Place · Drikung Kagyu monastery · India
Lamayuru
Also known as Lamayuru, Yuru, Yungdrung, moonland
The oldest monastic foundation in Ladakh, on a spur above the Indus gorge, traced in tradition to Naropa and to a lake that was drained to make room for it. It was a Bon site before it was Buddhist, and its Sengge Lhakhang holds eleventh-century work contemporary with Alchi's.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.287, 76.775
Worth knowing
The eroded badlands below it are called the moonland, and the lake story is geologically plausible: the basin does hold lake sediments. The Yuru Kabgyat masked dances in summer are among the oldest continuously performed in Ladakh, and the monastery sits directly on the old Srinagar to Leh road.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asAlchi Monastery, Ladakh
Lamayuru and Alchi are forty kilometres apart on the Indus and hold the two oldest bodies of wall painting in Ladakh, both eleventh to thirteenth century and both Kashmiri in idiom rather than Tibetan. They are the closest surviving evidence of what Kashmiri painting looked like, in a valley where nothing of it survives at all — the tradition is preserved outside its homeland.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Lamayuru Monastery”. Archaeological Survey of India, Leh circle records; Rob Linrothe on the early western Himalayan painting.
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