Buddhist monk’s dedication to educating children featured in documentary
Published: September 22, 2011
The audience gasps as a rockslide tumbles toward a group of small children trying to navigate a narrow mountain pass in the middle of the Himalayas. As the rocks fall, their guide, Lobsang Yonten, yells at them to run across the narrow stretch of path before the rocks hit. As the rocks crash down, the children make it safely across to the other side.
After giving each child a piece of candy to help calm them down, Yonten pushes the group of children, parents and monks forward.
Their reason for making the dangerous journey from Zanskar to Manali, India, braving temperatures below freezing while crossing a 17,000-foot-high mountain pass during winter on foot and horseback? These children want to go to school.
The story of Yonten and the 14 children, ages 4-12 years old, he leads out of the mountains and toward an education is told in the new film, Journey from Zanskar: A Monk’s Vow to Children. The film was shown Sept. 19 in the Tivoli Multicultural Lounge and featured a lecture from Yonten about the plight of the Zanskar people,
“Education is the most important tool,” said Yonten, a Geshe Buddhist monk who is originally from the Zanskar region, which is situated in the northern tip of India.
“Zanskar does not exist like it did 20 years ago, the Zanskar people have to go along with other people. If they do not have more education, they cannot go with the other people. And then maybe they look at other people and feel upset.”
Yonten has made it his mission to help bring education to the Zanskar region, which according to recent statistics from the U.N. has a literacy rate of 50 percent.
The region suffers from an infant mortality rate as high as one in two babies dying in childbirth in some villages, according to the Australian Himalayan Foundation, a nonprofit whose focus is on promoting education and health initiatives in the Himalayan mountains.
To provide their children with a complete Tibetan education, the parents in the film send their children to Buddhist monasteries and schools in Manali, India.
While this provides the children with a chance to be taught in their native language, the journey also means that the children will grow up away from their parents. Yonten, who left for a monastary when he was only 10 years old, did not return home to visit for a decade.
“I think they know they are trying to make their children better,” said Eryn O’Connor, a non-degree seeking pre-med student at Metro who attended the movie and lecture. “And even though it is hard to say goodbye to their child, I think that is what all parents want.”
Yet for Yonten, education is not just about what is learned from a book. His belief is that education must provide both external education, such as reading and writing, along with internal education, which teaches things like “compassion, love, kindness, tolerance, contentment.”
Yonten said that the schools in Zanskar lack the important component of internal education, something he said is important to the Tibetan culture.
“I think one of the things that I have seen in a few different places is how much people will work for an education and what they’ll give for an education and the sacrifice,” said Laura Roth, Metro’s Interim Assistant Dean of Student Life. Roth met Yonten while living in India last year and was inspired to bring him to Auraria in order to talk about his mission of education.
The film ends with the group arriving in Manali by bus after having to give up on passing over the mountain due to heavy snow. Red-eyed and exhausted, Yonten and his fellow monks are jubilant at the chance they have given the children of Zanskar.
“The difficulty is one time. Education is a lifetime,” Yonten said during the film.
Five years after the movie was made, all 14 children are still in school or in a monastery, yet none of them have made the journey back home to see their family.
People: Eryn O'Connor, Laura Roth, Lobsang Yonten
After the film was made a generous donor sponsored a trip for all of the children to return to see their parents. Since it had been over 5 years many of them did not recognize their children. Geshe Yonten says they were all happy to see each other and that the parents were very happy to see how much their children had learned.