Place · Gelug monastery · India
Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh
Also known as Thiksey, Thikse, Thiksey Gompa
A twelve-storey Gelug monastery stepped up a hill above the Indus, laid out to resemble the Potala at Lhasa. Its Maitreya temple holds a fifteen-metre seated figure installed in 1970 for the Dalai Lama's visit, built around the pillar of an older shrine.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.056, 77.667
Connections (5)
- Trade routeNathu La & the Chumbi corridor
The Himalayan monasteries and the trade corridors are the same map. Thiksey stands above the Indus on the road between Leh and the passes; the Nathu La route carried wool and tea between Bengal and Tibet and the texts that built the Tibetan canon. Monasteries were built where the traffic was because they lived on it — and because a monastery was the only institution on those roads capable of feeding and housing a caravan.
- Companion in the same setHemis Monastery, Ladakh
Hemis and Thiksey are Ladakh's two great Indus-valley monasteries, thirty kilometres apart and of different schools — Drukpa Kagyu and Gelug. Hemis sits in a side valley invisible from the road, which is why it was never plundered and is the richest; Thiksey faces the valley and imitates the Potala.
- Craft tradition ofTabo Monastery, Spiti
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.
- Institutional successionErdene Zuu, Karakorum
Mongolia took its Buddhism from the Gelug order, and Thiksey is the same order's architecture at the Indian end of it. The lineage runs from the Indian scholastic tradition through Tsongkhapa's fifteenth-century reform in Tibet, and then outward in both directions — south into Ladakh and Spiti, north into Mongolia after Altan Khan's meeting with the third Dalai Lama in 1578. Erdene Zuu was founded seven years later. So a monastery on the Indus and one built from the stones of Karakorum belong to the same order and study the same translated Indian texts.
- Site adjacencyHemis Monastery, Ladakh
Thiksey Monastery sits on the north bank of the Indus about 20 kilometres southeast of Leh and Hemis is a Drukpa gompa about 45 kilometres further south in a side valley; the two are prominent neighbouring Gelug and Drukpa houses in Ladakh's central monastic belt but neither is inside the other.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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