Shigatse & Tashilhumpo

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.

mala stones at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery

I met up with Gyantzing in the lobby at approximately ten o’clock, and we took the jeep to Tashilhumpo, the Panchen Lama’s monastery, where I jotted down messy notes. I learned that the striking building outside my window was originally from the thirteenth century, but the Chinese destroyed that one, and they had it rebuilt recently. It looks authentic and copies the Potala, which in its current form is seventeenth century and copied the original Tashilhumpo.

Shigatse has quickly grown from 250,000 to 400,000 and is the second largest city in Tibet. Chinese workers came to get jobs, and there’s a shortage of jobs, so homeless people are in the streets. I’ll bet all the homeless people are Tibetans. The Chinese move in and get the best jobs, the highest-paying jobs. Or at least male Chinese do; Lhasa, I’ve read, has a great many female Chinese prostitutes in addition to some Tibetan prostitutes. I didn’t feel like mentioning that to Gyantzing.

Tashilhumpo overall is a cluster of many buildings, including three with gold roofs. The central one is the only building that wasn’t destroyed during (or more likely before) the Cultural Revolution, and it houses the tomb of the Fourth…