Larung Gar Buddhist Academy
Interesting facts
- Long before the academy, the valley held a hermitage set up around 1880 by the Nyingma visionary master Dudjom Lingpa.
- In 1980 the founder had fewer than a dozen students; within about a year more than 100 were living in mud huts in the valley.
- In 1987 the 10th Panchen Lama gave the academy its official name, Serta Larung Ngarig Nangten Lobling, the Five Sciences Buddhist Academy.
- More than 500 khenpos and khenmos, holders of the highest scholastic title, have graduated here since 1980, women among them.
- Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok was recognised at the age of five as the reincarnation of Tertön Sogyal, a tantric visionary from Nyarong in eastern Tibet.
- In 1987 the founder led hundreds of his students on a pilgrimage to Mount Wutai, the sacred Buddhist mountain in Shanxi.
- In 1990 he travelled to India and taught at the Nyingma Institute in Mysore; in 1993 he toured Europe and North America.
- The founder died in Chengdu in January 2004, by which time his community counted more than 10,000 monks, nuns and lay disciples.
- Unofficial estimates in 2016 put the number of people living in the valley at 20,000 to 40,000, well above the official count of about 10,000.
Why it is worth it
Larung Gar fills a high valley in the Tibetan grasslands of western Sichuan with thousands of small red houses, packed so densely up the slopes that from the ridge above the whole bowl seems to be painted crimson. At about 4,000 metres, these simple dwellings of wood and mud brick once housed one of the largest communities of Buddhist practitioners in the world. It is one of the most extraordinary sights of the Tibetan plateau — not a monastery in the usual sense of a single building, but a city of retreat huts and study halls connected by footpaths.
The academy was founded in 1980 by Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, a lama of the Nyingma school who began with a small retreat in the empty valley. Teaching drew students from across the Tibetan regions and beyond, and by the late 1990s reports counted some 10,000 residents — about 4,500 nuns, 4,000 monks and nearly a thousand Han Chinese students. The community is organised into separate institutions for monks, for nuns, for lay practitioners and for international students.
The settlement has also been marked by repeated waves of state-ordered demolition. In 2001 thousands of dwellings were pulled down and many residents sent away, and in 2016 and 2017 another campaign cleared some 1,500 homes and expelled several thousand people. What remains is still a vast and moving place, where the red houses and meditation huts climbing the slopes make the valley look like a single living organism.
Getting there
Larung Gar lies in Sêrtar (Seda) County, Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, about 15 km before the county town of Sêrtar, a few kilometres off the main road. The nearest larger town in the selection, Barkam, is about 168 km away in a straight line, and Golog Maqên Airport (GMQ) about 250 km. In practice most travellers come overland from Chengdu, around 650 km away by road — a drive of eleven to thirteen hours across the high plateau. The valley sits at about 4,000 metres, so allow time to acclimatise.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, officially named by the 10th Panchen Lama in 1987 as the Serta Larung Five Science Buddhist Academy and also known as the Sertar Buddhist Institute, is a Tibetan Buddhist institute in Larung Gar, a township of Sêrtar County in northern Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwestern Sichuan Province, China. Part of the Tibetan cultural area of Kham, the institute grew from a mountain retreat established by Kyabje Khenchen Jigme Phuntsok in 1980, intending to provide ecumenical training in Tibetan Buddhism and renew meditation, ethics, and scholarship all over Tibet in the wake of China's Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.
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