Place · cliff-cave monastery · India
Phuktal
Also known as Phuktal, Phugtal, Phuktal Gompa, Zanskar
A Gelug monastery built into the mouth of a cave on a cliff above the Tsarap in Zanskar, reachable only on foot, its cells stacked in a honeycomb under the overhang. A spring inside the cave has never been measured to change volume, and the monastery's water comes from it.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.233, 76.933
Worth knowing
The Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös spent a winter here in the 1820s compiling the first Tibetan–English dictionary, which is how Tibetan lexicography began in a Zanskari cave. Everything the monastery needs is still carried in by pony or on backs, and in winter the approach is the frozen river itself.
Connections (2)
- Teaching lineageNālandā mahāvihāra
Alexander Csoma de Kőrös spent a winter in the cave at Phuktal in the 1820s compiling the first Tibetan-English dictionary, which is where Tibetan lexicography begins. The Buddhist learning that Nalanda lost in about 1200 had by then been carried over the passes and kept in places like this, and a Hungarian in a Zanskari cave is how Europe first got at it.
- AnalogueLo Manthang
Phuktal in Zanskar and Lo Manthang in Upper Mustang are the two places in this repository where the Tibetan Buddhist world survives on the Indian and Nepali side of the Himalaya in something close to its old form — a cliff-cave monastery reachable only on foot, and a walled capital with fifteenth-century murals. Both were closed to outsiders until the 1990s.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Phugtal Monastery”. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, A Dictionary Tibetan and English (1834), and the accounts of his Zanskar winters.
Open Phuktal in the repository →