Monks to Bring Art of Healing : Program: Eleven from Tibetan monastery, on a U.S. cultural tour, will perform sacred and folk dances and music at Bowers museum.

The Gaden Monastery in Tibet is said to have resembled some gleaming city-state perched atop two ridges 14,000 feet above sea level. Established in 1409, it was one of Tibet’s three great cultural centers and home to more than 3,000 Buddhist monks.

Gaden also was one of 6,000 monasteries destroyed by Chinese Communists in the 1959 takeover of Tibet, said Cheme Tsering, one of 11 monks who will perform “Sacred Earth and Healing Arts of Tibet” on Tuesday at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana.

Gaden’s ancient rituals and principles of monastic education, however, did not perish.

“Forty-four surviving Gaden monks, from (the monastery’s) Shartse college, fled to India,” Cheme said by phone from Duncan, British Columbia. “Ten years later, in a remote jungle a 12-hour bus journey from Mysore, Gaden Shartse was reborn.”

The Bowers program features sacred and folk dances accompanied by Tibetan bells, drums and horns. Music includes meditative split tonal chants, rare even in Tibetan monasteries, in which each monk creates two tones with his own voice. The Gaden Shartse monks will wear saffron- and crimson-colored ceremonial robes or elaborate folk attire as appropriate.

Early in their yearlong cultural tour, the monks performed sacred healing rituals on animals at the Oakland Zoo. Subsequently, they tried to clean up Boston Harbor.

Apparently no task is too big for the monks: At Bowers, they’ll attempt to return Orange County to a state of cosmic balance. That effort takes place early in the program.

The monks will also re-create a “dialectical debate,” with English translation, to provide an insight into monastic methods of education at Shartse. Such debates aim to fuse intuition and intellect, and to develop a keen analytical mind while teaching students not to take themselves too seriously.

“Engaging in a spiritual life need not make you narrow-minded nor constricted in your outlook,” Cheme said. “You can engage in these practices and also be a normal, happy, jovial human being, open enough to laugh at your own follies and to understand the folly of others.”

Potentially most fascinating, however, is choed , a ritual designed to force individuals to reconsider their basic premises about life.

“ Choed , or ‘cutting off,’ is usually performed by one person in the middle of night, in burial grounds or cemeteries, in places that are haunted,” Cheme said. “The practice challenges the individual’s idea of self, forces him to consider whether the self exists in the way that we imagine it or in another way.

“All that we are, and the way that we live, stems from the way we view our identity. . . . Individuals seeing choed will either experience a fundamental change in their way of looking at life, or they will feel totally put off,” Cheme said.

Today, Gaden Shartse Monastic College in Kirnatha boasts 600 full-time scholars, students and administrators. Cheme, 34, is a mandala researcher and education project coordinator at the monastic college, which benefits from proceeds of the tour.

The monks have been driving around the United States in a Ford van since October; they’ll also visit Latin America before returning to India. They chose to begin their tour in the United States for several reasons.

“The Americans are very open to new ideas, and we do not have any monks who speak, for instance, German or Japanese,” Cheme said. “Also, the road system is very good. We have been driving here for eight months, and not even one single flat tire. In India, you will have three flat tires in one day.”

While the monks are here, they are earnestly trying to learn as much as they can about U.S. culture.

Said Cheme: “We visit museums, stay in family homes, find out the main product of each city, visit bookstores. . . .

“Many of the monks do not speak English, so I translate,” Cheme said. “In Vermont, I bought a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind.’ In Phoenix we borrowed ‘The Source’ by Michener. In Seattle, we saw ‘The Ten Commandments.’ I translated the entire movie as we watched.”

Indeed, the most important goal of the tour is, he said, is “to bridge the gap between Tibetan isolationism and changing trends in the modern world.”

Said Cheme: “There is a lot to catch up (for) Tibetans. Before 1959, we thought Buddhism alone was sufficient in life, but because of that our country was easily manipulated and taken over by the Chinese.

“We need to generate awareness of Tibetan culture and history, but we also need to know about the world, to speak its language. We need to know what are the guidelines by which one nation gives help to another,” he said.

“During the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, there were more than 10 resolutions by the U.N. Security Council (in response to that invasion), mostly sponsored by the U.S. government,” he said.

“We want to know why that sort of support is there, and why we, who have been knocking on the door of the U.N. for 32 years (since the Chinese takeover), have not been given a single resolution. What are the deciding factors? Is it because we don’t have oil? We need to learn much more about Western culture.”

* “Sacred Earth and Healing Arts of Tibet” will be presented Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the courtyard of the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. $15 ($10 for museum members), includes admission to the “‘Art of the Himalayas: Treasures of Nepal and Tibet” exhibit continuing at the museum through July 31. Reservations are required. (714) 567-3670.