Place · Buddhist monastery · India
Pemayangtse Monastery, Sikkim
Also known as Pemayangtse, Pemayangtse (Nyingma), Pemayangtse Monastery, Sikkim
The Pemayangtse Monastery at Pelling in Sikkim, at 2,085 metres — one of the oldest and most important monasteries of Sikkim, founded in 1705 by Lhatsun Chenpo (one of the three Nyingma lamas who established Sikkim's monarchy under the Chogyal Phuntsog Namgyal in 1642). The monastery belongs to the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism — the oldest school associated with Padmasambhava. The complex includes a three-storey main shrine, 108 Buddhist images, and the famous 7-metre carved wooden model of the Padmasambhava heavenly palace (built over 5 years by Dungzin Rinpoche in the 1960s). The monastery holds the Pemayangtse Lamas who historically crowned the Sikkim Chogyals. The annual Chaam festival each February-March draws over 20,000 pilgrims. The adjacent Rabdentse ruins (the pre-Gangtok Sikkim capital) and the Khecheopalri sacred lake complete the Pelling pilgrimage circuit.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.305, 88.251
Connections (3)
- Companion in the same setRumtek Monastery, Sikkim
Rumtek and Pemayangtse are Sikkim's Kagyu and Nyingma seats, thirty kilometres apart. Pemayangtse was founded in 1705 beside the Namgyal capital and served the state; Rumtek was rebuilt in the 1960s by a refugee hierarch. One is a kingdom's monastery and the other an exile's. Pemayangtse admitted only monks of pure Tibetan descent, the ta-tshang, while Rumtek was built for a hierarch who had just lost his own country, which is a considerable difference in outlook.
- Court associationPang Lhabsol
Pang Lhabsol is a state ceremony in religious dress. Instituted by the third Chogyal in the fifteenth century, it worships Khangchendzonga as Sikkim's guardian deity and renews the blood-brotherhood sworn between the Lepcha and the Bhutia — the compact the kingdom was founded on. Pemayangtse, the Nyingma monastery whose abbots consecrated the Chogyals, is where that arrangement was institutionally held, and its monks danced the warrior cham the festival turns on.
- Site withinSikkim
Pemayangtse Monastery, Sikkim sits inside Sikkim and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pemayangtse Monastery”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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