Drikung Monastery

The Drikung (also spelled as Drigung) monastery was a kind of on the way back to Lhasa, although it was still another 150km westwards to Lhasa. The monastery is located in a valley. It's an old monastery, founded in 1179 and is the mother monastery of the Drikung Kagyu tradition.

 
Drigung Monastery

When the communist invaded Tibet in 1959 many monasteries were destroyed, including Drikung. In the 1980's the monastery reconstruction began and when I visited there was hardly a trail left (contrary to for example Ganden) of the destruction. The monastery once again was active.

The monastery is an important educational center for the tradition of the Driking with a large library including rare texts about all subjects of the Himalayan region. There are, works on Tibetan culture, tradition and geography, and of course the Buddhist texts of all schools.

Drikung monastery houses an important collection about the famous Dunhuang manuscripts unearthed along the Silk Road. There, an unimaginable wealth of texts in various languages dating from the 4th to the 11th centuries was discovered. The Tibetan corpus alone includes thousands of manuscripts of all kinds, including the earliest Tibetan medical drawing known at present.

 
Drikung Monastery and the Drikung Valley

Therefore these ancient texts provide researchers with a vast array of source material on the earliest period of Tibet.

I arrived in Drikung Monastery with not a lot of air to breath. Walking up to the monastery was not easy, even though I was now already several weeks in Tibet. The monastery lies at an altitude of 4600 meter. This makes you think again to spend energy.

Farmer in the Drigung Valley

The valley is reasonable fertile, farmers working the land growing wheat and cabbage as I understood it. While farming the land, yaks are also used as beasts of burden.

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