Mulbek Monastery

History

The Shargole tourist-place page groups Mulbek with Shargole cave monastery and Phokar Rizong as Kargil-side Buddhist landmarks.

District tourism emphasises the cliff-top position overlooking the valley and road corridor to Leh.

Stories

The Maitreya Carved into the Cliff

Beside the road at Mulbekh stands a rock-cut figure of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, about 9 metres tall. It is one of the three tallest rock-cut Buddha reliefs in Ladakh, sometimes called the Bamiyan Buddhas of Ladakh.

Dates differ. Some accounts place it in the Kushan period, between the first century BCE and the sixth century CE, while modern scholars generally prefer around the eighth century. A small temple built in 1975 hides part of its lower body.

Two Gompas on a Crag

The monastery sits at the top of a crag about 200 metres above the road, at roughly 3,500 metres. It has two old gompas: Serdung of the Drukpa lineage and Rgaldan-se of the Gelugpa lineage. The older Nyima Lhakhang is said to have been built by students of the translator Rinchen Zangpo.

The gompas were once linked with the palace of the local ruler below. A steep footpath winds up from behind, and the site lies about 40 kilometres from Kargil on the Kargil–Leh highway, the old caravan route between Kashmir and Ladakh.

A King’s Edict on the Hill

Near the monastery are rock inscriptions in Kharosthi script. According to the account summarised on Wikipedia, one is an edict issued around 1400 CE by a western Ladakh ruler called Bhum Ide, identified there with Tsongkapa, directing local people to stop sacrificing goats.

That identification and date come from one summary account and should be treated cautiously, since inscriptions of this kind are often read differently by different scholars.

Good to know

Caravan-route hilltop gompa

Rock-cut Maitreya on district page

En route Kargil–Leh highway

Getting there

Kargil–Leh NH; ~40 km from Kargil per district page. Air: Leh or Srinagar. Rail: Jammu Tawi.