The organising committee for Kalchakra puja, the Buddhist festival that the Dalai Lama initiated in Bodhgaya on Monday, has started a cashless donation system for devotees to beat demonetisation woes.

The committee has opened two bank accounts, in the Bodhgaya branches of State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank, and a swipe machine has been kept at the counters so that devotees can donate through credit/debit cards. The Bodhgaya Temple Management Committee (BTMC) has also started cashless donation facility for tourists and devotees from Saturday.

On Monday, the Dalai Lama performed ceremonies for ground rituals for the puja.

The Tibetan spiritual leader arrived at the Kalachakra ground around 7am and stayed there till 2pm. He performed prayers for three hours from 7am followed by an hour-long teaching session for disciples from 10am and a prayer from 12.30pm to 2pm. The festival will continue till January 14.

For the next two days (till January 4), the Dalai Lama will perform the ground rituals. He will deliver a discourse on "Middling status of meditation" on January 5, which is considered to be one of the main stages of the puja. Around 50,000 devotees, including Tibetan monks, people from north-eastern states of India besides the US, Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and other countries participated in prayers and the rituals on the first day.

Lamas of the Namgyal monastery in Himachal Pradesh chanted sutras in the Tibetan language while the Dalai Lama performed the rituals. Later, addressing new disciples, he asked them to practise meditation for the purity of soul and heart and delivered a sermon about the separate stages of Kalchakra.

"Attaining enlightenment is possible even today. But for this you will have to win all evils like mundane attractions towards materialism, greed, anger and jealousy. Always try to focus upon introspection that would help you differentiate between good and misdeeds," he told his disciples.

The discourse is being broadcast on FM radio in eight languages - Tibetan, Hindi, English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Mongolian and Korean. However, the rituals will be broadcast for the visual media in three languages: Tibetan, English and Chinese. A live webcast is also being conducted apart from live telecast on Tibet TV. The organising committee has installed around 35 big LCD screens inside the pandal at the venue so that devotees can get a close view of their spiritual leader. The Dalai Lama will deliver discourses from a 4,400sqft dais.