It used to be that every extended family would send at
least one boy to the monastery to become a monk. It was
just normal. And there were all these people in Tibet who
were also coming into India through Nepal and Bhutan,
and they would come into the monasteries and take up
their spaces, cohorts in their classes, but recently the
police forces have stopped that flow.
The monasteries and nunneries are doing great things in
their local communities in terms of social welfare programs.
They’re the ones who establish the clinics. They have
hospitals, library resources, and there are people for any
spiritual needs to be met in various ways, such as with
prayers and advice, giving names to the children and
blessings, and so on. All this plays a very vital role within
the refugee communities in India and Nepal. Also, people
in these communities have found ways to go abroad, to
Malaysia, Singapore, USA, Canada and Australia.
There’s a need for them to have access to spiritual services,
and that’s the project I’m working on now. That’s called
Gompa Services, or Gompa Tibetan Monastery Services.
Gompa Services is an online service platform that connects
more than 50 monasteries and nunneries in India and
Nepal to the world of their followers.If people want to watch a webcast of a teaching, or some
special ceremonies or a public puja, or if they want to
arrange their own personal puja with a dedication for a
specific purpose, they can do all that through the website.
If they want to make donations toward other social projects,
like the ones that help expand a library or build needed
dormitories, they can make offerings through our service.
We don’t charge any fees on those transactions.We have members who help support the functions. It’s
been going on since we started in 2014, and we really got
launched in the last couple of years. We started a publicity
launch a few months ago, in terms of making ourselves
widely known, after we had made sure everything was
working well.July 2019 31