The second diffusion
After the collapse of the Tibetan empire in the ninth century, organised monastic Buddhism declined in central Tibet. Its revival, which Tibetans call the later diffusion, began in the late tenth century from the far west, in the kingdom of Guge, ruled by descendants of the old imperial line. King Yeshe O, who became a monk, sent young Tibetans to Kashmir to study and invited Indian teachers. The most famous of the students was Rinchen Zangpo (958–1055), who translated a large part of the canon and is credited by tradition with founding 108 temples across western Tibet, Ladakh and Spiti.
Foundation
An inscription in the assembly hall records that the monastery was founded in a monkey year, generally taken as 996, and renovated forty-six years later, in 1042, by Yeshe O's great-nephew Jangchub O. Tabo is one of the few foundations associated with Rinchen Zangpo that survives in substantially original condition.
The year of the renovation, 1042, was also the year in which Jangchub O brought the Bengali master Atisha from the monastery of Vikramashila to western Tibet. Atisha met the aged Rinchen Zangpo at Tholing, the Guge royal monastery, and his teaching there and later in central Tibet shaped the reform of Tibetan monastic Buddhism. Tabo belongs to the same network of royal foundations as Tholing and Nyarma in Ladakh.
The monastery
Tabo's buildings are of mud brick, flat-roofed, and modest from outside, set within an enclosure on the valley floor. There are nine temples, several stupas, and caves in the cliff above used for meditation.
The assembly hall is the core. Its central space holds a three-dimensional mandala: a four-faced image of the buddha Vairocana in the centre and, set on brackets around the walls, more than thirty life-size clay figures of the deities of the Vajradhatu mandala. Below them the walls are painted with scenes from the life of the Buddha, the pilgrimage of the youth Sudhana from the Gandavyuha sutra, and portraits of the royal patrons and monks of the foundation, with inscriptions. The paintings belong to more than one period, the earliest of the late tenth or eleventh century, and show strong influence from Kashmir and Central Asia.
Rediscovery and today
Tabo was studied by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci in the 1930s, and more fully by teams from the 1980s onward, including a major project of documentation of its inscriptions and manuscripts. The Archaeological Survey of India protects the old buildings, and a new monastery has been built beside them for the community of monks, which belongs to the Gelug school. The Dalai Lama held the Kalachakra initiation at Tabo in 1983 and again in 1996, the monastery's thousandth year. Writers often call it the Ajanta of the Himalayas, for the age and quality of its paintings.
Further reading
- Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Williams, Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. Routledge, 2008
See also
- 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.
- Kashmir — Kashmir is a Himalayan valley in the northwestern subcontinent whose early history encompasses successive Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, the distinct philosophical tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, and a 14th-century transition to Muslim rule under the Shah Mir dynasty.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.