Member-only story
Sera Monastery
I visited India and Nepal for the first time on a Buddhist pilgrimage led by Shantum Seth in 2007. The following is from my 2008 trip to India, Nepal, and Tibet and is about Tibet.
I visited the breathtaking Sera Monastery this afternoon.
As we rode to Sera Monastery, which is on the outskirts of Lhasa, Gyantzing told me that it housed five thousand monks before the Chinese invasion, and now it only has eight hundred monks. To me, that still seems like an awfully big number. But simultaneously I don’t think it’s appropriate for the colonial government to limit the number of people who want a spiritual and communal life — or at least supposedly spiritual: not all monks are good, as we discussed in Dharamshala. Because of the Chinese occupation, monks and nuns aren’t allowed to study as deeply as they should, and as they do in Dharamshala.
Gyantzing explained that boys must be at least sixteen years old to become monks now. The Chinese authorities look at their background first, to make sure they have no relatives in India or relatives who are political protesters.
I surmise that generally boys who become monks when they’re only five years old aren’t old enough to know whether…