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The resident teacher at Tara Institute is the Venerable Geshe Lobsang Doga,
who was born in July 1935 in Kharnze, a small village in the remote Kham region
of north east Tibet.
At the age of seven, he entered the local monastery where the abbot predicted
that he would become a geshe. Ordained a novice monk, Geshe Doga lived and
studied at this monastery for the next ten years. After preliminary training,
he made the difficult three month journey to Lhasa, in south central Tibet.
There, at Sera Monastery, Geshe Doga met one of his main teachers, the Venerable
Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. Under Geshe Dhargyey's instructions he trained in
three of the five major treatises of buddhist philosophical study: Logic,
Perfection of Wisdom and the Middle Way View.
In 1959, Geshe Doga, together with hundreds of other monks, fled the Chinese
invasion of Tibet. Geshe-la arrived in India at the height of summer; there
was no food, no spare clothes and no money. For the next eight years he lived
in Buxador refugee camp, sleeping on cold concrete floors on nothing more
than hessian sacks filled with dried grass.
Despite these difficult conditions, Geshe Doga continued to study the two
remaining major treatises: Metaphysics and Ethical Discipline with another
of his gurus, the Venerable Gyurme Khensur Urgyen Tsetan Rinpoche. Geshe Doga
successfully completed his geshe degree whilst still at Buxador. Some time
later, Geshe-la and twelve other monks were chosen from one thousand monks
to study for an Acharya degree at Varanasi University. |
