རིག་གནས་བཅུ། The Ten Fields of Tibetan Knowledge

Inside Tibet, schooling in Tibetan is being pushed aside, and children are growing up literate in another language first. In exile, a third generation is growing up inside other cultures altogether. The painters, physicians, astrologers, grammarians and musicians who carry the ten fields are growing old, and much of what they know has never been set down in a form a young person could learn from.

Tibet has answered this kind of moment before. In the seventeenth century the regent Desi Sangye Gyatso made whole fields of knowledge visible and teachable: he wrote the standard works on medicine and on the calendar, had the whole of medicine painted onto seventy-nine thangkas so that students could see what they were learning, and founded a college on Chakpori hill to teach it. Genla takes up that work with the instruments of this century: to record each of the ten fields completely, to teach them in the open, and to build the tools that keep them in daily use.