ALCHI

The small village of Alchi (A lci), located about seventy kilometers west of Leh in Ladakh on an alluvial terrace on the left bank of the river Indus, has as its center an ancient religious area (chos 'khor). Alchi's religious area is composed of a large stŪpa, a three-storied temple (Gsum brtsegs), a congregation hall ('dus khang), two small chapels, and a later building, the socalled New Temple (Lha khang gsar ma). The site's thick white-washed walls of mud and stone follow the Tibetan tradition of architecture; the wooden facades and the beams and pillars of the interior structures are clearly Kashmiri in style.

The congregation hall, which dates to the late eleventh or early twelfth century, is the oldest building in the complex; the hall includes a Sarvavid-Vairocana sculpture at its back end and rich wall paintings that are mainly variants of the Vajradhātu-maṇḍala based on the Tibetan translation of the Sarvatathāgata-Tattvasaṃgraha (Symposium of Truth of All Buddhas). The three-storied temple, with three colossal clay sculptures of bodhisattvas in the niches, has similar maṇḍalas in its murals. The temple also houses representations of Tārā and Avalokiteśvara, along with many tathāgatas and secular figures. A series of images of priests in the second upper story ends with 'Bri-gung-pa (1143–1217), which leads to a date of around 1200 c.e. The stylistic elegance and sophistication of the murals has its roots in Kashmir. The so-called Great Stūpa is in fact a chapel in pañcāyatana form housing a stupa and decorated with "thousands" of buddhas and a group of priests. Tibetan inscriptions in all three buildings give the names, though no dates, of the founders, who apparently belonged to the ruling families of the Ladakhi kingdom. The murals in the smaller New Temple show a different iconographic tradition and clearly belong to a slightly later Tibetan style.

See also:Cave Sanctuaries; Himalayas, Buddhist Art in; India, Buddhist Art in; Monastic Architecture

Bibliography

Goepper, Roger. Alchi: Ladakh's Hidden Buddhist Sanctuary: The Sumtsek. London: Serindia, 1996.

Pal, Pratapaditya (text), and Fournier, Lionel (photographs). A Buddhist Paradise: The Murals of Alchi, Western Himalayas. Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Ravi Kumar, 1982.

Roger Goepper