Monastaries carrying out environmental protection projects to be awarded

Monastaries carrying out environmental protection projects to be awarded
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Highlights

Tibetan spiritual leader, the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorjee, said today that an environmental award would be given to monasteries or nunneries that are carrying out environmental protection projects.

Dharamsala: Tibetan spiritual leader, the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorjee, said today that an environmental award would be given to monasteries or nunneries that are carrying out environmental protection projects.

He said that the monasteries, which are showing a lot of innovative work or that have done a lot of consistent environmental projects, would win the prize. He said that it is a way of recognizing all the hard work that monasteries put into environment protection.

"We should do it in two ways, one award for nunneries and another for monks in monasteries but we have to see that whether it should be separate for India, Nepal and Bhutan, it can be decided later. It is a way of incentivising and recognizing all the hard work those monastries or nunneries put into environment protection," he added.

The 17th Karmapa addressed a conference on environmental protection at Norbu Lingka institute near north Indian hill town Dharamshala here.

"It would be some kind of incentivising the activities and the initiatives so he has not clearly pointed out when will it be awarded, but he has some plans for it and we are looking forward to that," said Lhakpa Tsering, the organizer of the conference.

"Today what he spoke about was more to do with the guidelines that we could work on for the coming five years regarding all the environment activities. People are very enthusiastic and they all are more enthusiastic now because his holiness came and gave wonderful guidelines that we could work on. At the moment, we have 43 participants from 29 monasteries and nunneries and three other organizations from India, Nepal and Bhutan," he added.

Deki Chungyalpa, th environmental adviser to Karmapa, said he is here today because we have a closing ceremony right now for the 6th Koryug conference, Koryug means environment in Tibetan.

"It is an association that he created which consists of 55 monasteries that are doing environmental projects all across the Himalayas and we just had the conference that was quite different from previous conference because this focused on what the next five year plan should look like for Koryug as an organization. He focused very much on interdependence and why we as Himalayan people but of course he mainly speaking to monastic should care about the environment and he also talked a lot about having to integrate with community. He mentions several times that we cannot wait for other people to fix the problem. We must move into the community and come up with the solutions ourselves. He focused a lot on how coordination within Nepal, India and Bhutan could be stronger on environmental projects and in that discussion he also spoke a lot about social media and the role of social media," he added.

Kun Kyong, a Tibetan charitable trust, organized the sixth Khoryug (environmental) conference for Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries in the Himalayas.

The annual conference was first started in 2009 with the guidelines of Tibetan spiritual leader the 17th Karmapa for environmental protection.
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