Drukpa
Buddhists Rejoice in the Colourful Annual Hemis Festival
NEW
DELHI and LEH, India,
June 28, 2013
The two-day
annual Hemis Festival by the Drukpa Buddhists was celebrated at the Hemis
Monastery in Leh, with a roaring attendance of more than 75,000 guests from all
over the world and blessed by Ladakh’s spiritual head, His Holiness the
Gyalwang Drukpa. Celebrated on the 10th and 11th day of the 5th lunar month,
the Hemis Festival marks the birth anniversary of Guru Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche,
the 8th century Indian guru revered for spreading Tantrayana Buddhism
throughout the entire Himalayas. The courtyard
of Hemis Monastery, the biggest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh, is the permanent
venue for the celebrations.
Drukpa
Buddhists celebrated the legendary Hemis Festival with great enthusiasm. The
festival duration is marked as a local public holiday, and involves the entire
city. Locals dressed up in their finest traditional garb for the occasion and
thronged the festival venue.
People
from a cross section of societies and countries jostled with each other to
watch monks perform splendid masked dances and sacred plays called ‘Cham’ to
the accompaniment of cymbals, drums and long horns. Sacred plays accompanied by
cymbals, long horns and drums were also performed. This series of mask dances,
performed by the monks, demonstrated good prevailing over evil. The monks put
on elaborate and colourful costumes and brightly painted masks, the most vital
part of the dance. The dance movements are slow, and the expressions grotesque.
Healing scent of herbal incense filled the atmosphere.
On
the first day of the Hemis Festival, the first dance was setting limit or 13
black hat dancers, followed by sixteen dancers wearing copper gilded masks.
Then there was the eight different forms of Padmasambhava followed by Guru
Padma Vajra. On the second day, the monks will continue their traditional
performances on various instruments, put on exhibition the thangka-painting of
silk patwork of great Gyelsey Rinpoche. The monks afterwards assembled in hall
and started the worship of Maharaja Pehara, a protector of Buddhist teaching.
At 11 am the eleven senior monks came out in the retinue of Maharaja Pehara.
About Drukpa
Buddhists
The Drukpa
Buddhists follow the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in philosophy, i.e. the
philosophy of “getting enlightened for the benefit of others” and the methods
are based on the Tantrayana teachings passed down from the great Indian saint
Naropa, born in 1016. “Druk” in means “Dragon” and it also refers to the sound
of thunder. In 1206, the first Gyalwang Drukpa saw nine dragons fly up into the
sky from the ground of Namdruk, and he named his lineage “Drukpa” or “lineage
of the Dragons” after this auspicious event.
Source: http://www.drukpa.org
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