05 · The Courtyard ཆོས་ར།
The Courtyard
Not a blog, a courtyard. Chö-ra is the open ground where this tradition thinks out loud. Long-form writing on what Sera Jey studies, how it lives, and what a visitor is actually looking at.
If Tibet were free tomorrow: a thought experiment about going home
This is fiction. It is also the one scenario nobody in the settlements plans out loud, and the documents that would govern it already exist. Here is roughly how it would go.
The Wheel of Time, and why it matters if you are nobody in particular
His Holiness the Dalai Lama has given the Kālachakra empowerment thirty-four times, to crowds of a hundred thousand and more. Almost none of those people were going to become tantric adepts. That is not a failure of the ceremony. It is the design.
197 monks and 147 acres: what re-establishment actually looked like
In 1970 a monastery that had housed thousands was reduced to a cohort, a forest and a decade of manual labour. The monastery's own account is admirably unsentimental.
How to be a good guest at a working monastery
Sera Jey is not a heritage site. It is several thousand people’s home, school and workplace, and it is open to you anyway.
Who Tsongkhapa was, and why this school argues so much
A fourteenth-century reformer who studied with everybody before founding anything, and who thought rigour was a form of devotion.
How to disappear for a month
Nobody fails a retreat because the meditation was too hard. They fail it because a direct debit bounced in week two and the centre had to come and find them. The unglamorous work of leaving modern life for thirty days.
The wrong monk
In 1967 a Russian-American socialite walked into a monastery in Darjeeling looking for somebody else, and mistook the young monk in front of her for him. The mistake held. Almost everything Western about this tradition comes from what happened next.
The shortcut, and why it is guarded
Tantra is described inside this tradition as the fast road to buddhahood. Everything interesting about it is in what that claim does and does not mean.
One hundred and eight, and nobody is quite sure why
Why a mala has that many beads, what it is made of and why, and how its count compares with the beads of two other religions that never borrowed it.
If everyone woke up Buddhist tomorrow
A thought experiment, and a fairly deflating one. Most of what people expect would happen would not, and the thing that would change is not the thing they name.
Nothing filed under that subject yet.
Related
Every unfamiliar word has an entry
Yigcha, khangtsen, düdra, lharampa, tsöpa, śūnyatā. If a term in these essays is doing more work than it looks like, the Lexicon explains it properly.
Sources
Where this comes from
These pieces draw on the monastery's own published history, the Sera Jey Foundation, the Central Tibetan Administration and standard reference accounts of the Geluk curriculum. Every claim with a date or a number is traceable.
A sister site
The degree, written by somebody who has it
Venerable Geshe Dashnyam Byambatseren is a Mongolian monk of this monastery and personal secretary to the Darpa Pandita. He completed the five great treatises here between 2003 and 2021 and defends his Geshe degree at Sera Jey before more than four thousand monks in October 2026. The curriculum, the debate courtyard, the degree and the titles are set out on his own site rather than here, because he has spent twenty-five years on them and this site has not.
Sources
References
Each piece carries its own reference list at the end. These are the sources the series returns to most often.
- 1About UsSera Jey Monastic University
The founding by Jetsun Kunkhen Lodrö Rinchen Senge, the two administrations, the Geshe Lharampa degree, the 75th abbot, and the affiliated centres abroad.
- 2Re-establishment at BylakuppeSera Jey Monastic University
The 1970 move: 197 Sera Jey and 103 Sera Mey monks, 225 acres at three quarters of an acre per monk, 147¾ acres to Sera Jey, 38 tiled houses, and the first assembly hall of 1976 to 1979.
- 3The Gelug Monastic Education SystemStudy Buddhism
The five great treatises, the sequence of study, and the structure of the Geshe degree.
- 4The Five Great TreatisesKopan Nunnery
Plain-language description of the five Indian root texts and their authors.
- 5Kalachakra initiationsThe Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The thirty-four Kālachakra empowerments given between 1954 and 2017, with places and attendance.
- 6Guidelines for Future Tibet's Polity, 26 February 1992Tibet Justice Center
The dissolution of the exile administration on return, the interim President, the Constituent Assembly, his decision to take no political office, demilitarisation and the environment.
Every factual claim on this page rests on one of the sources above. Links open in a new tab. The full list for the whole site, and the standard this site holds itself to, is on the sources page.