https://darpapandita.com/courtyard.html One long piece a month on Tibetan Buddhism in the Geluk tradition, written from Sera Jey Monastic University at Bylakuppe. en-GB Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://darpapandita.com/assets/icon-512.png https://darpapandita.com/ https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-return.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-return.html Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Fiction 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-kalachakra.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-kalachakra.html Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Teachings 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-1970.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-1970.html Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 History 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-visiting-well.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-visiting-well.html Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Visiting Sera Jey is not a heritage site. It is several thousand people’s home, school and workplace, and it is open to you anyway. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-tsongkhapa.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-tsongkhapa.html Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Tradition A fourteenth-century reformer who studied with everybody before founding anything, and who thought rigour was a form of devotion. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-leaving.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-leaving.html Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Practical 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-kopan.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-kopan.html Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 History 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-tantra.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-tantra.html Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Teachings 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-mala.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-mala.html Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Objects 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. https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-everyone.html https://darpapandita.com/courtyard-everyone.html Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Fiction 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.