In February 1996, 14 lamas from Sera Je Monastery in southern India embarked on a one-year tour of the US, Canada and Mexico. WildLife, Tamed Mind: The Spirit of Tibet presents Tibetan history and culture through ritual dance and music interwoven with CD-ROM-generated photos, videos and sound, together with live narration. The lamas have also toured cyberspace via Houston Chronicle Interactive's website for The Mandala of Hayagriva. The tour was initiated by the abbot and senior teachers of the monastery as a way of introducing Westerners to Buddhism while at the same time raising funds for construction of a new temple and debating grounds and to expand religious training programs.

Founded near Lhasa in 1419, Sera was the second largest monastery in the world, serving as a center of education and training for monks from all over Tibet who aspired for the geshe degree, the highest level of academic achievement (comparable to a Ph.D.) offered by the Gelugpa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. Over 7,000 lamas, or monks, were studying at Sera before the Chinese invasion; of these, about 500 managed to escape to India following the suppression of the Tibetan National Uprising in 1959.

At the request of the Dalai Lama, 1500 monks representing all four sects of Tibetan Buddhism were subsequently offered the facilities of a former British internment camp in the jungles of Assam. Buxa's high barbed-wire fence had previously imprisoned many of India's great independence fighters and, in the 1960s, its specter—combined with the hot, humid climate, an unaccustomed diet, tropical diseases and tuberculosis—led to physical illess, depression, madness and death for scores of monks. The situation became brighter only in the early 1970s when, together with some ten thousand lay Tibetans, the monks were resettled in Karnataka State. Another jungle had to be cleared, buildings constructed and crops planted but, physically and spiritually, the climate was less oppressive and monastic life again began to thrive.

Tibetan Buddhism may never again see the days when seven households support each monk and every family finds fulfillment in contributing at least one member to a monastery or nunnery. Yet even Tibetans who don't consider themselves to be religious grieve when monks and nuns must sacrifice time from dharma studies in order to secure the necessities of daily life, because national identity and religious identity are viewed as inseparable. (The Chinese government's understanding of this was evinced by its attack on Tibetan political cohesiveness as personified by the Panchen Lama.)

The only solace to be found in the incomprehensibly excruciating sacrifices made by Tibetan Buddhists is that survivors of the holocaust have been forced into contact with the rest of the world, which has been immeasurably richened by its encounters with the people, culture and religion of that besieged nation. Some thirty geshes from Sera Je have found refuge and eager students in the West, while their brethren in South India have built a hospital and pharmacy to serve both Tibetans and Indians and have established an Environmental Committee to improve and protect the natural ecology of that region. The monastery operates a farm, dairy, printing presses and computer input project, as well as a crafts division that produces traditional Tibetan carpets, tangkas and statues. But the main "business" of Sera Je continues to be religious studies and the pursuit of enlightenment. And thanks to recent "reform" policies in Chinese-occupied Tibet, business is booming. A flood of aspiring monks and nuns have escaped to seek refuge and religious training in India and Nepal, and the population of Sera Je has grown from 1300 monks in 1989 to its current total of 2600.

Needing to raise funds to accommodate these recent arrivals, the monastery decided to organize a tour of monks performing ritual dances and chants. While sometimes viewed by outsiders as fantastic or grotesque, religious art, music and dance have always played an integral role in Tibetan Buddhism as what Tarthang Tulku called "a guide to enlightenment, a system of symbolic images for transforming ordinary, dualistic consciousness into the highest understanding of reality." Through the visualization or ritual portrayal of our inner nature, both we and our world are transformed. Many teachings and practices are revealed only to initiates, but even the uninformed may benefit from encounters with these sacred arts. Thus a tour could benefit both the monastery and its Western sponsors. The monastery sought the assistance of a former Sera Je student, David Patt, author of A Strange Liberation: Tibetan Lives in Chinese Hands, who then wrote and produced WildLife, Tamed Mind. GLOW interviewed Mr. Patt, who is now serving as the tour's director.

GLOW: Many press reviews have expressed amazement and excitement that these monks, exiles of a country in which cars were a rarity until the Chinese invasion, are using all this computer-based multimedia presentation technology. It occurs to me that, on the contrary, the World-Wide Web may seem primitive to someone who's practiced visualizing mandalas that represent six levels of the universe and 722 emanations of a deity down to the fringe of his robe. A multimedia slide show with digitized sound, graphics and video may appear to be only a simplified version of the offerings—light, incense, sound, and symbolic visions of the universe—that Tibetans have been presenting to the Buddha for the past thirteen hundred years. Would you agree that this performance is just a logical extension of the kinds of things that lamas have been doing since Buddhism entered Tibet?

PATT: I think there's a difference. All this technology is basically tools to help human beings perform practical tasks, and it's not exactly appropriate to compare it to visualizations of mandalas. But it's true that the monks have cultivated certain mental capacities to a large extent, such that they can do things that we often feel we need computers to do, such as memorization. I've sat in front of teachers who could tell you about every deity and in which place it falls in the Kalachakra mandala. A lot of the technological tools that we have created for ourselves are designed to aid our mental capacity in ways that the monks, coming from a traditional culture, had to cultivate their minds to be able to do. In many ways—as individuals, as a culture—they have capacities that we haven't cultivated or that we've kind of transferred.

It's similar to Tibetan medicine, or to Oriental medicine in general, where the practitioner has to develop means of figuring out what's going on inside the body and its systems by looking at things like color of the eyes and feeling of the pulse and quality of the skin. The features of the body tell them what's going on in the internal organs, whereas we in the West have developed these fabulous machines like CAT scans to actually look inside the body. A good Tibetan or Chinese doctor can tell what's going on in the body by the signs on the outside, because they don't have the technology to do it for them.

GLOW: So we Westerners put our energy into transforming the tools or the world around us instead of transforming ourselves or our own abilities.

PATT: Right. At the same time, Buddhism teaches you to open your eyes to the world around you and to see it as it is. As long as Tibetan Buddhists were living in a very simple, agricultural economy in a very ecologically delicate niche in the Himalayas, they lived a very simple lifestyle. But these people don't live in Tibet any more; they haven't lived there since 1959. They're living in a world that is full of computers. Even in India, there's a huge computer revolution going on and, like everybody else, they're adapting and making use of these technologies - only, at their best, they're still using them to do what they have taken as their life's work, which is to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. To the extent that they can use this technology to better learn, teach or communicate with other people, so that others can also benefit from the teachings of Buddhism, they're more than happy to indulge in that.

You know, when you build a stupa, there are a whole lot of prescribed items that go inside. Many of the items are special prayers; different kinds of mantras go in different parts of the stupa. But you also put in a whole lot of worldly goods.

GLOW: Now it might be a CD-ROM of the Kangyur or something like that!

PATT: Not even just of the Kangyur, but it could be a CD-ROM of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? It's supposed to be the tools that you actually would use in your life - for example, garden tools, shovels, little toy cars, refrigerators and all these things get put inside the stupa. Today when people build stupas, they usually put in disks and computer programs, and maybe drawings or toy computers. All these things are symbolic of the worldly goods which are employed by a buddha or a bodhisattva who comes to the world today; he's not going to just sit in a cave and hide. They're going to use whatever tools are most effective in benefiting sentient beings. If you want to have a database so you can send your mailing out to a lot of people, you're going to use a computer or, if you want to communicate to a large audience, you'd use the Internet.

GLOW: Doesn't there remain a conflict between preserving traditional culture and getting caught up in the modern world and modern tools and everything that one needs to do to survive and keep a monastery alive at this point?

PATT: Yes, that is a tension that the monasteries feel every now and then. In its worst manifestation, it leads to monks leaving the monastery. And this often happens to the most talented or the ones who speak English who get invited to the West. They end up living in non-monastic situations, and they get distracted by the enticements of Western wealth and comfort, and they give up their robes. Because they couldn't really keep their vows in that context. That's the worst extreme of that situation, but you'd also find, at some of the big monasteries, the monks who have money or sponsors, or whose families have money, were accumulating motorcycles (which is a way to get around in India), stereo systems, computers and this kind of thing. Of course, all those things depend on how you use them. A car can be used as an ambulance to take monks to the hospital in Mysore, or it could be used to go to the movies on Saturday night. Again, it comes down to what's the motivation and how is the technology being used. There are computers at the monastery and, by and large, they're used for monastery business, such as inputting sacred texts so that they can be printed in Tibetan. That's not a problem. If monks are using them to play computer games, that's not a serious problem unless they're doing it too much.

GLOW: Monasteries have never been immune from political intrigues and power struggles, but I was surprised by the very political tone of your program and by the fact that monks are participating. Does that signal a greater trend toward social engagement and political involvement? Inside Tibet, monks and nuns have been forced to be politically involved. Now it seems that's happening more on the outside, too. I've heard of other monasteries besides Sera Je starting projects involving public health, education and ecological restoration and the like. Although there have always been ongoing relationships between monasteries and their surrounding communities, they were never institutionalized in the way they're beginning to be now.

PATT: Our show isn't really that political. Out of nine video segments, it essentially has only one that focuses on modern politics. The trend towards social engagement is something that the Dalai Lama has talked about. It was not a function of the monasteries in Tibet, at least not in a form that we in the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to think of it—hospitals, schools. The way a Tibetan monastery served its community's needs was by doing rituals that enabled the cycle of life to continue in a stable fashion, in the minds and in the world-view of Tibetan Buddhists. They would purify the ground and get the cooperation of the local deities to help with the crops. They would bring rain when the rain was needed to drive away hail. They would say pujas for people who were ill, to bring about the restoration of health, for protection of travellers. All these were functions of Buddhist monks inside Tibet, and still are the functions of Buddhist monks in communities outside Tibet. That was a form of social service, although we tend to think it might be just superstitious voodoo or something. To them, that was social service.

Of course, now that Tibetan Buddhism has been exposed to other ways that you can help people, these ideas are standard and, as you say, at Sera we're doing the health care. The committee has really done fantastic work in bringing medical care to both Tibetan monks and laypeople and to the Indian laypeople who live in the area surrounding the monastery. And now they have this Environmental Committee where they're planting trees and putting up a solar hot-water heater to help the cooks in the monastery. So all this good stuff is going on, and the Dalai Lama has encouraged it. And there are certainly a lot of Western Buddhists who are, of course, influenced by their own cultural background that this is the kind of thing that Buddhists should be doing. There's a whole hospice movement, especially among the Theravadin Buddhists. There's a lot going on, and I think it's fair to say that as time goes on, there will be more and more, because this is a way for Buddhist people to walk the walk and not just talk the talk of helping other sentient beings. Buddhists are, from time to time, accused of retreating to their little caves and not actually helping people, of just visualizing helping people and not actually doing it. It's a criticism that has some validity.

In the Tibetan community, there still is a sense that monks go to monasteries to study and to be monks. Especially among the older generation, the idea of going out and becoming nurses and social workers or whatever may still be a kind of an odd thing. But as the younger generation grows—and they're more savvy, more in touch with Western values—I think we'll see more and more of that. Maybe one of the good offshoots of these tours is that, when you get a bunch of monks who normally would not have been given the opportunity to travel to the West, they see other ways for people to live and they get new ideas and bring those back to the monastery. You know, I was saying that some monks end up giving up their robes and so going to the West isn't always a salutory thing to do, but I think that the monks learn a lot from these trips. And that's the way that Tibet is going to be brought into the modern world: by exposure of the people to modern ideas and then returning to their own communities.

GLOW: What's the significance of the title WildLife, Tamed Mind?

PATT: "WildLife" is, of course, a pun. Primarily it refers to the many animals in the show - yaks, deer, elephants, birds, monkeys, and the wonderful wildlife that thrived in Tibet and is now under threat due to the environmental destruction of Chinese settlement and exploitation. Secondarily, the title refers to the literal wildness of much of Tibet. It was a sparsely inhabited wilderness in much of the country. Life was hard, rough, not fenced in. It does not refer to some kind of "crazy wisdom" or uncontrolled behavior on the part of Tibetans or yogis in particular. Ours is a monastic tradition, with self-control and moral discipline at its core. "Tamed Mind" is what Buddhism is all about. We create our own happiness and sorrow, and the way we take control of our lives is by taking control of our minds.

GLOW: What's the relationship between Sera, Sera Je and Sera Me?

PATT: Sera monastery is the whole monastery together, the whole complex. Within each monastery, there are what are called dratsang in Tibetan, what we would translate as colleges; they're separate units, subsets of the whole monastery. In Tibet, Sera monastery had three dratsang: Sera Je, Sera Me, and Sera Ngagpa (which was a tantric college). Sera Ngagpa did not survive the escape; there weren't enough monks from Sera Ngagpa left to reconstitute it in India. So Sera now has two colleges in India.

Sera was essentially closed after the 1959 uprising. A lot of the monks had been involved in the fighting, and the Chinese basically closed all three of the big Gelugpa monasteries in Lhasa. As far as physical destruction is concerned, the Chinese made Ganden the big example, basically leveling it to the ground. Images of Ganden can be seen all over. They really systematically demolished it. They didn't do that with Sera. I haven't been to Sera, so I can't tell you the exact extent of the damage.

GLOW: It was more spiritual than physical.

PATT: Yes, it was. There was physical damage - a lot of desecration of temples and ripping-off of images and books and stuff. Some of it has been reconstructed by Tibetans under liberalisation. But there are basically two reasons for monks leaving. (I'm talking about all the monasteries in Tibet now.) One is that the continuity of teachers was completely broken. Many of the teachers fled and, of the ones who were left, a huge percentage just died in the '60s and during the Cultural Revolution. They starved to death in the early '60s and then they were tortured, beaten and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution. There was essentially a period from 1959 to 1980—twenty years—when there was no teaching going on. So the lineages and the training were broken, and there is no way for young monks who really want to pursue their studies in depth and intensity the way it used to be to get that in Tibet. They don't have access to the teachers. So that's one of the main reasons they leave.

The other thing that's going on for the "Big Three" (Sera, Ganden and Drepung monasteries) in Lhasa is that, since they became politically very volatile in the '80s when they started the demonstrations, the Chinese have essentially turned them into encampments of spies and Chinese-lackey controllers who keep a very close eye on all the activities going on in. They have watchers camped out next door and they set limits on who can stay there, so the monks have basically no freedom at all to act in a normal manner.

GLOW: My understanding is that, at this point, the number of people allowed to study religion at all is so small that it's practically invisible and, beyond that, that the educational policies push young Tibetans towards learning Chinese, forcing them to choose between that and unemployment, so that even to get basic literacy they have to escape the country.

PATT: If young Tibetans want to go into the Chinese educational system, learn Chinese, operate in Chinese and try to get ahead, there is some possibility for them to do it. But that essentially requires them to renounce any sense of personal identity as a Tibetan. Of course, many Tibetans don't want to do that. Those who do become somewhat suspect in the eyes of their Tibetan compatriots. So you have kind of an apartheid system where you're pressured to want to get ahead; if you have any ambition, you're pressured to become a collaborator. On the other hand, if you're not willing to work through the Chinese system, then your life opportunities are extremely restricted. You're going to be poor in what is really a very poor country.

Some scholars have written about the choice to become a monk or nun. You know, it's extraordinary. A number of young people, people who were essentially raised in Maoist China—they had no Buddhist education at all, their parents weren't even allowed to say a mantra without getting beaten up. And yet, these people, they get to be twenty and they want to become monks and nuns! So where does that come from? Some people say that this is the way to express your identity as a Tibetan. The Tibetan identity has always been so completely wrapped up with Tibetan Buddhism that it's not surprising that, if a young Tibetan wants to say "I'm Tibetan, I'm not Chinese," the most eloquent way to say that is to put on robes. And then, if they're serious about wanting to become monks or nuns, they have to go to Nepal or India. So that's one way to explain that phenomenon.

(1.75mb): Debate at Sera Je Monastery About Monastic Debate...

GLOW: Could you tell me how you got involved in this program, and about the process of creating it? Did you know what you were getting into when you started?

PATT: I had a pretty good idea. This isn't the first monks' tour and, before I completely took it on, I did talk to some people who had run previous tours to get some ideas. I've been involved in Tibetan Buddhism since 1974. The abbot of the monastery, Geshe Jampa Thekchog, contacted Geshe Sopa, my teacher, who's a professor at the University of Wisconsin and the head of Deer Park Buddhist Center in Madison, WI. He's the senior Sera Je geshe in North America. Geshe Sopa contacted me and, after some discussion, I finally said, "I'd be willing to do this, but I'm not willing to do the same old monks dancing and mystical gibberish from the announcer that just tries to do a New Age, feel-good kind of thing. If I do it, I want to do something different, and I want it to be genuinely educational, informative about both Tibetan Buddhism and the situation in Tibet." Geshe Sopa, who's also an educator, agreed completely. Our lineage is the lineage of educators, and we wanted to teach people something, not just run around and put on shows to make money and have people leave without knowing what they'd seen. Which, I think, is a general criticism of some of the shows that have gone before.

GLOW: How did you actually structure the show? Was your format influenced by lha mo [Tibetan opera], if not in actual content, then in its didactic, entertainment and religious functions, and its functions of subduing demons and bringing blessings? I've also wanted to ask you about this: My understanding was that particular ritual dances and musical offerings all have their own times, places and functions. So to transplant them from their traditional functions into a show that's travelling around at different times—how did you work with the monks to do this in a way that didn't unacceptably compromise religious purity? Also, it was my understanding that folk singing and dancing were traditionally forbidden to monks unless they were necessary in connection with the Mahayana Buddhist religion. But there are folk, or popular, numbers in WildLife, Tamed Mind. Have the traditional restrictions been relaxed, or are these performances seen as fulfilling a religious function?

PATT: That's a lot of loaded questions! I'll tell you the true story. Geshe Sopa and I talked, and we came up with a "wish list," a scenario that would tell the whole history of Buddhism in Tibet, focusing on some of the most interesting historical and religious figures, and a list of dances and presentations that would present a coherent picture of that history. We sent that to the monastery, and basically there was a period of negotiations during which they said, "We can do these dances and we can't do some of these." There was also some influence from Yeshe Rinpoche in Europe. So the monks in India learned a set of dances that was decided on in India, with input from Europe and America. They performed those dances on tour in Switzerland, Italy, France and Germany for seven months, with none of the other material that I put together here. They then sent me a list of the eight or nine dances they were doing, and I took that list and kind of meditated on it for a few weeks. It was like playing Scrabble: What could I do with these? What could I make out of this, in terms of what I wanted to do? By reorganizing the structure and cutting a couple of dances to make time for our video segments, I finally settled on a structure that made sense, presenting history in Act I and religion in Act II. And I then ordered pieces—you hinted at it—it starts out with an auspicious dance, and that's exactly what that dance is meant to do. It's performed on special occasions to inaugurate buildings or weddings; on any new undertaking, they do the Tashi Shoelpa Dance.

(1.75mb): The Auspicious Dance of Tashi Shoelpa (excerpt 1) (1.75mb): The Auspicious Dance of Tashi Shoelpa (excerpt 2) (1.75mb): The Auspicious Dance of Tashi Shoelpa (excerpt 3)

It is a lha mo dance, not a religious dance that would normally be done by monks. And then I thought, When you start telling people about something like Tibet, you start by talking about the people and the place, the geography. So we have our opening video segment of the land and people of Tibet. The monks had already come with a Yak Dance and, of course, that fit perfectly as one of the centerpieces of life in Tibet. As you see in the show, it's like the buffalo is to the American Indians.

(1.75mb): The Yak Dance

Once I decided it would be multimedia, I went out looking for visual elements. That really involved my using contacts and knowledge of what had been done before. Peter Gold was an old friend of mine. When I was living in Dharamsala and working on my book, I lived next door to Peter, who was working on his book Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom, and we spent a lot of time together. Peter travels all the time, he goes to Tibet every year, and he gave me access to his slide library. I filled in a few missing images from a few other people, but most of the pictures are Peter's. And then the moving images - I knew right away that I wanted to use images from Mickey Lemle's film Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama. I've used it a lot in classes that I've taught; it covers the politics and the religion, and it's a wonderful film.

So those are the elements, basically. And then the other element was Ani Thubten Dekyong, also known as Tseyang-la, our narrator, who's a very special person herself. She has very deep ties to Sera Je. One of her younger brothers is a rinpoche who's the reincarnation of Geshe Sopa's teacher in Tibet and one of the best young lamas in Sera. She had another brother who was also a monk at Sera Je. Most of Tseyang's teachers - Lama Yeshe and Geshe Sopa and others - are Sera Je geshes. We thought very highly of her English skills and her ability to work with and talk to Westerners. When Geshe Sopa asked her to do this, she gave it thought for quite a while, because it's a pretty major commitment to do this for a year. When she agreed, we were really excited that another new element that we were bringing was to have a nun involved and to expose American audiences to the nuns of Tibet. Because women in Tibet have had a very major impact on the culture and, especially, on the freedom struggle.

GLOW: Is the tour going to specifically benefit nuns in any way?

PATT: I can't say that it will, specifically. The money is basically going to go to the monastery. Ani-la herself was one of the founders and raised the money for the Kacho Ghakyil Nunnery in Kathmandu.

GLOW: Attention has been paid in the press to the fact that Tseyang-la is the first Tibetan nun to perform in the US. But what hasn't been mentioned is that Tibetan Buddhist nuns have never been permitted to participate in ritual dance, that no nun has ever reached the level of training where she's been permitted to learn overtone chanting techniques, and that this year marked the first occasion on which nuns were permitted to engage in public, formal debate. So it seems to me rather ironic, if not infuriating, that she's putting herself out for a bunch of guys.

Beyond that, I just read in the first issue of Ch–-Yang that when Jetsun Jamyang Ch–je decided to found the monastery, he divined the place at which it should be built and, when his disciples went to investigate, they found a nunnery at that very spot - which they then decided should be moved elsewhere. According to Ch–-Yang, from that time on, the relocated nunnery (which was called Nechung Ri) was paid "a certain quantity of grain annually" by Sera Je in exchange for the grounds that it had sacrificed. And those payments continued until the time that Tibet was occupied by the Chinese.

PATT: Is that right? Oh wow, I never heard that story. I'm not going to apologize for it because I don't think it was an egalitarian way to run a society any more than you do. But that's the way Tibet was. Anybody who can sit around and say Tibet was Shangri-La and there was no inequality, or that it was not essentially a feudal society or there wasn't any exploitation of people, just doesn't know anything about Tibet. What you're saying is basically true. On the other hand, the Tibetan nuns aren't bitter about that in the way Western-educated women who have strong feminist ideology might be. They're coming at it as natives of that culture, in which nuns' role was to perform rituals, and they were not given opportunities to teach or study.

GLOW: Well, self-abnegation is a female tradition throughout the world! But I get the impression that they're just happy to be able to practice their religion, and they ask no more than that.

PATT: That's right, they are. It's true of all people who are still immersed in their native cultures that they don't see what's wrong with it until someone comes along and gives them a different perspective. Tibetan nuns are now going to classes at the School of Dialectics at Dharamsala and that kind of thing, and Western women are helping Tibetan nuns to get the kind of opportunities they didn't have. Those opportunities are just beginning to open up for them.

GLOW: What sorts of groups have you been working with in arranging housing and events for the tour?

PATT: When you have to fill up 365 days on a calendar, and have a place for them to sleep and eat and perform every one of those days of the year, you work with anybody who's willing to work with you! Many of the Tibetan resettlement communities love to have the monks stay with them, and to cook real food for the monks. And the monks love to stay with them. In some communities, the Tibetans are the main organizers. As for other groups, we've been invited a lot by Students for a Free Tibet. We've done many gigs at universities arranged through professors of Asian Studies, Asian Religions and Buddhism. We've done a few Unity churches, which were the mainstay of some of the other tours, and some community theaters and other commercial theatrical venues. And some dharma centers.

GLOW: What's been striking about this tour is that you're getting into the backroads of America, not just hitting the major urban centers.

PATT: The big cities have everything already; it's hard for one more monks' tour to make an impression. But in the smaller places, you're really appreciated when you show up. For example, when I was with the tour, we went to Las Cruces, NM, where we were brought by some young American Indians who had gone to Dharamsala in an exchange program and become complete Tibetophiles. It was this really nice little college town full of American Indians and Mexican-Americans, and these people were really interested in Tibet and Buddhism. There were no Buddhist centers in Las Cruces, so this was a special event for them. They had been reading books, but had no access to teachers. So it was very moving and exciting when they got to spend a couple of days with a bunch of monks.

GLOW: In your advance publicity you listed some ways in which the monks may benefit the well-being of Americans, such as blessing towns or visiting local elementary schools. Are there other things the monks want to do? And how can people become involved with the tour, if they want to bring the monks to their towns or arrange events auxiliary to those already scheduled? And what about Netizens in other parts of the world? Are there ways in which they can work with the monks at Sera Je or with your tour? What can we do to keep the spirit of Tibet alive?

PATT: We are really happy to hear from people e