Gyantse

I visited India and Nepal for the first time on a Buddhist pilgrimage led by Shantum Seth in 2007. The following is from my 2008 trip to India, Nepal, and Tibet and is about Tibet.

A statue of Green Tara inside the stupa of Pelkor Chode

When we arrived in the village of Gyantse, I gazed at a fascinating fortress-monastery perched on a mountain. It looks impossible to reach and no doubt is meant to look that way.

Down below it is the charming Palcho Monastery (or Pelkor Chode) and an amazing stupa that’s Tibetan style below but Nepalese style above. Many big dogs — Tibetan mastiffs, I surmise — lay around in front of the monastery, and they were obviously strays, given how dirty their coats were. I thought that stray dogs in India generally look healthier. Looking at the dogs, I remembered the Tibetan saying that stray dogs hang out around monasteries because they were bad monks in previous lives.

Palcho Monastery

According to Gyantzing, in the year 1480, King Repten Kunpeng founded the Palcho Monastery, under the first Panchen Lama. It housed two hundred thousand monks before the Chinese invasion of 1950 (I just can’t call it the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” because it was extremely not peaceful and extremely not liberation — it was a violent and colonialist invasion). It’s down…