Sagya Monastery
( 2005-10-27 )

Best time to go: Summer

The Sagya Monastery is located in Sagya County, about 180 kilometers from Xigaze Prefecture in Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. The huge brooding monastery was Tibet's most powerful more than 700 years ago, and is the ancestral monastery of the Sagya Sect of TibetanBuddhism.

Sagya originally comprised the Northern and Southern monasteries, but only the Southern Monastery remains today.

In 1073, Kun Gongjor Gyibo, founder of the Sagya Sect, built a white palace on the gray clay hill on the northern bank of the Chun Qu River, and named it Sagya (meaning "gray clay"), which became the ancestral monastery of the Sagya Sect. But now only wall ruins remain, called the Northern Monastery.

In 1268, Pagba built the Southern Sagya Monastery. The monastery evolved to its present stae under the renovation and expansion of his descendants. The monastery occupies 45,000 square meters, and its surrounding wall is five meters high and nearly two meters thick. On each of the four corners stands a watchtower.

Because the monastery wall has three separate stripes of red, white, and blue, which represent Wisdom Buddha, Bodhisattva, and Buddha's warrior attendants, the Sagya Sect is also called the Stripe Sect.

The main hall of the Southern Monastery occupies 5,700 square meters, with 40 red pillars supporting the ceiling. The four in the center are the thickest, and the thickest of the four -- Gyina Seqen Garna, meaning pillar sent by the emperor -- is 1.5 meters in diameter. The second thickest is named Chongbo Garwa, meaning pillar sent by thewild yak; the third thickest is Dabo Garwa, meaning pillar sent by thetiger; and the fourth thickest is Nabo Chaza Garwa, meaning bleeding pillar sent by the sea god.

In the largest renovation during the Pagba time -- the period of theYuan Dynasty(1271-1368) in Central China -- a number of Chinese Han craftsmen were employed for the work, thus making the Sagya Monastery a combination of Tibetan, Mongolian, and Han architectural styles with obvious influences from the Tibetan religion. With the Sagya Monastery as the political, economic, and cultural center of Tibet, the Kuns steadily developed the Sagya Sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

Five descendants from the Kuns made great contributions to the founding of the Sagya Sect, so they were hailed as the five founders of the sect.

Gonggar Nyingbo, who inherited and spread the Buddhist Neo-Secret Sect, Soinam Chemo, who advocated the recruitment of disciples for the Neo-Secret Sect, and Zhaba Gyaincain, Soinam Chemo's younger brother who excelled in both the Open and Secret sects, were called the Three Founders in White by later generations, as all three married and had children. .