His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, gives one sermon annually in the main temple's court, right in front of the entrance to his residence in the Tibetan exile community Dharmsala, in northern India.
Scarcely 200 km of Himalayan mountain ranges separate the small town at 1,900 meters elevation in the 5,000-meter Himachal Pradesh range from the homeland, Tibet, which the young Dalai Lama left with thousands of his people at age 24 in 1959, following the Chinese military occupation of the country.
Even though about 1,200 foreigners gather for it, the original purpose of the 10-day seminar in the first weeks of March is to refresh, reinvigorate and deepen the practice of the Tibetan laymen, lamas and rinpoches, who come from exile settlements in India, Nepal, Ladakh, Switzerland and other countries which host the Tibetan diaspora. Few were able to come from Tibet.