Lobsang Phuntsok

"Everyone is an invited guest of the universe," Lobsang Phuntsok tells the 125 children of his community in the Himalayas every day. He means it — because he spent most of his childhood being told the opposite. Born in secret in 1971 in Arunachal Pradesh — his young, unmarried mother had nowhere to turn and no way to keep him — he was left in dried leaves and nearly didn't survive his first hour on earth. He grew into a lost, angry boy the village had already written off. Today, he is father to over a hundred of those same kinds of children — the ones nobody else will take.

Since 2006, Jhamtse Gatsal Children's Community — "the garden of love and compassion" — has been home to children rescued from poverty, abuse, and neglect in one of India's most remote regions. Lobsang doesn't ask villages for their best students. He asks: "Who are the difficult kids? Who does nobody want?" Those are the ones he takes. He calls them "jewels in the dirt." In nearly twenty years, not one child has been given a psychiatric medication. The healing comes entirely from love, belonging, and community.

What makes this believable is his own story. His grandparents found him near death as a newborn — they'd followed a sound they thought was a goat. They loved him through years of broken windows and stolen prayer flags, through a childhood so dark he considered ending his life before age seven. Then they did the one thing that saved him: they sent him to Sera Je Monastery in South India. The night before he left, his grandfather — a tough, quiet man — stitched a small sack from his own trousers and filled it with all his savings. No speech. Just trust, folded into cloth.

At the monastery, a teacher's words slowly rewired him: "You are a tiny part of a larger family in this universe. How can you contribute?" That question changed everything. He eventually became one of ten monks selected by the Dalai Lama to teach Tibetan Buddhism in the West — spending eight years at universities, hospices, and medical schools across North America. But every time he returned to India, he saw children carrying the same wounds he once had. He walked away from his life in Massachusetts and went back to the mountains.

The Emmy Award-winning documentary Tashi and the Monk brought Jhamtse Gatsal to millions worldwide, and its long-awaited follow-up Loving Karma has just arrived. His work has drawn recognition from Harvard to the United Nations, and his talks on love, compassion, and the purpose of education have reached audiences across five continents. Everywhere he goes, the message is the same: "The most important task before us today is to revive the human spirit and rebuild the human community."

Join us in conversation with this former uninvited guest who became a father to hundreds — and is proving, one child at a time, that love is the only medicine that heals everything.