On 15 July 1991 Lama Osel Rinpoche, the reincarnation of Lama Thubten Yeshe, formally entered Sera monastery. He was six years old. As his small motorcade approached its destination, a red line could be seen in the distance. As the cars drew closer their occupants saw that it was the entire assembly of monks, who had turned out to line the road to welcome their newest incumbent. It was an honour accorded only to the highest lamas–but, it was agreed, Lama Yeshe certainly qualified due to his immense work in spreading the holy Buddha dharma across the world, and because of the prestige he brought to his monastery. To the monks of Sera, the small Western boy clasping his hands together and bowing in greeting had simply 'come home'.

Sera was awesome place and as far away as you could get from the archetypal image of a mysterious building clinging to a mountain peak. It was as big as a town, with streets, houses, dormitories, temples, kitchens, shops and dogs: a bustling, throbbing place pulsating with the vibrant, all-male energy of vast numbers of Tibetan monks. By the time Lama Osel arrived there were over two thousand of them, and their numbers were growing yearly as more and more fled from Tibet to seek the spiritual training that was denied them in their homeland. Lama Osel had entered the largest monastery in the world.

Sera was one of the three great monastic universities that the Tibetan refugees had painstakingly rebuilt in exile. It was of vital importance. Their monastic universities were not only the womb of their greatest spiritual, philosophical and meditational masters, they were also the bedrock of Tibetan culture.

Back in Tibet it was to the original Sera monastery, on the outskirts of Lhasa, that the young Thubten Yeshe had gone when he was just seven years old. There he began his austere, highly disciplined training which would lead eventually to a worldwide mission. It was a mighty place, founded in 1419 by Jamchen Choje Sakya Yeshe, a disciple of the famous Lama Tsongkhapa, the great reformer of Tibetan Buddhism and founder of the Yellow Hat sect. Ironically, in the light of the Chinese destruction that was to follow centuries later, Jamchen Choje Sakya Yeshe was twice sent to China to teach the Buddhist doctrine to the Emperor. By 1959, when the Chinese invaded, Sera monastery held a huge population of ten thousand monks. Although a quarter of these managed to escape to northern India, among them Lama Yeshe, many died from the unaccustomed heat and diet in the refugee camps.

Those who remained were eventually given a heavily wooded area in Karnataka state in southern India, about a two-hour drive west of Mysore. They set about clearing the space and building again the seat of learning that was to preserve their spiritual heritage and maintain the strength of their spiritual lineages.

Now, after Lama Osel's arrival, the ceremonies and welcoming parties went on for three days as the monastery officially offered him a place in their august place of learning, and in return Lama Osel offered them the traditional gifts of ceremonial pujas, food, money and tea, as well as a new well and substantial contributions to the Sera Health Project. It did not come cheap. The estimated cost of Lama Osel starting his new education was around US$50,000.

Lama Osel appeared happy in his new house, built specially for him in a quiet place on the outskirts of the monastery. It had a garden and a dog called Om Mani. On the morning after his arrival the abbot arrived at Lama's new house to greet him personally. Lama commented that he thought everything had gone extremely well. 'I dreamed before coming that first there was a lot of light coming up and I was down, then much light came down and I was up high,' he said. It was an auspicious dream.

Many Western students had arrived at Sera to witness this turning-point in Lama Osel's life. Among them were his parents, Maria and Paco. At one point during the investiture Maria and Paco stood up and walked out of the temple together–a symbolic gesture which formalized their willingness to give their child to the religious life. Although Osel had in fact been happily leading an independent life for four years now, as his parents physically turned their backs on him and walked away he looked a little wistful.

Now the serious work–the hours of study and the tough discipline–was about to begin in earnest. Lama Osel was being plunged into an extraordinary system–rich, wonderful and unique. Only Sera had the means to lay the foundation of the work that Lama Osel was destined to carry out. For only the Tibetan teaching system had the 'technology' for understanding the mind in all its manifold and subtle details. The expectation was that Osel would become a holder of the lineage of teachings and initiations, which was possible only by passing through the special education of a Tibetan monastery and specifically the tulku training system. More significantly, it was felt that only an education in Sera could furnish Lama Osel with the credibility regarded as absolutely necessary for his future life as a teacher. No matter how inherently gifted as a spiritual master he might be, without the thorough training and qualifications available from Sera his work would be undermined.

For all this I, and many others, quaked a little at this next phase in Osel's life. He was after all, a Western child with a Western mind, and Sera was–well, so Tibetan. It was also steeped in the framework of a six hundred-year-old tradition which had not changed much over the years. Many of us wondered how Lama Osel, with his love of computers and Michael Jackson music, would fare within the rules and rigid protocol of this strong Tibetan experience.

Maria voiced the concerns that a few of us were feeling: 'Lama's temperament is free, creative and spontaneous. He learns by reason. If you explain things to him he grasps It very quickly. In the traditional Tibetan system, however, learning is done by rote. They learn all the prayers, all the scriptures, by heart– and then when that is accomplished they debate on the meaning. This is not the Western approach to education and in my view is rather archaic.'

Osel's day was now broken into strict periods of learning: 7 a.m. get up; prayers before breakfast at 8 a.m.; Tibetan language class from 9 a.m. for two hours; then Spanish class for one hour; lunch at noon; 1 p.m.- 3 p.m. English reading, writing and maths; 5.30 p.m. lessons with his Tibetan teacher; dinner; bed at 9 p.m.

It was indeed a tough regime, with the emphasis for the first few years on memorization and getting used to the monastic discipline. He was aiming eventually for a geshe degree, equivalent to a doctor of divinity, which back in Tibet took some thirty years to achieve. Here in Sera the process had been speeded up, but still there would be years of rigorous learning and debating before Osel was through. I wondered if he would stick it out.

I thought back to Lama Yeshe, and the way he had broken with the traditional methods of teaching to reach us Westerners. He had once told me he didn't care, that he was prepared to use any technique to get his audience to understand the Buddha dharma. That was his great appeal his ability to communicate the way of the Buddha with his whole body, with gestures, with antics, with his marvellous sense of humour and with his spontaneous acts of kindness and love. He was not a conventional lama at all, on the outside at least. He knew that Westerners were not interested in the strict Tibetan presentation of the dharma and so had found his own highly individualistic way of teaching it. Part of me baulked at the idea of Lama Osel returning to the system which Lama Yeshe had, in the outer form, moved away from.

Still, Lama Zopa had decreed quite unequivocally that it was best for Lama Osel to go to Sera. And who were we to dispute that great man, who cherished Lama Osel more than his own life? He had taken enormous care in choosing Lama Osel's gen-la, the Tibetan geshe who was to teach the boy the Tibetan language, the memorization of texts and Lam Rim (the step-by-step guide to Enlightenment) subjects. He was a gentle, kind man and one of the best teachers in Sera. As Lama Zopa pointed out, the conditions provided for Lama Osel were all-important. So, for all its possible drawbacks, Sera had incomparable benefits to offer. We could only wait and see the outcome.

Not that Lama Osel's Western roots were being totally forgotten. In order to help build a bridge between the two ways of life Lama Zopa, with his infinite care, had arranged for a Western tutor to be brought into Sera to furnish Lama Osel with the beginnings of a Western education alongside the traditional Tibetan Buddhist one. The advertisement placed in the top newspapers in London, New York and Australia revealed the enormity and extraordinary nature of the task:

PRIVATE TUTOR–to provide full primary education to highest international standards for six- year-old Spanish reincarnation of former Tibetan Lama Thubten Yeshe. Tuition to run in parallel with a traditional Tibetan monastic education to be provided by others. Tuition to assist the young Lama to integrate Western and Eastern curricula in preparation for a life of teaching.

Primary instruction medium English, secondary Spanish. Location South India eight months, Europe one month per year. This unusual and challenging assignment requires a person of highest integrity, five to ten years' tutoring experience and impeccable references.

The person who won the job from hundreds of applicants was Norma Quesada-Wolf, a classicist in her early thirties from Yale University. Born in Venezuela of an American mother and Spanish father, and with ten years of Zen Buddhist meditation behind her, Norma seemed tailor-made for the job. With her husband John she moved into Sera armed with an independent study programme from the Calvert School in America, which not only set out a tutoring schedule for Lama Osel but provided means for independently assessing his progress as well.

Peter Kedge, a board member of the FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition) and long-time student of Lama Yeshe, had conducted the search for the right tutor. He explained the hopes for Lama Osel's education: 'Great emphasis is being placed on providing Lama Osel with a strong basic Western contemporary education so that, in his later years, the "language" he uses to explain molecular physics will be the same as when explaining emptiness–the aim being to cross the boundaries of the Eastern mind and the Western mind, exposing their similarities.' It was a mighty plan indeed, but one could not help but be a little apprehensive at the load of expectations and aspirations that was being put on a pair of small, six-year-old shoulders.

The observations of Norma Quesada-Wolf, as a newcomer to this extraordinary scene of Western reincarnate lamas, were particularly interesting. Her first impression was of a child who played hide-and- seek, then showed her and her husband the Buddhas in his room, the watercolours and drawings he had done, and where a certain lizard lived. He then asked if they were tired from their journey, turned to someone and asked, with natural dignity, if they had been offered tea.

'I suppose I was expecting to find a wise, very serious little figure, someone like Teddy in the J. D. Salinger story of the same name. But while Lama certainly does have this aspect, I had not anticipated how light-hearted and charming he would be,' she said.

With professional interest she also noted what many amateur observers had seen on many occasions– Lama Osel's unusual powers of concentration and his ability to be totally absorbed in what he was doing.

'There's something special about him. He has a capacity for concentration, for remembering, and for invention and imagination that seems to me to be beyond the capacities of an average child. When something holds his interest, whether it be playing with Lego blocks or doing a lesson, he just disappears into it and remains in that thing for long stretches of time, constantly thinking about it, imagining it, playing with it, and seeing it from all different perspectives.' Her words immediately flashed me back to another time when Lama Yeshe was talking about how we perceived things. He took as his example a flower. Never has a flower been looked at in the depth in which Lama Yeshe saw it. He examined all its parts, he considered its perfume and its effect on our sense of smell and an insect's, he talked about its aesthetic properties and how the flower had been an object of poetry, intuition, love and admiration, and how this differed from culture to culture. Through this intense and detailed scrutiny Lama Yeshe was trying to get us to see the totality of things through varied levels of meaning.

In fact Lama Yeshe had very clear views about how children should be educated. Using his graphic, idiosyncratic style of English he delineated his beliefs in a system which he called 'Universal Education':

A narrow presentation of the world in education suffocates children. It brings frustration and blockage that interrupts the child's openness to learning. Children do not want to be trapped by limitations. If one shows them the reality of things which is beyond all limitations, their enthusiasm for learning will never cease and the individual will become a totally integrated person.

Any explanation is incomplete if there is no logical reference, no intellectual basis for it. Behind this base there must be a psychological explanation and a philosophical framework. Then the totality in all its aspects becomes so profound, so profound. In other words, contained in an entire subject are the essence of religion, philosophy and psychology without any separation, existing simultaneously. In this way the person becomes integrated. In the world today these have become separated. Really, you cannot separate them.

We cannot make divisions such as: you are the spiritual person, you are the philosopher and you are the psychologist. All of reality is contained, potentially and now existent, in everybody. Education should be everything to come together, not separating, not partial.

The bad in the world, in my opinion, is religion separated from life, from science, and science separated from religion. These should go together...

It was a system that was now tallying with Lama Osel's own approach to learning.

Certainly Osel was enraptured by science in the form of anything to do with outer space, and had numerous books on space and space travel which he discussed in detail with Norma. She noted, however, that he would often put his comic book stories of Superman and Batman into a dharma context, working out the morals of the 'goodies' and 'baddies' according to Buddhist belief.

He also showed an aptitude for mathematics and was fascinated by large numbers, vast distances, huge sizes and great weights–in fact, anything big. In the past few years he had also become fascinated by illusion and magic, and would often play games where he pretended to make things appear and disappear. He was also genuinely enthralled by the minutiae of the insect kingdom, as I had seen in London's Natural History Museum, and in the evolution of species. Osel's was a broad mind–just like Lama Yeshe's.

Norma noted other character traits, too–Lama's equally famous strong-mindedness, and the fact that he often wasn't a 'model' child. 'When something doesn't interest him, it is impressive how he can invent one way after another, non-stop, to divert his and your attention from the thing at hand. He has a strong will and high spirits, and is very independent-minded. '

This again was reassuring. Norma was verifying what many of us had witnessed–that Lama Osel was not in any way a malleable person. He was very much his own person. It was gratifying, for one of my greatest concerns was that Lama Osel would be 'conditioned' into his present role, thereby detracting from the authenticity of his identity. How much more satisfactory to have a lama who was full of life and mischief and who could think for himself.

As she looked at the child who was now under her care, Norma saw further signs that Osel was out of the ordinary. On one occasion during an English lesson she was asking him for the opposite meaning of words. She would say 'up' and he would reply 'down', for instance. When she asked him for the opposite of 'asleep', however, he replied 'Buddha!' It was an astute and subtle answer, and a remarkable one for a child of his age. Not many adults are aware that the definition of a Buddha is a fully awakened being. Later she was to describe Lama Osel as a 'brilliantly gifted child'.

As she looked at the child who was now under her care, Norma saw further signs that Osel was out of the ordinary. On one occasion during an English lesson she was asking him for the opposite meaning of words. She would say 'up' and he would reply 'down', for instance. When she asked him for the opposite of 'asleep', however, he replied 'Buddha!' It was an astute and subtle answer, and a remarkable one for a child of his age. Not many adults are aware that the definition of a Buddha is a fully awakened being. Later she was to describe Lama Osel as a 'brilliantly gifted child'.

Educationally, in fact, Lama Osel was doing well across the board. His gen-la, Geshe Gendun Chopel, announced that his charge was exceptionally intelligent and, even though he too noticed the boy's fondness for play, he felt that it would abate naturally as he grew older and understood the importance of studying. He also remarked that, although at first he had regarded Lama Osel as an ordinary child with the status of a tulku, since getting to know him he now considered him to be extraordinary, with an exceptionally clear memory.

But in spite of his excellent schoo1 reports, like many a small boy Osel often complained at having to study and told visitors he was 'too busy'. Once he was overheard saying: 'Don't you know I learn when I am playing?' He was, of course, absolutely right.

Continue to Part IV>>
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