Monks, Sera Monastery, Tibet, 2007
It’s been a while since I posted any photos from my trip to Tibet in 2007, so I thought I would do something along those lines today.
I’m including not only a couple of photos I made with my pocket digital camera, a Canon A570IS, but for the first time, one of my little travel videos, too. In fact, the video is the main reason for this post. I’ve been wanting to do something with it for some time, but I wanted to do some editing on the video first (adding introduction and end cards) and I had to wait until I bought a program that could do that with my relatively new computer.
So, now that I have the software, there’s been nothing holding me back. Here goes:
The photos you see here were made at Sera Monastery, one of the main Buddhist monasteries near Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. This monastery includes a debating courtyard, where the monks go in the afternoon to debate Buddhist principles and philosophy. I’ve read that one of the methods used in debating is for a monk to strike one of his hands into the open palm of the other hand to emphasize a point he’s making.
Well, the time that I was there, I happened to make a short video of one monk who was clearly relishing his making a point. I don’t speak Tibetan so I had no idea what he and his fellow monks were discussing, but this fellow was clearly enjoying himself. I’m guessing that this is not a normal thing there, as I showed the video to my Tibetan tour guide and he really got a big kick out of seeing it, too.
So, please enjoy my little video of how this Tibetan monk liked to debate.
I’m told that is typical debate interactions among the Buddhist monks at Sera monastery in India….a delight in logic and reasoning!