Foundation
Ladakh's Namgyal dynasty reached the height of its power under Sengge Namgyal, who ruled in the first half of the seventeenth century. He was a patron of the Drukpa school, a branch of the Kagyu order whose main centres lay in Bhutan and southern Tibet, and he invited the Drukpa lama Stagtsang Raspa to Ladakh. Under his patronage the lama founded Hemis, in a side valley above the Indus. The date of foundation is usually placed in the 1630s, with major building in the decades after. The year 1672 is also widely given, sometimes as a re-foundation, though it falls after Sengge Namgyal's death, and the sources do not settle the question. The monastery became the leading Drukpa house in Ladakh and received large estates.
Stagtsang Raspa and the king founded or endowed other Drukpa houses in the same years, among them Hanle in the far south-east and Chemrey, a short distance from Hemis, built in 1664 in memory of Sengge Namgyal after his death. Hemis became the head of this network of smaller monasteries and village temples, which it still supports.
The monastery
The monastery is built around a courtyard on a slope, with two assembly halls, the dukhang and the tshogkhang, and chapels on the upper storeys. It holds a large collection of images, thangkas, and ritual objects, including a copper-gilt statue of the Buddha and many stupas of precious metal. The courtyard is the stage for the annual festival.
The festival
The Hemis Tsechu is held on the tenth day of the fifth month of the Tibetan calendar, usually in June or July, the day held sacred to Padmasambhava, the teacher credited with bringing tantric Buddhism to Tibet. Monks perform masked dances, the cham, enacting the triumph of the dharma over hostile forces and the eight manifestations of Padmasambhava. Every twelve years, in the year of the monkey, the monastery unrolls a very large embroidered thangka of Padmasambhava across the façade. The festival draws pilgrims from across Ladakh and, since the region opened to tourism in the 1970s, large numbers of visitors.
The Notovitch claim
In 1894 the Russian traveller Nicolas Notovitch published a book claiming that at Hemis he had been shown a Tibetan manuscript describing the travels in India of a holy man called Issa, whom he identified with Jesus. The claim was challenged at once. The Sanskritist Friedrich Max Müller doubted it, and J. Archibald Douglas, an English teacher in India, visited Hemis in 1895 and reported that the head lama denied that Notovitch had ever been shown any such text, or that any such text existed. Scholars regard the account as a fabrication, though it continues to circulate in popular literature.
Later history
Hemis largely escaped the destruction suffered by Ladakh's monasteries in the Dogra conquest of the 1830s, and it remains one of the richest in the region. The surrounding valleys form the Hemis National Park, known for its snow leopards.
Further reading
- Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Lopez, Donald S. The Story of Buddhism. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001
See also
- Namgyal dynasty of Ladakh — The Namgyals ruled Ladakh from Leh from the fifteenth century until the Dogra conquest of 1842, and under Sengge Namgyal built the Leh palace and the great monasteries.
- Vajrayana — Vajrayana is the tantric development of Mahayana Buddhism, using mantra, visualisation, ritual and initiation to pursue buddhahood by an accelerated path, dominant in Tibet and Himalayan Buddhism.
- Tibet — Tibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.