Inside the Potala, past the state apartments and funerary stupas, sits a small cave shrine older than the rest of the building around it.
A cave kept inside the palace
Tradition holds that a meditation cave used by Songtsen Gampo, the seventh century king credited with the site's first palace, survives inside the later Red Palace as a preserved chapel, incorporated into the much larger structure built around it a thousand years afterward rather than demolished to make way for it. Whether the cave's fabric is genuinely seventh century or a later reconstruction maintaining the tradition is not settled by outside archaeological study, since the chapel remains an active shrine rather than an excavation site.
Chapels built for use, not display
Beyond the state rooms, the palace holds numerous smaller chapels housing painted mandalas, protector deity images and votive offerings, maintained by resident monks for ritual use. These spaces functioned as the palace's devotional core well before, and independent of, the building's later role as a seat of government.
A path worn by ordinary pilgrims
Before 1959, Tibetan pilgrims commonly performed kora, circumambulation, around the Potala's base as an act of devotion distinct from any audience with the government inside, a practice that continues in reduced form today among visitors permitted to walk the perimeter path.