Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Jampa Kaldan reflects on contemporary monastery life in India and what draws Western practitioners to communities like Sera. He opens with vivid observations of monastic culture—the raw encounter with radically different worldviews, values, and daily practices—and identifies four major gaps between Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the Western context: background beliefs (medieval European cosmology versus modern science), underlying values (individualism, technological mastery, busyness, practical aid, creativity), daily habits and rituals, and language itself. He then pivots to practical relevance: why a Westerner might ordain and live at a monastery, citing space for practice, direct experience of an enlightenment community, intensive study of Buddhist philosophy and technique, embodied understanding of interdependence, and new ways of working with sexuality and celibacy. He concludes by outlining five principles for Western practitioners here: the central role of rigorous study in Gelugpa Buddhism, the necessity of spiritual community, treating all of life as practice, and sustaining long-term effort amidst modern distractions. Pitched at curious practitioners and those considering deeper commitment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 Toughts 2002 02 17.mp3
UUID: 8086a0ff-d65f-486c-ab10-a5ae4917246d
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Thoughts from a 21st Century Monastery (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2002-02-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,971
Think because there’s no one to do it to, so they just have to be themselves. Couldn’t they do it to each other? Yeah. But they don’t. You could do that part.
You could. Could. Yeah. You could, for sure. And you hear about terrible stuff like that in, you know, some institutions where the new ones get a terrible time from the old ones.
But that I’d I’d haven’t observed that happening. But even that’s completely different to the scale of division of of humanness that that occurs between the genders in a normal culture. And there’s this ancient world simplicity to their worldview and beliefs. They’ve got a strong simple faith in a cosmology and a system of knowledge at which they believe has been revealed by the Buddha and elaborated by some of the main great masters down through the ages. And I think that the whole business of this coming to terms with the modern western world and its sophisticated science and technology is very challenging for them as they still believe.
You know, they come out of Tibet believing that the world is flat and that dragons cause thunder thunder and that the sun is actually a very brightly shining god and things like that. Yet even though it’s challenging, but I think they’re trying to embrace these profoundly challenging times with an incredible down to earth practicality typical of the Tibetans. So overall, the monastery is this high intensity high intensity, what you could say, Geshe producing facility. You know, I can’t help think of the analogy of a Lapidus, you know, someone who makes gemstones. They have these tumbling machines, and you just throw a whole lot of rough semi precious stones in this.
We switch it on and let it tumble for three months, and at the intake, you open it and take it out, and there’s these beautiful round polished stones. And that’s really what the monastery is like. It takes these wild, uneducated, uncouth lads from the backwoods of Tibet and just throws them all in this machine, shuts the door, switches it on. And then after twenty or thirty years, you get these beautiful, rounded, sophisticated, well educated human beings that we should see in our Tibetan teachers. There’s a constant dropout during the years, and one of the huge differences that they’re struggling to come to terms with is that the nature of these big monastic universities, and there’s three of them in India as there as there was in Tibet.
There used to be three around Lhasa in the old days. In the old days, all the monks would come and just do like three years like an initial basic degree and then get a document saying yeah you’ve got that you can now go back here to one of the six thousand little monasteries all over Tibet and they just live back there and practice and so on but now there’s nowhere else for them to go, so they’re all just going on through this long intensive program of study. Many of them are not suited to it and so there’s this it’s one of the things that the monastery is struggling with how to handle that. But some of them are there’s a regular stream of the classes do gradually get smaller. Some people go back to the village.
A few disrobe and go into life in India. So, you know My my teacher, really, it was nice to do. He just left it up to me. Yeah. Yeah.
Any other questions about that stuff? How they keep the nunneries? Now there are there are a couple of nunneries. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, has been encouraging for the nuns to set up study monasteries in India where the nuns can begin to enter into this same full on process of study just as the monks do. In the past in Tibet, there were nunneries, a few, but they didn’t do the program of study like the monks could.
So that’s wonderful to see that that they’ll probably be the first nuns coming to the end of these these fifteen years program of study in the not too distant future. Yeah. There are a lot of there’s various programs all from all around the world such as Khensur Rinpoche’s Monk sponsorship scheme. There are similar ones to that operating for nuns. So yeah.
And and there’s various support coming from different organizations to help nunneries and as as there is for the various monasteries. Yeah. You the tradition has always been that families do have a little bit of ongoing contact with their children but not very much. The child is basically seen as leaving the family behind and moving into a new life. So what you’re saying there probably does happen perhaps a little bit more now than it might have in the past, but it would be quite rare.
But you know sometimes monks will have to go back to their family and help for various reasons perhaps you know family emergencies or a father dies and there’s no one else to look after the family and things those things happen yeah okay so let’s have some comments about this great divide between ancient east and modern west. So when one can have a serious debate with someone about the existence of dragons, demons, a flat earth with a group of refugees living in a third world country and having to do that in a Tibetan language, then one can guess that that here’s a place that is situated on the other side of quite a large gulf from what our everyday world is. And I I four elements of this gulf have come to mind for me and I’m sure there are others but these four are the background beliefs about the world, some underlying values, thirdly some daily habits and rituals and fourthly of course the language. So I’ll make a couple of comments about each of these. The background beliefs.
There’s really there’s not time to talk about in any detail about the complex metaphysical system and cosmology which would be accepted by my colleagues and which is so utterly different to our modern worldview. But perhaps the way to get a feel for what it might be like would be to think of what it was perhaps like for a monk or nun living in a monastery back in medieval Europe where the whole of reality is seen as through and through as being a spiritual place and that you are a tiny part fitting into that vast spiritual system having a position somewhere within it. That’s how my colleagues would think about their reality. And our Tibetan teachers, by and large present the Buddhist teachings within that intellectual context precisely as has been done for the last couple of thousand years. And this can create enormous difficulties for a a Western practitioner because that presentation starts with a large number of unstated underlying assumptions.
Stephen Batchelor in his book Alone With Others explores some aspects of that that this gulf for a western Buddhist, which can produce an inner sense of perhaps being torn apart by the attempt of trying to have your foot in these two different worlds. And things like the stress of trying to work out how one should practice deep respect for a great spiritual master who whose view of the world, one finds it hard to accept in quite a number of ways. So the positive aspect of that however is that it requires one to keep returning to the basics of what spiritual practice is all about. So what about some underlying values? That’s the belief.
Secondly, underlying values. Let me pick out five cultural values which are highly regarded by us and which strike me as being significantly different in Tibetan culture. Firstly individualism. While the Tibetans seem to have more of this than a lot of other Asians it’s certainly not something that they cultivate as we do when we encourage our children to be and to express themselves as being their unique self. That just doesn’t exist in their way of thought.
I just don’t think like that. Now I think this gives us a strength in that we are encouraged to take responsibility for ourselves and But it also can cause us problems in working well in community and probably requires more work from us, more spiritual work from us in letting go of our very elaborate ego structure that we assume is what we are. They don’t have to do so much of that work because they haven’t put all the energy into constructing this very complicated ego structure that we have. Secondly, of skill in understanding and controlling the world. So the awesome success of science and technology.
Now whilst being the Tibetans are very very practical and down to earth in one sense. But the primary orientation of Tibetan culture is on the understanding and the management not of the world out there but of your mind. And just as science has still and is perhaps in the process of coming to a point of understanding the business about transforming your mind, it’s on the verge of probably getting close to that. But it’s not there and in the same way the Tibetan way has seen little if any place for a scientific technical approach to the world. So this I think this gives us the strength of being able to foster conditions of general well-being and leisure for the majority of Westerners which provides a rich opportunity for many many people to be able to undertake spiritual practice in a way that was never feasible before in human history.
But as well on that other than as well as that positive side, it also produces the world’s most sophisticated escapes from reality. And as well as all the escapism that it provides it can perhaps lead us to have the pipe dream that all our problems can be solved for us by science. Thirdly, busyness and activity and quick results. We’re really into those three. We almost must be doing things and find it hard to value ourselves without this, especially if we don’t come up with some fairly quick results.
And in contrast the Tibetan style is much more easygoing and they feel okay about pacing themselves in a very long term way. I think this does give us strength in a sense we have a sense of urgency and determination to succeed that has a positive side but it can set us up for all sorts of difficulties and unrealistic expectations and a lack of patience whilst trying to walk on the spiritual path And we perhaps see some elements of this reflected in a general way in our culture with the widespread incidence of depression and the use of antidepressants. And I’ve tasted that with my own struggle with depression at Sarah, struggling with these very issues of the values that I brought with me and the way they have led me to fall over. And I suspect some of you might have tasted similar things in your lives. Fourthly another value that we heard is practical concern for those in need.
Practical concern for those in need. So we see the Western world, it’s the Western world that’s spearheading both intra and international aid and support for those who aren’t so well off. And while this dimension of life is present in Tibetan culture, and obviously so in comparison with the surrounding Indian culture where it seems to be utterly non existent, really for within Tibetan culture, it’s really the long term vision of transforming oneself so as then to be able to help others, which is what they value most highly, rather than getting out there and helping right here and now. So this does give us a strength in seeking to make the world a better place here and now there’s no doubt about that but it can also have perhaps a downside in leading to sometimes some perhaps what you could call not so wise do gooding to try and help others when maybe we don’t really know the best way to help or we help them in the wrong way and upset their own development and also it makes it because our focus is on that we find it hard to value the important work of devoting oneself to self transformation.
We find it harder to value that. And then another point is creativity, fifth point. So individualism, skill about understanding and controlling the world, the busy ness and activity and quick results, practical concern for those in need, and creativity. We value this very highly, and we train our children to be good at it. Whereas Tibetans see that what’s most important is to do well what has already been done in the past.
And this is illustrated by their approach to art. The various paintings you see around us here are not are not works of art in the sense that we know. They are not works of creative art as we understand it. They are contemplative replications of what has been done in the past rather than creating something new. And it’s also illustrated in their approach to academic life where what is valued is the mastering of a pre existing system of thought.
In stark contrast to us when someone does a PhD at university it’s utterly essential that that person advances in a creative way the field of human knowledge that no one else has done before. Whereas advanced study here is simply increasing your skill of mastery of the pre existing system of thought because the focus is not on expanding that in a sense of expanding the body of knowledge, the focus is on using that as a platform to then transform oneself as an individual. So this our creativity gives us some real strength in finding better ways to do things. It’s a wonderful characteristic we have, but it can also lead us to being fashion addicts. And it makes it harder for us to see the benefit and usefulness of simply mastering an old technique.
We have to get over this in this thing about, well, it’s old, therefore, it’s not the latest, therefore, it’s no good, which is just the way we think. We can’t help it. In fact, to master some old technique and there’s an interesting kind of circle here that if if in in mastering a boring old non creative technique we perhaps can attain a state of what’s described as spontaneous compassionate creative engagement with the flow of reality which is one way of talking about the state of Buddhahood. So using this uncreative process can be a means to perhaps attaining a type of a form of creativity in the world that we can hardly even dream about interestingly enough. So then underline anyone got a question about those underlying values?
So some something about daily habits and rituals. So this includes not only the habits and ways of daily life in a different culture, which shake up one expecteachings about how things should be done. But also the depth and and complexity of Buddhist ritual and iconography that you see around the world, which can be absolutely daunting and overwhelming for a questioner. And of course, some people’s reaction to all this is to fall in love with all things Tibetan. And of course, the danger in this is that we take all these outward things as thereby comprising a spiritual practice in some way.
And on the other hand, one can be repelled by this baroque, this over the top baroque complexity. Complexity and throw away the magnificent baby of the Buddhadharma along with and I can’t really call it the bathwater because that’s a terrible thing to say about the Indo Tibetan tradition because it’s it’s such a wonderful human creation. But to throw away what should be, maybe perhaps thrown away with what shouldn’t be. Maybe a better analogy is is the jewel in the crown and because you don’t like the the color of the crown you throw it out despite the fact that there’s a huge diamond sitting in there worth ten billion dollars. And finding a skillful way between those two extremes is not an easy task, and it can cause considerable distress and and consumption of energy.
And it’s perhaps why the Dalai Lama encourages people to to practice the religion of their home culture. His holiness often says that to Westerners. It’s best if you practice your own culture’s religion. It’s too hard to change over. I’d like to just a little quote from his holiness from teach some teachings that he gave at Sarah in July last year from my notes.
So when people become desperate, they look to religion. Then it is especially good to look at one look to one which is based on logic and reason. Although it’s best to practice the religion of one’s culture. Some westerns one some westerners remain stubborn and wanna put in much effort with many language problems in order to study the Buddhadharma. For us Tibetans, it’s easy, like a prepared feast on the plate ready to eat, and we don’t have to put in much effort.
We’re brought up in the whole culture and language. What’s essentially sincere this is I think is most interesting. What’s essentially sincere mental practice rather than all the outward things that we put so much importance on. And then he gives the example of the great Tibetan saint and yogi, Milarepa, from the early days of Buddhism in Tibet, most famous practitioner in in Tibetan history, who just didn’t study a lot and hardly had any possessions and devoted himself intensely to his practice and his meditation and became one of the greatest greatest saints of all time, Milarepa, and had a profound impact on on on Tibetan history and thought. And then, of course, the fourth thing is the language.
And all, you know, the beliefs, the values, and the habits are all embedded in this strange different language called Tibetan. So that there’s always a struggle for anyone involved in Tibetan Buddhism about having the business of translation, translation about what does it all mean. So these four dimensions producing this gulf and probably others I haven’t thought of and I don’t think there’s an easy resolution to the problems that they pose and yet it’s it seems clear to me that we are all people who want to be happy and not to suffer. We have this common humanity that his holiness is always talking about and that the Buddha Dharma can clearly contains what seems to me the world’s most sophisticated and amazing approach to spiritual practice. And that’s something that and that practice is something which is producing continues to produce large numbers of great masters and saintly people.
And for this reason, I think it demands serious attention. So that brings us to what the relevance might be of of Tibetan Buddhism and and more particularly this community at Sera Monastery, what the relevance of that might be for Western spirituality. Now I’ll look at it from two perspectives. Firstly, the relevance for for a westerner who might want to go and live there in a way that I did. And secondly, the relevance of a western practitioner or Buddhism or spirituality living here.
So firstly, the one about a westerner who might go and live at Sarah. Why should a westerner get ordained and go and live at Sera Monastery? That’s the answer I wanted the question I want to answer. Why should they bother doing that? Or a nun.
Why should one a nun why should a woman become a nun and go and do the same thing in one of those monasteries in India? Is it just is this just some sort of escapism from coming to terms with your own culture? Or maybe a futile effort to become a Tibetan and put on sort of ill fitting garments from another culture? Perhaps these questions have become more relevant in recent times because we have now just finished a building at Sera Monastery a house called Sera Je House for Western monks to be able to who wish to come and live and study at Sera to be able to come and and be able to live and have a place where they can build and share a community together there just as the Tibetans do. They haven’t been able to do that in the past.
It’s been very isolated in the past for Westerners living there. And that’s also a project of the FPMT as is Buddha House under the direction of Lama Zopa Rinpoche. So I can think of five reasons why going there may be useful for a Buddhist practitioner, a westerner. These are it gives you the space to practice. It gives you an experience of what a working enlightenment community could be like.
It allows you to study intensely the Buddhist tradition. It gives you a practical taste of the interdependence of reality. And it allows one to work with one’s sexuality in a new way that we have forgotten about mostly in our culture. So each of those in turn firstly space to practice and these are in no particular order. Living there provides one with some space and protection from this everyday hyper busyness of our culture and the astoundingly aggressive levels of distraction that we just are coming we just take for granted in here.
There is just an incredible assault on our senses from every direction to drag us away from anything that’s inward looking. Yeah. Media all the media and advertising, but also just the sheer diversity of of options for for entertainment and escape. It’s just there’s just so many, and they keep splitting into finer and finer and more tailored more and more for each individual you know. And so one really useful thing about living in that environment is it allows you time to focus on the inner process of self transformation which is really hard to get here.
Secondly, gives you an experience of an enlightenment community. So this raison d’etre, the reason for this monastery being there is to maximize everyone’s opportunities for serious spiritual practice. It’s not there for any other reason. Its purpose is to be the context in which the experience of the steps on the path to the state of enlightenment can not only be valued but can be inter subjectively made real and living. And by that I mean this community.
This is a community which has a body of language to describe the experiences that can go on, an understanding about the means by which you have to practice in order to produce those experiences and a history and a presence of expertise to make some judgments about whether you’re doing it the right way or not. So that whole community is if you like makes real the possibility of being able to attain this state in those ways. And it can’t work without such a community. Just as you can’t have a scientific enterprise without a scientific community who are all working together creating a culture and language that sets out details of what we’ve achieved, how you achieve it, what are the standards, what are the measurement criteria for the ongoing process of achieving the results that that community is trying to achieve. Very similar.
Thirdly, the the study of the Buddhist tradition. And I don’t have to say much about that. It provides an opportunity to dig deeply to whatever degree you’re able into this vast and rich complexity of the Buddhist tradition, which covers this an awesome range of of philosophical views and techniques for personal development. And then fourthly, this this business of having a practical taste of the interdependence of reality. This comes in a couple of different ways.
When I arrived in India, I was shocked and terrified by what I found there. And it appeared to me as if I was surrounded by something which could not possibly be real. All I could see was utter chaos, ubiquitous filth, massive poverty, rampant corruption, and mind boggling cultural diversity. And yet in the midst of my fear, I would I can remember looking out and and seeing all these people and thinking, there’s one there’s one billion of you who take all this for granted, and I’m the freak. You guys all take this as being absolute reality, the way everything should be.
And I was terrified about everything about it and couldn’t believe how it could all work and going getting on a bus to go to Mysore the first time convinced that I was gonna be killed in an accident on the road because it’s impossible for anything to function. And what’s the point of going down to the shop to buy something because this system could never actually mean there was anything in a shop. It’s just such a mess. And it took me two or three years to feel as if I was home there at home, which means, of course, that I then lost that initial scary but wonderful sense of the way that that that whole reality had been constructed by those people and was maintained simply on the basis of all of them agreeing that this is the way it is. That’s that’s the only basis for it.
If they don’t all agree on it, then Indian culture just utterly just disappears overnight. And it’s and it’s a deeper realization of, I think, just that kind in in deep meditation, which stands at the center of the Buddhist understanding of what constitutes a liberating experience. And a second taste of that same experience came for me when I first joined the debating class. And I can remember so vividly that time of walking out onto the debating courtyard so afraid. And due to my limited ability with Tibetan language, I felt as if I had stepped into some sort of a like a surreal landscape, like a Dali painting.
You may have seen those Dali paintings that are just these bizarre landscapes, and I felt as if I’d stepped into the middle of one of those because I was I was suddenly surrounded by all these strange figures. They were all carrying on and seemingly doing all these jerking actions in an orchestrated way and and all seeming to be playing some strange game or dance. And it was all just a chaotic cacophony from my side. All these strange and incomprehensible noises. You know, one person makes strange noises to the other person, and they would seem to respond for some reason.
Why? What? As if it was as if they had meaningful language amongst themselves. That’s what it seemed like, And which of course was the case. And then as that year went on, I again lost that raw openness and increasingly I became lost with them in their constructed world of the language and it didn’t seem like a Dali painting anymore.
It just seemed like I had to go out there and do today what I’d memorized that afternoon. So I think experiences like that can be like a practical meditation on on what in the Buddhist tradition is called emptiness. This this interconnectedness or constructiveness of our whole reality. And perhaps some of you might have had similar experiences. I think you don’t have to go as utterly bizarre situation as I’ve talked about.
Some of you have traveled. You may have experienced. I think we can have tastes of it. And it’s good to be aware of of maybe the usefulness of these instead of just pushing them away as being aberrations. Maybe these are opening up what where where we’re supposed to be going as a spiritual practitioner.
When we start a job and feel utterly confused about this strange new office world we’ve walked into, We don’t know anything about what they were doing there. I think perhaps when someone dies that’s close to us, we have maybe have an intense sense of the world just doesn’t fit together anymore. The whole construction of reality seems to have disintegrated. And I think my understanding of this I think was confirmed to me by my teacher Khensur Rinpoche. On once I was talking to him several some years ago at Sarah about how the struggle I was having coming to terms with all this the baroque complexity of the rituals and everything I couldn’t relate to there so often and and his reply was I was absolutely knocked over by his reply amongst other things.
The key thing that struck me was that he made the point he just said maybe you are maybe you are seeing or exposed to the emptiness of it all, the constructiveness of all this. All this stuff you see has only come about because of causes and circumstances and historical conditions, and the only way to understand it all is to understand it from that perspective. And if you come from somewhere else, well, of course, you’ll feel uptight and strange and angry and out of place. So I think this couldn’t be a most useful experience for a westerner to be aware of and grapple with wherever that whether here or there. But when you go into context like that, then you get it very you can get it very intensely.
And the final thing I’d like to make some comments is working with sexuality in a new way. In the sixties and seventies, the feminists came up with this concept of radical celibacy. And if I recall correctly, this was a deliberate and chosen forsaking of sexual contact with men for the purpose of facilitating one’s liberation from the oppression of the male dominated patriarchal culture. Now these these ancient rigid gender divisions need needed badly to be addressed. And it’s really only as a result of the hard work of the feminist movement and the suffragettes before that that women now for the first time in human history history have en masse the opportunity for serious spiritual practice.
That is to address the more fundamental level of oppression due to the deeply entrenched dysfunctional habitual patterns of our thinking and behaving, which are faced by every one of us, whether male or female. So with sex, it’s very hard to find the middle way, between approaching our sexuality with guilt and negativity in a cloud of taboos on the one hand and on the other hand indulgently giving ourselves over to this energy. And living in this middle way between the two is something that is central to the life of a monk or nun. And it’s an approach to one’s life which can be fostered and supported by living in a place such as Sarah where the whole community is trying to do that. I’d like to read a most stimulating quote from a Matthew Fox.
He was he is a Dominican Catholic priest. I think he was. I think he might have been asked to leave the Catholic church some time ago because of his views. But he wrote a book in the late eighties called the coming of the cosmic Christ, and he talks about celibacy. Celibacy is truly a prophetic option when it calls attention to the needs of the sexual sexually dispossessed of a culture.
The sick, the prisoner, the mentally retarded, the single, the divorced, the widowed, the homosexual, the poor. All of these persons lead less than satisfying sexual lives in our civilization. Like voluntary poverty, voluntary celibacy allows solidarity to emerge amongst the voiceless ones in society, especially a society as preoccupied with sex as Western culture is today. In addition to being in solidarity with the sexually dispossessed, the celibate also offers a prophetic voice to the sexual struggle insofar as he or she can laugh at his or her own sexuality, all dressed up and no place to go. It’s one definition of a celibate.
A society that takes sexuality too seriously as ours does either on the right by excessive moralizing or on the left by excessive license and preoccupation needs sexual fools and jesters. This is one role the celibate plays in such a cultural situation. The celibate is also one who has dared to dance with the demons of loneliness. Loneliness is a dark and dreadful spirit that haunts our civilization today, and the voluntary celibate has risked much to wrestle these cosmic demons in the night. The emptying that results from having such dancing allows the celibate an avenue of understanding compassion by which to enter the lives of others who have been touched by loneliness.
And I think perhaps there’s another dimension that Matthew Fox hasn’t mentioned, and that is that we we have this wonderful powerful sexual energy and we can learn the art of living on the edge with it. Simply being with it and seeing it energize one’s life and avoid these two extremes of repression on the one hand and indulgence on the other. Both of which inevitably get us into difficulties. So for a westerner who chooses a path of celibacy, then I think the monastic setting can greatly facilitate that work. Does anyone have a question about the comments about what I made about the uses of for a Western living at Sarah.
Anyone have a question? Yeah. Well I don’t think it’s much positive and negative it’s more like as I said each of each of these characteristics that I talked about have got a positive side but also a down side but there was certainly one of the things that one of the other things that I haven’t mentioned that struck me very strongly on coming back was compared to India was the the just unbelievable level of wealth here just this extraordinary wealth that we take for granted. And in terms of it being a shock, well, the I think the first couple of times I came back, I was a bit I was real I think I was a bit numb to really feel it. I just sort of thought it was okay coming back.
Then the third time, it had been nearly three years, and I felt a deep culture shock on coming back. And I felt completely alienated from here for a couple of weeks, and then it all came back to feel like home again. But on this last occasion, I I suspect one learnt gets used to shifting back and forwards. And this time, I didn’t feel any shock at all. It just said, well, just follow along now.
I’m back here. You know? This is how you do things here. Yeah. Any other questions about that so far?
Alright. So what are some messages for a practitioner living in the West? Again there five things that strike me here. Important one the importance of study. Secondly the central role of a spiritual community.
Thirdly seeing all of your life as being practiced. Fourthly, the need for consistent and long term effort. And fifthly, having space from distractions. So firstly, the importance of study. As distinct from other contemplative and mystical traditions in the world, Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, puts a tremendous emphasis on study as a powerful mode of spiritual practice.