group tour to Ladakh and Kashmir (part 2 - the Hemis Festival)
Per the tour group literature, one of the high points of this trip was the Hemis Tsechu (festival), held annually for the last 300 years or so at Hemis Gompa (the largest Buddhist monastery in Ladakh) to honour the birth of Padmasambhava, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism. It didn’t figure particularly highly in my reasons for selecting this particular tour, but I have to admit that it was pretty impressive! Over the course of this the second (main) day of the festival, there are some ten different sets of masked performers doing their dances in the central courtyard, accompanied by musicians playing a few different musical instruments, particularly various trumpet/bugle-type things – some of them also masked. I did buy a guidebook to the festival, which enabled me to label my photos, but really … this is a sample extract describing the first set of mask dancers: “The thirteen black hats’ or evil terminators’ dance represents the Nagpa tradition of Vajrayana practition...