Page 7 - Sera Monastery News Today

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Image via Time After Time Rebkong is a small monastic town that lies 180 kilometers south of Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. Situated on the edge of the Tibetan plateau at an elevation of 2,600 meters (8,530 feet), the town is surrounded by mountains and expanses of nomadic pastureland in a region historically known to its nomadic inhabitants as Amdo Tibet. Home to several monasteries and villages around the main hub of the central town, the area has hundreds of professional artists �...

In the early 1980s, José Cabezón was the Spanish translator for His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, translating for him in Spain, Costa Rica, Mexico and, on a few occasions, in India. As a result, he became a lifelong student of the Dalai Lama. The connection endures. Cabezón today holds the Dalai Lama Endowed Chair in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara, which recently marked the 20th anniversary of that endowment. In a nice complement to the milestone, the university’s Arts & Lectures pro...

Image courtesy of Dragon Adventures Located in the northern mountain ranges of Hunan, the remote Zhangjiajie National Forest was known only to the Tujia, Miao and Bai minority groups for centuries. Today, with its towering karst spires, rich brown earth and lush forests, Zhangjiajie has become a striking and iconic Chinese landscape. Made a UNESCO Heritage Site in 1992, and immortalized by the film Avatar, the park is a dramatic landscape of deep, forested canyons and enormous, isolated limest...

This piece is adapted from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, translated by Kevin Carrico, which will be published by Verso on January 12. February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the...

Reuters Chinese authorities in Tibet have imposed restrictions on religious practices and shuttered temples in the city of Lhasa ahead the Tibetan New Year, citing coronavirus concerns, sources in Tibet told RFA. The Lunar New Year, called Losar in Tibetan, falls on February 12 this year. In most years, the first three days of the New Year are packed with festivals and religious ceremonies, and most Tibetan Buddhists in Lhasa visit temples during the holiday. “There are many re...