your bridge home
Tales of the Gods
The lama who founded this monastery had already consecrated a kingdom. Then they made it very hard to get in.
The lama who founded this monastery had already consecrated a kingdom.
Lhatsun Chenpo was one of three lamas credited with establishing Sikkim itself, and with consecrating its first Chogyal in the century before. When a man of that standing puts up a building, it becomes the centre of things almost immediately.
What he actually built, in 1705 in West Sikkim, was small. A Lhakhang, a chapel.
It grew under Chakdor Namgyal, Sikkim's third Chogyal, working with the scholar-monk Khenchen Rolpai Dorjee. Between them they turned a founding chapel into one of the most respected institutions in the kingdom, and its rise ran alongside the Chogyal dynasty's own. Both were pulling power together across the same scattered mountain settlements.
They called it Pemayangtse, perfect sublime lotus. The name says what the ambition was from the first day. Not a monastery. The best Nyingma teaching the kingdom could produce.
And then they made it very hard to get in.
Most monasteries in those mountains took whoever came. Pemayangtse did not.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.