Avalokiteśvara — the Bodhisattva of compassion at the "Ajanta of the Himalayas"
Tabo is a small monastic settlement high in the Spiti valley of Lahul and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, and the figure this entry is about is the great Avalokitesvara in its principal temple — the building usually called the Temple of Great Compassion, and referred to locally by a Spiti name that a guardian should record from the monastery itself. It is not an image in the round in the plains idiom. Avalokitesvara here is a large stucco figure, seated, four-armed, with a small Amitabha Buddha in the crown of the head: the standard Mahayana signal that this is the form of the bodhisattva associated with the Western Buddha and therefore the compassionate one. The stucco is modelled over a core, and the modelling of the drapery and the jewellery is what makes the Tabo images famous among those who came to see them.
The monastery is conventionally dated to 996 CE, founded by the Tibetan translator and monk Lotsawa Rinchen Zangpo, and it is among the oldest continuously used Buddhist institutions in the Indian Himalaya. The number of buildings is usually given as nine, of which the painted temples are variously counted as seven or as five, because the count depends on whether one counts structures that retain murals and structures that do not. I have not settled that count, and a guardian should not take it from this entry.
What is distinctive here is not the subject but the enclosure. Tabo stands at roughly 3,200 metres, in a landscape where the winter severs it from the world for months. The monastery was built for a community that had to live through those months on what it had stored. The murals, the stucco and the later painted additions therefore record a self-sufficient monastic life rather than a courtly one, and the Western Himalayan carving idiom — closer to Kashmir and Ladakh than to the plains — is what makes Tabo worth recording separately from the other foundations in this valley.
Three claims carried in the existing frontmatter for this entry I cannot support, and I have therefore not repeated them. That Ibn Battuta described this area is doubtful; his itinerary does not securely cover Spiti, and the attribution should be treated as withdrawn rather than as evidence. That the Dalai Lama gives Kalachakra initiations at Tabo I cannot confirm from any record, and Kalachakra is given at many places. And the site's World Heritage status should be stated only in its exact current form, once someone has checked it.
The existing citations included Wikipedia and the travel account flagged above. They have been replaced with site-level works and the district gazetteer, which is what this material actually needs. Open questions for a guardian: the 996 CE foundation date and how it is transmitted; the number of buildings and of painted temples; the reading and translation of the foundation inscription on the Avalokitesvara image, which is the best local evidence for the sculpture's date; and the site's exact present heritage designation.
.jpg/500px-Buddha_in_Sarnath_Museum_(Dhammajak_Mutra).jpg)
