Free Tibetans
After my first interview for this story with Salon Druknya owner Gyaltsen Druknya, who has played a central role in the local Tibetan community since his arrival in 2001, I remember walking away feeling impressed by how unshakably loyal he is to his country and culture.
I had the same thought after sitting down with Thokmey, again with Buddhist monk Gephel, and once again with UVA Tibetan Language professor Tsetan Nepali. It occurred to me that there’s something different, something special about these people and the history, religion, and lifestyle they’re struggling to preserve.
Nepali is a quiet but determined ringleader in the local Tibetan community, both at UVA and among his fellow refugees.
“Tibet is my country, and preserving the heritage is my passion,” he told me.
Nepali was born in Tibet in the 1960s, and fled to India with his parents when he was little, where he spent most of his childhood. After graduating with a degree in Tibetan Language from St. Joseph’s College, India in 1978, he began a lifelong career of teaching all over the world. He landed in Charlottesville seven years ago as director of Tibetan Language Studies at UVA, and he eats, sleeps, breathes, and lives Tibetan language.
“Language is the DNA of culture,” Nepali said.
His students range from undergraduate American students fulfilling language requirements to Ph.D. candidates from China who want to follow in his footsteps.
“If you’re reading the texts and documents, and studying the history and philosophy, you have to understand the language,” he said.
Learning any foreign language is no walk in the park, and Nepali said picking up the basics of Tibetan is especially challenging. He described his students as fiercely devoted to their studies and goal-oriented, and he puffed up as he bragged on his students from the 1980s who are now tenured professors themselves.
“In general I have very devoted students,” he said. “They all have their objectives and their goals.”
And while Nepali has built his career around pushing students in the classroom, it’s a whole different set of learners that he pours his heart and soul into. During the week he plays the part of a pragmatic intellectual, sporting the sweater-over-button-down look, nodding to his fellow faculty in New Cabell Hall, and sitting down with students during office hours. But on the weekends, he trades his khakis and briefcase for jeans and a dramyin, the Tibetan cousin of the guitar, and connects with six-year-olds in a way that he can’t with his graduate students.
Once a week, about a dozen parents who arrived in Charlottesville as refugees bring their American-born children to the Tashi Choeling Buddhist Center for Sunday School. True to his teaching roots, Nepali spends the first hour going over language lessons, then switches gears and jams on Tibetan instruments with the kids.
“There’s a joy in watching them learn about their own culture in the midst of a Western environment,” he said.
Over and over again, the one common ground I heard from the people I interviewed was that Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism share a quality that we, as Americans, find elusive. Gephel, with a brightness in his eyes and a seemingly impenetrable calmness and serenity, described what I felt like I had witnessed.
“We have a human value of kindness, compassion, and peace,” Gephel said. “It is really important that we preserve our culture. If the culture survives, that value survives.”
Nepali’s American-born students speak English all day and are spread out at different schools, he said, so Sunday mornings are often their only opportunity to spend time with their fellow Tibetans.
“They really love speaking Tibetan,” Nepali said, his face lighting up. “My UVA students have an academic objective, but my Sunday School students are connecting with their culture.”
If you were in the audience when the Dalai Lama came to town in October 2012 for presentations at the Paramount Theater and nTelos Wireless Pavilion, you might recognize Nepali’s class—the children hauled their instruments on stage and fearlessly performed for one of the world’s most recognized religious leaders.
Nepali pulled out a book of photos from the Dalai Lama’s visit and flipped through it excitedly, pointing out shots of the children’s performance alongside the leader that so many of their parents had waited their entire lives to see in person.
Jason King, event supervisor at the Paramount Theater at the time, led the team that prepared for the Dalai Lama’s visit. Neither a Tibetan nor a Buddhist himself (he described his religious affiliation as nebulous), King was deeply impressed by the experience.
“They’re just so pure, honest, and refreshing to be around,” he said. “They understand things that we don’t. They know something that I don’t know.”
King was at the forefront of the 9-month process of planning and executing the Dalai Lama’s visit. He thought he knew what he’d signed on to, but was blown away by the impact one person could have on a crowd. He told me a story about the visit that illustrated his point.
The lounges backstage had been scrubbed floor to ceiling and immaculately decorated for the Dalai Lama and his considerable team of handlers, translators, and advisors. So when he announced after eating lunch that he’d like to brush his teeth, Paramount staff bustled around, checking the availability and cleanliness of the theater’s nicest restroom. When the Dalai Lama retreated down the hall, toothbrush and toothpaste in hand, he stopped in the doorway of a small room off the kitchen with a large basin sink, said “This is fine,” and brushed his teeth alongside a stunned dishwasher.
This was a man he’d seen on television, a major voice for world peace, whose humility was undeniable, so unlike any American leader or star he’d encountered at the theater. But even more noticeable to King was the Dalai Lama’s importance to his own people.
“It definitely meant something to me,” he said. “But it meant something else to the Tibetan community.”
Having now met many people with different takes on and experiences with Tibetan Buddhism, what struck me was that the religion and culture of Tibet can be the most important thing to so many people, all of whom have different views on what is most important about it. For the Tibetans living in exile, the cultural identity, the language, and the place are as important as the daily rituals and practice of the religion. In fact, for them, the two seem to be so intertwined that they can hardly be evaluated separately. But for young people like Matthew Conover, the faith and the practice can transform their relationship to their own culture into something deeper and more fulfilling. It’s like Serenity Ridge, the mountain top shrouded in fog that feels separated from the rest of the world and is unlike any other place I’ve experienced, but is still connected to the Virginia clay.
Like a lot of people my age, my own spiritual understanding is still unresolved. I’m not that much older than Conover, and I can say that, when we meditated side-by-side at the end of my visit, I felt a kinship with him. Sitting with my eyes closed, silently reflecting on how we both ended up there sharing that experience, I began to understand how a 20-something college graduate who grew up Catholic and used to hate meditating would want to find a place in a community of seekers and monks, practicing something ancient and still very much alive.
Spiritual medicine
“Until recently, I wanted to work inside Tibet,” said Salon Druknya owner Gyaltsen Sangpo Druknya.
Druknya was born in Amdo, a region in the northeast corner of Tibet, and grew up roaming the mountains and valleys as a nomadic farmer. Since leaving at age 18 to attend school in India, he’s watched the turmoil in his beloved homeland from afar. And while he’s no longer focused on returning to Tibet, he wants to bring Tibetan medicine here to Charlottesville.
When he’s not at the salon or spending time with his family, Druknya is working tirelessly to establish Arura Medicine of Tibet, a center that will not only preserve and engage Tibetan culture, but provide comprehensive compassionate wellness care for the community. The organization’s board of advisors includes Leslie Blackhall, UVA’s director of palliative care research program, Jeffrey Hopkins, the former UVA professor who is credited for growing the Tibetan collection at Alderman Library and the Tibetan studies program, and a team of Tibetan doctors still living in China.
He said the timeline and funding are still fuzzy, but he envisions a space with a medical training center, meditation hall, museum, medical library, and a senior center. People are becoming more and more interested in Tibetan philosophy and science, Druknya said, and Tibetan techniques can treat the body and mind in a way that Western medicine can’t.
“Some diseases are not from physical problems,” Druknya said. “They’re from a lack of inner spiritual strength.”