Screening of Ganden: A Joyful Land
This November, Religious Studies hosted a viewing of Ngawang Choephel’s 2019 film Ganden: A Joyful Land. Professor Kevin Vose opened the event with some brief remarks about Choephel, who was in attendance. Choephel was raised within a Tibetan community in India that had successfully established and rebuilt Tibet’s culture despite the difficulties that their community had endured as exiles following China’s 1949 invasion. Choephel lived in close proximity to the Ganden Monastery in Karnataka, just half a mile away. He attended the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts and was later granted a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue further study at Middlebury College in Vermont.
The film memorializes the last generation of monks to serve at Ganden Monastery in Tibet. It tracks their recollections from the years before the 1949 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the invasion itself and the journey to India as exiles, and finally of the 1966 reestablishment of Ganden monastery in Karnataka, India. For context, Choephel emphasized during a Q&A session following the film viewing, Ganden is to Tibetan Buddhism what the Vatican is to Roman Catholicism.
Choephel provides occasional narration during the film, but it is largely driven by interviews with the monks. The camera focuses on their faces as they speak, with intermittent transitions to relevant images and film footage of the monastery. But Choephel always returns to his own footage of the monks; their expressions and gestures eloquently evoke their deep emotional response to Ganden, its destruction, and reconstruction in India. All the men interviewed were impassioned with a great love for Ganden and the surrounding landscape, emphasizing how happy life was before the 1949 invasion. Life in the monastery was simple, but joyful. A typical day consisted of prayer, tea, debate, with more prayer until night. Despite the regulated routine, Ganden was a place one would never want to leave.
The monks’ exile and the temples later destruction in 1965 was thus all the more heartbreaking. Despite the great physical struggle of travelling from Tibet to India (a trek that lasted 4 months), the monks seemed to focus on the intense emotional impact of this displacement. Attempting to convey the import of the devastating loss, one man queried, “What would you do if you lost everything that defined who you are?” One particularly poignant moment occurred as one monk began singing an “old melody” --a chant he and the others had sung in Ganden prior to their exile. The memories attached to this song brought him to tears.
Despite the emotional distress that Ganden conveys, it ends on an uplifting and hopeful note. We see footage of young scholars debating in the monastery at Karnataka, clapping their hands (a gesture signaling logic’s defeat of ignorance) in the same manner we’d observed earlier in black and white footage from the original Ganden. The camera follows a group of younger boys as they ready themselves in the morning to go off and pursue their studies. Despite invasion, exile, and destruction, Tibetan Buddhism and all its traditions live on through the next generation.
