Place · cliff monastery · Bhutan
Paro Taktsang
A monastery on a granite cliff nine hundred metres above the Paro valley, built in 1692 around the cave where Padmasambhava is held to have meditated for three years, three months, three weeks, three days and three hours. The name means the tiger's lair: he is said to have flown there from Tibet on the back of a tigress, one of the founding episodes of Himalayan Buddhism, and the site is the most important pilgrimage in Bhutan.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.492, 89.364
Worth knowing
It burned almost completely in 1998 and was rebuilt by 2005 to the same plan, so the building a visitor photographs is younger than the photographs of it that made it famous.
Connections (2)
- Mythic sequenceLhasa
The story runs from Tibet to the cliff. Padmasambhava is said to have flown from Tibet to the Paro cliff on the back of a tigress — one of the founding episodes of Himalayan Buddhism — and Taktsang was built in 1692 around the cave where he then meditated. Lhasa is where the Tibetan side of that tradition is centred and where the Jokhang holds the images Songtsen Gampo's reign brought in. The Bhutanese valleys received their Buddhism through Tibet, not directly across the Himalaya.
- Shared sacred geographyHemis Tsechu
One figure, two ends of the Himalaya, and the same claim made about him. Hemis dances the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava for his birthday; Taktsang was built around the Paro cave where he is said to have meditated after flying there on a tigress. Between Ladakh and Bhutan he is the single thread of Himalayan Buddhism — an Indian tantric master from Oḍḍiyāna, which is usually placed in the Swat valley, remembered across two thousand kilometres of mountains that never had a common state.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Paro Taktsang”. Bhutan Department of Culture records; Michael Aris, Bhutan: The Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom (1979).
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