Tsering

Tsering is a Tibetan monk from the Gsalrig Chongg monastery, and the guardian of the Nineteenth Rinpoche. He and the Rinpoche currently reside in an ancient monastery built seamlessly into the side of the highest peak of the Dhauladhar range of the Himalayas, where he continues to serve as the monastery's "manager."

Tsering, a well-preserved man in his sixties, came to the Gsalrig Chongg monastery when he was two years old. He is one of the few among them who speak English, and typically serves as a translator on the rare occasions when the monastery receives Western visitors. When former student Aloysius Pendergast brought his ward Constance Greene to Gsalrig Chongg, he had not seen a female in over fifty years. She was the first female presence at the monastery in its thousand-year existence, and he became her teacher in the discipline of Chongg Ran. When she left, he gifted her with a dgongs, a fantastically complex knot tied from a gray silken cord in the eighteenth century by a revered lama. It was a meditative tool, never to be untied in the real world, lest it lose its power and be reduced to a simple silken cord.

When the Nineteenth Rinpoche was born and proclaimed the reincarnation of the rinpoche, the Chinese authorities occupying Tibet attempted to sieze him. To protect the boy, Tsering and the monks smuggled him from Gsalrig Chongg to the Dhauladhar monastery in India.