A few miles west of Lhasa, beneath the slopes of Mount Gephel, an immense collection of white buildings rises against the mountainside. From a distance the structures appear almost to have been poured across the slope, one monastery, residence, temple, courtyard, and assembly hall pressed against another. The image helped give Drepung its familiar interpretation as the “pile of rice,” but the monastery that developed there after 1416 became far more than an impressive religious complex. For centuries Drepung stood among the greatest centers of Tibetan Buddhist education, a home of the early Dalai Lamas, a major landholding institution, and eventually one of the largest concentrations of monks anywhere in the Buddhist world.
Its history is unusually important because Drepung brings together subjects that are sometimes treated separately in Tibetan history. Monastic education, ritual practice, political power, regional identity, economic organization, pilgrimage, the development of the Gelug tradition, and the rise of the Dalai Lama institution all passed through Drepung. Georges Dreyfus, one of the principal modern scholars of the monastery, argues that studying Drepung provides a way of seeing religion, politics, economy, and culture functioning together within traditional Tibetan society.
Jamyang Chöjé and the Founding of Drepung
The story of Drepung begins with the transformation of Tibetan Buddhism during the lifetime of Je Tsongkhapa. Born in Amdo in 1357, Tsongkhapa became one of the most influential Tibetan Buddhist teachers of his age. The religious movement that formed around his teachings would eventually become known as the Gelug tradition, although its early adherents were often associated with Ganden, the monastery Tsongkhapa founded in 1409.
Among Tsongkhapa’s important disciples was Jamyang Chöjé Tashi Pelden, who lived from 1379 to 1449. Some modern websites give a different birth year, but the 1379 date is supported by specialist Tibetan biographical scholarship and is the safer date to use. The research materials for this article likewise identify him as a disciple of Tsongkhapa and the founder whose life must form the starting point for Drepung’s institutional history.
Jamyang Chöjé had studied subjects including Prajñāpāramitā before joining Tsongkhapa at Ganden, where he studied Madhyamaka and tantric teachings. According to the Tibetan traditions summarized by Dreyfus, his abilities were impressive enough that he became one of Tsongkhapa’s principal assistants, repeating and explaining teachings to other students. Tsongkhapa eventually encouraged him to establish another monastery. Later tradition remembered this encouragement through a saying predicting that the new foundation would surpass even its “mother” monastery at Ganden.
The site chosen for the monastery already carried religious associations. Caves in the mountainside provided places where practitioners could retreat, memorize texts, and meditate. Dreyfus notes that Jamyang Chöjé moved to the area in 1414, initially living in a small thatched dwelling near one of the caves before teaching closer to the place where Drepung’s Main Assembly Hall would eventually stand.
With the patronage of Namkha Zangpo of the Neudong family, construction began in earnest in 1416. The early project included the Main Assembly Hall, a tantric temple that developed into the Tantric Monastic College, and residences for the growing population of monks. By 1419 the work had advanced far enough for Tsongkhapa to visit and consecrate important buildings and religious images. The monastery that later seemed almost impossibly large had therefore developed from a relatively small community centered on a teacher, caves, classrooms, and a group of new religious buildings.
Reconstructing Drepung’s Early History
Much of what is known about Drepung’s first centuries comes from Tibetan religious histories written after the monastery’s foundation. They are indispensable, but they must also be read with the same care given to chronicles and institutional histories from other religious traditions.
One particularly important early account was written by Paṇchen Sönam Drakpa, who lived from 1478 to 1554 and later served as abbot of Drepung. His biography of Jamyang Chöjé also discusses the establishment of the monastery, giving historians a source written much closer to the founding generation than most surviving accounts. Another important Tibetan history was produced by Purchok Ngawang Jampa and deals with the establishment of Tibet’s great Gelug monastic seats. Desi Sangyé Gyatso’s seventeenth-century Yellow Beryl became one of the major sources for Drepung’s early institutional history.
The Yellow Beryl is especially valuable because Sangyé Gyatso had access to a world of Tibetan institutional knowledge that has since become more difficult to reconstruct. Yet Dreyfus cautions that it is also traditional historiography written by a political and religious figure closely connected to the Fifth Dalai Lama. Its presentation naturally emphasizes the importance of the Dalai Lama lineage. That does not make the work unusable. It means its information must be compared with biographies, institutional records, monastic regulations, later histories, and surviving traditions rather than read as a detached modern chronicle.
From One Monastery to Seven Colleges
Drepung grew quickly under Jamyang Chöjé. As its population increased, the monastery divided into smaller institutional communities. Before the middle of the fifteenth century, Drepung had developed seven major monastic subunits: Gomang, Loseling, Shakkor, Gyepa, Deyang, Ngakpa, and the Vinaya College.
These were more than dormitories. Different colleges developed different areas of concentration, teachers, scholastic traditions, administrative offices, disciplinary systems, and eventually their own textbooks and institutional identities. Gomang, Loseling, Shakkor, and Gyepa were associated particularly with the study of Prajñāpāramitā and Madhyamaka. The Vinaya College emphasized monastic discipline and related traditions. Deyang specialized in logic and epistemology, while Ngakpa concentrated on tantric practice and major Gelug tantric cycles.
Not all seven remained equally powerful. Gomang and Loseling became enormous institutions in their own right, eventually containing thousands of monks. Shakkor, Gyepa, and the Vinaya College were absorbed into larger colleges during the eighteenth century, although their abbatial offices continued to have ceremonial or administrative importance. Four functioning colleges remained in the later traditional system: Loseling, Gomang, Deyang, and Ngakpa. Loseling and Gomang were by far the largest.
This helps explain why calling Drepung simply a “monastery” can hide the scale of the institution. By the later centuries of its history, Drepung resembled a religious city containing large semi-autonomous monastic communities. A monk’s immediate institutional identity might be tied more strongly to Gomang or Loseling than to Drepung as an abstract whole. Each major college had its own administration, assembly spaces, rituals, curriculum, disciplinary structure, and regional subdivisions.
Drepung and the Rise of the Dalai Lamas
Drepung’s history became increasingly connected with the lineage later known as the Dalai Lamas. This relationship fundamentally changed the monastery’s political importance.
The retrospective Second Dalai Lama, Gendün Gyatso, became closely associated with Drepung and helped strengthen its position as a center of Gelug religious life. A residence established for the Dalai Lama lineage at Drepung became known as the Ganden Phodrang. The residence remained associated with the Dalai Lamas until the Fifth Dalai Lama transferred the center of his government to the Potala Palace. The name Ganden Phodrang itself later became associated with the Tibetan government created under the Fifth Dalai Lama.
The relationship was not merely ceremonial. Drepung became one of the principal centers from which the Dalai Lama institution developed its religious authority. Several important Dalai Lamas were connected with Drepung’s leadership, and the monastery occupied a central place in the expanding Gelug network.
That rise unfolded during a period of political conflict. Central Tibet and Tsang were contested by competing regional powers whose alliances frequently overlapped with religious institutions. Drepung itself was affected by this struggle. At different points its monks were prevented from participating in the Great Prayer Festival at Lhasa, its political position was challenged, and the monastery became deeply involved in the changing relationship between religious and secular authority.
The decisive change came during the lifetime of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso. Following military victories by forces allied with Güshi Khan and the Gelug leadership, the Fifth Dalai Lama assumed political authority in 1642. Drepung moved from being a powerful but sometimes contested religious center to one of the important institutional pillars of the new political order. Estates and revenues strengthened the monastery, and major construction projects expanded its buildings. The Great Assembly Hall was rebuilt, while the Ganden Phodrang complex was enlarged and decorated.
Drepung’s influence therefore cannot be separated cleanly into “religious” and “political” periods. Its scholarship gave it prestige, its enormous population gave it institutional weight, and its connection with the Dalai Lamas placed it close to the center of Tibetan government.
Governing a Monastic City
A community containing thousands of monks required rules far beyond the basic disciplinary principles associated with Buddhist monastic life. Drepung developed administrative structures for property, education, ceremonies, discipline, residences, finances, disputes, and the daily movement of an enormous population.
Some of the best evidence comes from monastic regulations, or bca’ yig. Rules associated with the Fifth Dalai Lama provide unusually direct evidence about how Drepung was expected to operate during the seventeenth century. They concern admission, discipline, administration, relations among different groups of monks, and the authority of officials. Modern historian Berthe Jansen has used these regulations to reconstruct the institutional and social world of Tibetan monasteries in ways that conventional religious biographies rarely allow.
Leadership also became increasingly complicated. The original monastery had been dominated by Jamyang Chöjé and his successors, but a vast institution could no longer function as one community directed by a single abbot. Colleges developed their own abbots and administrators, while councils represented different portions of the larger establishment. By the later period, the Large Council of Drepung included representatives of functioning and nominal colleges as well as officials connected with the Ganden Phodrang and the Great Assembly Hall.
The result was an institution that had evolved far beyond the monastery founded in 1416. Drepung had become a federation of religious communities bound together by history, ritual, property, scholarship, and shared institutional identity.
Scholarship, Debate, and Life at Drepung
Drepung became famous as a center of Buddhist learning, yet daily life there was more varied than the image of thousands of monks constantly engaged in philosophical study might suggest.
A minority followed demanding scholastic careers requiring extensive memorization, study, commentary, and formal debate. The great philosophical colleges built reputations around these traditions, and scholars who completed advanced programs could pursue the highest levels of Gelug education. Drepung’s reputation drew monks from distant regions of Tibet and from the wider Tibetan Buddhist world.
Others lived very different lives. Many monks concentrated on ritual obligations, monastery administration, economic responsibilities, or services performed for lay patrons. Dreyfus emphasizes that Drepung did not require every monk to become a scholar. The institution contained devoted philosophers and teachers, but it also contained administrators, ritual specialists, workers, disciplinarians, and monks whose religious lives revolved primarily around collective ceremonies.
The Library of Congress Tibetan Oral History Archive provides an especially valuable window into this world. Melvyn Goldstein and his collaborators interviewed roughly one hundred men who had been members of Drepung during the traditional period. Their recollections discuss education, food, finances, teachers, regional identities, residences, religious obligations, and everyday experiences that rarely appear in official chronicles. The collection preserves voices from a world that changed dramatically after 1959.
One surviving interview records a former monk remembering that Drepung’s conventional population was spoken of as 7,700, although gatherings connected with important ceremonies could include more than 10,000 monks. He also remembered the poverty experienced by some students, particularly monks who had traveled from distant regions and lacked substantial financial support. Such testimony makes clear that beneath Drepung’s institutional wealth stood thousands of individual lives that could differ enormously from one another.
Drepung and Nechung
Drepung’s religious world also extended beyond its own walls. Nearby Nechung Monastery became associated with the Nechung Oracle, one of the most important oracular institutions in Tibetan religious and political history.
Nechung had connections with Drepung by at least the early modern period, and the Fifth Dalai Lama strengthened its place within the religious structure surrounding the Tibetan government. The oracle came to serve as the state oracle, consulted on important religious and governmental matters. Modern scholarship treats Nechung as an institution essential to understanding the relationship between ritual, protective deities, the Dalai Lama lineage, and Tibetan government.
For pilgrims visiting Drepung, therefore, the area represented more than academic monasticism. The mountain, caves, protective deities, nearby Nechung institution, temples, and sacred images placed the monastic university inside a wider religious landscape. Drepung was simultaneously a school, monastery, pilgrimage destination, political institution, and sacred place.
When Drepung Became One of the World’s Largest Monasteries
The most striking fact about later Drepung is its scale.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Desi Sangyé Gyatso recorded roughly 4,400 monks. The population continued to increase over the following centuries. When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama visited Drepung during examinations in 1958, an official count approached 10,000, and Dreyfus considers it likely that even this did not include everyone associated with the institution.
Early photographs help make those numbers tangible. In 1900 and 1901 the Mongolian Buddhist travelers G. Ts. Tsybikov and Ovshe Norzunov photographed Drepung from the east. The resulting image shows a vast concentration of whitewashed structures spread across the base of the mountain. The Library of Congress record notes that nineteenth-century writers already regarded Drepung as Tibet’s most populous monastery and repeated estimates of around 7,000 monks.
John Claude White photographed Drepung and its monks in 1904. British Library holdings include images of the monastery itself and a large group of monks assembled on one of its terraces. These are especially valuable because they preserve the physical environment and human scale of Drepung decades before the transformations of the mid-twentieth century.
F. Spencer Chapman, who visited Tibet during the British mission of 1936 and 1937, later described Drepung in Lhasa: The Holy City. He recorded the conventional figure of approximately 7,700 monks and noted that the population could reach around 10,000. Melvyn Goldstein’s later historical research likewise describes Drepung at the end of the traditional period as Tibet’s largest monastic institution, with a population around 10,000. The convergence of eyewitness testimony, institutional memory, photographs, oral histories, and later scholarship makes the claim to extraordinary size far stronger than the unsupported superlatives frequently repeated in tourism literature.
Drepung in the Twentieth Century
The political changes of the twentieth century transformed Drepung more radically than any event since its founding.
Following the establishment of People’s Republic of China control over Tibet, the monastery initially continued to function, but the situation changed sharply after the 1959 Tibetan uprising. Goldstein divides the period into several stages. From 1951 through 1959, religious institutions experienced a period of relative accommodation. Between 1959 and 1966, policies dismantled much of the economic and social system that had sustained large monasteries. During the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, organized religious life faced far more comprehensive suppression.
Drepung’s monastic population collapsed. Goldstein’s research records a decline from approximately 10,000 monks near the end of the traditional period to only a few hundred. The old system of enormous estates, thousands of resident monks, regional houses, scholastic colleges, and large-scale ritual institutions could no longer function in its previous form.
After reforms beginning in the late 1970s, religious practice was again permitted to expand and Drepung underwent a significant revival. Monks returned, buildings and rituals were restored, and forms of religious education resumed. The Drepung that reemerged, however, was necessarily different from the institution that had existed before 1959. It operated with a far smaller population and within a completely altered political and economic environment.
Rebuilding Drepung in India
Drepung’s history after 1959 also developed outside Tibet.
Monks who fled into exile worked to recreate the monastic colleges in India. Drepung was eventually reestablished at Mundgod in Karnataka, where Gomang and Loseling again became major centers of Gelug Buddhist education. Preserving the institution involved more than constructing temples. Teachers had to reconstruct curricula, print texts, revive examination systems, train new generations, and rebuild the complicated intellectual lineages on which the older monastery had depended.
The exile population grew rapidly. Dreyfus estimated that Drepung in Mundgod had reached around 3,000 monks by the turn of the twenty-first century. Although he notes that the reestablished institution could not simply reproduce the immense scholarly environment that existed in Tibet before 1959, he credits it with successfully transmitting much of the intellectual tradition through renewed classes, examinations, teachers, and textual study.
Drepung therefore developed into an institution with more than one geographical center. The historic monastery remained outside Lhasa while major strands of its scholastic and institutional traditions continued in India.
Why Drepung Monastery Matters
The importance of Drepung cannot be measured simply by counting monks or buildings. Its history mirrors some of the most consequential developments in Tibetan Buddhism from the fifteenth century onward.
It began with Jamyang Chöjé and the first generation after Tsongkhapa. It grew alongside the emergence of the Gelug tradition. Its colleges helped create one of Tibet’s major systems of Buddhist philosophical education. Its Ganden Phodrang residence became closely connected with the developing Dalai Lama lineage. Under the Fifth Dalai Lama, Drepung entered the center of a new relationship between monastic institutions and government. By the twentieth century, it had grown into an enormous religious community whose population approached 10,000.
Yet Drepung was never merely an institution of elites. Behind its abbots, great teachers, political connections, and famous assembly halls lived generations of ordinary monks. Some became accomplished scholars. Others performed rituals, administered estates, memorized prayers, managed kitchens, enforced discipline, traveled from distant regions, or struggled simply to obtain food and tea while pursuing a monastic life.
That human scale is one reason the surviving oral histories and photographs matter so much. The image taken by Tsybikov and Norzunov around 1900 preserves Drepung as a seemingly endless white settlement beneath the mountain. The testimony gathered from former monks preserves something the photograph cannot: the voices of the people who inhabited those rooms.
More than six centuries after construction began in 1416, Drepung remains one of the clearest examples of how a monastery can become far more than a collection of religious buildings. It became a university, a political institution, a pilgrimage center, an economic community, a home for thousands, and one of the places through which Tibetan Buddhist learning was carried from one generation to another.
Sources & Further Reading
Bsod nams grags pa [Paṇchen Sönam Drakpa]. “‘Jam dbyangs chos rje bkra shis dpal ldan gyi rnam thar dang gang gi gdan sa dpal ldan ’bras spungs phyag ’debs tshul sogs ’chad pa.” In Gsung ’bum bsod nams grags pa, vol. 11, 181–202. 1982–1990. BDRC W23828. https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Jamyang-Choje-Tasho-Pelden/P35
Sangs rgyas rgya mtsho [Desi Sangyé Gyatso]. Dga’ ldan chos ’byung bai dūr ya ser po [Yellow Beryl]. Xining: Chinese Tibetan Cultural Publishing House, 1989 edition. https://sources.mandala.library.virginia.edu/source/bai-durya-ser-po
Ngag-dbang-blo-bzang-rgya-mtsho, Fifth Dalai Lama. The Illusive Play: The Autobiography of the Fifth Dalai Lama. Translated by Samten G. Karmay. Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2014. https://library.gomde.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=2114
Norzunov, Ovshe M., and G. Ts. Tsybikov. Lhasa, Drepung Monastery from the East. Photograph, 1900–1901. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021670637/
Bailey, Frederick Marshman. Drepung Monastery, 7,700 Monks. Nechung Oracle, with Golden Roof, in Foreground. Photograph, August 3, 1904. British Library, Photo 1083/14(325). https://searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/041-003191393
White, John Claude. Image in Debung [Drepung] Monastery. Photograph, ca. 1904. British Library, Photo 430/53(52). https://searcharchives.bl.uk/catalog/041-003085188
Chapman, F. Spencer. Lhasa: The Holy City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1938. https://books.google.com/books/about/Lhasa.html?id=d-SCAAAAIAAJ
Goldstein, Melvyn C. Tibetan Oral History Archive Project. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/collections/tibetan-oral-history-project/about-this-collection/
Lobsang Gyatso. Memoirs of a Tibetan Lama. Translated and edited by Gareth Sparham. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1998. https://www.shambhala.com/snowlion_articles/memoirs-of-a-tibetan-lama/
Dreyfus, Georges B. J. “Drepung: An Introduction.” Tibetan and Himalayan Library, University of Virginia, 2006. https://texts.mandala.library.virginia.edu/node/16222
Dreyfus, Georges B. J. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: The Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-sound-of-two-hands-clapping/paper
Goldstein, Melvyn C. “The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery.” In Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, edited by Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein, 15–52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.5973182.6
Jansen, Berthe. “How to Tame a Wild Monastic Elephant: Drepung Monastery According to the Great Fifth.” In The Tibetans that Escaped the Historian’s Net: Studies in the Social History of Tibetan Societies, edited by Charles Ramble, Peter Schwieger, and Alice Travers, 109–139. Kathmandu: Vajra Books, 2013. https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_37.pdf
Jansen, Berthe. The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv941wdq
Gyatso, Thinlay. “Jamyang Choje Tashi Pelden.” The Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. May 2014. https://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Jamyang-Choje-Tasho-Pelden/P35
The Treasury of Lives. “Drepung Monastery.” The Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. https://treasuryoflives.org/institution/Drepung-Monastery
The Treasury of Lives. “Drepung Ngakpa Dratsang.” The Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. https://treasuryoflives.org/institution/Drepung-Ngakpa-Dratsang
The Treasury of Lives. “Drepung (India).” The Treasury of Lives: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region. https://treasuryoflives.org/institution/Drepung-%28India%29
Akester, Matthew. Jamyang Khyentsé Wangpo’s Guide to Central Tibet. Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2016. https://serindia.com/products/jamyang-khyentse-wangpos-guide-to-central-tibet-by-matthew-akester
Dorje, Gyurme. Tibet Handbook. 4th ed. Bath: Footprint, 2009. https://obnb.uk/p14508639-tibet-handbook
van Schaik, Sam. Tibet: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300194104/tibet/
Waddell, L. Austine. The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism: With Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and Mythology, and in Its Relation to Indian Buddhism. London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1895. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23283234M/The_Buddhism_of_Tibet_or_Lamaism
Drepung Gomang Monastery. “Welcome to the Official Website of Drepung Gomang Monastery.” https://www.drepunggomang.org/monastery-administration2/24-official-website-of-drepung-gomang-monastery