"When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised."

FROM DHARAMSALA, INDIA

The dull clanging of a bell awakens him at 6 a.m. It's dark. He climbs from his thick blue sleeping bag into the chill of the Himalayan air and pads across bare concrete to the bathroom - a cold-water tap and a ceramic hole in the floor.

He drapes himself in a cloud of crimson robes, descends a pocked and stained staircase, and joins the other monks streaming silently to morning prayers. Barefoot before the golden Buddha, he bows and folds his legs lotus-style beneath him. The guttural chant rolls from his lips like a gentle song, his slight body hunched, his shaved head bent: "Namo dharmaya, namo sanghaya."

A few years ago, his name was Donald Pham, and he lived in his family's airy Laguna Niguel home with soaring ceilings, thick carpet and vistas of rolling hills. He was a gifted student who owned a body-board and played clarinet and Nintendo. He had his own bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, loved science fiction and toyed with the idea of becoming a writer or doctor.

Today, he is Konchog "Kusho" Osel - youngest student at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, run by the Tibetan Government in Exile at the behest of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama.

At the age most boys are going to parties, courting girls and playing football, he has taken a vow of chastity, promised to relieve the suffering "of all sentient beings" and learned to play cricket. He has pledged to tame all passions, rigorously discipline body, speech and mind and never intentionally kill another living thing, not even a mosquito. He has accepted the emptiness and impermanence of all things - including himself - and is struggling to forsake attachment, not just to objects, but to the people he loves.

Grasping is suffering. Letting go is freedom.

Young Kusho's goal - the goal of all Tibetan Buddhists - is enlightenment itself. A state of perfect wisdom. A state, the Dalai Lama has written, that can be infused with mystery and border on magic: monks lost in meditation who raise their body temperatures 18 degrees, even while sitting on beds of snow; lamas whose bodies die but remain fresh for weeks; lamas who are rumored to fly. The boy who used to be called Don is on an arduous road, one that can take far more than a lifetime to complete. His grandfather adamantly opposed the idea. Relatives denounced it as madness. He has fallen ill from alien food and water, wept with homesickness and wondered exactly why he was there. There are so many challenges, but breaking the bonds of attachment to his family is proving to be one of the hardest tasks of all.

Clutching a corner of his robe, Kusho swings it over his shoulder in a billowing cloud of crimson, then buries his face in it, almost as if to find shelter. "Namo gurubay, namo Buddhaya." ("I take refuge in my gurus. I take refuge in the Buddha.")

The boy is 16. He is a monk. The first foreigner ever accepted into his monastery. How did he come to this? Whose decision was it? Will he be able to keep his vows for life?

A FATEFUL TOOTHACHE

The romance between Don's mother and father began with a disastrous root canal half a world away.

Huyen "Lee" Nguyen rushed to Saigon's government-run dental school in 1971 with a throbbing jaw and bloated face, intending to see the senior instructor immediately. But a young dental student named Hy Pham spotted her first and decided to treat the cute girl in the miniskirt himself.

Lee was his first root canal. "He didn't make me better," she says. "I felt worse."

Lee complained, and Hy felt terrible. He gave her medicine and presented himself that night at her house with a box of candy and an apology. He asked if he could keep visiting. She said yes.

They were engaged within a year, and the wedding was planned for after Hy finished Army duty. But Saigon fell to the communists first, forcing Hy to flee in 1975. Three times Lee tried to join him, paying for passage with bars of gold. The first time, she was too ill to sail. The second time, communist patrols captured her boat, and she spent two months in jail. The third time, she fled through the jungles, praying to Buddha as she dodged snakes, wild cats and booby traps. When she finally reached a refugee camp in Thailand, fellow refugees credited their success to her prayers.

Lee joined Hy in Los Angeles in 1980 when he was working on another dental degree. Her entire family eventually followed. They married in 1981, opened a clinic in Long Beach and considered themselves blessed when Connie, their oldest daughter, was born a year later.

THE BOOK OF DEATH

Lee had long been a devout Buddhist. She understood karma as the law of cause and effect that determined everyone's station in life. She believed wholly in reincarnation. But after her mother died a difficult death in 1984, questions nagged at her.

Can a person control his death? Where does he go in the interim? What will the next rebirth be?

When she became pregnant again in 1985 with Don, her questions intensified. What sort of life was inside her? What part of a person goes on after death? How, exactly, does reincarnation work? She probed the mysteries with Hy and asked at a local Vietnamese Buddhist temple, but she couldn't find a satisfactory answer.

Then Lee, two months' pregnant, found the book that would change the course of her family's life.

It came from Tibetan Buddhism, a very different tradition from the Vietnamese Buddhism she grew up with. Called "Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth," it was written by a spiritual assistant to the Dalai Lama named Lati Rinpoche - a teacher who would have enormous power over her unborn child's future.

"I grabbed that book and I read - oh, my goodness, amazing book," she says. "Lati Rinpoche was able to answer everything from his experience. He is the reincarnation of an important tulku (a highly realized being) and has lived many lifetimes.''

The book says that the time between death and rebirth is, at most, 49 days, or seven cycles of seven - the number of days that the Buddha was lost in bliss when he achieved enlightenment. Those still enslaved by desire and attachment pass into a middle state. If their actions in the past life were good, they enjoy a favorable rebirth in the human realm. If their actions were bad, however, they have an unfavorable rebirth in the animal realm.

Lee read the book nearly every night as her belly grew round. Her son, Donald, was born March, 18, 1986, in a labor she recalls as remarkably easy. "I think he brought me to Tibetan Buddhism," Lee says.

A SPECIAL CHILD

Don was a gentle baby who seemed different from the very beginning. "He was very, very serious," Lee says. "He was like an old man."

Don was content to sit for hours and watch his older sister, Connie, lord over the toy collection. The two couldn't have been more different: Connie, 4, was bold, passionate and demandingly inquisitive, while her brother seemed intent on absorbing the entire world through his eyes by watching it very, very, carefully.

Fourteen months later, their little sister, Christine, was born. She and Don were soon dubbed "the twins." They shared the same calm demeanor and the same gummy smile. They were both painfully shy, and they were virtually inseparable, arms entangled as they learned to talk and toddle. Connie, feeling left out, often wrought big-sister havoc upon them.

Work and three children kept Lee too busy to think much more about the mysteries of death until 1990, when her mother-in-law offhandedly gave her a newspaper for the waiting room of the dental office. Lee was thumbing through it when a small item leapt out at her: A Tibetan monk was visiting a temple in Los Angeles. A monk named Lati Rinpoche.

She lost her breath. "The name was tiny, just a dot on the page," Lee says. "But to me it looked like the whole world. I can see that only."

Lati Rinpoche was the monk who wrote the book about death.

The next day, Lee went to the temple to meet him. "I saw Lati Rinpoche for the first time in my life, but I had a feeling that I saw him, sometime, somewhere before," Lee says.

His tales of the Himalayas seemed strangely familiar, too. "I feel, oh, I've been there before," she says.

Lee returned the next day to hear his teachings with her three children in tow. As soon as Lati Rinpoche entered the temple, Don, then 4, pitched over on his bench and smashed his head. He didn't cry, but a bruise quickly rose. Lee fetched ice to soothe it, and Don and the other children sat without complaint through two hours of teachings on the nature of consciousness. That night, Lee said, Don's swelling mysteriously disappeared.

Lati Rinpoche gave teachings in California for two weeks, and Lee took the children to hear him almost every day. She was entranced, on fire, with what she recognized as the truth. The Phams stayed on as members of the Los Angeles temple, faithfully appearing each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday to hear the wisdom of its spiritual leader, Geshe Tsultim Gyeltsen, affectionately known as Geshe-la.

Such dedication wasn't easy. It required a 50-mile drive through rush-hour traffic - each way - and Lee wasn't keen on subjecting the little ones to it three times a week. She encouraged Don and Christine to stay with their cousins instead, but they insisted on going with her. The children became fixtures in the temple's last row, quietly drawing or coloring as Geshe-la taught the graduated path to enlightenment by meditation and mindfulness of body, speech and mind. He spoke of the difficulties of meditation, how the untrained mind springs from idea to idea without focus like a monkey in a tree, how difficult it is to calm and still.

Once, Lee gently admonished her son for not paying attention, but Don insisted he was listening. "I say, 'OK, what did Geshe-la teach today?'." Lee says. "And right away, he replied, 'Geshe-la said, 'Consciousness is like a monkey.'."

Lee was surprised. It seemed an advanced idea for a kindergartner to grasp.

Don showed a level of selflessness that was startling in such a young child, says Tenzin Dorjee, a family friend and former monk. When he took the children out for ice cream, Don would refuse to order, afraid of wasting money and preferring that his sisters be indulged instead.

"He worries a lot. Too much. I say, 'You are just a child,'." Dorjee said. "He already shows a sense of responsibility at too young an age. If he happened to kill an insect, he felt bad for the whole day."

The depth of Don's feeling became eerily apparent one afternoon while the Phams dined in their sunny kitchen. Christine accidentally broke a plate and burst into tears. Her brother's words of comfort to her made his parents' eyes widen: "Don't worry, it's just a thing. If you're attached to a little thing like that, how you can give up your body when you die?"

"I never forgot the moment when he said that," Lee says. "He was 5."

Lee thought this was an auspicious sign and shared the news with Geshe-la at temple. Geshe-la was pleased but instructed Lee to say nothing more about it; they would watch Don to see how his spirit grew. All three of the Pham children, Geshe-la thought, were uncharacteristically devoted to the teachings at very early ages. "How they understood we don't know," Geshe-la says. "They build up from the small, all the time listening, listening, listening, listening. ... All the time collecting in their consciousness."

FIRST VIETNAMESE GESHE

Even though their hearts had turned to Tibetan Buddhism, the Phams still visited the Vietnamese temple for big holidays and celebrations. These galas were marked by merriment, prayers and offerings but not by lengthy lectures on sacred texts. This did not escape Don's attention.

He asked Lee, using the Vietnamese word for "mother": "Me, why is there no teaching at the Vietnamese temple? If you don't get the teaching, how can you know what is wrong or right?"

Lee answered his challenge with a challenge of her own. "I said, 'OK, now that you see that, you can become a good Vietnamese monk so you can give them the teaching,'." she says. "He said he will. He did not hesitate. So I said to him, 'Mom hopes that in your future you can give a different flower to their beautiful garden.'."

Any doubts Lee may have had evaporated in the car on the way to temple when Don was 8. Lee had tuned in to Vietnamese radio, where a speaker extolled the talent in the immigrant community, from lawyers to doctors to engineers.

Don piped up from the back seat: Why are there are so many doctors and lawyers in the Vietnamese community, but no geshe? he asked. I will be the first Vietnamese geshe.

A geshe is the most learned of Tibetan Buddhist monks. Lee decided it was time to seriously consult with Geshe-la about the boy's future.

WISDOM OF TIBET

Geshe-la's face is barely creased by his 79 years.

Born in eastern Tibet, he entered the ancient Gaden Shartse monastery near Lhasa when he was 8 years old, and it was his home for nearly 30 years.

That ended abruptly after evening prayers on March 14, 1959, as the Chinese army was closing in on the capital. The Chinese were intent on "liberating" Tibet from its "backward" religion and economic stagnation. Geshe-la knew that the Dalai Lama already had fled through the snowy Himalayas to India, but was told he must flee as well.

It was nearly midnight. Geshe-la grabbed a few holy books and some food, turned his back on his home and walked toward India, wearing only his robes.

The paths through the Himalayas were choked with snow. Many Tibetans died there, victims of Chinese soldiers or exposure; others lost feet, hands, fingers and toes to frostbite. Geshe-la was lucky. Thirty-five days after fleeing, he arrived, stunned and exhausted, at an Indian refugee camp. Gaden, he would learn, had been destroyed by Chinese forces. Many monks had been imprisoned, tortured, even killed.

The Dalai Lama urged the refugees to pick up exactly where they had left off. So Geshe-la dove back into his studies, earning the Lharampa Geshe degree, the highest awarded by the monastic university system. Much like a doctorate of divinity, it took 23 years to complete.

In 1963, the Dalai Lama sent him abroad to spread Buddha's teachings in England and the United States. China may have seized Tibet, killed hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, destroyed countless monasteries and phased out the Tibetan language - but Tibetan traditions were marching forward, nonetheless.

He had helped them take root in California, and Geshe-la listened carefully as Lee spoke of Don. In Geshe-la's Tibet, it was common for families to offer sons to the monastery. But Laguna Niguel was many worlds away from Tibet.

Geshe-la appreciated that Lee and Hy wanted their son to be a monk. He agreed that Don was sweet, smart and seemed to have the right temperament for monastic life. But he knew that the bond between mother and son was strong. Did the parents really understand what it meant to offer a child to the monastery? Did they have any idea what it was like to live within its walls? The exhausting hours monks must keep, the worldly things they must forsake, the strict vows they must obey? Could they comprehend what life is like in India, which has been called a highly developed nation in an advanced state of decay?

It was not enough to just imagine a land of staggering riches and abysmal poverty, of brutal heat and lashing monsoons, of dusty villages and wandering ascetics. Geshe-la insisted that Lee and Hy go to India, stay with the monks and see for themselves.

She was told that a monastery is like an ocean. "A lot of treasure, but a lot of sharks, too," Lee says. "You cannot find anywhere that is perfect."

PASSAGE TO INDIA

Don was 9 years old when his parents boarded a plane for the daylong flight to Bombay in 1995. After two more grueling days of travel, they arrived in the southern state of Karnataka, where they finally climbed on a bus that would take them to the monastery.

It snaked along streets choked with cows, dogs, rickshaws, ox carts, scooters and people - so many people - dodging overloaded trucks speeding toward disaster and finally arrived at the Tibetan settlement of Mundgod. The re-established Gaden Shartse monastery squatted on a low hill, isolated, prayer flags flapping languidly in the heat.

This new Gaden had come a long way since the refugees camped in tents and built the first common hall from mud, thatch and bamboo. It had grown into a rambling campus capped with a cavernous prayer hall, Tibetan flourishes of red and gold flashing from the rooftops. The next generation of Tibetan leaders - some 1,500 students - studied there. And one of Gaden's most exalted teachers was Lati Rinpoche, spiritual assistant to the Dalai Lama and the monk who wrote the book on death that brought the Phams to Tibetan Buddhism in the first place.

Life at Gaden, Lee and Hy learned, was rigidly structured.

The gong awoke them at 5 a.m. A silent parade of scarlet robes filled the temple for prayer. Breakfast was at 7, a sober affair of chewy Tibetan bread and exotic tea blended with butter, milk and salt. Then the monks attended classes in language, debate and logic until 12:30 p.m., when they broke for lunch.

Afternoons were crowded with private teachings from gurus and tutors; a light dinner of rice and soup was served at 6; then the monks assembled again for Buddhist teaching and debate classes that stretched, sometimes, until midnight.

Lee and Hy stayed for six weeks. Gaden, they decided, was a profoundly sacred, spiritual place. They were deeply touched by its harmony, by the purity of its discipline, by the compassion they felt emanating from its monks. The monks were almost constantly engaged in learning, with more hours devoted to study than even the best American private schools offered. And there were no distractions - no televisions, no DVD players, no computer games.

There were also no comforts of home. No fast food, no washing machines, no hot water, no privacy. Not even any Westerners to talk to. Just a closed universe of refugees, speaking a language they didn't understand.

Don would be a foreigner in a completely foreign land. Is this what they wanted for their only son?

DIVINATION

The question eventually would be decided by ancient ritual.

In divination, a holy man appeals directly to a deity, seeking the answer to a vexing question. The ritual can employ fire, mirrors, prayer beads, bones. It would be performed in India by Lati Rinpoche himself.

The question went beyond whether Don should enter the monastery; it was also whether his little sister should enter the nunnery. Christine wanted to dedicate herself to Buddha's teachings - and be near her brother.

The signs were clear, Lati Rinpoche said. Don should enter the monastery. Christine must wait.

Lee and Hy were thrilled that their hunches about Don had been correct. "He is a special boy. A very good boy," his father says. "I believe that this is the right path for him to follow, and he believes that, too."

The Phams knew it would be difficult news to break to the extended family. They were pondering how to do it when Don, in his excitement, told his cousin. The news raced through Lee's family - Don was going to India to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

Lee's father, Nam Van Nguyen, was outraged.

He had fathered four sons and eight daughters, and saw one of them die. He had been a bicycle merchant, a presidential adviser, a lieutenant in the French army and a newspaperman. He fled his homeland after it fell to communists, built a new life in the United States and watched proudly as his sons and daughters became professionals - doctors, dentists, pharmacists - and sent their own children to college. America was the land of opportunity, the land of plenty, the land people from all over the world longed to reach. How could his daughter even think about sending Don away from all this for the privations of India?

Nguyen ordered a family meeting of his 11 children. Together, they would persuade Lee not to do something foolish.

CONFRONTATION

Nguyen fumed in the family room of a daughter's house. His children, their husbands and wives crowded around him.

Nguyen did not have a favorable view of monks. When he was jailed for planning protests against the government as a newspaper writer in Vietnam, monks were among his fellow inmates. He said their followers came day after day, bearing apples, grapes, oranges, milk.

He was forbidden to enter a room where a high monk was staying but flung the doors open anyway and saw the monk enjoying a fine meal as two attendants fanned him and two others fed him. Nguyen was outraged. This wasn't the life he wanted for his grandson.

Don, he said, is a sweet boy, an obedient boy. His desire to help people is real and noble. But he could help countless people by getting the best education possible and becoming a doctor or a dentist like his father. He could cut prices to help the needy and give money to the poor. He does not need to be a monk.

He leveled his charge. Don's wish to enter the monastery is not his own wish. It is his parents' wish, Nguyen said. Don agrees to make them happy.

Don's aunts and uncles jumped into the fray. Don is just a child. How can you send him to live in India by himself? How can you separate him from his family? How can you take a gifted student out of school? How can you do this?

Don, Nguyen said, is a boy of no choice.

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* The Orange County Register © 2003: http://www.ocregister.com/features/monk/