Place · ancient Buddhist temple · Bhutan
Jampa Lhakhang, Bumthang
Ascribed, like Kyichu, to Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century and dedicated to Maitreya, the Buddha yet to come. Its October festival, the Jampa Lhakhang Drup, is among the oldest and least tidied-up in Bhutan: it includes the mewang, a fire ceremony in which people run beneath a burning gate, and the tercham, a masked dance performed naked at midnight for fertility, which is not shown to tourists in the way the day dances are.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.575, 90.734
Worth knowing
The naked midnight dance is the part of the Bhutanese festival calendar that the tourist board does not photograph, and it is also the part the valley itself regards as the reason the festival works.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asKyichu Lhakhang
The two temples Bhutan ascribes to Songtsen Gampo, and between them the country's claim to a seventh-century beginning. Kyichu sits in the Paro valley in the west, Jampa in Bumthang in the centre, and both are counted among the ring of temples the Tibetan king is said to have built to pin down a demoness across the Himalaya. Neither attribution is established by inscription or excavation; what is certain is that both shrines are very old and that Bhutan dates itself from them.
- Site adjacencyKurjey Lhakhang, Bumthang
Jampa Lhakhang, the 7th-century temple attributed to Songtsen Gampo, and Kurjey Lhakhang, built around the body-print of Padmasambhava, both stand in the Choskhor valley of Bumthang. They are a short walk apart on the Bumthang pilgrim circuit, not one inside the other.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jampa Lhakhang”. Bhutan Department of Culture records; Françoise Pommaret on the Bumthang festivals.
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