The Potala, the Dalai Lama’s Palace
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 the Potala in Lhasa, the capitol of Tibet.
The Dalai Lama hasn’t lived in the Potala Palace since 1959 due to the Chinese invasion and his exile. The Potala is a beautiful looming fortress that dominated Lhasa’s scenery until the Chinese started building tall skyscrapers. The Potala was a combination palace, government building, and Buddhist monastery, but now it’s a museum. The oldest parts of the palace are from the seventh century, but the current palace is mostly from the seventeenth century, quite a golden age for Tibet.
The Potala has a thousand rooms and is thirteen stories tall. We couldn’t enter every room, but it seemed like we climbed all the stairs.
My tour guide, Gyantzing, and I went to the Potala. It’s named after the Potalaka, a rocky mountain that, according to legend, is where the bodhisattva of compassion lives, whether you call that bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Sanskrit), Chenrezig (Tibetan), Quan Yin (Chinese), or Kannon (Japanese). The name and gender change from one culture to another.