Tashilhunpo Monastery: Seat of the Panchen Lamas in Shigatse
On the western edge of Shigatse, Tibet's second-largest city, a tiered wall of whitewashed buildings and golden roofs climbs the lower slope of Drolmari, the Hill of Tara. This is Tashilhunpo Monastery, founded in 1447 by Gendun Drup, a close disciple of the great reformer Tsongkhapa who was later recognised, posthumously, as the First Dalai Lama. For roughly four centuries the monastery has been the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas, holders of the second-most important reincarnation lineage in Tibetan Buddhism. Pilgrims still circle its perimeter on the kora path each morning, spinning prayer wheels beneath red-and-white walls, while inside a colossal gilded statue of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, gazes out over the valley of the Nyang River at an altitude of about 3,800 metres.
A name that promises good fortune
The monastery's full Tibetan name is usually rendered as Tashi Lhunpo, a phrase often translated as heap of glory, or more expansively as all fortune and happiness gathered here. The name was well chosen. When Gendun Drup began construction in 1447, the Gelug school founded by his teacher Tsongkhapa was still young, and Tashilhunpo quickly became one of its principal strongholds outside Lhasa, alongside the great monasteries of Ganden, Drepung and Sera. Gendun Drup spent much of his later life at Tashilhunpo, teaching, writing and expanding the complex, and he died there in 1474. His remains were enshrined at the monastery, making it the only one of the great Gelug houses to hold the tomb of a Dalai Lama outside Lhasa. From the beginning the site was laid out as a small monastic town rather than a single temple: assembly halls, colleges, kitchens, monks' quarters and chapels grew together behind a perimeter wall, connected by steep flagstone lanes that pilgrims still climb today.
Shigatse and the setting
Tashilhunpo cannot be separated from Shigatse, historically the capital of the Tsang region and long the second city of Tibet after Lhasa. The town sits near the confluence of the Nyang River and the Yarlung Tsangpo, the great river that eventually becomes the Brahmaputra, and it commanded trade routes running west toward Ngari and south toward the Himalayan passes. A monastery of Tashilhunpo's ambition needed exactly this kind of economic and political base. Over the centuries the fortunes of monastery and city rose together: estates in the surrounding valleys supported thousands of monks, and the rulers of Tsang, and later the Panchen Lamas themselves, made Shigatse a genuine counterweight to Lhasa. Visitors approaching from the east still see the complex much as travellers described it centuries ago, a band of ochre, crimson and gold stretched across the hillside, crowned by the tall red tomb chapels with their gilded roofs. The old Shigatse dzong, a fortress on a ridge north of the town that once echoed the Potala in miniature, completes a skyline in which religious and worldly power face each other across the rooftops.
The rise of the Panchen Lamas
The lineage that made Tashilhunpo famous took shape in the seventeenth century. Lobsang Chokyi Gyaltsen, abbot of the monastery and one of the most respected scholars of his age, served as tutor to the young Fifth Dalai Lama. In gratitude, the Fifth Dalai Lama declared his teacher to be Panchen, a contraction of a Sanskrit-Tibetan phrase meaning great scholar, and recognised him as an emanation of Amitabha, the Buddha of boundless light. Because the title was applied retroactively to three earlier abbots, Lobsang Chokyi Gyaltsen is counted as the Fourth Panchen Lama even though he was the first to bear the name in his lifetime. From then on, Tashilhunpo was the seat of the lineage, and the relationship between Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas became one of the central threads of Tibetan history: each was traditionally involved in recognising the reincarnation of the other, teacher and student alternating across generations. The lineage remains the focus of a painful modern dispute. In 1995 the Dalai Lama recognised a young boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; the boy was taken into custody by the Chinese authorities shortly afterwards and has not been seen in public since, while Beijing installed another candidate, Gyaincain Norbu, in his place.
The great Maitreya of 1914
The single most celebrated object at Tashilhunpo stands inside the Jamkhang Chenmo, the towering red chapel at the western end of the complex. Here, in 1914, the Ninth Panchen Lama commissioned an image of Maitreya, the Buddha of the coming age, on a scale almost without parallel. The seated figure rises about 26 metres, its frame worked in copper and gilded with a vast quantity of gold, and hundreds of craftsmen laboured for years to complete it. The statue is studded with pearls, coral, amber and turquoise, and its face alone is taller than a standing adult. Pilgrims ascend the chapel floor by floor, so that the Buddha is encountered in stages: first the enormous lotus throne, then folded hands, then finally the serene golden face lit by butter lamps far above. Maitreya has a special resonance at Tashilhunpo, since the Panchen Lamas are traditionally associated with prayers for the future Buddha's coming, and images of Maitreya had stood at the monastery since the days of Gendun Drup himself.
Tombs, loss and restoration
Tashilhunpo is also a necropolis of the Panchen lineage, and its tomb chapels tell a story of both devotion and destruction. The funerary stupa of the Fourth Panchen Lama, richly plated in gold and silver, was built in the seventeenth century and survives to this day. The tombs of the Fifth through Ninth Panchen Lamas, however, were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, when the monastery, though spared total demolition, suffered serious damage and the community of monks was dispersed. After religious life resumed, the Tenth Panchen Lama built a new consolidated mausoleum, known as Tashi Langyar, to enshrine the recovered remains of his five predecessors together. He died at Shigatse in January 1989, only days after consecrating it, and his own gold-covered tomb chapel was completed at the monastery a few years later. Walking today from stupa to stupa, past murals restored by contemporary artists, visitors move through layers of the twentieth century as much as through older centuries of Tibetan art.
Festivals, pilgrims and monastic life today
Before 1959 Tashilhunpo housed several thousand monks and functioned as one of the largest monastic universities in Tibet, with colleges devoted to philosophy, tantra and ritual arts. Today the community numbers in the hundreds, but the rhythms of monastic life continue: debate in the courtyards, chanted assemblies in the Kelsang Lhakhang, the great hall complex at the heart of the monastery, and the slow circuit of pilgrims prostrating along the kora. The most spectacular moment of the year comes at the summer thangka festival, when enormous appliqué images of the Buddhas of past, present and future are unfurled in turn from the thangka wall, a massive white display structure on the hillside that is visible from across Shigatse and stands taller than the surrounding halls. A branch of the community also lives on far from Tibet: monks who followed the Dalai Lama into exile re-established Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Bylakuppe in southern India, where the lineage's traditions of ritual, dance and scholarship are maintained in parallel.
Explore on the map
Tashilhunpo is a place best understood spatially, as a monastic town of lanes, courtyards and rooftop terraces stacked against a hillside. To see exactly where it sits in Shigatse, how far it lies from Lhasa and the other great Gelug monasteries, and which historic religious houses share the valley of the Yarlung Tsangpo, open the interactive map. There you can compare Tashilhunpo with monasteries across the Himalayas and the rest of the world, and start planning your own route through Tibet's sacred geography.