Dr. Alexander Berzin: Teaching Tours & Projects for HH the Dalai Lama

Teaching Tours around the World

Soon after Serkong Rinpoche passed away, I also started to be invited to give talks at many of the Dharma centers we had been to together. Eventually, other Western European, North American, Australasian and Southeast Asian centers invited me as well. The Tibetan community we had visited in Lindsay, Canada also invited me. They asked me to speak about Dharma to their children, since the children could not relate to the traditional way the Geshes presented it. 

Over the many years that I went on such teaching tours, almost always traveling alone, I regarded them as bodhichitta retreats. When I was experiencing obstacles and mental blocks in making progress in translating a text or in writing a book in Dharamsala, I knew that to break through these blocks I needed to build up more positive force (so-called “merit”). Offering the gift of the Dharma to others was the perfect way to do this. My personal experience in following this guideline is that it works. I have continued to follow it ever after. 

Once, I decided to try making one of these tours with an assistant and so I invited my Indian neighbor, Rajinder Dogra, to accompany me. In the end, however, I decided that it was better to travel on my own. Rajinder taught geography at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Lower Dharamsala and lived in a dilapidated garden shed in the yard below my shack. Sharing a communal water tap, we had become friends. His shed leaked and had several gaps in the walls, and so sometimes during winter storms, he would stay with me and share the warmth of my electric heater. When he worked for two years in Bangkok, Thailand, I, in turn, had stayed with him to escape the coldest winter weeks in Dharamsala. Those days, I had a dog, Tsultrim. When I was out of town, Tsultrim would stay with Rajinder’s fiancé Renu’s family. Renu was a local schoolteacher. I learned a great deal about village Indian society by spending many leisure hours with Rajinder and Renu’s friends and their families. 

Over the years of teaching at Dharma centers around the world, I kept His Holiness informed of how these centers were developing. Perhaps as a result, His Holiness sent me to lecture at Ganden, Drepung and Sera Monasteries in South India to monks who aspired to become teachers and translators in the West. I explained to them what to expect and how to prepare [Advice for Tibetans before Teaching in the West]. I was also asked to teach a seminar on translation methods to young Tibetans who aspired to become Dharma translators, which I happily did in Delhi [Workshop for Tibetans Translating Dharma: Report].

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