By Ian Green

At Gyantse, in the 1960s, 15 monasteries were destroyed and an unrecorded number of monks were killed. Behind the Great Stupa the debris is spread out like a great quarry.

Today the monks of Gyantse are busy serving as curators of what has become one of Tibet’s major tourist attractions. The monks are now free again to practice their religion, but generally this practice remains restricted to rituals and the karma yoga of work, since they do not have the time, the teachers or the numbers to do more.

Gyantse is Tibet’s fourth largest town. It lies beside the Nyan Chu River between Lhasa and Shigatse, and is an eight-hour drive southwest of Lhasa. In former times, its location on the main trade routes to India was the foundation for great prosperity. By the mid-15th century, the princes of Gyantse ruled over a vast area of southwestern and southern Tibet. It was this power plus their newly acquired wealth that enabled them to play their role as builders and patrons of the arts.

The Great Stupa of Gyantse was erected at a time when Tibetan aristocracy was still powerful. It was above all the celebration of the Gyantse dynasty, but also an act of religious devotion by all the people of the principality who, in various ways and for so many years, contributed to its construction and decoration. The laborers who built it, the artists who decorated it, the monks who surveyed the layout of the decoration, as well as the members of the army, of the court, of the aristocracy and of the ruling family, all gave a contribution to what still stands as one of the most important religious and artistic monuments in Tibet.

Foremost amongst the princes of Gyantse was Rabten Kunsang (1389-1440), who was, by all accounts, an enlightened ruler. He introduced measures to counter bribery and to relieve the burden of taxation on his subjects. He urged his people to venerate practitioners of all religions – whether they were Buddhist of any school or followers of Bon. This prince of Gyantse was a holy man who urged his subjects to lead a good life. He decreed many restrictions on killing, selling and eating meat, and warned his people against harboring the false opinion that eating the flesh of a slaughtered animal is not a sin.

Rabten Kunsang, the Prince of Gyantse, has left several magnificent legacies, including the publication of important religious works. But most of all he will be remembered for his important buildings, and most notably for the Gyantse Stupa.

The Great Stupa of Gyantse is built in the middle of a natural amphitheater which is at the end of the main street in Gyantse. Facing it from a high crag a kilometer away is the imposing Gyantse Fort (dzong). The stupa is about 50 meters square [164 feet square] at its base and rises to a height of 35 meters [115 feet]. It is oriented according to the compass with the main entrance facing south. All together the stupa rises eight stories, contains 75 chapels, has 73 statue groups and over 2,000 square meters [6,562 square feet] of painted walls.

In 1418, Rabten Kunsang commenced construction of the main Gyantse Monastery, which lies next to the stupa. The monastery was completed by 1425 when the massive boundary wall, complete with 16 turrets and six doors, was built.

In the Fire Female Sheep year 1427, when Rabten Kunsang had reached the age of 38, the foundations were laid of the “auspicious [stupa with] many doors symbolizing the many doors of the holy region, which is unrivaled, since it surpasses the imagination of Brahma, Indra and the like” (an inscription on the stupa itself). Work on the main structure continued solidly for 12 years until 1439.

As the building progressed the decoration of the various chapels and temples on the lower levels took place simultaneously. Rabten Kunsang summoned 34 painters and nine sculptors to decorate the temples and chapels of the Great Stupa of Gyantse.

Most of the construction and decoration was completed by 1440, the year that Rabten Kunsang died. However, work on the building lasted for much longer than that. For example the gilded copper covering on the spire was added in 1472. (The covering of the spire was fire-gilded using an amalgam made up of 2141 zho of gold and 7700 zho of mercury). And two years later, on the fifteenth day of the fourth month of the Wood Male Horse year 1474, the Lord of the Precious Teachings Jamyang Konchog Zangpo, arrived in Gyantse to conduct the consecration ceremony. This was 47 years after construction had begun.

In 1474, the Gyantse Stupa assumed the aspect that it still has today. The stupa is built on solid rock, which has proven to be an ideal foundation for the huge weight of the construction. It is constructed with load-bearing walls of stone and clay bricks with wooden rafters. The central core of the stupa is, according to the present abbot of Gyantse, full of tsa-tsas. The walls of the structure appear to lean against this core. The walls are built so that they are thicker at the bottom than the top, although the inside walls are always kept vertical. With such techniques as these, the builders were able to minimize the thickness of the walls.

The outside walls are plastered in white with bands on each level that are richly decorated with Buddhist symbols such as the dharmachakra and the lotus flower. As the sacred texts are the verbal expression of the Dharma, so the stupa is its architectural expression. The Great Stupa of Gyantse is above all a spiritual statement. In its religious intention, it serves the same purpose as Indonesia’s Borobudur stupa: as a worshipper circumambulates the stupa, in one case externally and in the other internally, so he or she advances (if well-instructed) to ever higher states of self-realization or self-identification with the iconographic forms presented at each succeeding stage.

Considering the harshness of the climate and the basic building materials, the Gyantse stupa has survived remarkably well. The building, externally at least, also survived the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s unscathed. Certainly major sagging has occurred in the stupa and this has led to many cracks in the building. Inside, water drippings have caused considerable damage to some paintings or have altered their colors. Clumsy patching, carried out with modern and unsuitable materials, such as concrete and synthetic colors, has also produced further damage. But overall the state of preservation is good.

According to Professor David L. Snellgrove, “The 75 temples and chapels distributed on the eight stories of the Ku-Bum, representing the deities of all the chief tantric cycles and the spiritual lineages who propagated them, afford a global view of the world as conceived in the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist culture of the 15th century, a visual summa of all the knowledge of the time, as well as a true pantheon (sKu-’bum) of images, which for years to come will be an inexhaustible reference source for students of Tibetan art and religion.”

Source: The Great Stupa of Gyantse, by Franco Ricca & Erberto LoBue, published in London by Serindia Publications, 1993.