I came back recently from a 3 day trip to the nearby town of Labrang. Labrang lies 4 hours south of the city and has the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery on the northern Tibetan Plateau. Home to nearly 2000 Buddhist monks, Labrang is a center of Tibetan culture and religion and is the unofficial “capital” of northern Tibet. Buddhist pilgrims come from all across northern Tibet to worship and prostrate at the monastery. I took a small team here to prayer walk the area.
Pilgrims walking around a stupa
Pilgrims prostrating around the monastery
Pilgrims spinning prayer wheels
Tibetan pilgrim prostrating around Labrang Monastery
Around Labrang Monastery is a 2 mile pilgrimage circuit that is lined with Buddhist prayer wheels. These prayer wheels have written mantra’s (a 6 or 8 syllable chant that Tibetans believe will protect them from evil spirits and bring them good karma and merit) on the outside and contain hundreds or thousands of written mantra’s inside. Tibetans believe that each spin of a prayer wheel is equivalent to saying the mantra as many times as it is written inside. So if a prayer wheel has a mantra written in it 1000 times, each spin is equal to saying it 1000 times. Each morning, thousands of Tibetans rise early in the morning to walk the Labrang “kora”, the pilgrimage circuit around the monastery. So early in the morning, the small team and I got up and braved the -6F / -21C temperature to walk with the thousands of pilgrims to pray for the town, pray for monks and to pray for the Tibetan people.
Long line of pilgrims walking around the monastery
Monks gathering at Labrang Monastery
Road leading to the monastery
Tibetan nomad man wearing traditional sheep skin boots
Labrang has long been a politically active region. In 2008, widespread independence riots and violence occurred in the area. Portions of town were destroyed by fires started during the riots. The town was closed to foreign travelers for more than 1 year until the Chinese government could finally get full control over the area. Over the past 16 months, nearly 25 Tibetans in the Labrang area (and 100 Tibetans across Tibet) have committed political suicide by self-immolating. They feel that suicide by self-immolation is the only form of “protest” they have left as even a peaceful protest against the government can land a Tibetan in prison for 7 to 10 years. While I was in Labrang, a 22 year old self immolated (http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/13/world/asia/china-tibet-self-immolation) and died.
Monk walking barefoot across the snow
Monk walking through the monastery in snow and sub-zero temperatures
The slow drive home along snow-covered roads
As with nearly all of the Tibetan Plateau, foreigners are not permitted to live in Labrang. They can visit the area and stay for a few days, but that is all….and even that is not possible when political tensions are high (Labrang was closed for over a year to travelers in 2008 due to political uprisings). While there, we prayed for peace in the region, that people in the area would have access to hear the Gospel and that foreigner would one day be able to live in this beautiful area. It was a privilege for us to spend a few days in this town, interceding on its behalf.