Sonam Kundop, who is actually one of the rare askers of why

I was frustrated one day a couple of months ago because I was stumbling over how to ask a simple “why” question. Months of living among Tibetans and I couldn’t form a simple question. Ridiculous! But then I realized that part of the reason for this is that you almost never hear monks — or any Tibetans for that matter — asking why.

I asked Geshé Tenzin, one of my teachers, what he thought about foreign practitioners, now that he has met so many. He said, “Tibetan practitioners always just accept everything without questioning. Foreigners always want to know the what and the why.”

In Kathmandu, when I would meet with the head of the School of Practice, he would make fun of me by following up the most mundane of my statements with, “Why?” and then let loose an infectious giggle.

About half of the monks I’ve met have asked me what I’m doing at Menri, but the questions generally stop there. The other questions they ask are all of the same ilk: Where are you going? When did you arrive? How long will you stay? Have you eaten? Maybe 10% of all conversations with monks feature questions beyond these four.

There is an interesting possible cultural dynamic here. Are Tibetans religiously or otherwise temperamentally predisposed to live closer to the present? Are why questions too bound up with distant past or future motivations and actions? Or maybe karma makes why questions irrelevant?

One ramification of this has become all too clear in recent days. Geshés and others never thought to ask what visitors thought about Bön, why they are interested in Bön, what they plan to say about Bön in their research publications. Now that the results of such research are emerging, the monks see that the people they helped are saying things that the monks never said — the conclusions these people reached are different and sometimes inflammatory or pejorative or just don’t make sense to them.

Is this kind of crisis enough to alter what seems to be a deeply embedded cultural trait? Or will the monks just refuse to interface with individuals whose motives are ambiguous? Unfortunately, for now, the evidence points to the latter.