) was held on March 11, 1995 in France, in the city of Tour where 32 languages were taught covering reading and writing. By the third year in France, the Festival had 85 languages taught, 254 courses, and over 3600 attendees. Soon, the idea of the language festival spread to Russia, Finland and some 20 countries. In 2008, the first Language Festival was held in China during the course of which over 130 languages and dialects were taught.

W.2# >2& #.' 32(0720' )$7%&' 3"6'?Basically it was intended as an introduction to complete beginners who had an interest in the language of one’s interest and choice. I was there to talk about the Tibetan language. !e organizers has arranged two sessions on spoken Tibetan and two on reading Tibetan and another two presentations on the charitable work of Tibet Foundation over the weekend of March 12th and 13th.

My presentation on the spoken aspect of Tibetan language was focused on the ergative nature whereby the order of the sentence is Subject-Object and Verb as opposed to languages like English with the sentence order of Subject - Verb and Object. For example, the sentence in English language, “!e Yak (subject) + kicked (verb) + Dawa (object)” is conveyed in Tibetan as, “Yak (agentive case) + Dawa (object or the patient) + kicked (verb + auxiliary verb to denote tense)”.

After introducing some of the basic grammatical points, personal pronouns for e.g. I, we, you, he, she, they; verb forms like go, going, went and will go, we had drill exercises in constructing various sentences with sentences like:1. Essential qualities: I am/am not Tibetan. You are/are not English. He/she is/isn’t Chinese.2. Person and Tense changes: I’m/am not going to Lhasa. He is/is not going to Tibet.3. I went/didn’t go to Tibet. He went/didn’t go to India. He will/will not go to Beijing.

I used the pattern drills based on the Fluent Tibetan course-book, to familiarise the receptive audience about the peculiarities of Tibetan syntax and grammar. It’s great fun all around as learners who had never before heard or studied Tibetan language, responding positively and with a quick grasp of the nuances that make Tibetan an ergative language.

As it was not possible to teach a language within the space of forty minutes, I suggested useful websites to visit for those who wished to check out Tibetan language as absolute beginners. !e free online website www.digitaldialects.com is a very useful resource. !e Digital Dialects website features free to use online games for learning languages including Tibetan. Language resources include games for learning phrases, numbers, useful words, spelling, verb conjugation and alphabets. I recommend the site to anyone interested in browsing the Tibetan language site for checking out the Tibetan alphabets, vowels, superscribed and subjoined letters, numbers and phrases with interactive games to test your learning.

As for the introductory talk on the work of Tibet Foundation, I used power point presentation to describe in brief the various programmes as described in detail on our website at www.tibet-foundation.org

!e talk highlighted the devastation and loss of life in the earthquake of Yushu on 14th April 2010 and the emergency aid provided, funds raised so far by Tibet Foundation to date and the five year Yushu Prefecture Health Initiative. The Government has already committed RMB 48,000,000 for the Yushu Tibetan Medical Centre project on

Tibet Foundation at the International Language Festival, University of SheFeld M2%). ,/ - ,@#. /-,, +1 TD G$(62#&2(0

!e SheFeld University International Languages Festival featured introduction to some 150 di"erent languages and dialects from across the world, including special languages and codes such as Sign Language or Braille. !e International Students Committee’s aim in organizing this event was “to spark participants’ interests for language and linguistics, whilst at the same time demonstrating the diverse culture and dialects present in SheFeld University.”

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a land area of 12,000 square meters. !e proposed programme comprises four projects: (1) Production of Tibetan medicine(2) Advanced training of Tibetan barefoot doctors (3) Cultivation of rare medical herbs, and (4) Further research and development of Tibetan medicine. !is is a joint undertaking between the Department of Health, the Yushu Prefecture Tibetan Hospital and Tibet Foundation.

!e duration of the programme is for five years at an estimated cost of £1,000,000 – one-third to be paid by the Health Department and Tibetan Hospital, and two-thirds by Tibet Foundation.

Further details on estimated and actual costing are available at the website of Tibet Foundation.

Online and regular home tuition in Tibetan language tuition o"ered by Tsering D Gonkatsang, BA; B Ed. MA (Oxford) M. Ed. CTEFLA, PG Diploma in teaching in higher education (Oxford) Contact: (44) 208 4586714 Email: [email protected]

Illustrating Tibetan syntax with total physical response approach After the talk about Tibet Foundation and its charitable work in and outside TibetModel of proposed Yushu Prefecture Tibetan Medical Hospital

The fundamental staple food of Tibet is, of course, not borrowed from China at all. Tsampa or roasted barley meal is so di"erent from the Chinese staple of rice and wheat, that when Chinese Communist soldiers first came to Tibet and tried to eat tsampa they choked and gagged on the powdery stu" – much to the amusement of Tibetan bystanders.

But as tricky as it can be to eat without mastering the proper technique, tsampa is the foundation of a noble diet, similar in part to what people ate in the classical world. In H.D.F Kitto’s remarkable introduction to ancient Greece (!e Greeks) he tells us that “Barley meal, olives, a little wine, fish as a relish, meat only on high holidays – such was the normal diet.” Pliny tells us that gladiators in Rome were also called hordearii, barley men, because of the amount of barley, a muscle building food they ate. Hordeum vulgare being the Latin for barley.

In !e Odyssey (T.E. Lawrence’s translation) when Odysseus returns home to Ithaca he is given a meal by Eumaeus the swineherd, who does not recognize the hero as his old master. “When the two roast piglets were done he carried them to Odysseus and set them in front of him, still on the spits and piping hot. He dusted them over with barley meal….”. Tibetans prefer boiling to roasting meat but I suppose like the Greeks they don’t like loosing the fatty juices. I’m not sure if this common practice but I once saw a Khampa

THE INCOMPARABLE TSAMPAB1 J2*12(0 N$%+7

man in Mustang skewer a large chunk of boiled mutton out of a pot with his knife. He then dusted the meat with tsampa so that the juices wouldn’t drip down his chin when he went to work on it.

If you think I’m trying a little too hard to elevate the culinary or cultural status of tsampa with all my references to Greece and Rome, check out this passage from Food Civilization by Carson Ritchie:Roasted corn was one of the great culinary inventions. It was still in use in Tibet until the Chinese communist invasion, in the form of tsampa or roasted barley corns, ground into meal. It would keep indefinitely, and could be prepared by adding cold or hot water to it. Homer’s heroes even added barley meal to wine. It could be mixed with other foods, such as broths, and was so light that it could easily be carried about. Husked grain, whether parched or toasted or not, became the great food of antiquity.

Ritchie also informs us that making tsampa was one of the ways in which Neolithic man grappled with the considerable problems posed by moving to di"erent foods from those eaten by the earlier hunters. Various ingenious processes were carried out by Neolithic man to get to the edible part of cereals – threshing, boiling the heads, and so on, but roasting barley-corn and then milling it, in e"ect making tsampa, was one of the first ways.


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T.' 5"%#7'& $: T&2*42Older Tibetans need little encouragement to hold forth on the wonderful properties of tsampa. But in colonial times, snooty European travelers in the Himalayas had less elegiac views of our national staple. An English lady in Ladakh was horrified to see the natives eating tsampa “…with their fingers …it almost makes you sick just to watch them wolf it down.” Strangely enough, our old friend Heinrich Harrer joins the sahibs and memsahibs in this condescending chorus. In Seven Years in Tibet he writes “Of course one cannot compare the productivity of Tibetan workers with that of Europeans. !e physical strength of the natives was much inferior.” He ascribes the low productivity of the Tibetans to their staple diet of tsampa. Henrig-la seems to have forgotten that he survived his tremendous trek across the Jhangtang in winter on a near exclusive diet of tsampa, not Wiener schnitzels.

Peter Fleming who traveled across Amdo, Tsaidam, Turkestan and Baltistan in 1935, on a steady diet of tsampa, is more befittingly appreciative :Tsamba has much to recommend it, and if I were a poet I would write an ode to the stu". It is sustaining, digestible and cheap. For nearly three months we had tsamba for breakfast and tsamba for lunch, and the diet was neither as unappetizing nor as monotonous as it sounds. One of the great virtues of tsamba is that you can vary the flavour and the consistency at will. You can make it into a cake or you can make it into a porridge; and either can be flavoured with sugar, salt, pepper, vinegar, or (on special occasions for you only had one bottle) Worcester Sauce. And, as if that were not enough, you can

make it with cocoa instead of with tea. I would not go so far as to say that you never get tired of tsamba, but you would get tired of anything else much quicker.

Even Melvyn Goldstein, usually not the most sympathetic of souls to things Tibetan, is positive on tsampa, claiming that it “…is a great trail food because it requires no further cooking and can be eaten with plain water if it is not feasible to make a fire and tea, for example during a storm (and…) it provides a highly nutritious meal that requires virtually no preparation.”

!e fact of barley’s exceptional nutritional qualities—that Tibetans, Romans and ancient Greeks had long known and celebrated—finally received due recognition from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006. !is is what that august body declared, “Scientific evidence indicates that including barley in a healthy diet can help reduce the risk of coronary heart disease by lowering bad cholesterol (low density lipo-proteins) and total cholesterol levels.”

!e New York Times (Wednesday, June 28, 2006) added that “!e new health claims for barley are substantial and are based on “significant scientific evidence.” Other claims being made for a “barley-inclusive” diet is ‘reduction of risk for cancer of the stomach and intestine’; ‘reduction of risk of cardiovascular diseases’; ‘reduction of risk of Type 2 diabetes’; ‘stimulation of the immune system’; and ‘contribution to reduction of the risk of obesity’.

Traditionally, it is not only Tibetans who have made nutritional and medical claims for barley. !e Japanese make a tea of roasted barley, called mugicha (boricha

in Korea) which is said to cleanse the blood of impurities and reduce stress. In Britain you have Lemon Barley Water, a great tonic popular with parents and children alike. It has long been the oFcial drink supplied to players at Wimbledon.

T.' !'3")2#' 2%# $: 4%'42%"(0 2(! '2#"(0 T&2*42

Okay, so tsampa’s good for you. But how is a non-Tibetan, or a Tibetan out of touch with his roots, supposed to eat it without su"ering the fate of the Chinese soldiers mentioned earlier. Peter Fleming who wanted to write an ode to tsampa, describes the basic way of going about it:You fill your shallow wooden bowl with tea, then you let the butter melt in the tea (the butter is usually rancid and has a good cheesy flavour); then you put a handful of tsamba in. At first it floats; then like a child’s castle of sand, its foundation begins to be eaten by the liquid. You coax it with your fingers until it is more or less saturated and has become a paste; this you knead until you have a kind of doughy cake in your hand and the wooden bowl is empty and clean. Breakfast is ready.

!e watchword is “coax”. You have to go about the process slowly and gently, “folding” the tsampa into the tea like you would fold melted chocolate into egg-white when making chocolate mousse. Tibetans don’t use the word “knead” (zi) for the process of preparing tsampa for eating. !e word used is “yoe” which would mean blending or mixing but, I repeat, done gently. When prepared in this fashion you get a mixture that is not sticky or doughy but soft and manageable. !is end-product

is now called paag, and not tsampa anymore. You can then make convenient lumps of the stu", ready to be eaten, without tsampa sticking all over your hands and everywhere. A small lump or roll of paag squeezed in your fist is called daga.

I remember as a child my nanny, Dawa Bhuti (from Kharag in Shigatse district) telling me this story where a daga of paag featured prominently. The story had a flavour of Ruskin’s !e King of the Golden River. !ree sisters (the older two selfish and mean, the youngest kind and beautiful) have to go on a quest. One by one they walk up a mountain and each in turn encounter this little dog. !e puppy begs them for food with this couplet that concludes with three barks:

If you give me one lump (of paag)I will tell you one taleArf! Arf! Ar!daga chig taynatam chig shay yongAk Ak Ak.Another way to eat tsampa is straight and

dry. Tibetan’s call this method tsang-gam. You take a spoonful of the dry meal and pop it in your mouth. Another way is to just lick the dry tsampa from a bowl. When old tsampa hands do it, it looks deceptively easy, but the practice is not recommended. If you insist, you should know that the trick is never to inhale when performing tsang-gam. If you do, even a little, you will su"er a coughing spell, possibly even a nasty choking experience. Death by tsampa! More improbable things have happened in Tibet.

Tibetan peasants, especially those from the Tsang region like to add a handful of


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tsampa to their bowl of barley-ale (chang) and eat it with their fingers in a fashion called kyo-mak da. I once tried adding tsampa to red-wine as Carson Ritchie tells us Homer’s heroes did. !e result was, well, interesting.

For breakfast tsampa is usually consumed as cham-dur, or, as Tibetan restaurants feature it on their menus, “tsampa porridge”. It is a dish much loved by children. My daughter Namkha Lhamo regularly eats cham-dur when we have tsampa in the house. You put a pat of butter in a bowl with some powdered cheese (chu-shib) and a little sugar (preferably brown sugar) and pour in some hot tea (or hot milk) in the bowl getting the butter to melt and blending with everything else. You then stir in enough tsampa so that the mixture is more runny than doughy—porridge consistency—and get on with your breakfast.

Children in Tibet also love to eat the barley grain (ney) after it is roasted and popped. !is Tibetan pop-corn is called yod. !e popped barley is milled at a water-mill called the chu-thag and made into tsampa.

Quality tsampa milled from high-grade barley, the grain washed and prepared in a special way, is not only delicious but has a wonderful sweet aroma to it. When I was

in Mustang our phokhang or commissariat at Kag-Beni had a special supply of tsampa that was so good that one of our instructors, !ondup Gyalpo la (a former sergeant in the Guards regiment in Lhasa) would just mix it with water from the stream and eat it without any side-dish or sauce. He insisted that adding anything else would spoil the taste of the tsampa. Tsampa eaten in this way is called chu-paag.

For dinner you could make a nice soup or broth called tsam-thug with tsampa, meat and vegetables, but more on that in Part II of this essay.

In ancient Tibet, tsampa was served at banquets in large brick-like cakes called masen. At the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), Sonam Wangdu la, one of my star comedians who was also a master-chef in old Lhasa, once served this dish at a New

Year dinner at TIPA. !e tsampa cakes were accompanied large joints of cooked mutton and radish. !is ancient banquet was called sozi masen.

Tang dynasty accounts mention that Tibetans pressed a lump of tsampa with their thumb, and used the hollow space as a spoon to scoop up stew or vegetables.

T&2*42 42%24.'%(23"2A largish wooden bowl or gog-phor is generally used for mixing and eating tsampa. !is bowl has a tight-fitting lid which can be taken o" and used to hold your side-dish (paag-drel) of stew, soup or vegetables. !is will be discussed in Part II.

You might also also use a jha-phor or tea bowl, for drinking tea or beer. It is smaller and shallower than the tsampa bowl and the inside is sometimes lined with silver. Your set of wooden bowls might include a tiny bowl (with lid) in which you keep a supply of your favorite hot-sauce. !is bowl can be stored inside the large gog-phor after you’ve had your meal. !ese wooden bowls are manufactured in southern Tibet and in Mon Tawang. !ey are also made in Bhutan by skilled wood-turners. Some of these bowls are credited with being able to detect poison.

An important article for a tsampa based meal is the sol-ray or napkin. Its usually the name size as a napkin in the west, but sometimes bigger. It is important to have this on your lap as tsampa tends to spill a little, no matter how careful you are when you mix it. When you were traveling the napkin could be used to tie up your bowls and things in the napkin. Such napkins are

handy as they can, at a pinch, substitute for a bowl to hold lumps of tsampa or meat. In Bhutan people use a wooden bowl for their soup like Tibetans but their traditional rice dish is always served in a large napkin called the tho-ray, that everyone carries about with him. I saw a photograph of the former king, Jigme Singe Wangchuk, using such a napkin when having a meal with a crowd of ordinary Bhutanese people. A nice democratic gesture.

Anyhow, If you haven’t picked up the skill of mixing tsampa in a bowl you can use a bag to do the mixing in. In Tibet a pliant bag of thin leather with a drawstring (oto) on the opening, is used. It is called a thang-khug. You can use a plastic bag at a pinch. I have seen Tibetans doing that. It mustn’t be too sti", but I guess it shouldn’t be too thin either, and tear.

!ere is a larger tsampa bag of leather and fabric which is called a tsam-khug, and is largely used for storing and sometimes serving tsampa at a table; but not for mixing. I saw a beautiful tsam-khug leather bag trimmed with brocade, at the monastery of Gar Rimpoche in Rarang, Kinnaur. !e bag had a serving spoon inside called the tsam-thur, which is used to serve out the tsampa.

Generally you would use a special wooden container with a lid, called tsam-phor, to store and serve tsampa at a table. !ese bowl-like containers are often painted with designs on the outside and laquered red on the inside. Some of these vessels are even decorated with turquoise, coral and semi-precious stones on the outside. In the old days a high lama, a merchant prince or an

Right: a gog-phor with a tight-fitting lidBelow: a jha-phor or tea bowl

Photos: www.jamyangnorbu.com


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important oFcial might have such a fancy tsam-phor on his side-table. One tsam-phor I saw had a special lid which incorporated a small bowl on the top. !at small bowl was used to hold a supply of thue, which is a rich concoction of powdered-cheese, butter and brown-sugar (bhurom) used to flavor the tsampa.

T.' V$)2+732%1 A V$")' $: T&2*42Tsampa is also eaten in Turkestan where it is called talkhan. In Bihar and some parts of north India a kind of tsampa (sometimes mixed with milled chick-pea) is called satthu and eaten by peasants and labourers. In certain parts of north China where tsampa is eaten it is called tso-mien. All Chinese Communist publication, even those in English, invariably refer to Tibetan barley, not by its native name of ney or dru, but in pinyin as Qingke – probably pronounced “chinky” (I think).

!e honourific for tsampa is su-shib. Of course the Dalai Lama has a very special tsampa made for him which is called jamin.

On the other hand inferior tsampa eaten by poorer people is called kamsob or tsam-sog. !is is sometimes mixed with pea-flour (ten-tsam or ten-shi) which is generally cheaper, though quite flavourful in its own right.

Since tsampa played such an important role in Tibetan life, it should come as no surprise that there were special tsampa oFcials called the tsam-shipa and the tsam-nyer in charge of procurement, storage and distribution of tsampa. A special department of the government called the tsam-sher laykhung collected agricultural produce for distribution to monasteries and the army. Wages in old Tibet, for soldiers of the army and the like, were paid in large part with tsampa. !is was called tsam-phog. A payment in cash was made for the remainder, called the sha-phog or “meat wages”

Tsampa is used in religious ritual for making sacramental cakes called tsok and torma, and in the sangsol ceremony where handfuls of tsampa are tossed in the air (tsam-tor). Tsampa is also burnt and the smoke o"ered not only to various deities, but sometimes as an act of compassion to yidags (tantalized spirits) existing in a special subdivision of the Buddhist hell. Since these creatures are said to take in nurishment only through smell, the burnt-tsampa o"ering (soor or tsam-soor) was an e"ective way of feeding them.

Tsampa appears in many Tibetan expressions and proverbs:Tsamkhu tongpa dap pa: to beat an empty tsampa bag. To try and get something out of nothing.Tsampa sholpa: to sprinkle or throw tsampa. To flatter.

Tsampa gam lingbu tang: eat dry tsampa and play the flute at the same time. Do two incompatible things. Conflict of interest.Ngu-khug tsam-khuk la bhechoe tang: using your money bag for storing tsampa. Squander your wealth. Charles Bell renders this as “!e Good father had a full money-bag/ !e bad son uses it as a bag for flour.”Tsampa rang ge zay, thang-khuk mi la yok: you eat the tsampa but put the tsampa-bag on someone else’s (head). To profit from a situation but let others su"er the consequences.Tsampae khyekyag bhutog ki chay: baking-soda acting as guarantor to tsampa, (both can be blown away by the wind). One insubstantial person cannot support another.Tsampae-drima kha: smelling of tsampa. Having a Tibetan quality. Tibetan-ness.

The word tsam-zen, is a contraction for tsampa-zangen or tsampa eater. Two separate sources told me that when the first demonstration started in Lhasa in 1987, and Tibetans were called out from their homes to join the protesters in the streets, the rallying cry was Tsampa zangen tso ma dhon-sho, “All tsampa eaters come out”.

Babu Tharchin la, the editor of the Tibetan newspaper in Kalimpong, !e Tibet Mirror, in an editorial (October 1, 1952) called on all Tibetans, specifically the people of Kham, to unite.We, the tsampa eaters, chuba wearers, dice players, raw and dried meat eaters, followers of Buddhism, Tibetan language speakers, the people from !e !ree Circuits of Ngari (Ngari Korsum), Four Horns of Central Tibet (U-Tsang Ru-zhi), Six Ranges of

Eastern Tibet (Dokham Gangdrug) and the !irteen Myriarchies of Tibet (Bhod Trik-khor Chuksum) we must make the e"ort to end the [Chinese] occupation.

On October 1, 1957, !e Tibet Mirror published a “reminder song” which had as a refrain these lines “Don’t let silver coins lure you, /Stand up, stand up the tsampa eaters!”

In an article in Himal in 1993, the scholar Tsering Shakya la: wrote that “During the height of the Tibetan resistance to the Chinese in 1959, a letter appeared in the Tibet Mirror, symbolically addressed to ‘all tsampa eaters’. !e writer had gone down to the staple, barley as the most basic element which united the Tibetan-speaking world. If Buddhism provided the atom of Tibetanness, then tsampa provided the sub-particles of Tibetanness. !e use of tsampa transcended dialect, sect, gender and regionalism”

The website High Peaks Pure Earth recently came out with a well-documented article describing how a cultural re-assertion of Tibetan identity was taking place all over the plateau since the protests and crackdown of 2008, and that tsampa was enjoying something of a cultural revival. !e report mentioned the singer Tashi Dhondup who was sentenced for 15 months in labour camp for his album Torture Without Trace. In one song Tashi la sang: “Remembering my brother in exile / I carry a bag of tsampa on my back / And take this road to / !e western land of scholars.”

Perhaps we could join our brothers and sisters in Tibet in this culinary revival. !e health benefits are undeniable and tsampa

A fancy tsam-phor


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has the unqualified blessings (jhinlap) of the FDA, which many Chinese food imports deservedly don’t. Eating a tsampa meal, even occasionally, with your family would be a good way to remind ourselves, especially our children, of our Tibetan heritage. Perhaps we could do it on Losar. In old Tibet your always had the Sozi Masen banquet on Losar (especially at the Potala) even if other bills-of-fare were enjoyed on that day.

Jews eat unleavened bread at their Passover meal to remember the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt to the promised land. So perhaps we could incorporate tsampa in our March 10th breakfast. !is is just a suggestion. I’m sure readers will be able to come up with other and better ideas of how we could create a meaningful ritual meal for that day. Send in your thoughts. Any information you might have on tsampa-manufacturers or retailers in the USA, India and Europe and other related subjects would be really welcome. !anks.

Note: !is is the first of a Four Part series on Tibetan culinary culture. So many people have given me bits of information at one time or the other that I haven’t quite been able to keep track of everything. A full acknowledgement will appear at the end of Part IV.

!is article (publised earlier on Phayul.com) is reproduced with the permission of the author, Mr Jamyang Norbu, [email protected]

To buy Tibetan Tsampa in London please visit www.tsampa.co.uk Or contact [email protected] Tel: 020 8522 1182

sponsors choose names with a message such as Peace and Joy and then there are the fun ones like Popcorn and Cracker Yak.

!e Foundation requests a donation of £180 to sponsor a yak. !e actual cost of yak varies according to local factors and to exchange rates etc at the time of purchase and the general trend is for prices to rise. It may not always be possible therefore to purchase a yak for each donation we receive. In order to make best use of the generous donations, yak purchase and distribution is carried out at intervals by pooling donations and purchasing the maximum number of yaks possible.

!e Foundation would like to thank all those who have generously donated funds towards Yak for Life programme. Your support makes a real di"erence to the people in need, especially those in Yushu a"ected by a devastating earthquake in 2010.

Marie Rabouhans, Yak for Life programme

It is now fifteen years since the first yaks1 were provided as part of the Tibet Foundation’s relief e"ort following the heavy snowstorms and blizzards during the winter of 1995/6 in Yushu and Shershul counties in eastern Tibet. Livestock replacement was, at that time, the first priority of our local partners. Since then the Foundation has continued to provide yak with young calves to people in this region under the Yak for Life programme. In addition to the animals given to individual nomad families, some others have been given to communities/institutions. For example, 25 yaks were given to Boomsar Old People’s home in the winter of 2000 and a further 111 in 2002.

By providing livestock to impoverished nomadic families and residents of an old people’s home in Tibet, the Yak for Life programme has been one of the Aid to Tibet’s most successful projects. During the last eight years over 400 yaks have been purchased by the programme; the majority of these have been provided to families within Yushu Prefecture.

!e money collected by the Foundation is sent to our representatives in Tibet. In consultation with the local authorities, they select the families most in need, buy yaks locally and distribute them. Nomad families

1 In the ‘Yak of Life’ programme Yak means a female yak called “dri” in Tibetan.

Yak for Life

rely on their yaks for milk, butter, hair, dung for cooking, meat and hides. Much of the milk is processed to produce butter, cheese and some yoghurt. Excess milk produce and wool can be sold and the proceeds used to purchase grain and other necessary goods.

As many of our supporters will know, the programme provides the funding for yaks by means of Yak Sponsorship. Over the years generous donors have been imaginative in their sponsorship. Some have sponsored yak to commemorate events such as birthdays, weddings and retirements or in memory of a loved one. Others have raised sponsorship by running, cycling or swimming.

Donations have come from individuals, families and groups of friends or colleagues – whether it’s an individual or a collective yak, the benefits to the recipients are the same. Sponsors or donors receive a personalised certificate and a Yak for Life souvenir. Donors can name the yak (for their donor’s certificate at least) When choosing names for their yak certificate, sponsors have been equally imaginative; Tibetan names such as Tashi, Tara and Dolma are popular, other


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!e Department of Education of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is also responsible for more than 85 Tibetan schools in India and Nepal. Teaching is in Tibetan, English and Hindi (Nepali in Nepal). !e schools teach Tibetan culture as well as providing vocational studies. We sponsor children in many schools including schools in Bhuntar, Chauntra, Darjeeling, Dalhousie, Gangtok, Gopalpur, Herbertpur, Kalimpong, Miao, Mussoorie, Ponta, Pokhra, Shillong, Simla and Sonada.

The Foundation usually receives two reports a year and the children also write letters to their sponsors. As you can see it is quite a complex task to organize the sending of letters and reports. !e Department of Education does this extremely well and we rely on these postings to keep our sponsors informed.

Lastly the Tibetan Homes Foundation in Mussoorie provides accommodation and education for poor refugee children. !ey are sent to the school on the recommendation of Tibetan Welfare OFces and the Central Destitute Committee of the CTA. In most cases the children have only one parent who cannot look after them because of mental or physical illness or they are orphans.

Writing in December to the Foundation the Sponsorship Secretary Mr Kalsang Namgyal says, “I am happy to inform you that things are running smoothly at the THF.

Tibet Foundation continues to sponsor a great variety of projects for Tibetans throughout India and Nepal. !ese projects are largely educational aimed at individual Tibetans – school children, monks, nuns, the elderly and students in higher education. It is through the generosity of sponsors, who give on a monthly basis, that these schemes are able to continue and grow.

The sponsorship scheme runs in conjunction with the recognized Tibetan refugee institutions in India and Nepal. Money raised through sponsorship does not go to the individual sponsored. It is used to cover living expenses, such as food, clothing, accommodation and education costs. Usually the individual sponsored receives a small amount of pocket money but contributions go to support the whole community, not just those with sponsors.

Last year when the Tibetan celebrated its 25th Anniversary, the Education Minister of the Central Tibetan Administration (Tibetan government in exile) Mr !upten Lungrig sent a letter to the Foundation on behalf of all Tibetan refugee children in exile saying, “We highly value and treasure the generous moral and material support which we have received regularly over the past twenty five years in the form of sponsorships and scholarship funds. Your relentless support is of tremendous help in our work for the destitute and needy”.

Sponsorship Matters!

!e Minister goes on to say that many of the children that have been sponsored are “currently serving our community ….we are confident that many of these children will grow up to further the great causes of global harmony and universal responsibility in the footsteps of His Holiness the XlV Dalai Lama” In gratitude to the sponsors, he says, “in the style and spirit of our tradition, we would like to pray and wish you all good health, long life, happiness and success. We thank you all once again”.

!e education provided in the various Tibetan Schools is highly valued by the Tibetan community where many people are still desperately poor. Tibetan parents believe that their children’s chance of a positive future is greatly strengthened by a good education in a Tibetan environment.

Every year we receive case histories of children whose parents cannot a"ord even a basic education for their children. !ese histories are not only about children from the Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal but also about children who have made the arduous journey by foot across the Himalayas from Tibet. Two such case histories were of two sisters, Lobsang and Pema, 10 and 11, “whose parents are simple farmers who depend on their small herd of cattle and land for their daily livelihood. They constantly worry about the future of their two daughters who have attended

school for a year and can read and write in Chinese very well but have no possibility of education in Tibetan.”

Happily the two girls survived the hardships of the journey and now attend a Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) School and are receiving their education in Tibetan as well as having the opportunity to study the Buddha Dharma. Sadly, like many thousands of Tibetan children they live separated from their parents for years, as there is no possibility of holiday visits. !eir parents willingly bear the pain of separation to ensure their children have a Tibetan education.

!e TCV celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 2010, years since its inception in 1960. From very humble beginnings TCV has come a long way to become a fully integrated community for a large number of destitute children in exile. It has many branches in all the Tibetan refugee areas from Ladakh in the north to Bylakuppe in the south including Suja, Gopalpur, Salakui and more. Its motto is “others before self ”. To date, over 37,000 children have been educated in these communities and currently there are 15,000 children. !e schools provide a very high standard of education which results in many students being o"ered scholarships both in India and in universities and colleges throughout the world.


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!is month is quite cold with a sudden drop in temperature. !is is the month when the children begin to burn the midnight lamp…. the usual time schedule at the homes has been changed and the children stay up longer with their home parents serving them tea to keep them awake!”

!e home parents take the place of the children’s own parents or replace them if they are orphans. As the children’s letters say they are living very happily with their brothers, sisters and friends and are glad to be there, receiving a good education.

I have written only briefly about a few of the institutions that the Tibet Foundation sponsors. As you can see education for these children is vital to preserve their language and culture. It is true all over the world that education is the key to lifting people out of poverty. !e Tibetans are one example.

What has impressed me about the letters and reports received by the Foundation is the dedication and hard work of all of the children and teachers in these schools. !ey work extremely hard and there is little bad behaviour, they really do want to make a di"erence to their communities. !ey have a strong sense of identity and readily express their gratitude for the chance of education. We in Britain often take our education for granted and some children are often cynical about their role in school and society. It is not so with Tibetan children, let us hope we can carry on helping them to achieve their goals that is why “sponsorship matters”.Further information on sponsorship is available from the Foundation on request.Alison Forster, Sponsorship Coordinator

Books received Living Tibet!e Diary, paintings, maps, drawings and photographs of Anne Jennings Brown

!e author wrote, “when I walked away from the family at passport control at Heathrow. I wondered … why on earth I could not just stay contentedly in our happy and comfortable family home.”

Read the book to find the answer.Quicksilver Publications, London 2011ISBN 978-0-9557600-4-4Paperback 250 pages

Muses in ExileAn Anthology of Tibetan PoetryEdited with an Introduction by Bhuchung D Sonam

!is book has writings from 31 authors some of whom have already passed away.

A quote from the book“For the first time, the voices of Tibet’s diaspora find expression in an anthology of poetry composed in English: Muses In Exile. History teaches us that artistic and

intellectual creativity reach their zenith under the most adverse conditions. And so it has been with Tibetan verse.” (A quote from the book)Paljor Publications Delhi 2010 (Reprint)ISBN: 81-86230-48-3Price: Indian Rs. 200Paperback 194 pages

Conflict of DualityBy Bhuchung D Sonam

A quote from the bookWandererI fail to take anyBurdened by chaotic thoughtsOrphaned by a clear focusDeserted by wisdom of visionLike a stray do I clingTo the dry worldly bone …In a blossoming garden of hatred!is little boyDrowns in tears of sorrow …

TibetWrites, Dharamsala 2006Price: Indian Rs. 150Paperback 80 pages

Songs from a DistanceBy Bhuchung D Sonam

A quote from the bookMarch for Freedom.. for the exiled and lonelyalways searching for homelet’s open our warm heartslet’s give them love and compassion

Hand-in-hand we standshoulder-to-shoulder we marchheart-to-heart we reachfor peace, for justice, for freedom.

TibetWrites, Dharamsala 2009ISBN: 81-904174-4-4Price: Indian Rs. 65Paperback 80 pages

View, the Rigpa Journal

!is edition celebrates the life of Kyabjé Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and the first visit of his incarnation, Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche, to the West.It includes a report on the celebrations to mark the centenary of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s birth and a teaching by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche on the meditation methods of shamatha and vipashyana.

Rigpa, July 2010, 64 pages

Ocean Of Melody: Songs Of ;e Sixth Dalai Lama Translated by Lhasang Tsering

Rupa & Co.112 pages


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C'(#%23 T"+'#2( A!*"("&#%2#"$( Soon after his flight from Tibet His Holiness the Dalai Lama established the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in India. It is commonly referred to as the “Tibetan Government in Exile”. Although the CTA is not officially recognized by any government in the world, many countries in practice acknowledge and deal with it as a government that maintains a system of administration with its own elected members of National Assembly and a cabinet with an elected Senior Kalon (minister).

The CTA’s main objective is helping the rehabilitation of Tibetan refugees and supporting the continuation and preservation of Tibetan religion and culture under the supervision of its di"erent departments such as departments of education, religion, health, etc. Most of these departments are registered with charitable status in accordance with the law in India.

From it’s headquarter in Dharamsala in northern India, it plays the role of a free voice for all Tibetans and contributes in creating a greater awareness of Tibet internationally. It

CALL OF THE SNOW LIONS7443'*'(#2%1 I(:$%*2#"$(

coordinates the administration of a network of schools, monasteries and other cultural institutes throughout India and Nepal. !e greatest achievement of the Administration is its ability to successfully establish in India, Bhutan and Nepal schools for modern education and monasteries for religious education for young Tibetans.

E!7)2#"$( :$% T"+'#2(&The administration of the education of Tibetan children in India falls into four categories – a) supported by the Government of India, b) supported by the CTA, c) supported by both the CTA and the Indian government or other autonomous institutes, and c) supported by private institutes.

In 1961 the Government of India established Central Tibetan Schools Administration (CTSA) in New Delhi as an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Human Resource Development with the objective to establish, manage and assist schools in India for the education of Tibetan children living in India. !e main purpose of setting up CTSA and Tibetan schools is to provide Tibetans with a modern education

as well as an opportunity to preserve and promote their own culture and heritage.

!e Department of Education of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) oversees the education and welfare of students in 77 Tibetan schools in India, Nepal and Bhutan with approximately 28,000 students. Out of the 77 schools, 28 of them known as Central School for Tibetans (CST) or some times Central Tibetan School (CTS) are directly run and funded by the CTSA.

Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) in Dharamsala and Tibetan Homes Foundation (THF) in Mussoorie, both autonomous institutes administer 17 schools with over 11,500 students and 2 schools with more than 2,200 students respectively.

!e Snow Lion Foundation, a registered non-profit trust in Katmandu looks after 13 Tibetan schools in Nepal with more than 3,000 students and the Sambhota Tibetan Schools Society, directly funded by the Department of Education (of CTA)

Dharamsala, HP

Suja nr. Palampur, HP

Herbertpur, HP

Settlements nr. Dehradun, Uttarakhand

Kalimpong, West Bengal

Buxa Duar, West Bengal

Misamari, Assam

Mundgod, Karnataka

Bylakuppe, Hunsur, Kolegal, Karnataka

Nearly 21,000 viewers have seen the Foundation’s recent documentary film series, the Call of the Snow Lion on our website and YouTube, and many others have seen the DVD. Some viewers have contacted us to say how much they enjoyed the film and requested additional information on the locations of the film and background of the organisations mentioned in the film. We hope the following information is helpful.


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administers 13 more schools with more than 2,150 students.

In addition there are some privately run Tibetan schools such as the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Cultural Institute (ITBCI) in Kalimpong. All these schools are aFliated to Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and follow the Indian national curriculum. The medium of instruction at primary level is Tibetan and thereafter English. Currently, the total number of Tibetan students enrolled from pre-primary to class XII is nearly 47,000.

Apart from those schools directly funded by Indian government through CTSA, all other schools depend much on funds donated by charitable organizations from within and outside India. Tibet Foundation in London has been supporting some of these schools with sponsorship since 1985.

K23"*4$(0 Kalimpong is a hill station known to be one of the best small holiday resorts during the British rule in India. It is in the Indian State of West Bengal, just, two and half hours by road from Darjeeling.

In the past Kalimpong was famous as a major centre of wool trade between India and Tibet. Tibetan caravans of mules and horses were common sights, importing wool from Tibet and exporting cotton goods from India. Before 1959 Kalimpong was the only place in India where Tibetan traders and rich Tibetans from Lhasa visited most regularly and some of them even sent their children there to study English language.

!e place has been associated with many famous names such as Everest Expeditions from days of Mallory and Irving in 1920s to Hillary and Tenzing Sherpa in 1950s, famous writers such as Alexandra David-Neel, diplomats such as Charles Bell, and Tibetologist such as Prince Peter of Greece. Kalimpong became home for the 13th Dalai Lama when he escaped to India in 1910.

Today, Kalimpong is a tourist centre, popular for mountain viewing, bird watching and hill walking exploring rich variety of Himalayan plants and flowers. It has also become a place where many Tibetans found their homes and established successfully many Buddhist temples and monasteries and schools where one can learn Tibetan language, religion and culture.

CST K23"*4$(0Central School for Tibetans (CST) Kalimpong is one of the six residential schools managed by the CTSA. It was established in 1964. !is school was then one of the largest residential Tibetan schools with over 800 boarders. Currently, the school has 554 (256 boys and 298 girls) of which 270 are boarders. A number of students in this school receive sponsorship from Tibet Foundation.

Lately, number of Tibetan students attending CST schools has dropped. !ree main reasons are given – immigration, decline in the number of students coming from Tibet and lower rate of birth amongst Tibetan families. Over the years number of people moving to bigger cities and even abroad to the West has increased. Secondly,

the number of students coming from Tibet has declined in the last couple of years as border security control has been tightened up. !irdly, there is a steady decline in the rate of birth amongst Tibetan families. In addition, those well-o" families choose to send their children to private schools where facilities are better.

ITBCI S).$$3 Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Cultural Institute (ITBCI) School was founded by a Tibetan Lama, called Dhardo Rinpoche originally from a monastery in Dhartsedo in Kham region of Tibet. He was educated in Drepung monastery in Tibet and became a highly respected Geshe. He was then sent to India as the abbot of a Tibetan monastery in Bodhgaya. During summer months he spent his time helping two Tibetan monasteries in Ghoom Gonpa in Darjeeling and !arpa Choeling in Kalimpong.

In 1950s there was a large number of people of Tibetan origin as well as Tibetan traders from Tibet doing business in Kalimpong and adjacent areas. At that time there was not a single school where Tibetan language could be learnt. Dhardo Rinpoche established the ITBCI School in 1954 with sole objective of providing the local people with opportunity to learn Tibetan language and Buddhist culture.

In March 1959 when Tibetan refugees first arrived in Kalimpong the ITBCI School was the only school where Tibetans could go for education and learn Tibetan language. Many Tibetans who studied in this school have become very successful and many

hold high positions, working in Central Tibetan and local Indian administrations. !ese include oFcers working in oFces of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the CTA in Dharamsala. Some have become police superintendents and heads of local government departments in Kalimpong. A founding trustee and few others associated with Tibet Foundation had studied in this school in 1959 and early 60s.

Today, the ITBCI school has 340 students including 75 as boarders. It continues to teach Tibetan, Hindi and Nepalese languages and Buddhist culture – religion, art and music. Most the artistes of the Gangjong Doeghar started from this school and became successful artistes. Today the school is acknowledged to be a well-established multi-cultural institute with students from di"erent ethnic background. In a message Sangharakshitsa, spiritual head of the Western Buddhist Order, wrote, “the school has benefited the lives of thousands of students, imparting not only secular knowledge but also religious understanding.”

Many students are from very poor families and depend on financial support given by charitable organisations through sponsorship. !e Western Buddhist Order, a NGO in UK is the main supporter of the school. Tibet Foundation has helped the school with school uniforms and stationery.

G2(0<$(0 D$'0.2% Gangjong Doeghar is an independent performing arts association founded in the


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year 1995 in Kalimpong as a registered Society in West Bengal. Starting as a small informal group of people, GD has become a professional dance troupe well known both in India and abroad. It currently has 5 professional and 30 leading artistes of dancers and musicians from di"erent ethnic background such as Tibetan, Sherpa and Bhutia.

Mr. Gogah, the founding director of the Doeghar is a master craftsman, designing and producing all their dance costumes and masks. Gangjong Doeghar has already performed in many cities in India and abroad in countries such as United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Holland Australia, Russia, Nepal and Bhutan. Their performances are well known for high quality. !ey have produced a series of CD’s and audio cassettes of their songs and music.

A board of committed volunteers administers the Society with funds donated mainly by individuals. The Society has expressed in its literature its appreciation to Tibet Foundation for the foundation’s continuous support.

T"+'#2( O4'%2 !e Tibetan Opera has a long history and its tradition is popular amongst the Tibetan communities all over Tibet. In the early 1960’s the first Tibetan Opera Association was established in Kalimpong with a few old masters who escaped from Tibet. Since then it has performed many places including Shoten Festivals in Dharamsala. Many members of the Gangjong Doeghar Performing Arts are active members of the Association.

M7(!0$! T"+'#2( S'##3'*'(# "( S$7#. I(!"2 !ere are a number of Tibetan settlements in south India such as settlements in Bylakuppee, Kolegal, Hunsur and Mundgod. Most of them are based on agriculture.

Mundgod is a small town in Uttara Kannada district in the state of Karnataka in south India. Since the 1960s it has become home for thousands of Tibetan refugees when Doeguling Tibetan settlement was established.

At the request of the CTA the government of India in consultation with the state government of Karnataka agreed to provide Tibetan refugees with 4,000 acres of mostly forestland near Taluk village in North Kanara district. The first Tibetan settlers were provided with tents and bamboo huts for temporary shelter. With great hardship – hot climate and unfamiliar environment, cutting wood and turning the woodland into farms for cultivation, they established Doeguling Tibetan Settlement in Mundgod in 1966. According the Mundgod representative of the CTA the settlement started with a population of about 4,600 and gradually the population has now increased to nearly 17,000.

!e settlement comprises of 11 camps with two large monasteries of Drepung and Ganden. It is one of the biggest Tibetan settlements in India with schools for students, monasteries for monks, nunneries for nuns, old people’s home for elderly, hospital for the sick and other facilities such as bank, café and guest houses. !e main occupation of the settlement is agriculture.

Most of the works are carried out on co-operative basis. There are camp leaders elected by the people and a settlement oFce with a representative of the CTA that administer the settlement.

Over 50 years in India the situation in exile is changing. !e older generation with the knowledge and personal experience of living in Tibet is slowly disappearing and a new generation of young people born and brought up in India is undergoing some kind of acculturation. With a general trend of movement of people from rural areas into cities, young educated Tibetans are leaving the settlement for better opportunities in cities. Many have gone to the West. Today, there is a growing concern amongst those Tibetans still living in the settlement for the future survival of these settlements.

B792 D72% C2*4Buxa Duar is the name of a place in West Bengal. During the British rule in India, this place was well known for its notorious prison camp where many early Indian freedom fighters were detained. When first Tibetans arrived in India as refugees most of them were kept at a transit camp in Misamari, another place in Assam. From there all the monks were transferred to Buxa. The former British Indian prison camp became home for Tibetan refugee monks.

The monks continued their tradition of practising and passing their Buddhist knowledge to younger generations in a very hard condition. Most of them su"ered from ill health and traumatisation. Many died and many became insane. Those

who survived became the first residents of various monasteries established later in south India.

D%'47(0 M$(2&#'%1Drepung Monastery was founded in Lhasa in 1416 by Jamyang Choje, a disciple of Je Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. At its height, Drepung was the world’s largest monastery, having over 10,000 monks in residence with seven colleges - Gomang, Loseling, Deyang, Shagkor, Gyelwa or Tosamling (!os-bsam gling), Dulwa and Ngagpa. It produced some of Tibet’s most renowned spiritual masters. Today in Tibet with restrictions imposed by the Chinese government its population is just a few hundred.

In 1959 when His Holiness the Dalai Lama with thousands of Tibetans left Tibet, many monks escaped to India. With assistance from the Indian government, they established temporary residence at Buxaduar in West Bengal for nine years.

In 1970 they moved to settle in Mundgod in South India. Having cleared the forest they turned the land into fields for growing food and re-built their new monasteries. Over the years the monks have worked hard to make the monasteries in south India as major centers of learning Buddhism. Drepung monastery is one of the biggest monasteries and today Drepung has two colleges, Loseling and Gomang with a total population of about 6,000 monks.

Most of the monks are from Tibet. !ere are other students from the Himalayan regions of Nepal and India. After the


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collapse of Soviet Union, many students are also coming from Russia and Mongolia to study Buddhism for the revival of Buddhist religion in their own countries.

!e monastery has the responsibility of looking after 6,000 monks. They do not receive any financial support for their activities from any government. Apart from the Department of Religion of the CTA providing some support they depend mostly on funds donated by individuals and charitable organisations. Amongst the charities in the West helping them is Tibet Foundation giving sponsorship to a number of Tibetan monks studying in Loseling and students from Mongolia and Russia studying in Gomang.

In the same settlement, there are some other monasteries. Gaden is the next big monastery. Je Tsongkhapa founded the original Gaden monastery in Tibet in 1409. It was known to have 6,000 monks in the early 20th century with two principal colleges, Jangtse and Shartse. It was in this monastery that the present Dalai Lama took his final Geshe degree examination in 1958.

The basic curriculum in all the monasteries in India remains similar to those in monasteries in Tibet before 1959. In addition, some of them have modern subjects in their curriculum such as science, history, literature and English language. Some monks completing their courses from these monasteries go out as far as Europe and America to teach Buddhism. Today, many Buddhist centers in the West have Tibetan teachers educated and trained in monasteries in India.

H'%+'%#47% T"+'#2( S'##3'*'(# "( ($%#. I(!"2!ere are many Tibetan settlements in north India such as Klement Town, Purwala, Dekyiling and Yougyeling—all close to Dehra Dun. Most of them are based on trading and business.

Doegu-Yougyeling, a small settlement in three villages was established in Herbertpur in 1977 with 100 Tibetan refugees’ families in 160 acres of land. The settlement is situated in the state of Uttaranchal, 32 Km from Dehradun City. Present population is 406. !eir main occupation is trading and seasonal sweater selling business.

Like all Tibetan settlements this settlement is administered under the supervision of a representative of CTA. It has primary schools, a modern allopathic dispensary and an old people’s home.

O3! P'$43'’& H$*' H'%+'%#47%

!ere are 103 elders in the old people’s home in Herbertpur. !is home is special because the elders in the home are all veterans of a special Indo-Tibetan frontier force of the Indian army. In their youth they joined the army to be ready to fight for Tibet. Eventually many ended up in the frontlines of the Bangladesh War of Freedom.

Today, many of them receive a pension of just £3 per month from the Indian army and cannot meet their needs for meals, clothes and blankets, and more. !ey very much depend on the support of the CTA and Tibetan Homes Foundation. !e charities that help them include the American

Himalayan Foundation in USA and Tibet Foundation in UK. !ese brave veterans are still full of enthusiasm and many have become master noodle makers. !e noodles made by them are popular in the area and best known for good quality and taste.

D.2%2*&232Dharamsala is a small city in the northern

Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. It is the winter seat of the state government of Himachal Pradesh and the district headquarters of the Kangra district. But Dharamsala is better known in the world as the official residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, often referred to as “Tibetan Government in Exile”.

Since its establishment in 1960, the number of Tibetans living in Dharamsala has increased. Today it has a population of 20,000 people. In 1970, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives was opened. This library now houses over 80,000 manuscripts and other important resources related to Tibetan history, literature, Buddhism, art and culture. It is considered one of the most important institutions for Tibetology in the world.

!ere are monasteries, nunneries, schools, and yoga and handicraft centers. Today, Dharamsala has become a very crowded hill station and an important tourist destination with many hotels and restaurants. All year round there are religious and cultural activities. !ousands of people from all over the world go to Dharamsala for the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

T"+'#2( M'!")23 2(! A&#%$3$0")23 I(&#"#7#'

!e Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute (Men-Tsee-Khang) was established in 1961 in Dharamsala. With a modest beginning it has undergone significant development with the creation of the Pharmaceutical, Research & Development, Materia Medica as well as the institute for training new doctors and astrologers.

Today, it has 350 sta" members and oversees the operation of nearly 40 branch clinics in India and Nepal. Herbal medical products manufactured and Tibetan calendars and personal horoscopes produced at the institute are unique and regarded as one of the best of their kind in the world. Doctors and astrologers from the institute visit many countries in the world to give consultation and lectures on Tibetan medicine. Tibet Foundation has organized regular visits of Tibetan doctors to UK for the last 19 years.

D$3*2 L"(0 N7(('%1 Dolma Ling Nunnery is an institute

dedicated specifically to higher Buddhist education for Tibetan Buddhist nuns. It is fully funded by the Tibetan Nuns Project, a humanitarian and non-governmental organization based in Dharamsala. Dolma Ling o"ers a 17-year curriculum of traditional Buddhist philosophy and debate along with modern courses in Tibetan language, English, mathematics, computer skills and basic medical training. !e nuns also receive training in the ritual arts such as sand mandala and butter sculpture.


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!e nunnery was successfully completed after twelve years of hard work and was oFcially inaugurated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama on December 8, 2005.

Currently, there are 209 nuns fully engaged in study, practice, nunnery work, and self-suFciency projects. Many students are expected in the next couple of years to complete the five major Buddhist topics needed to master a Geshema degree. Some nuns have completed their studies and are already teaching in schools.

S.70&'+ N7(('%1!e original Shugseb Nunnery in Tibet

dates back to 1181. Twenty nuns escaped from Tibet in 1990. With support from the Tibetan Nuns Project they established the present Shugseb Nunnery in Garoh village, some 15 km from Dharamsala. In December 2010 His Holiness the Dalai Lama oFcially inaugurated the nunnery. Currently, the nunnery has 108 nuns undertaking Buddhist studies.

News in Brief

On 11th of December 2010 the Tibetan Community in Britain and Tibet Foundation organised a celebration to mark the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1989. It was held in the Conway Hall in central London. The programme began with speeches by Mr. Thupten Samdup, His Holiness’ London representative, Mr. Sonam Frazi, European member of the Tibetan Assembly in Dharamsala and Mr. Phuntsog Wangyal, chairman of Tibet Foundation. It was concluded with a lovely performance of Tibetan folk dance and music presented by the Tibetan Community. For more information contact:Rangdol, tel.: 0783 077 7760 [email protected]

On 2nd April 2011 the Palyul Centre in London organised the second anniversary of the Maha Parinirvana (passing away) of His Holiness Penor Rinpoche at the Drukpa UK London Centre. !ere was a traditional programme of prayers from 11am to 4pm with four lamas from the Palyul Centre lead by Khenpo Rinpoche Pema Choephel. Amongst the guests attending the occasion were the general public and representatives of various Tibetan Buddhist centres and Tibetan organisations including His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s representative Mr. !upten Samdup. It was a great occasion for all those who knew His Holiness to reflect on the kindness and compassion with which the late Penor Rinpoche gave teachings and helped his disciples throughout his life. For more information contact: Palyul Centre at telephone 020 7359 5964 Email: [email protected]

TCV SUJATCV Suja is one of 16 TCV Schools with

nearly 17,000 students in India. !e number of helpless children coming from Tibet to India has increased in 1990s and the CTA had to ask the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV) to take the responsibility of providing them with good education. With support from SOS Kinderdorf International the TCV established new TCV Suja School in Bir in 1986. Major part of the construction was completed in 1994 and a fresh batch of 303 children from Tibet joined the Village. Since then the number of students were kept on increasing. Today the school has 1,564 students. It is almost entirely sta"ed by former students of TCV.

Like all TCV Schools the mission of the TCV Suja is to ensure that all Tibetan children under its care receive a sound education both modern and traditional, a firm cultural identity and to become self reliant, ultimately contributing to the society particularly the Tibetan Community.

Information compiled by Phuntsog Wangyal

From 12th to 14th April 2011 His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited Ireland participating in a conference, “Possibilities 2011 Social Forum” in Dublin and gave public talks in Kildare and Limerick in Ireland. For more information contact:OFce of Tibet, telephone 020 7722 5378 Email: [email protected]

Call of the Snow Lion – A documentary series revealing a history of the unsettled Tibetan DiasporaNOW AVAILABLE ON DVD FROM TIBET FOUNDATION

A documentary series on the history of the unsettled Tibetan diaspora in India and beyond, based on interviews with young and old, monks and nuns, students and teachers, artists and musicians, ordinary people and oFcials, and many others including professionals, writers and filmmakers.A double DVD PAL priced at £14.50 plus £2.50 for post and packing. Send your orders to Tibet Foundation.

For full details go to: http://www.tibet-foundation.org/art_culture/call_of_the_snow_lion/


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TEACHING SCHEDULE OF HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA

!is information is liable to change and you are advised to visit an oFcial website such as www.tibet.com (the website of the London OFce of His Holiness the Dalai Lama) in order to confirm it.

USA Los Angeles, CAMay 1: public talk at the Terrace !eater.Secular Ethics and Meditation www.tdling.org/hhdl2011/gstdl-weekendMay 2 at UCLA Royce Hall Public talk: What is True Wisdom Public symposium: Buddhism and Neuroscience: A Discussion on Attention, Mental Flexibility and Compassion www.dalailama.ucla.edu

Minneapolis, MNMay 8, Mariucci Arena, Uni. of Minnesota www.dalailama.umn.edu Teaching: Medicine Buddha EmpowermentPublic talk: Peace !rough Inner Peace

Fayetteville, ARMay 11 at the Bud Walton Arena.Panel discussion: Turning Swords into Plough shares: !e Many Paths of Non-ViolencePublic talk: Non-Violence in the New Century: !e Way Forwardwww.dalailama.uark.edu

Newark, NJMay 13 & 14 !e Power of Non-Violencewww.newarkpeace.org

INDIA – Dharamsala, H.P.June 3 & 4: teaching ‘Buddhism’ at Upper TCV School Auditorium

AUSTRALIA www.dalailamainaustralia.org(all Australian events except Brisbane conference)Melbourne at the Melbourne Convention CenterJune 11 to 13 Teaching: Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of LifeJune 11 Public Talk: A Conversation with HHDL on Happiness, Life & Living - Karma and Reincarnation Canberra June 14 Public Talk: at the Royal !eater National Convention Center A Conversation with HHDL on Happiness, Life & Living - Love and Forgiveness. Brisbane at the Suncorp Piazza, Southbank ParklandsJune 15: Forum No Matter What, Never Give Up

Sunshine CoastJune 16 Teaching at the Chenresig InstituteA short Buddhist teaching

BrisbaneJune 17 at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Center Conference: Happiness and Its Causes www.happinessanditscauses.com.au

Public Talk: A Conversation with HHDL on Happiness, Life & Living - Happiness and Compassion

PerthJune 19 Public Talk, the Burswood DomeA Conversation with HHDL on Happiness, Life & Living - Spirituality in the Modern World.

INDIA – Dharamsala, H.P. at the Main Tibetan TempleJune 28 & 29: Teachings: Je Tsongkhapa’s Praise to the Buddha for His Teachings on Dependent Origination and an Avalokiteshvera Permission InitiationContact: Snow Lotus Foundation, Email: [email protected]: +84919996858

USA Washington, DC - Kalachakra 2011July 6 to 16 Kalachakra for World Peace July 6 - 8: Preparation and consecration of the venue, creation of the sand mandala. July 9 - 11: preliminary teachings on Gyalsey !okme Sangpo’s 37 Practices of A Boddhisattva & Kamalashila’s !e Middling States of Meditation. July 12: the Kalachakra Ritual Dance by the monks of Namgyal Monastery. July 13 to 15: the Kalachakra Initiation. July 16: a long life empowerment and a ceremony for the long life of His Holiness. www kalachakra2011.com

FRANCEAugust 13-15 Toulouse at the Zenith de ToulouseAug. 13 & 14 Teaching: Kamalashila’s !e Middling States of MeditationAug. 15 Public Talk: !e Art of Happiness www.dalailama-toulouse2011.fr

COMING EVENTS

What Meditation Really Is — Understanding the Mind: the Key to Peace & Happiness

Public Talk with Sogyal Rinpoche

Tuesday 10th May 7.00pmFriends’ Meeting House, Euston Road, NW1 2BJTickets: £15/£10 concession in advance£18/£12 concession on the doorAvailable from Brown Paper Tickets on 0800 411 8881 (24 hrs)

This evening offers the opportunity to receive a complete introduction to the mind and meditation from Sogyal Rinpoche, a world-renowned Buddhist teacher from Tibet and the author of the highly acclaimed !e Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.


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Tibetan Medical Consultations

Sunday 12th to ;ursday 16th June 2011

Birmingham and London

As a part of Tibet Foundation’s ongoing Tibetan Medicine Programme, Dr Tenpa Choephel, the Principal of the Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute in Dharamsala will visit UK and give consultations.

If you are registered as a member of the Foundation you will automatically get detailed information nearer to the time. For further details and appointments, please contact our oFce on 020 7930 6001

His Eminence Ratna Vajra Rinpocheis the eldest son of His Ho l ine s s the Sakya Trizin, the Head of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. He is a master of both the esoteric and exoteric traditions of Buddhist philosophy and meditation and is wellknown for the clarity of his teachings and his superb command of English.

A Special Teaching on Vajra Yogini (Naro Khacho ma)Tuesday 2nd August at 3:00pm16a Highmoor Road, Caversham Heights, Reading, RG4 7BNRestrictions: Only those who have received

Vajra Yogini empowerment from a qualified Sakyapa Master can attend.

Long life Initiations of Buddha Amitayu & Haya-GriwaWednesday 3rd August at 2:30pm,Victoria Hall, Reading Town Hall, Reading RG1 1QHEntrance fee for both programmes: On collection: Sakya Ling members – £25non-members – £30By post add £3 for booking fee. Cheques payable to Sakya Ling Buddhist centre (UK)

For more information please contact: Sakya Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre, 97a Swansea Road, Reading RG1 8HA Tel.: 01189 672 744 / 07917 464 258 / 07809 678 177 [email protected] www.sakyalingreading.co.uk

12th-14th August 2011Hevajra cause and path empowerments

Hosted by the Sakya !ubten Ling Tibetan Buddhist Centre, Bournemouth

!e Hevajra cause and path initiations belong to the highest Annutara Yoga Tantra and are aprinciple deity practices of the Lamdre. !e Lamdre is at the core of the Sakya tradition

Spaces strictly limited, please book early.For booking and further information contact: Richard or Sue Tel.: 01202-483110 [email protected] www.stl.org.uk

C$*"(0 '5'(#& - continued

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