Tsering Ragya. (Xinhua photo/Zhao Danping)

Tsering Ragya, a Tibetan lama in southwest China's Sichuan Province, enjoys using social media on his mobile phone.

With a smart phone in his hand, the 35-year-old abbot of Samkhar Monastery in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Garze often talks with friends on WeChat, a most popular social networking platform in China. He shares pictures and posts in his WeChat groups.

The lama speaks Mandarin Chinese with a local accent, but he doesn't read or write Chinese. So he talks with his Han friends via voice messages on WeChat. When his Han friends text him in Chinese, he can figure out what they say with the help of an app which translates the text into voice.

　　Tsering shows his WeChat messages. (Xinhua photo/Zhao Danping)

Tsering has been a monk since he was 11. He had studied in a Tibetan Buddhism academy in Kangding for eight years, and later became head of Samkhar Monastery.

Every morning he gets up at 6:00 for meditation. After breakfast, he has a lot of routine affairs in the monastery to deal with.

The lamasery is under repair, and Tsering talks about it with friends on WeChat, such as matters about building materials, he said. His temple is two kilometers away from the nearest Chor Village and receives mostly local villagers.

　　Samkhar Monastery. (Web photo)

However, Tsering aims high.

"Chor Village is developing tourism, so our monastery will embrace more tourists and worshipers from outside in the future," said Tsering.

"In this way, we will get to know more about the outside world, and more people can get to know about Tibetan Buddhism,which helps promote our religion," he added.

Garze is home to a population of 1.1 million, and more than 80 percent of them are Tibetans. Enditem

Editor: Lucia Su