Tsurphu Monastery

Dusum Khyenpa founded Tsurphu in 1189, late in a long teaching life that had already made him one of the most respected meditation masters of his generation. What made the monastery historically significant was recognized after his death: his students identified a child as his conscious rebirth, and that recognition became the first tulku succession in Tibetan Buddhism, a model of deliberately identified reincarnate teachers that the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama lineages, among others, would later adopt.

The Karmapas who succeeded Dusum Khyenpa at Tsurphu built the Karma Kagyu school into one of the major traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, associated with the black ceremonial hat that gives the lineage its popular name in the West and with a body of teaching on meditation and the nature of mind transmitted from master to recognized successor across eight centuries.

The Cultural Revolution reached Tolung valley in the 1960s and left Tsurphu largely in ruins. Reconstruction began in the 1980s under a changed political climate that allowed limited religious rebuilding, and the monastery slowly regained working temples and a resident monastic community, though at a fraction of its former scale.

The seventeenth Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, was enthroned at the rebuilt Tsurphu in 1992 as a child, recognized jointly by the Dalai Lama and Chinese authorities. He resided there through the 1990s before leaving Tibet at the end of 1999 in an unannounced journey to India, after which Tsurphu continued as a functioning monastery under a Karmapa who has not returned to it.

Tsurphu's first article says the Cultural Revolution left the monastery largely in ruins; what was actually destroyed there was deliberate and specific rather than incidental. Three large stupas inside the main temple, holding relics of successive Kagyu teachers, and a set of statues depicting every Karmapa up to the tenth were torn down by hand, methodically, with dynamite used only on the largest single image, the Lachen statue, when hand demolition proved insufficient. Almost nothing of the pre 1959 monastery survived standing.

Reconstruction began only when China's border with Nepal reopened to older Tibetans in the early 1980s. The sixteenth Karmapa, already in exile, sent his own representative, Drupon Dechen Rinpoche, back into Tibet specifically to rebuild Tsurphu, and physical work started there in 1980 under his direction, continuing after the sixteenth Karmapa's own death the following year. The monastery visitors see today, its assembly hall, its residential quarters, its smaller shrine rooms, dates almost entirely from that 1980s campaign forward rather than from any earlier century.

The rebuilt assembly hall now houses a funeral chorten containing the sixteenth Karmapa's own relics, a memorial built into the same reconstruction it commemorates. Tsurphu today supports a resident community of roughly three hundred seventy monks, with another fifty or so living in retreat in the surrounding mountains, a fraction of its pre destruction size but a functioning monastic community nonetheless, sustained by a reconstruction that had to rebuild its relics as well as its walls.