Journey
Himalayan monasteries
Where Indian Buddhism went after it stopped being Indian. From Alchi's eleventh-century Kashmiri murals to Tawang's Gelug foundation of the 1680s, these monasteries preserve painting, architecture and texts that vanished in the plains — and several of them keep an Indian idiom nothing in India now carries. Alchi's murals are the closest thing anywhere to a surviving Kashmiri painting tradition.
Stops (16)
- Alchi Monastery, Ladakh · Alchi — the Kashmiri murals
On the Indus in Ladakh, founded about the eleventh century and, unusually, left alone: later reformers built new monasteries elsewhere rather than repainting this one. Its murals are therefore Kashmiri Buddhist work of a school that has disappeared entirely from Kashmir — the best surviving Indian Buddhist painting outside Ajantā.
- Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh · Thiksey — twelve storeys up a hill
A Gelug monastery stepped up a hill above the Indus, deliberately laid out to recall the Potala at Lhasa. Its Maitreya temple holds a fifteen-metre seated figure installed in 1970 for the Dalai Lama's visit, built up around the pillar of the older shrine beneath it.
- Hemis Monastery, Ladakh · Hemis — the thangka unrolled every twelve years
The richest and largest Ladakhi monastery, Drukpa Kagyu, re-established in 1672 under Sengge Namgyal in a side valley invisible from the Indus road — which is why it was never plundered. Its twelve-metre thangka of Padmasambhava is shown once every twelve years.
- Diskit Monastery, Nubra Valley · Diskit — Maitreya facing the border
Nubra's oldest gompa, founded in the fourteenth century, with a thirty-two-metre Maitreya added in 2010 on the hill below it, facing down the Shyok toward Pakistan. It was consecrated with the stated intention of preventing further war in the valley.
- Tabo Monastery, Spiti · Tabo — the oldest still working
Founded in 996 by Yeshe-Ö of Guge and never abandoned, which makes it the oldest continuously functioning Buddhist monastery in India. Its mud-brick halls hold eleventh-century murals and life-size stucco figures standing out from the wall — the western Himalayan survival of an Indian idiom lost in India.
- Ki Monastery, Spiti · Ki — the fort monastery of Spiti
The largest gompa in Spiti, piled up a conical hill above the river in successive layers because it was repeatedly sacked — by Mongols, by Ladakhis, by Sikhs — and rebuilt each time on top of the ruins. The result is a building shaped by its own history of attack.
- Dhankar Monastery, Spiti · Dhankar — the cliff seat of the Nono
A twelfth-century monastery on a spur of eroding conglomerate above the Spiti and Pin confluence, once the fort and seat of the Nono, Spiti's ruler. The cliff it stands on is crumbling; the community has largely moved to a new building below and the old one is on the endangered list.
- Nako Monastery, Kinnaur · Nako — Rinchen Zangpo
A Kinnaur village monastery of the eleventh century, with murals of the school associated with Rinchen Zangpo, the great translator sent to Kashmir by the Guge kings and credited with founding a hundred and eight temples. Nako, Tabo and Alchi are what that programme actually left.
- Rewalsar, Mandi · Rewalsar — the lake of three religions
A small lake in Mandi where Padmasambhava is said to have been burned on a pyre that turned to water. Tibetans call it Tso Pema, and it holds a gompa, a Sikh gurdwara commemorating Guru Gobind Singh, and Hindu temples — three traditions on one shore.
- Rumtek Monastery, Sikkim · Rumtek — the Karmapa in exile
The Kagyu seat in India, rebuilt in the 1960s by the sixteenth Karmapa after he left Tsurphu in Tibet. Its Golden Stupa holds his relics. The succession dispute after his death in 1981 split the school in two and has been litigated in Indian courts ever since.
- Pemayangtse Monastery, Sikkim · Pemayangtse — the Nyingma seat of Sikkim
Founded in 1705 above the old Namgyal capital at Rabdentse, and reserved to monks of pure Tibetan descent — ta-tshang, the perfect ones. Its seven-tiered wooden model of Padmasambhava's heavenly palace was carved by a single monk over five years.
- Tawang · Tawang — the largest in India
A Gelug foundation of the 1680s on a spur at three thousand metres, holding several hundred monks and an eight-metre Śākyamuni. The Dalai Lama crossed into India here in 1959, and the monastery sits in territory China still claims — a religious institution on a contested border.
- Urgelling Monastery, Tawang · Urgelling — the sixth Dalai Lama
A small gompa a few kilometres below Tawang where Tsangyang Gyatso was born in 1683. He is the only Dalai Lama born outside Tibet, refused full monastic ordination, and wrote love poems still sung in Tibetan — the least conventional occupant of the office and a Monpa from what is now Arunachal.
- Thembang fortified village · Thembang — the village built as a dzong
A Monpa village walled as a fort with two gates, of a type shared across the eastern Himalaya into Bhutan. It is on the route the Dalai Lama took in 1959, and is the clearest surviving example of Himalayan settlement organised for defence rather than for a monastery.
- Khangchendzonga National Park · Khangchendzonga — the hidden land
A beyul in Tibetan Buddhism: a landscape held to be concealed by Padmasambhava as a refuge for times of trouble, to be opened when needed. It is listed by UNESCO for its natural and its cultural value together, which is rare and is exactly the point about beyuls.
- Lo Manthang · founded 1380
Lo Manthang, the walled capital of the kingdom of Lo in Upper Mustang, north of the main Himalayan range in the Tibetan rain shadow: four streets, a royal palace, and the Jampa, Thubchen and Chodey monasteries holding fifteenth-century painting that survives nowhere else in this quality. The valley was closed to outsiders until 1992 and the raja kept a recognised title until 2008.