Place · Drukpa monastery · India
Hemis Monastery, Ladakh
Also known as Hemis, Hemis Gompa, Hemis Ladakh
The wealthiest and largest of Ladakh's monasteries, a Drukpa Kagyu foundation re-established in 1672 under Sengge Namgyal. Its Tsechu festival stages masked cham dances, and a thangka twelve metres high is unrolled once every twelve years.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Tibetan monastic records
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.913, 77.703 (approximate)
Connections (7)
- Companion in the same setThiksey Monastery, Ladakh
Hemis and Thiksey are Ladakh's two great Indus-valley monasteries, thirty kilometres apart and of different schools — Drukpa Kagyu and Gelug. Hemis sits in a side valley invisible from the road, which is why it was never plundered and is the richest; Thiksey faces the valley and imitates the Potala.
- Companion in the same setDiskit Monastery, Nubra Valley
Diskit in Nubra and Hemis in the Indus valley are Ladakh's oldest and richest gompas, separated by the Khardung La. Diskit's thirty-two-metre Maitreya, added in 2010, faces down the Shyok toward Pakistan and was consecrated with the stated aim of preventing further war in the valley. Hemis sits in a side valley invisible from the Indus road, which is why it was never plundered and became the richest monastery in Ladakh.
- Trade routeLeh
Leh's bazaar and the Ladakhi monasteries were two parts of one economy: the monasteries held land, lent money, and took a share of the caravan trade, and Hemis — the largest and richest of them — was endowed by the Namgyal kings out of exactly that revenue. When the Xinjiang and Tibet routes closed in 1949 and 1959 the bazaar's business ended within a decade and the monasteries lost their trading income with it.
- CampaignBasgo
Basgo held a three-year Mongol and Tibetan siege in the 1680s, and the Namgyals bought their relief from the Mughal governor of Kashmir at the price of a mosque in Leh and a nominal conversion. Hemis, founded under the same dynasty, became the richest Drukpa monastery in Ladakh out of the settlement that followed. The kingdom's religious map is the shape of that one war.
- Shrine within cityHemis Tsechu
Hemis is the largest monastery in Ladakh and the Tsechu is what it is for, twice over: the cham danced in its courtyard in the Tibetan fifth month for Padmasambhava's birth is liturgy performed by ordained monks to prescribed steps, and every twelfth year, in the monkey year, the monastery's great appliqué thangka of Padmasambhava is unrolled down the wall. The building exists to house the rite, and the rite is how the building addresses the valley.
- Site adjacencyThiksey Monastery, Ladakh
Thiksey Monastery sits on the north bank of the Indus about 20 kilometres southeast of Leh and Hemis is a Drukpa gompa about 45 kilometres further south in a side valley; the two are prominent neighbouring Gelug and Drukpa houses in Ladakh's central monastic belt but neither is inside the other.
- Site adjacencyAlchi Monastery, Ladakh
Alchi lies on the Indus about 70 kilometres west of Leh and preserves 11th-century Kashmiri wall paintings; Hemis is the great Drukpa gompa in a side valley 45 kilometres south of Leh. They are two of the signature monasteries of Ladakh but neither contains the other.
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Hemis Monastery, Ladakh
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