The Venerable Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen 1924 - 2009

Venerable Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen passed away on February 13 2009 in his home at the Thubten Dhargye Ling Buddhist Center in Long Beach California, surrounded by monks from Gaden Shartse Monastery and family members.

Geshe Gyeltsen was a long-standing friend of the Society with an association beginning in the 1960s. He arrived in the UK in 1963 with two Tibetan house parents and twenty-two very young Tibetan children, most of whom were orphans or whose parents had been left behind in Tibet. They came to live in the new Tibetan House at the Pestalozzi International Children’s Village at Sedlescome in Sussex and Geshe Gyeltsen was their religious teacher.

During the 1990s, by which time he was based in the United States, he played a very positive and helpful part at the Summer School during visits to Europe. He was a very popular speaker and much loved by his audience and for some Society members was the key influence on their developing Buddhist practice. More publicly Geshe-la made a brief, but important, appearance as Lama Dorje in Bernado Bertolucci's film Little Buddha. A full obituary of Geshe Gyeltsen will be published in the May edition of the Middle Way. For more information please go to www.tdling.org