Excelsior Correspondent
LEH, July 1: The two-day annual Hemis Festival by the Drukpa Buddhists was celebrated at the Hemis Monastery in Leh, with a roaring attendance of over 75,000 guests from all over the world, here.
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 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 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.
Follow our WhatsApp channel