Place · Buddhist monastery · India
Nako Monastery, Kinnaur
Also known as Kinnaur, Nako Gompa, Nako Monastery
The Nako Monastery at Nako village in Kinnaur district, Himachal Pradesh, at 3,662 metres — an 11-century Buddhist monastery in the Rinchen Zangpo (Great Translator of Tibetan Buddhism, 958-1055 CE) tradition, with four temples carrying 11-century murals in the distinctive Western Tibetan 'Guge style' established by Rinchen Zangpo. The murals are among the finest surviving 11-century Tibetan Buddhist paintings in the Western Himalayas, surviving earthquakes and the 1962 Sino-Indian War. The monastery sits beside the Nako Lake (3,665m), a sacred alpine lake. The adjoining 1,000-year-old willow tree (planted by Rinchen Zangpo) is a pilgrim attraction. ASI protection since 2007. The 2017 Nako Murals Conservation Project (funded by the Namgyal Research Institute) stabilised the paintings. The monastery is on the Hindustan-Tibet Highway (NH-22).
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 31.885, 78.630
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageAtiśa Dīpankara Śrījñāna
Rinchen Zangpo was sent from Guge to Kashmir to study and came back with artists and texts; the murals at Nako, Tabo and Alchi are what that mission produced. Atiśa arrived a generation later into a landscape Rinchen Zangpo had already built. Rinchen Zangpo is credited with founding a hundred and eight temples across western Tibet and the Indian Himalaya, of which Tabo, Nako and Alchi are what actually survives.
- Route adjacencyBhimakali, Kinnaur
Sarahan and Nako sit on the old Hindustan–Tibet road through Kinnaur, the route up the Sutlej toward the Tibetan plateau. One is the Bushahr state's Śākta temple in deodar and dry stone, the other an eleventh-century Buddhist monastery with Kashmiri murals — the same road carrying two religions into the same valley.
- Site adjacencyBhimakali, Kinnaur
Nako Monastery and Bhimakali Bhima Kali are both prominent sacred sites of Kinnaur, standing in different valleys of the district — Nako on the high plateau above the Satluj, Bhimakali at Sarahan on the lower slope — and belong beside each other in Kinnaur's religious landscape rather than one inside the other.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kinnaur district”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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