Monks of the Gyuto Tantric College perform the multiphonic chanting that Tibetan Buddhism uses to reach what practitioners describe as the ecstasy of true meditation, each monk sounding several notes at once through a technique built for ritual rather than melody. The Dalai Lama introduces the ceremonies on camera, and the film cuts between the rituals themselves and images of Tibetan sacred art, thangkas, mandalas, and ritual objects used in the practices being shown. Before the ceremonies begin, the film lays out Tibetan history through archival footage running from the 1920s up to the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959, giving context for why these monks and their traditions ended up documented and preserved outside Tibet at all. There is no narrator walking viewers through doctrine step by step; the chanting, the visual art, and the historical footage are left to carry the material directly. It plays as much like a record of a threatened practice as an explanation of one, footage taken because the world that produced it was disappearing.