What each day actually is

The Tibetan new year, and the one day on this page that is as much a household occasion as a religious one.

Two halves, in order

Losar is not one celebration but two joined together, and the order matters. First the old year is sent off: debts settled, quarrels ended, the house cleaned out, and the accumulated rubbish of the year disposed of deliberately rather than incidentally. Only then is the new year invited in.

Guthuk, and the dumpling that tells you about yourself

On the eve, families eat guthuk, a noodle soup. Objects are hidden inside some of the dumplings, and what you get is read as a comment on your character. Wool means you are kind. Charcoal means you have a black heart. It is affectionate rather than solemn, and it is the part children remember.

Then the new year

New prayer flags go up. Juniper and incense are burned. Khapse, deep-fried biscuits in various shapes, are made in quantity, and at Dolma Ling the nuns make elaborate butter sculptures of flowers and auspicious symbols. In a monastery Losar also opens the great prayer festival that follows it.

Not a single day but a week, and the reason the Geluk academic year has the shape it has.

Founded in 1409, and why that year matters

Je Tsongkhapa established Mönlam Chenmo at the Jokhang in Lhasa in 1409, ten years before he died and ten years before Sera was founded. Monks of Drepung, Sera and Ganden gathered for it. From 1417 Drepung presided. It has run for about six hundred years.

The examinations

This is the detail that connects the festival to this site. The oral examinations for the Geshe Lharampa degree, the highest in the Geluk system, were held during Mönlam. A candidate who had studied for twenty years defended in front of the assembled monks of three monasteries, during the most public week of the year. The degree was not awarded in a room.

What it leads to

The week runs from the fourth to the eleventh day of the first month, inside the fifteen days of miracles, and the whole sequence closes on Chotrul Duchen.

The first of the four great days, and the close of fifteen days rather than a day on its own.

What is commemorated

Over fifteen days the Buddha is held to have displayed miraculous powers in order to subdue six teachers who lacked faith in him, and to inspire faith in his followers. FPMT is precise that the observance is days 1 to 15 of the first month, with day 15 called Chotrul Duchen. All fifteen count.

Why a tradition this sceptical of display commemorates a display

Buddhism is generally cool about miraculous powers. The Vinaya restricts advertising attainments, and this site has a whole page on what the tradition does not claim. The reading given inside the tradition is that the display was for a specific purpose and an audience that needed it, not a demonstration of power for its own sake. That distinction carries a lot of weight here and is easy to miss from outside.

The holiest day of the year, and the only one that marks three things at once.

Three events, one day

The Buddha’s birth, his enlightenment and his parinirvana are all commemorated on the fifteenth of the fourth month. Other Buddhist traditions keep the same occasion as Vesak, sometimes on a different date.

Why the figure attached to it is larger

FPMT gives the multiplication of karmic result on the four great days as one hundred million, and for this day three hundred million, precisely because it marks three events rather than one. The arithmetic is not the point; the reason for the difference is.

The whole month counts

The fourth Tibetan month is the month of merit, not just its fifteenth day. At Dolma Ling the nuns read the entire Kangyur, the collected words of the Buddha, over several days during it.

A day of incense offering made to the whole world rather than to anything in particular.

Sang, the smoke offering

Sangsol is an offering of fragrant smoke, usually juniper. Unlike most of the days here it is not tied to an event in the Buddha’s life. It is closer to a seasonal purification, and it predates the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet in its form.

Tsampa in the air

Handfuls of tsampa, roasted barley flour, are thrown into the air. Photographs of Tibetan festivals with a white cloud over the crowd are almost always this.

The day the teaching began, and it nearly did not.

Sarnath, seven weeks after

The Buddha gave his first teaching at Sarnath, near Varanasi, seven weeks after his enlightenment, to the five companions who had earlier abandoned him.

The part worth sitting with

According to the tradition’s own account he first decided not to teach, on the grounds that what he had understood was too subtle and nobody would follow it. He was asked, and changed his mind.

Everything downstream of that decision, every monastery on this site, every book on the people page, this website, exists because of a change of mind that the tradition has never tidied out of the story. It could have kept a founder who always intended to teach. It did not.

The Buddha comes back down, having gone somewhere for a reason that is easy to miss.

Where he went, and why

The Buddha spent several months teaching in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. Among those he taught was his mother, Mayadevi, who had died a week after his birth and been reborn there.

That is the whole of it, and it is worth saying plainly: the reason given for the only episode in which the Buddha leaves the human world for months is that he went to teach his mother. He then came back.

The great day of the Geluk year that is not one of the four, and in a Geluk monastery the one you would notice most.

What the name says

Ganden Ngamchoe means literally ‘Ganden Offering of the Twenty-Fifth Day’. It is the anniversary of the parinirvana of Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), the founder of the Geluk school, on the twenty-fifth day of the tenth Tibetan month.

1419

He died in the same year Sera was founded. The monastery this site is written from is exactly as old as his absence.

Butter lamps in every window

The visible custom is light. Lamps go along every windowsill, wall and roofline, which is why the day is sometimes called the festival of lights. In the monasteries the practice Lama Zopa Rinpoche encouraged is the puja of one thousand offerings to Lama Tsongkhapa: a thousand sets of seven offerings, with the offering verse recited a thousand times. Where that is impossible, Lama Chopa with as many offerings as can be set out.