Tashi Jong: Exile & The Dance of Time

It’s one thing for an individual to build a new life in a foreign land, but what about an entire community or culture? Filmed twenty-five years ago in one of the first Tibetan refugee communities established in India, Barbara Green’s award-winning 1998 documentary Tashi Jong: A Traditional Tibetan Community in Exile (45 min.) is now considered historical documentation of life in exile.

An intimate journey through the daily life and rituals of this community of three hundred lay people and one hundred monks, the story culminates in a stunning visual feast of sacred lama dance. These dances, called cham, celebrate the legendary Indian master Padmasambhava, who brought Vajrayana Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century.

The film will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and members of the Tashi Jong community who now live in New York. The evening culminates with a visit to the galleries led by Tashi Chodron to view the exhibition The Second Buddha: Master of Time, which traces the life and legends of Padmasambhava.

About the Speakers

Barbara Green has been a practicing psychotherapist in the San Francisco Bay area. For the past twenty-five years she has used video documentation to support and educate about a wide range of Tibetan subjects, and she has worked on film projects in India, Eastern Tibet, Bhutan, and the United States. Her award-winning 1998 feature documentary Tashi Jong: A Traditional Tibetan Community in Exile aired on Canadian and Korean television and on PBS stations throughout the United States. Most recently she was a consultant to the independent feature film My Son Tenzin, directed by Tibetan filmmaker Tashi Wangchuck. She created the nonprofit Tibetan Video Preservation Project, an educational resource of more than one hundred hours of archival video from the United States, India, Bhutan, and Eastern Tibet. Barbara serves on the Board of Directors of the Buddhist Film Foundation and is an advisor to the Committee of 100 for Tibet and Bay Area Friends of Tibet.