Drepung Monastery

Spilling down the foot of Mount Gephel on the western outskirts of Lhasa, Drepung is a whole town of whitewashed colleges, halls and dormitories stacked up the slope. Its Tibetan name means "rice heap", and from a distance the pale buildings piled one above another do look like a mound of grain. It was founded in 1416 by Jamyang Choje Tashi Palden, one of the leading disciples of Tsongkhapa, the reformer whose Gelug school would come to dominate Tibetan Buddhism, and it named itself after a sacred site in southern India.

Drepung became the largest of the three great Gelug monasteries of central Tibet, together with Sera and Ganden, and for centuries it was one of the biggest monastic institutions anywhere: a British visitor in the 1930s put its population at around 7,700 monks. It was organised much like a medieval university, with separate colleges such as Loseling and Gomang that had their own curricula, debating courtyards and regional followings, drawing students from across Tibet and Mongolia. Its scholastic standards earned it comparison with Nalanda, the great Buddhist university of ancient India.

The monastery also stood at the centre of Tibetan political history. In 1518 the monk later counted as the 2nd Dalai Lama took up residence in a palace within the complex called the Ganden Phodrang, and the Dalai Lamas lived there until the Great Fifth built the Potala Palace in the 17th century; the government he founded took the name of this residence. The great assembly hall, its roof carried on a forest of painted columns, remains the heart of the complex. Each summer, at the start of the Shoton festival, monks unroll an enormous thangka of the Buddha across the hillside above the monastery, an event that draws crowds from all over Lhasa. After 1959 the tradition was also re-established by exiled monks in Karnataka in southern India.

Lhasa, the historic capital of Tibet, lies in the Kyi Chu valley at about 3,650 metres; its old centre grew up around the Jokhang temple, while the Potala Palace rises on a hill to the west.

Getting there

Drepung is about 5 km west of central Lhasa, on the lower slopes of Mount Gephel. Lhasa railway station, on the Qinghai–Tibet Railway, is on the south-western side of the city. Lhasa Gonggar International Airport (LXA) lies about 44 km to the south-west in the Yarlung Tsangpo valley.