Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Chapter 7. A Talk about Dolgyal
Recently I wrote a foreword to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s book about Dolgyal, or
Shugden, 44 for the Mongolian translation of the book made by the monks from the
monastery in Ulaanbaatar, Idgaa Choizinling.
Idgaa Choizinling, which is part of Sera Je, was in Mongolia before Russia took over. It was
built by an old monk who studied at Sera Je, debating and studying philosophical texts
composed by Jetsun Chökyi Gyaltsen.
I went there the first time I was in Mongolia but the door was closed and I didn’t see
anybody. The second time I went to Mongolia, the monks from the monastery came to the
center to call on me but they stayed outside and we never managed to meet even though
they waited for five days. Then on my last day there I went to the monastery and was able to
meet them. There were twenty young boys of between maybe four and seven, all with their
heads shaved, dressed in chubas and holding malas. They were sitting in a long room looking
very inspired, very enthusiastic to be monks. I did the five precepts with them and gave the
lungs of the Guru Puja, the Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga (Tib: Ganden Lha Gyäma) and some
other practices.
It was crowded because their parents and many other people were there as well. There were
only two older monks, maybe eighty or ninety years old, left from before the Russians
invaded Mongolia. They were fully ordained monks before but maybe because of the
situation they had taken to wearing Mongolian robes, a sort of yellow chuba. It was like a
robe for the monks. Maybe they had only taken the five precepts, I’m not sure. One of the
old monks was holding the stick wrapped in a lot of Mongolian khatags that the disciplinarian
holds in a puja, so he might have been the disciplinarian before the Russians came.
After the teaching he offered me a Mongolian carpet and asked me to rebuild the monastery.
I accepted and it has worked very well. It seems they have quite good karma because a
benefactor in Taiwan, whose father died, offered the money to rebuild it and it was finished
a long time ago. Now it is probably an even better place. Usually monasteries in Tibet are
not so comfortable and look kind of dark, with tiny windows, but this one has many
windows. It’s spacious enough to seat thousands of people and is a good place to give
teachings. The name, Idgaa Choizinling, means “Joyful Pure Land” or, in Sanskrit,
“Tushita.” There are between thirty and sixty small monks who can study there, whereas
before to study philosophy they had to go to Sera Je, very far away in India.
The monks there could have translated either of two books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
but they decided to translate the one about Dolgyal because although many people in
Mongolia have heard His Holiness’s advice not to follow Dolgyal, it depends on whom they
meet. If they meet somebody who follows His Holiness and doesn’t practice Dolgyal, they
deny practicing Dolgyal. For instance, if they meet me, they tell me they don’t practice.
Some people know about the situation in Dharamsala and what His Holiness says but still
think this is His Holiness’s advice alone and so they continue to practice. They mainly follow
the attachment or anger of their group, their party or their guru, becoming angry at His
Holiness without really checking well whether it is correct or incorrect, even though when
81