Place · Himalayan monastery · India

Tabo Monastery, Spiti

Also known as Tabo, Tabo Chos-Khor, Tabo Gompa

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Tibetan monastic records

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

32.095, 78.383 (approximate)

Connections (10)

• Teaching lineageAtiśa Dīpankara Śrījñāna

  Atiśa is recorded at Tabo on his way into Tibet in the 1040s, and the Guge kingdom that invited him is the same that founded the monastery in 996. Western Tibet's revival and the western Himalayan monasteries are one programme: buy Indian teachers, build temples, translate everything. His Lamp for the Path reorganised the whole teaching as a graded sequence, and the Kadam school he founded became the base from which the Gelug order later grew.

• Companion in the same setTawang

  Tabo in the west and Tawang in the east are the two ends of the Indian Himalayan monastic belt, two thousand kilometres apart, founded seven hundred years apart, and belonging to different schools. Both are now in border districts, which is most of why both are politically significant. The fourteenth Dalai Lama crossed into India at Tawang in 1959, and China still claims the district, so a seventeenth-century monastery sits inside a live international dispute.

• Companion in the same setKi Monastery, Spiti

  Ki and Tabo are Spiti's two principal monasteries, thirty kilometres apart on the same river and as different as monasteries get. Tabo is flat mud-brick on the valley floor with its eleventh-century interior intact; Ki is piled up a conical hill in layers because it was repeatedly sacked and rebuilt on its own ruins.

• TransmissionVikramashilā

  Scholars leaving Vikramaśilā carried tantric Buddhism north into the western Himalaya and Tibet, and Tabo was founded in 996 by the Guge kings who were buying that transmission. Atiśa, Vikramaśilā's abbot, passed through on his way to Tibet in the 1040s. Tabo has never been abandoned since 996, which makes it the oldest continuously functioning Buddhist monastery in India and the best-preserved interior of that transmission anywhere.

• Craft tradition ofThiksey Monastery, Ladakh

  Alchi, Tabo and Nako preserve the same western-Himalayan Buddhist painting, made by artists brought from Kashmir under the Guge kings' translation programme. Kashmir itself retains almost nothing of that school, so these three monasteries are where a lost Indian idiom actually survives on a wall. The Guge kings sent Rinchen Zangpo to Kashmir to study and he came back with artists as well as texts, which is why the painting is Kashmiri and the buildings are Tibetan.

• TransmissionAmarāvatī Mahāstūpa

  Amarāvatī on the Krishna is the traditional site of the Buddha's Kālachakra teaching, which is why Tibetan pilgrimage still points at the lower Krishna valley and why the Dalai Lama has given the Kālachakra initiation there. A western Himalayan monastery's liturgy points at an Andhra stupa. The Kālachakra is the last major tantra to enter the Tibetan canon and the one the present Dalai Lama has conferred most often, including at Amarāvatī itself in 2006.

• TransmissionPāla bronze casting

  Pala bronzes travelled north with monks and were copied in Tibet and Nepal, and the metal images in the western Himalayan monasteries — Tabo, Alchi, the Guge temples — belong to a style that starts in eastern India. The Newar casters of the Kathmandu valley, who supplied Tibet with images for centuries afterwards, are the surviving end of the same tradition: the technique left India when the monasteries did and has been practised abroad ever since.

• AnalogueSimtokha Dzong

  Two Himalayan buildings that became schools of their own language. Tabo in Spiti, founded in 996, held one of the great translation workshops of the western Himalaya, where Sanskrit texts were rendered into Tibetan under Rinchen Zangpo. Simtokha, Bhutan's first dzong of 1629, now houses the institute where Dzongkha and classical Chöke are taught. At both, the work is the same in outline: an Indian textual corpus kept alive in a mountain language.

• Site adjacencyDhankar Monastery, Spiti

  Dhankar is a cliff-top Gelug gompa above the Spiti-Pin confluence; Tabo is the great mud-brick monastery of Spiti's lower valley about 30 kilometres further down. They are neighbouring houses of Spiti's monastic landscape, not one inside the other.

• Life routePadmasambhava

  Padmasambhava is traditionally said to have passed through the Spiti valley on his overland route from Uddiyana to Tibet; Tabo monastery (founded 996 CE by Rinchen Zangpo on the lower Spiti) is an important secondary Nyingma site in India outside the Padmasambhava-primary monasteries of the Tsho-pema (Rewalsar) area in Mandi, Himachal Pradesh.

On these journeys

• Himalayan monasteries
• Tibetan Buddhism — India, Tibet, Mongolia

Sources

Tabo Monastery — ASI

• Wikipedia