Drukpa Buddhists Rejoice in the Colourful Annual Hemis Festival

NEW DELHI, June 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Travellers From Across the Globe Spellbound by the Himalayan Celebration

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.

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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 16 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 the 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.

For more details, please visit: http://www.drukpa.org or http://www.drukpa-hemis.org

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.

Primary Media Contact: Shreeya Roy, Communications@drukpa.com, 91-9350335761