Rumtek Monastery: Sikkim’s Dharma Chakra Centre and the Karmapa Tradition

Rumtek Monastery sits on a forested ridge across the valley from Gangtok, its gilded roof ornaments catching the light long before the town below has properly woken. It looks ancient, and in one sense it is: a monastery of the Karma Kagyu school has stood on this hillside since at least the eighteenth century. But the building you walk into today was raised in the 1960s by a lama who had just fled Tibet with his lineage’s most sacred objects, and it was built as a deliberate echo of the monastery he had left behind. On the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan, Rumtek is the group’s first encounter with Sikkim’s Buddhist heritage, a detour on the mountain drive from Darjeeling before the road climbs into Gangtok.

Rumtek Monastery’s setting above Gangtok

Rumtek lies about 24 kilometres from Gangtok by road, at roughly 1,500 metres, on the opposite flank of the valley from the Sikkimese capital. From the monastery rooftops you look straight across at Gangtok strung along its ridge, with terraced fields and forest falling away between the two. The position was chosen with care. Tibetan monastic tradition reads a landscape for auspicious signs, and the sources on Rumtek’s rebuilding describe exactly the qualities a lama would look for: a mountain at the back, streams running below, and an open outlook to the front.

Travellers on the tour reach it at the end of a long and varied morning. The day begins in Darjeeling, the old hill station whose British and Sikkimese past the group will have spent the previous two days exploring, and follows the Peshok road down through tea gardens with views towards the Kanchenjunga range. At Teesta Bazaar the road meets the Teesta River and follows its emerald valley north. Rumtek is the last stop before Gangtok, where the group arrives in the late afternoon. It is a natural hinge in the full fourteen-day route across Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan: the point where the colonial landscape of Darjeeling gives way to the Buddhist one that runs, in different forms, all the way to Bhutan’s Paro Valley.

How much walking does a visit to Rumtek involve?

Expect a short but steady uphill walk of around ten minutes from where vehicles stop to the monastery courtyard, followed by stairs within the complex. Vehicles generally drop visitors at the lower security gate, and the path from there is paved but sloping. The golden stupa behind the main hall is reached by a further flight of steps. The visit sits comfortably within the tour’s Level 2 (Moderate) activity rating, and there are places to pause and sit in the courtyard along the way.

The Karmapa and the Karma Kagyu tradition

To understand why Rumtek matters, you need to know who it was built for. Tibetan Buddhism has four major schools, and the Kagyu is one of them, tracing its teachings back through a line of Indian and Tibetan masters. Within the Kagyu, the Karma Kagyu branch is led by the Karmapa, and the Karmapa holds a particular place in Tibetan religious history: the first Karmapa, Düsum Khyenpa (1110–1193), is regarded as the first lama whose reincarnation was formally recognised and enthroned. The practice of identifying a tulku, a recognised reincarnation, which later shaped the succession of the Dalai Lamas, begins with his line.

The Karmapas are sometimes called the Black Hat lamas, after a black crown associated with the lineage. For eight centuries their principal seat was Tsurphu Monastery in the Tölung Valley west of Lhasa, and their influence reached well beyond Tibet into Bhutan, Ladakh and the kingdoms of the southern Himalaya.

Sikkim was one of those kingdoms. Tradition credits the 9th Karmapa, Wangchuk Dorje (1556–1603), with founding three monasteries in the region during his travels: Rumtek, Phodong and Ralang. The monastery that actually stood at Rumtek for the next two centuries is generally dated to the mid-eighteenth century, associated with the 12th Karmapa, Changchub Dorje. By then Sikkim was ruled by its own Buddhist kings, the Chogyals, whose court patronised Tibetan monastic schools as part of the kingdom’s identity. Rumtek served for a time as the main Karma Kagyu seat in Sikkim, but over the following two centuries it declined, and by the mid-twentieth century it was in ruins.

A monastery rebuilt in twentieth-century Sikkim

The Rumtek you visit is a product of 1959. In February of that year, as Chinese control over Tibet tightened, the 16th Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924–1981), left Tsurphu with around 160 monks and students. The party escaped south through Bhutan, carrying the lineage’s most sacred treasures and relics. Sikkim, at that point still a kingdom under Indian protection, offered him refuge, and its ruler, Chogyal Tashi Namgyal, offered land.

The Karmapa was shown several possible sites and chose the ruined monastery at Rumtek. Construction of a new complex began in the early 1960s and took around four years. The relics brought out of Tsurphu were installed, and at Losar, the Tibetan New Year, in 1966, the Karmapa formally inaugurated his new seat in exile under the name Dharma Chakra Centre, the centre of the wheel of the Buddha’s teaching.

The new building was modelled on Tsurphu itself. That is worth keeping in mind as you stand in the courtyard. Tsurphu was badly damaged in the decades after 1959 and has since been partly rebuilt, so Rumtek is, in a real sense, one of the clearest surviving statements of what the Karmapa’s seat was meant to look like: an act of preservation as much as of construction, made by a community that did not know whether it would ever go home.

It also changed Sikkim. A kingdom whose monasteries had long been dominated by the older Nyingma school now held the seat of one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most prominent lineages. The Karmapa travelled widely from Rumtek in the 1970s, and the Karma Kagyu centres he and his students founded in Europe, North America and Asia all looked back to this hillside. It is one reason the monastery has an international character that surprises many first-time visitors.

Is Rumtek Monastery the same as Old Rumtek?

No. The large complex most people mean by Rumtek Monastery is the Dharma Chakra Centre built by the 16th Karmapa in the 1960s. The older and much smaller monastery on the site of the original foundation, usually called Old Rumtek, stands a short way downhill, roughly fifteen minutes on foot outside the main gate. The tour’s visit is to the Dharma Chakra Centre.

Architecture, ritual and respectful observation

The Dharma Chakra Centre is arranged around a broad stone courtyard, with the monks’ living quarters forming its walls and the main prayer hall, the dukhang, rising at the head. The façade follows Tibetan monastic convention: whitewashed walls, deep-set windows framed in dark paint, bands of red and ochre beneath the roof, and gilded ornaments along the roofline. The courtyard is where the masked cham dances are performed at festival times, and on an ordinary day it is where you see the monastery’s working life, novices crossing to classes and older monks moving between the hall and their quarters.

At the entrance to the main hall stand painted images of the Four Guardian Kings, who protect the four directions. Inside, tall red columns hung with thangkas, the painted scroll images of Tibetan Buddhism, lead the eye towards a large gilded Buddha at the far end. The walls are covered in murals, and rows of low benches mark where the monks sit for prayer. If the group arrives during a session, you will hear long horns, drums and the deep, rhythmic chanting for which Tibetan monasteries are known. Visitors are welcome to sit quietly at the back.

Behind the main hall, a flight of steps leads to two further buildings. The first houses the golden stupa, a reliquary begun in 1982, the year after the 16th Karmapa’s death, to hold his remains; it is covered in gold and set with turquoise and coral. Facing it is the Karma Shri Nalanda Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies, a monastic college inaugurated in 1981, where monks follow a long course in Buddhist philosophy.

A few customs make a visit easier. Walk around the buildings and turn the prayer wheels clockwise, the direction of Buddhist circumambulation. Remove your shoes before entering the prayer hall and the stupa room. Dress modestly, with shoulders and knees covered, and keep your voice low when prayers are under way.

Can you take photographs inside Rumtek Monastery?

Not inside the main prayer hall or the golden stupa room, where photography is prohibited. The courtyard, the exterior of the buildings and the views across the valley can be photographed freely, and they are where most of the best pictures are anyway. Even outside, it is courteous to ask before photographing individual monks, and to put the camera away during prayers.

Why is there security at Rumtek Monastery?

Because Rumtek sits at the centre of a long-running dispute over the Karmapa succession, and Indian security personnel check visitors’ identification at the gate. After the 16th Karmapa died in 1981, two different candidates were recognised as the 17th Karmapa in the 1990s by different senior lamas, and stewardship of Rumtek and its contents became the subject of a lengthy case in the Indian courts. Visitors are not affected beyond the checks, but you will need to carry your passport on the day. Foreign nationals also require a permit to enter Sikkim.

For the traveller, the practical upshot is modest: a checkpoint, a passport, a few minutes’ wait. It is also a reminder that Rumtek is a living institution with a community and a history still being worked out, not a museum. That is a large part of what makes it worth visiting.

Rumtek in an Eastern Himalaya itinerary

Rumtek works best as the opening chapter of a longer story, and the itinerary is built that way. The following day, the group explores Gangtok itself, including Enchey Monastery, founded in 1840 under the 8th Chogyal and belonging to the Nyingma school, the oldest of the four. Seeing the two within a day of each other makes the differences between schools, and the way both were woven into the Sikkimese court, far easier to grasp. Our guide to Gangtok and its monasteries, markets and viewpoints covers that day in detail.

The thread then continues into Bhutan. Bhutan’s state religion is the Drukpa Kagyu, another branch of the same Kagyu family, and the dzongs and temples of Thimphu, Punakha and Paro show what Kagyu monastic culture looks like where it never had to go into exile. It was also through Bhutan that the 16th Karmapa escaped in 1959, so the route the tour follows retraces, in reverse, part of the journey that brought Rumtek into being. By the time the group climbs towards Taktsang, the Tiger’s Nest Monastery, near the end of the tour, Rumtek’s courtyard will feel like the first line of a long and coherent argument about how Buddhism shaped the Eastern Himalaya.

That coherence is what makes Rumtek more than a stop on the road to Gangtok. It is a building made in a moment of loss, by people determined that their tradition would survive it, and it still does the work it was built for. Standing in its courtyard with the valley below and Gangtok across the way, you are looking at the whole history of this region in miniature: Tibet, Sikkim, India and Bhutan, bound together by roads, faith and exile. To see it with a small group, a Program Leader and local guides who know its story, explore the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan, departing each April and November.