Journeys in Ladakh, Part VI: Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries and Tantric Scares

We saw many monasteries on this trip and got somewhat familiar with their very complicated iconography--although it's ultimately impossible to keep track of who all the different Buddha emanations and students are. All the monasteries are divided into sects that take different mystics to be their founders and worship different lamas and emanations.

The sects are friendly and the Dalai Lama reigns supreme; every temple has a throne for His Holiness and another one for the leader of the sect. Visually, the sects distinguish themselves by their colorful and whimsical headgear, e.g. the Yellow Hats and the Red Hats.

Buddhism originated in India around 600 BC and was imported to Tibet by Indian mystics starting in the 7th century B.C. The practice of Buddhism in the region incorporates elements of the native Bon religion, which believes in a world inhabited by good and evil spirits and that one should engage with feelings, emotions and imagination as a direct path to Buddhahood.

To this end, it's possible to use shamanic incantations, voodoo figurines (see the clay ones in the top photo), animal sacrifices, and human skulls --priests use them in ceremonies to this day and formerly, blood would be drunk from them. It's actually possible to buy a real human skull from the market in Leh for $300, not that we were tempted!

So, local religion is a combination of Buddhism and the truly scary and mind-bending--images of skeletons and skulls and graphic visualizations of what happens to enemies of Buddhism are widely used (one memorable detail is arms and legs tied together around the victors' necks, in the manner of a scarf). Endearingly, some sculptures have their faces covered when you enter into a temple, because they are just too scary to look at.

The murals of most of the temples and chapels we visited were hard to place in time, because of the shoddy labeling. The majority were built in the 16th-17th centuries, though some are more recent. And most are not of the quality exhibited here, from a monastery called Tak-Thok, more on which later.