Jalue Dorje walked through crowded Kathmandu streets, past stalls of fruit and incense, toward the soaring white dome of the Boudhanath stupa. Six months earlier, he had been pulling all-nighters playing Madden NFL in his home near Minneapolis, snacking on pizza rolls and Diet Coke. Now, dressed in maroon and golden monastic robes with white Crocs — decorated with “The Simpsons” charms — beneath his feet, he entered a prayer hall reserved for lamas and monks with doctorates. Inside, he bowed before Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche, the spiritual head of Shechen Monastery, and offered a golden plate symbolizing the universe, along with a white ceremonial scarf. It was the first mandala, or ritual offering, Dorje had made since arriving in South Asia, and it marked the moment he realized how far he had come.
“This is the real one, you know? We’re here and this is really happening,” Dorje said, reflecting on the offering. “I’m doing what the prophecy fulfilled.”
Dorje’s path began before he could speak. At four months old, Kyabje Trulshik Rinpoche, a venerated Tibetan Buddhist master, identified him as a reincarnated lama. Several other lamas later confirmed him as the eighth Terchen Taksham Rinpoche, a lineage whose first incarnation was born in 1655. In 2010, when the Dalai Lama visited Wisconsin, Dorje’s parents brought him to meet the spiritual leader. The Dalai Lama cut a lock of Dorje’s hair in a ceremony and advised the family to let the boy stay in the United States to perfect his English before entering a monastery.
“From my parents’ end, educating me was a really big one,” Dorje said. “They followed the words of his holiness; he laid the foundation, and they took that gamble.”
Growing up in Columbia Heights, Dorje led a double life. Mornings began with reciting sacred texts. After school came football practice — he played left guard — and evenings were for tutoring in Tibetan history and Buddhism. At night, he practiced calligraphy or listened to Drake. He collected Pokémon cards by memorizing scriptures, a deal he made with his father, and kept a photo of the Dalai Lama above his DVDs of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” On his bedroom wall, a senior-year poster showed him in football uniform, touching thumb tips to index fingers in a meditation gesture.
“It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns every day,” Dorje said. “We overcame a lot.”
After graduating from high school last year, Dorje boarded a plane for New Delhi with his parents, who drove him north to Dehradun, near the Himalayan foothills. They painted his monastic room and erected a shrine where he could pray at dawn and dusk. Saying goodbye was wrenching for the only child and his family. Yet within months, Dorje had adjusted to monastic routine — rising at dawn for prayers, eating rice and lentils, washing his own clothes by hand — and began bonding with other young tulkus, or reincarnated spiritual masters, from across Asia.
Among them was 13-year-old Trulshik Yangsi Rinpoche, believed to be the reincarnation of the very master who first recognized Dorje as a baby. The two bonded over Tintin comics, and Dorje became his English teacher. “I think of him as my spiritual teacher,” Dorje said. “I’m profoundly grateful that I get to repay my debt to the one who found me and improving his English.”
“He’s my best friend,” Yangsi Rinpoche said.
Dorje’s training recently brought him to Nepal, where he attended 12 days of sacred rituals at Shechen Monastery, near the 1,500-year-old Boudhanath stupa. On the final day, he joined senior lamas in giving the concluding blessing — tapping thousands of bowed heads with a ritual vase and a peacock feather to sprinkle holy water. His parents, who had flown from Minneapolis, were among those who received the blessing.
After the rituals, the family made an eight-hour pilgrimage on dirt roads to the Maratika or Halesi Mahadev Caves, a site sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists about 100 miles southwest of Mount Everest. Dorje sat cross-legged beside his father, Dorje Tsegyal, and they prayed together, as they had done almost daily since his childhood.
Dorje’s long-term plan, after several years of contemplation and asceticism, is to return to Minnesota and teach at the Nyingmapa Taksham Buddhist Center, aiming to become “a leader of peace” modeled on the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi. For now, the young lama, who still texts friends back home about NFL games and listens to Taylor Swift, takes the long view.
“This,” he said, “is just the beginning.”