What is a Tibetan Monk?
Buddhist monks are, well, monks. There’s some diversity in Buddhism as to how monks live but Tibetan ones conform to approximately what people think monks should be. They live austerely furnished communal dwellings and practice meditation and mindfulness and charity etc. They have a long (very long) list of vows they’re supposed to keep. In pure Buddhism the Buddha uses metaphors that involve spiritual things but he denounces believing in what you have not personally experienced. He rejects many key elements of traditional Hindu thought on these grounds. The Tibetans get around this by using rituals from older practices called Tantra and Yoga to try to experience some of the metaphysical world directly. They push their bodies to the limits in bizarre ways and will do things like assume uncomfortable yoga positions and hold them for hours, or starve themselves, or stare at a pebble or a symbol in their mind for hours on end and hope a spiritual experience comes to them. Buddha probably
