| Shashur Monastery | |
|---|---|
| Religion | |
| Affiliation | Tibetan Buddhism |
| Sect | Drugpa |
| Location | |
| Location | Lahaul and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, India |
| Country | India |
  Location within India | |
| Geographic coordinates | 32°34′45″N77°1′32″E / 32.57917°N 77.02556°E Coordinates: 32°34′45″N77°1′32″E / 32.57917°N 77.02556°E |
| Architecture | |
| Founder | Lama Deva Gyatsho |
| Part of a series on |
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History and overview |
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Shashur or Sashur Monastery is a Buddhist monastery of the Drugpa sect in Lahaul and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, northern India. It is located 137 kilometres from Manali. Sha-shur means "blue pines" in the local dialect, as patches of blue pine can be seen around the monastery. [1]
Buddhism is the world's fourth-largest religion with over 520 million followers, or over 7% of the global population, known as Buddhists. Buddhism encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices largely based on original teachings attributed to the Buddha and resulting interpreted philosophies. Buddhism originated in ancient India as a Sramana tradition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, spreading through much of Asia. Two major extant branches of Buddhism are generally recognized by scholars: Theravada and Mahayana.
The Drukpa Lineage, or simply Drukpa, sometimes called either Dugpa or "Red Hat sect" in older sources, is a branch of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Kagyu school is one of the Sarma or "New Translations" schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
Himachal Pradesh is a state in the northern part of India. Situated in the Western Himalayas, it is bordered by union territory of Jammu and Kashmir on the north, Punjab on the west, Haryana on the southwest, Uttarakhand on the southeast, and Tibet on the east. At its southernmost point, it also touches the state of Uttar Pradesh. The state's name was coined by acharya Diwakar Dutt Sharma, one of the state's eminent Sanskrit scholars.
This monastery was built in the 17th century by Lama Deva Gyatsho of Zanskar who was a missionary of Nawang Namgyal, the king of Bhutan. [1] However, a smaller gompa had existed previous to the current building.
Zanskar or Zahar (locally) or Zangskar is a subdistrict or tehsil of the Kargil district of the union territory of Ladakh. The administrative centre is Padum. Zanskar, together with the neighbouring region of Ladakh, was briefly a part of the kingdom of Guge in Western Tibet.
Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia. Located in the Eastern Himalayas, it is bordered by the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China in the north, the Sikkim state of India and the Chumbi Valley of Tibet in the west, the Arunachal Pradesh state of India in the east, and the states of Assam and West Bengal in the south. Bhutan is geopolitically in South Asia and is the region's second least populous nation after the Maldives. Thimphu is its capital and largest city, while Phuntsholing is its financial center.
This monastery has large Thangka paintings, some of them over fifteen feet, and wall paintings depicting all the 84 siddhas of Buddhism. [1] In the month of June or July Chham is performed in the monastery.
A thangka, variously spelt as thangka, tangka, thanka, or tanka, is a Tibetan Buddhist painting on cotton, silk appliqué, usually depicting a Buddhist deity, scene, or mandala. Thangkas are traditionally kept unframed and rolled up when not on display, mounted on a textile backing somewhat in the style of Chinese scroll paintings, with a further silk cover on the front. So treated, thangkas can last a long time, but because of their delicate nature, they have to be kept in dry places where moisture will not affect the quality of the silk. Most thangkas are relatively small, comparable in size to a Western half-length portrait, but some are extremely large, several metres in each dimension; these were designed to be displayed, typically for very brief periods on a monastery wall, as part of religious festivals. Most thangkas were intended for personal meditation or instruction of monastic students. They often have elaborate compositions including many very small figures. A central deity is often surrounded by other identified figures in a symmetrical composition. Narrative scenes are less common, but do appear.
