A dob-dob is a member of a type of Tibetan Buddhist monk fraternity that existed in Gelug

Gelug

The Gelug or Gelug-pa , also known as the Yellow Hat sect, is a school of Buddhism founded by Je Tsongkhapa , a philosopher and Tibetan religious leader...

 monasteries in Tibet

Tibet

Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

 such as Sera Monastery

Sera Monastery

Sera Monastery is one of the 'great three' Gelukpa university monasteries of Tibet, located north of Lhasa. The other two are Ganden Monastery and Drepung Monastery. The origin of the name 'Sera' is attributed to a fact that the site where the monastery was built was surrounded by wild roses in...

 and are reported to still exist in Gelug monasteries today, although possibly in a somewhat altered form. The status of dob-dobs tended to be somewhat ambiguous and they were generally the less academic monks who had an interest in sports, fighting and other 'worldly' matters.

Disruptive influences or peacemakers?

Dob-dobs sometimes acted as self-appointed policemen in the monasteries. Geshe Lama Konchog

Geshe Lama Konchog

Geshe Lama Konchog, born Lobsang Puntsog , was a renowned Tibetan Buddhist gelugpa lama, who had thousands of followers around the world. Konchog was recognized by the Dalai Lama to be a Great Mahasiddha, or realized guru....

 for example recalled being beaten by his dob-dob uncle in Sera for being over-eager to study and take Tantric initiations. Dob-dobs were often seen as potential trouble-makers with Sir Charles Bell

Charles Alfred Bell

Sir Charles Alfred Bell K.C.I.E. , born in Calcutta, was a British-Indian tibetologist. He was educated at Winchester College. After joining the Indian Civil Service, he was appointed Political Officer in Sikkim in 1908...

 describing in his portrait of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...

 how dob-dobs were foremost amongst monks at large religious ceremonies who were "bursting with superfluous energy, and spoiling for a fight".

However, dob-dobs also contributed many positive qualities to monastery life. According to José Ignacio Cabezón of the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library:

On the other hand, dob dobs were known for being forthright, honest, hard-working and extremely loyal (to their fraternities and to their college). They were also known for their generosity and their sense of fairness.

It was often the dob dobs who would care for sick or elderly monks who could not leave their rooms.

Life as a dob-dob

Tashi Khedrup became a candidate to join the dob-dobs in Sera in 1951, when he was nearly 15 years old. He describes how the dob-dob fraternity worked for its members:

The association I joined had about 36 members who came from different colleges all over the monastery. That made it possible to meet a lot of new friends. There was no entrance fee, but each member contributed what he could to a common fund from which we bought food, which we ate in one another's rooms. Usually meetings were held in the room of the leader... He had been a famous jumper and fighter, but was very quiet in his manner though he saw to it that discipline was properly kept. Clubs of that sort, which we called kyidu -- that means that everyone shares the good and bad alike -- might last for many years or might break up and reform into new groups. If a member died, a share of his property went to the kyidu, some went to pay the men whose duty it was to cut up his dead body, and the rest to his college.

For the teen-aged Tashi Khedrup at least, sartorial elegance was a big part of the fraternity:

Dob - dobs were always very proud of their clothes and looked after them carefully. We liked a specially dark shade of expensive, fine woollen cloth for our long skirt - like garment. It had to be folded carefully into a number of pleats, rather like a kilt and when we were in our rooms we usually took it off and put it under a board and sat on it to press the pleats. The front part had to be quite flat, again like a kilt. And I could now grow my hair long. There were strict rules about the exact length and manner in which it had to be cut; the right side was brushed downwards and the left was bunched up into a big curl. We all took a lot of trouble to keep our hair well and rubbed it regularly with vaseline.

Monastery laborers

In terms of running the monastery, the main task of the dob-dobs was to perform essential domestic labor for the upkeep of the building and the monks inhabiting it. Brian Harris recounts of a visit to the monastery in the 1990s and how "sixty dob-dobs would come to help and mix the porrige with a large wooden paddle" at Thikse

Thikse

Thikse Gompa or Thikse Monastery is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Yellow Hat sect, located on top of a hill, approximately 19 kilometres east of Leh in Ladakh, India...

 Monastery, Ladakh

Ladakh

Ladakh is a region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of the Republic of India. It lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south, inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent...

, Northern India. Genge Lobsang Samdup recounted how at Ganden monastery

Ganden Monastery

Ganden Monastery or Ganden Namgyeling is one of the 'great three' Gelukpa university monasteries of Tibet, located at the top of Wangbur Mountain, Tagtse County, 36 kilometers ENE from the Potala Palace in Lhasa, at an altitude of 4,300m...

 it was the dob-dob who played the thongchen, or long horns, and who also provided the tent for the Dalai Lama's visit.

Dob-dobs and 'bookmen'

The dob-dob appears to have a similar role to that of the lay brother

Lay brother

In the most common usage, lay brothers are those members of Catholic religious orders, particularly of monastic orders, occupied primarily with manual labour and with the secular affairs of a monastery or friary, in contrast to the choir monks of the same monastery who are devoted mainly to the...

 in Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

 religious orders. Likewise, in Gelug monasteries the 'bookmen' monks have a similar position within the monastery to the Catholic choir monks. Tashi Khendup wrote of the two factions:

Compared with the bookmen monks we Dob-dob were learning nothing. We did go to the assemblies when there was a good distribution of food or money; and we had to be careful to hide our curls, which were not allowed to be worn there. Sometimes, too, we went to listen to the scholars practising debating in the poplar grove where this took place. We found this amusing and would imitate their gestures - stamping, waving, rosaries, clapping one hand against the other at arm’s length, and uttering a shout when making a point. We may have picked up some of the argument, too; but the main reason for going was that there was a distribution of food and money there on some days.

External link

• A Study of the LDABB LDB by Melvyn C. Goldstein, in Central Asiatic Journal, 1 x (2), 1964