About THL > Features & Spotlights > Sera Monastery Resources > Sera Essays Intro
Introduction to Sera Essays
Essays on various aspects of Sera Monastery are present throughout the Sera website. This section presents them all in one place for easy reference. Clicking on a specific title will take you to the essay itself. Please note that each essay has an interactive table of contents to the right. This table of contents allows you to navigate your way through the essay’s various sections simply by clicking on the section you want to read. In addition, you can “specify view” – the popular view renders Tibetan terms and names in easy-to-pronounce forms, while the scholarly view renders Tibetan in precise transliteration using the Wylie system – great for spelling, but difficult for the ordinary reader to pronounce. Finally, you can “specify format” to either read section by section, view the whole document together, or get a printer-friendly view.
The essays include the book-length study of Sera Hermitages, with its many individual chapters, as well as original essays on the Space of Sera and the Colleges of Sera. These original essays and the Sera Hermitages essays are all composed by José Cabezón, the director of the Sera Monastery website and professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. We also include several reprinted essays, which have been generously provided by their authors and original publishers.