A lovely short film. ‘Tashi and the monk’. Just under 40 minutes. On a remote mountaintop, a brave social experiment is taking place. Committed to raising children with love and compassion, former Buddhist monk Lobsang Phuntsok attempts to heal his own childhood abandonment. He does this by adopting 85 unwanted children and growing them as a family at Jhamtse Gatsal, a remote children’s community in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The film follows Jhamtse’s newest arrival, a wild and troubled 5-year-old girl named Tashi, as she learns what love is and how it can help her to heal. The film is directed by Andrew Hinton and Johnny Burke and has won many awards including Emmy Winner Best Documentary (Short).
Recently, before going to sleep, I saw the film. It is beautiful. There is one thing that comes to light. The inner world of so many children bears the burden of hurt and scars and that hurt, those scars remain. And as adults, that hurt manifests even more in their conditioning. The small child Tashi in the film was a good example of how the tender world of a child is destroyed by ‘ugly’, selfish, uncaring adults (parents). The monk is a good example of what beautiful things love and compassion can do. If one studies the inner world of people, one may find so much ugliness that is due to hurt suffered in childhood.
A friend, who lives in a developed country, told me: “I have seen that my whole life… not only in myself as a child but also in the inner world of hundreds of kids I had the honor to share my life with so far. The inner world is a mess in many senses. The outer does not look like that though. It looks clean and neat and very orderly. A total mismatch!”
We can see how the violence and disorder we see in the world and in human beings is linked to hurt and scars of different types suffered in childhood. It is a vicious cycle. Can humanity change?
The pain n agony of elders descended upon young knowingly n unknowingly have made this beautiful world not so beautiful… Pl understand n stop contributing ur part. 🙏
Children as victims of family upheaval created by current social structures is a blot on humanity. Why is our social system not geared to take care of this aspect. Have we drifted too far from our natural instincts of compassion and care and got glued to our family structures? From living together as tribes to joint families to nuclear families to single parents… has this left us vulnerable to pain which we can inflict on our young ones. The ‘Me Space’ ….’ I as individual’ …. “My family’ may have no doubt some benefits but could also have invariably created silos …… barriers for humanity to flow freely. The ‘individual’s choices” which we imagine are just a creation of a conditioned mind…. questioning the notion of free will. Even among few of us, who are able to see this gap, most start running away from it because of fear of unknown. A new system of care for our young ones can spring out only if we are able to understand the vulnerability of present systems.
Unless we realized the ME n its overlapping instinct of converting every thing to MINE… This circus will countinue. 🙏