Tsozong Gongba Monastery, Tibetan Buddhist monastery on Tashi Island, Nyingchi Prefecture, China.
Tsozong Gongba is a small Nyingma monastery of wood and stone on Tashi Island, a 2,000-square-metre islet in Pagsum Lake, Gongbo'gyamda County. Its two-storey assembly hall holds three large statues: Maitreya in the centre, Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara on the left and a golden boy-and-girl image on the right. Four buildings stand around a small yard.
The monastery was founded in 1400, according to the English source, by the Nyingma monk Sungye Lingpa, who built it on Tashi Island following the instructions of Padmasambhava. The Chinese source dates its origin to the late Tang dynasty. Its own chronicle was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so its early history now rests on the oral accounts of local elders and a few pages of a Pagsum Lake gazetteer.
The monastery holds two annual festivals: Saga Dawa on the 15th day of the 4th Tibetan month, when villagers in ceremonial dress burn incense at the temple and then circle Pagsum Lake, and Chos Vkhor on the 4th day of the 6th month, when pilgrims from Bahe and Cuogao townships gather and picnic in the nearby forest. The kora passes a sky burial site, a body-print of Gesar, a water burial platform, and a peach tree entwined with a pine whose leaves are said to show Tibetan letters.
Tsozong Gongba sits on Tashi Island, a 2,000-square-metre islet in Pagsum Lake, reached by boat across the lake; the island lies over 40 km from the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and about 80 km from Gongbo'gyamda county town. The kora begins south of the monastery, where a peach tree clasping a pine stands beside the sky-burial site and the water-burial platform.
The monastery's name means 'castle in the lake' because it sits on an island within Pagsum Lake, completely surrounded by water. A circumambulation path connects several sacred sites around the grounds and is regularly walked by pilgrims seeking spiritual benefit.
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