Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/336

 292 ARCHITECTURE IN THE HIMALAYAS. BOOK II. scenes, divinities, etc. Attached to the temple and scattered among the residences are numerous little chapels to the inferior gods, goddesses, and demons. The introduction of Buddhism into Tibet is ascribed to King Sron-btsang-gam-po (629-650 A.D.), who married a Chinese and a Nepalese princess both of them Buddhists. He is said to have built the monastery of Labrang in the centre of Lhasa (A.D. 644), with perhaps the largest temple, as it is the most ancient in the country. His Chinese queen had brought with her a famous sandal-wood image of Sakyamuni and another of Ananda, and for these was erected, about 650, the Ramoche temple, a little to the north-east of Labrang. The monastery of Potala 1 (Plate VI.) outside the city of Lhasa, where the Dalai Lama resides, seems to be of more magnificence than all the rest the centre being occupied by a great block, dominating the others, which contains the temples, audience halls and chaityas of the Dalai Lamas. It is known as the Red Palace, and on its roof are the gilded pavilions of Chinese style that render it so conspicuous in the landscape. It was built by the first Dalai Lama, between 1642 and 1650, on the ruins of the ancient fortress of Sron-btsang-gam-po, on a hill in the west of Lhasa rising about 300 feet above the plain. It is a great edifice of heavy though imposing aspect with its gilded roofs and bells surmounting the chortens or chaityas that enshrine the relics of the Dalai Lamas since the middle of the 1 7th century. Inside it is richly decorated, and, besides the reception and state rooms and sanctuaries, it is said to contain about 10,000 chambers for its myriad occupants. Around this central palace are grouped a number of smaller ones, where the inferior members of this great ecclesiastical order reside ; but of all this it is difficult to form a distinct idea without some better drawings than are at present available. The Dalai Lama, who resides in this palace, is believed by the Tibetans to be the living incarnation of the Bodhisattwa Avalokitejvara, and, in consequence, is the principal object of worship in Lhasa. There are, however, four or five subordinate incarnations in different parts of Tibet and Mongolia, who, 1 Hue, from a mistaken etymology, has ' ' Buddha-la. " The later Buddhists speak of three Potalas, as former residences of Avalokiteivara one at Tatta in the Indus delta, but Hiuen Tsiang places it in the extreme south of India, if not in Ceylon (Beal, 'Buddhist Records,' vol. ii, p. 233), and it is probably the same as Sumanakuta or Adam's Peak ('Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,' N.S., vol. xv.p.339); the second is P'u-t'o-shan among the Chusan islands ; and the third, that at Lhasa, the capital of the Dalai Lamas since 1643. But there was another Chinese Potala, or an imitation one, at Je-ho or Cheng-tu Fu, about no miles north-east from Pekin. 'Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,' vol. xxiii. (1904), p. 614; and vol. xxix. (1907), pp. 1 80 and 185.