INDIA. Karnataka province. Bylakuppe. Sera Jey Tibetan monastery. Monks working outside the new temple at Sera. This enables them to earn a little money to help pay their tuition and board. His Holiness the Dalai Lama gives each monk in the monastery a sum of money equivalent to a bowl of noodle soup a day. For the rest, they must try and find sponsors, usually foreigners.

Two or three years after their death, important lamas are reincarnated in the body of a child. The search for this child is based on the information left by the lama himself: dreams, visions and the intuition of other lamas. The Tulkus are discovered at 3 or 4 years of age, declared at about 4 or 5 and then enter the monastery at the age of 6. According to the rules of the monastery, each Tulku is instructed by a tutor and is either prevented or restricted from seeing other young monks from its age group. All the Tulkus are called Rinpoche which means "the precious one".