Rolwaling: the history of a little- known beyul
Rolwaling (Tib Rol ba mkha’ ‘gro’i gling) is a remote high-altitude valley bordering Nepal’s Khumbu region to its west. Named beyul (sbas yul) or ‘sacred hidden valley’ by the Tibetan visionary Rigdzin Gödem, it has a complicated religious history involving key Tibetan spiritual figures, Padmasambha...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebhr, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
European Bulletin of Himalayan Research
2026
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | Rolwaling (Tib Rol ba mkha’ ‘gro’i gling) is a remote high-altitude valley bordering Nepal’s Khumbu region to its west. Named beyul (sbas yul) or ‘sacred hidden valley’ by the Tibetan visionary Rigdzin Gödem, it has a complicated religious history involving key Tibetan spiritual figures, Padmasambhava, Milarepa and Tashi Tseringma, along with two Tibetan Buddhist sects, Kagyu and Nyingma. Both its religious and secular history is reviewed here and then compared with that of nine other beyuls scattered across the Himalayas. Rolwaling’s distinctive features, including its religious heritage, geographical isolation and late settlement by Sherpas in the 1870s, are highlighted along with its egalitarian self-government. Currently, it is an almost abandoned nature conservation area inhabited mostly in summer by a monastic community faced with the threat of catastrophic flooding by Nepal’s largest glacial lake at its eastern end. |
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