Karma County 2

Labrang

I spent most of the next day in and around the monastery.

It was freezing in the morn

The main street near my place.

So many amazing carved doorways around

Even though Labrang is a living breathing monastery, there are tourist facilities there, and there's a charge to enter certain parts of the complex. But the fee includes a tour in English, and you can wander around to your heart's content after that.

Rather elaborate visitor centre.

There were some great historical pics of locals in there.

This series was taken in the 1930s

Girl band, playing traditional Tibetan stringed instruments, the dram yen and the sgra-synan.

There's a 3km long kora around the monastery, a sacred path circumambulating the whole temple complex. There's prayer wheels pretty much all the way around.

The whole place is low rise, all the buildings are separated by paved paths, with lots of open areas and squares throughout the complex. It has a real spaciousness to it.

My tour guide was a beautiful monk who's been living and studying at the monastery for 23 years. While we wandered around seeing the sights that he was required to show me he also talked with me extensively about Tibetan spiritual beliefs. But he did it in a typical Tibetan monk kinda way, in their true debating style tradition, by continually asking me multitudes of baffling questions that I couldn't answer. Like, "what is life?", "who are you?", and "who am I?"

And whenever I mustered some sort of what I considered to be a quite reasonable considered answer he immediately debunked it with some sort of obvious fact or approach that I hadn't thought about.

But the crux of the matter was that we really got each other, and connected in the most beautiful way. It was very moving to spend those couple of hours with him. We left as brothers, which, incredibly, happened on another two occasions later that evening.

That's the nature of the culture here.

This is some of the most incredible and intricate sculpted art I've ever seen. These sculptures are made entirely of yak butter. Yes, butter. The process to make them is incredibly delicate and time consuming.

The whole structure is made up of little pierces of yak butter of various shapes, each single one of which has been hand rolled, shaped and coloured with the most beautiful pigments.

What I couldn't get my head around was the detail. What an incredibly meditative experience creating these works.

Here, let me zoom in on that last one for ya.

And it all has to be created in a cold place, or the butter melts, and, as you could well imagine, the result would be a warped kaleidoscopic spiritual shitshow.

That does happen sometimes, apparently.

My monk guide told me that the monks actually create new sculptures at the monastery every six months. Absolutely unbelievable.

And there were so many of them too.

Photos were strictly prohibited from the inside any of the temple buildings. Once our little tour and philosophical deepdive was over, I wandered into this temple courtyard.

I can't begin to describe to you how incredible it was in there. Hundreds of monks were sitting on the stone steps outside the temple, clad in thick maroon cloaks and wearing tall fur-lined yellow hats, they were rocking from side to side in deep meditation, chanting their own chants individually, creating a cacophony of sound, and the most amazing of sights to behold.

The fragrant smoke of juniper leaves wafted through the air, and I was immediately transported to a new spiritual realm, somehow thrust into some deep medieval past, which was completely linked to the present moment.

It was so powerful, I can't really describe how overwhelming it was.

Dukkar happened to have a few related pics hanging at his place, to give you a tiny idea of the scene. But these pics are just a hint of what it was like, the actual scene was so much more incredible, there were so many monks, it was cold, the monks were rocking and chanting almost trance-like, devotees were prostrating everywhere, it was really powerful, and so trippy at the same time.

Then I followed the monks inside for more chanting, they chanted together this time, those deep deep Tibetan chants that seem to emanate from the primordial depths of the cosmos.

Then I did the rounds of paying tribute to all of the different icons, along with the hordes of devout pilgrims, who were all adding bits of yak butter to the thousands of lamps burning all over the place, prostrating, bowing, chanting, and completely immersed in their practices.

It really was incredible in there.