For twenty-one days in late September and October 2026, a hall in the foothills of Himachal Pradesh filled with the sound of chanting, drums and long, layered recitation. Roughly 2,000 practitioners from around the world sat through the rites of a Tara puja, a devotional ritual built around the twenty-one forms of Arya Tara, the female bodhisattva associated with swift compassion and protection. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the Khyentse Foundation, and the puja was held at the Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö Institute in a setting that, as the BDG video report shows, is part monastery, part pilgrimage, and part open-air gathering. The nine-minute field report by video journalist Sandeep Kumar is short and, in its auto-generated transcript, often fragmentary. But it captures something worth understanding: a Tibetan monastic lineage rebuilt on Indian soil, a deliberately nonsectarian ethic, and a long counting practice that asks thousands of people to give their attention to one thing for three weeks.
According to the event description, the puja ran from 25 September to 15 October 2026 at the Dzongsar Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö Institute in Himachal Pradesh, northern India. It was hosted jointly by the Khyentse Foundation and the institute and offered a series of teachings by Kyabje Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche alongside the daily ritual. The description puts attendance at about 2,000 participants from around the world, a figure that tells you as much about the scale of the anniversary as about the appeal of the practice itself.
The video's opening minutes move between monks, the hall and fragments of ritual music. The soundtrack is mostly chant and percussion, with the spoken words coming in brief bursts. That texture matters. A Tara puja is not a lecture. It is something people do with their voices and bodies over many hours, and the camera largely lets the room do the talking.
The video's clearest explanation of the choice comes from a monk at the monastery. He says that when the Khyentse Foundation was founded, its founder chose Tara as the protector of the Foundation, and that the twenty-one-day puja is a way of marking the anniversary by requesting her continued protection and patronage. The event description states the same purpose in more formal terms: the gathering was held "to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of Khyentse Foundation and to request the continuing protection and patronage of Arya Tara."
The number twenty-one is not decorative. It refers to the twenty-one Taras, the traditional set of emanations of the goddess, each associated with a different aspect of protection and blessing. The rite is known in Tibetan as the Dol-Chog, and the monk says the text being used was revealed by a teacher whose name does not survive in the transcript. He also notes that the lineage holder has performed this practice many times, and calls it "very, very powerful." Whatever one's own relationship to devotional practice, the logic is clear. A protector invoked for a specific anniversary, through a specific text, over a specific span of days, gives a community a shared rhythm. Three weeks is long enough for it to become a habit, not just a visit.
The most striking historical detail in the video is the monastery's own story of displacement. The monk explains that the institution, which he names as Zong Monastery Sheda, was originally established in Tibet. After the Chinese invasion, it was re-founded in India. He describes an earlier site, which the auto-transcript renders only as "beer," and says the community outgrew it because there were too many monks. The response was to build a larger version.
That sentence carries a lot of history in a few words. A monastic community that was founded in one country, uprooted by political events within living memory of its members, and then rebuilt at a larger scale in another country is not an abstraction. It is a continuity of study, ritual and lineage that moved with its people. The video does not elaborate on the dates or the political circumstances, and it would be a mistake to fill that gap with detail the source does not provide. What it does show is the result: a working monastery with enough monks to need more room, hosting a multi-week ritual for an international crowd.
The most quotable moment in the report comes when the monk describes the monastery's stance toward other traditions. Speaking to the camera, he said: "we consider every tradition as equal and equally respectable. We don't think that we're above anyone." He added that the monastery has "a really big mix" of people from different traditions among the gathering. That remark, which the video records around the three-and-a-half-minute mark, is the emotional center of the piece, and it is worth taking seriously as a principle rather than a courtesy.
The monk is candid that the monastery is not neutral in every respect. It mostly follows the Sakya tradition and its study curriculum is, in his words, basically what every other monastery studies, "except that the commentary differs a little bit." The monastery favors the commentarial writings of one of the principal Sakya masters. Most of its rituals are Sakya, though the particular puja in these weeks belongs to a different ritual framework, which he describes simply as part of the mix. So the nonsectarianism he describes is not a claim to have no lineage. It is a claim that a particular lineage can hold its own commitments while recognizing other lineages as legitimate. In a movement that has sometimes been divided by school, that is a meaningful position to state out loud in front of two thousand people.
The video's most instructive phrase is the one that names the core of the ritual. The monk explains that in Tibetan the puja is called by a term meaning accumulation, and that here it refers to an accumulation of 100,000 repetitions of the practice. This is a central idea in Tibetan Buddhist training. A set number of recitations or prostrations, counted and completed, is a way of turning a practice from something one does occasionally into something one embodies. The count gives the mind a measurable task. It also makes the practice communal: when two thousand people are reciting together, the total is not a private tally but a shared offering.
Seen this way, the twenty-one days are the container for an accumulation that is partly literal and partly symbolic. The number of days, the number of Taras and the number of recitations all serve the same aim, which is to make devotion structured, repeated and collective. The video's final minutes, where the chanting rises and layers over the hall, show what that looks like from the outside. The drums, horns and voices are not background music. They are the rhythm by which the count is kept.
It would be dishonest to present this nine-minute report as a full account of the event. The auto-generated transcript is incomplete and in places garbled, and many sentences cannot be recovered with confidence. The teachings by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, which are part of the event described, are not captured in the excerpt. The historical timeline of the monastery is sketched only in outline. Readers who want the teachings themselves, or a precise account of the monastery's move from Tibet, will need fuller sources.
What the video does offer is a clear, human portrait of a gathering: a monastery that has been rebuilt, a protector chosen for a community's anniversary, a principle of equal respect for other traditions, and a practice whose power lies in patient, shared counting. For a viewer who has never attended a puja, that is a useful entry point. For someone who has, it is a reminder that these rituals are living things, sustained by people who keep showing up for three weeks in a row.
If this report has you curious about the Tara practice, start with the basic vocabulary: what a puja is, what the Dol-Chog refers to, and how accumulation practices work in Tibetan training. Then look for the teachings from the event itself, since the video only hints at them. If the nonsectarian stance interests you, compare how different lineages describe their relationships with one another; the monk's remarks offer one clear model. And if you are drawn to the idea of a practice sustained by a community over time, consider how you might build a smaller rhythm of your own, with a set number of days and a set count, and see what the accumulation teaches you.
