14 questions, answered properly

The clap belongs to the standing challenger only, never the seated defender, and it lands on the last syllable of the challenge. Its working job is to mark the exact moment a claim becomes binding, so that everybody within earshot knows what the defender now owes.

It also carries a taught meaning. The right hand, coming down, stands for method and compassion; the left, receiving, for wisdom. The sound is their joining. Both explanations are true at once, which is fairly typical of this tradition.

Tibetan Nuns Project on the gestures of debate · Why the debate courtyard has no chairs, by a geshe of this monastery

Mostly it is not praying in the sense of asking a deity for something, because there is no creator god in Buddhism to ask. What sounds like prayer is usually one of three things: liturgy recited together, mantra recitation, or the verbal working-through of a visualisation.

There is genuine devotion in it, directed at buddhas and bodhisattvas, but a buddha is understood as somebody who became one, not as somebody who always was. The request is for inspiration and blessing rather than intervention.

Mantras, with what each one says · Puja, in the Lexicon

Various symbolic explanations are given and the tradition does not settle on one. The practical answer is more useful: 108 is long enough to settle into and short enough to finish, and it makes counting accumulations in hundreds of thousands arithmetically tidy.

You turn back at the large guru bead rather than crossing it, so a round is always 108 and never 109.

Mala, in the Lexicon

Often, yes, and this surprises almost every Western visitor. The Tibetan canon permits meat under the rule of threefold purity: a monk may eat it if he has not seen, heard, or suspected that the animal was killed for him specifically. On the Tibetan plateau, at four thousand metres with almost nothing growing, that permission was not academic.

The picture is mixed and changing. Many monks and nuns are vegetarian, vegetarianism has been strongly encouraged in recent decades, and the food served in the assembly halls of the three great seats is vegetarian.

Tricycle on Tibetan vegetarians, past and present

Phones, frequently. At some large monasteries the majority of monks carry one, and this has been true for well over a decade.

Money is more interesting. There is no salary. A monk is supported by donations, by his khangtsen, and often by an individual sponsor abroad. Some monasteries pay a stipend from visitor income, and monks earn small amounts by performing rituals for lay families or by painting thangkas. Nobody is getting rich, and the whole thing runs on an economy of giving that has no equivalent in a salaried society.

Reporting on monasteries and mobile phones · Khangtsen, in the Lexicon

No, and this is probably the most widely held misconception about the tradition.

Tibetan Buddhism has four schools, each with its own head. The head of the Geluk school is the Ganden Tripa, the Holder of the Throne of Ganden, an office reached through scholarly attainment and seniority and held for a fixed term rather than through recognised reincarnation.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a Geluk lineage holder of enormous spiritual authority, and was Tibet's head of state until he gave up political office in 2011. He is not the institutional head of the Geluk school, and he has never been the head of Tibetan Buddhism as a whole.

Ganden Tripa · Titles and Ranks · The Dalai Lamas

Because the institution and the buildings are different things.

Sera was founded near Lhasa in 1419 and the buildings are still standing there. After 1959 the monastery was emptied, and in 1970 the monks who had escaped rebuilt it at Bylakuppe in Karnataka. Both places are called Sera, both are real, and the one in India is now by far the larger. Sera Jey alone has more than four thousand eight hundred monk-students; the monastery in Lhasa holds roughly three hundred under population caps.

The Monastery · The great seats, then and now

Novice ordination has traditionally required a minimum age of seven, which is the age at which the Buddha's own son Rahula was ordained.

The old Vinaya formulation for the lower limit is memorable: a candidate should be old enough to scare off a crow. Boys frequently live and study at a monastery for years before taking even novice vows, so being at a monastery and being ordained are two separate things.

Samanera ordination and the minimum age · Gelong and getsul, in the Lexicon

Nothing dramatic, and it is common. The full course runs seventeen years at Sera Jey and about twenty-three for the highest grade, and not everybody is aiming at it.

Some monks complete only the memorisation examinations. Some take one of the lower grades of the degree instead of Lharampa, sometimes because of health or age, sometimes because their monastery needs them. Others move into ritual, administration, teaching, art or the kitchen, all of which the institution needs as much as it needs scholars.

What is a Geshe, FPMT Mandala · Titles and Ranks

Yes. Monastic vows are not a life sentence and disrobing is a recognised procedure, not an excommunication. A monk asks to be released, returns his robes, and returns to lay life.

Socially it is harder than the rule makes it sound. In most Buddhist societies disrobing carries a degree of disapproval, and for somebody who entered at eight and leaves at twenty-six it is a complete change of life with no obvious landing place. Re-ordination later is possible in some traditions.

Disrobing, in the Buddhist Monastic Code

Yes, now. The Geshema degree is the female equivalent, and the first Geshemas graduated in 2016 after decades of groundwork and with the encouragement of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Nunneries in India run the same five-treatise curriculum and the same public debate examinations.

That it took until 2016 is part of the answer, and worth saying rather than skipping.

The Geshema degree, Tibetan Nuns Project · Geshema, in the Lexicon

Foreigners do ordain in this tradition and some live and study in the great monasteries. The International Mahayana Institute, FPMT's ordained community, has a house at Sera Je itself.

The practical obstacles are real. It takes fluent Tibetan to follow the curriculum, it takes years, and foreign nationals need a Protected Area Permit even to stay overnight at Bylakuppe. Most Westerners who want this train at a Western monastery first. That is the sensible route and nobody will think less of you for taking it.

Sera IMI House, in the FPMT directory · The Protected Area Permit

Donation, almost entirely. There are no fees, no tuition and no endowment of the kind a Western university would recognise.

A monastery of several thousand runs on individual sponsorship of monks, on a food fund, on offerings made for pujas, and on charitable foundations abroad. Sera Jey's own institutions, its secondary school of more than 550 pupils, its health care committee founded in 1989, its kitchen and its library, are funded the same way.

Sera Jey Foundation · Sera Jhe Health Care Committee

No. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said repeatedly that most people are better off deepening the tradition they grew up in, and he invites non-Buddhists to his teachings as observers.

Visiting requires courtesy, not conversion. Studying requires curiosity. Taking refuge, which is the formal boundary of being a Buddhist, is a separate decision that nobody will push you towards.

Start Here · Refuge, in the Lexicon