Place · Buddhist monastery · India
Urgelling Monastery, Tawang
Also known as Sixth Dalai Lama's birthplace, Tawang, Urgelling Monastery
The Urgelling Monastery at Tawang in West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh, at 3,048 metres — the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706), born here in 1683 before being recognised as the Dalai Lama incarnation at age 14. Tsangyang Gyatso is unique among the Dalai Lamas as the only one born outside Tibet, as the only one who refused full ordination, and as the one whose erotic love poetry (collected as his Lha-tshig Ga-zhas) is still sung in Tibetan — his poems break the Dalai Lama's expected monastic restraint. He was deposed in 1706 and his death remains mysterious (either poisoned or escaped to Mongolia). The monastery is a small Nyingma establishment. The adjacent Tawang Monastery (10 kilometres away) is the largest in India.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.572, 91.856
Connections (5)
- Site adjacencyTawang
Urgelling lies a few kilometres below Tawang monastery and is where Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama, was born in 1683 — the only holder of the office born outside Tibet. He refused full ordination and wrote love poetry still sung in Tibetan, and the great Gelug foundation above him is of the school he would not conform to.
- Silsila lineageTashichho Dzong, Thimphu
Tawang and Thimphu belong to one religious geography that a border now runs through. Urgelling in Tawang is the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, born in 1683 into a Monpa family of country that was culturally and at times politically tied to Bhutan; the Monpa still speak a Tibetic language close to Dzongkha's neighbours and build in the same idiom. Tashichho is where the Bhutanese side of that world is governed from, with the chief abbot in the same walls as the ministries.
- Shrine within cityTorgya, Tawang
Torgya is Tawang monastery performing its protective function rather than assuming it. Founded about 1680 under the fifth Dalai Lama's authority and the largest monastery in India, it dances masked cham for three days each January and then carries out an effigy holding the year's accumulated evil and burns it in front of the valley. Urgelling, a few kilometres away, is where the sixth Dalai Lama was born in 1683 — the monastery and the birthplace belong to one Monpa Buddhist world.
- Site withinTawang
The Urgelling Monastery sits within the Tawang region of Arunachal Pradesh, 5 kilometres from the main Tawang Monastery (the largest in India). The small Nyingma monastery marks the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706), the only Dalai Lama born outside Tibet. The Urgelling-Tawang pair makes the Tawang region one of the key Dalai Lama pilgrimage sites and part of the Monpa Gelug-Nyingma Buddhist cultural zone.
- Life routePadmasambhava
Padmasambhava is remembered in Monpa tradition as having meditated in a cave at Urgelling near Tawang on his overland journey from Uddiyana to Tibet; the sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso was born in Urgelling in 1683 and is said to have been born there specifically for this Padmasambhava association.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Urgelling Monastery”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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