Circumambulation

In Shigatse, I loved the particular shade of blue on the stone sign out front of the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery.The monastery is supposed to be the home of the Panchen Lama, the highest ranking lama after the Dalia Lama in the dominant Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism.  The “Gelugpa” practitioners are sometimes called the “yellow hats” in distinction from the Kagyu, Sakya, Jonang, and Nyingma schools whose practitioners are called the “red hats”.  All, however, are part of the Vajrayāna (meaning “diamond vehicle” or “thunderbolt vehicle”) branch of tantric Buddhism.

The Panchem and Dalai Lamas are supposed to recognize — and thereby affirm — each other, but here’s where things get tricky.  In exile, the 14th Dalai Lama recognized one person as the 11th Panchen Lama while the Chinese government recognized another.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which officiates at religious events recognized by the People Republic of China’s and which has been detained in a series of unknown locations.

Photographs inside this building were forbidden, but one of the highlights of my entire trip to Tibet was seeing the 35 foot tall statue of Maitreya (the Future Buddha), the biggest gilded statue in the world.
  
In a (rare) stroke of luck, we happened to attend on a festival day when the monks were debating just as they do every day at the Sera Monastery!