Rare Ceremony for Tibetan Monks The monk Gyurme Chodrak reads a peja, or Buddhist prayer book, in a monastery maintained by the United Sherpa Association in Elmhurst, Queens. For more than a month, some of the highest ranked Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhist monks in the region took part in a rare ceremony where every single text of their Buddhist liturgy was read from morning until night until all 108 books were read.