Sakya

The colour scheme stops you. Every monastery in Tibet is white or ochre or crimson. Sakya is grey — a deep slate grey banded with vertical stripes of white and dark red — and the effect is so unlike anything else on the Tibetan plateau that the first sight of the southern monastery rising from the valley floor produces a genuine double-take. It looks more like a fortified city in medieval France than a Himalayan Buddhist institution, which is appropriate: during the 13th and 14th centuries, Sakya wasn’t just a monastery. It was the seat of a dynasty that governed Tibet under Mongol authority, and it was built to look the part.

The drive from Shigatse takes about two hours along a road that crosses the plateau and drops into the Trum Chu valley. Sakya sits on both sides of a river — the older northern monastery, largely destroyed, on one bank; the massive southern complex on the other. Most visitors spend their time in the south.

Inside the Main Assembly Hall

The southern monastery’s main hall is among the most impressive interior spaces in Tibet. The scale is genuinely enormous: the assembly hall is supported by four great pillars, one of which — the “eagle pillar” — is said to have been carried from India by an eagle in the founding mythologies. Whether or not you subscribe to that origin story, the pillar is tremendous. The hall’s shelves hold manuscripts — tens of thousands of volumes stacked floor to ceiling on racks that line the entire rear and side walls — and the collection is considered one of the most significant repositories of Tibetan Buddhist texts anywhere. A recent cataloguing project identified over 80,000 texts.

I walked slowly along the manuscript shelves with a small flashlight (the hall is very dark, lit mainly by butter lamps) and read the labels where they existed. Some texts date to the imperial period. Some may be unique surviving copies. The weight of that fact accumulates slowly.

The Gonkhang

A separate chapel at the back of the complex houses the Gonkhang — the protector deity chapel — which is kept deliberately dark and somewhat theatrical in its presentation. Fierce protective deities rendered in vivid pigments cover every surface. The ceiling is hung with old weapons and pieces of armour donated by Sakya rulers over the centuries. A monk stood at the entrance to control entry and spoke quietly to each visitor before allowing them in. Inside I stayed five minutes and came out feeling I’d visited somewhere that operated by different rules.

The Northern Monastery

The original site of Sakya monastery across the river is mostly ruins now — the Cultural Revolution was particularly destructive here — but the foundations are large enough to suggest the scale of what existed. A few rebuilt structures are in use, and the site is quiet in a way that the busy southern complex isn’t. I sat on a wall for a while eating lunch and looking at the ruins and thinking about continuity and destruction, which is perhaps the most persistent meditation Tibet offers.

Sakya Town

The small settlement around the monastery is functional and unhurried. One main street, a few restaurants serving tsampa, butter tea, and Tibetan noodle dishes, a small market. I ate at a place run by a Tibetan family who brought me an extra portion of noodles without being asked, which I chose to interpret as a statement about how I looked after two weeks at altitude.

When to go: April through October. Sakya is typically a stop between Shigatse and the Friendship Highway route south toward Nepal. The monastery has no specific festival calendar that would make one month dramatically better than another, so the main considerations are road conditions and weather. May and September tend to offer the clearest light for the monastery’s dramatic exterior.