The Mega-Sized Guru that Presides over the Hidden Land

This large-scale representation of Guru Rinpoche, also known as Padmasambhava, is one of many enormous statues built in the Himalayan region since the turn of the millennium. At the time of its completion in 2004, it was considered the largest statue of Guru Rinpoche in the world. While, historically, a number of Buddhist communities built large statues of other popular buddhas, this particular statue held special significance for Sikkim, the small northeast Indian state where it was constructed. Local Buddhist communities trace the beginning of Buddhist history in Sikkim to the eighth century, with the visit of the legendary tantric teacher described in Tibetan and Himalayan narratives.

Guru Rinpoche is venerated throughout Inner Asia and the Himalayas as the figure who introduced Tantric Buddhism to the region after he was invited from India to Tibet by the Tibetan king Tri Songdetsen (742–ca. 800).1 His activities are held to have assisted in the consolidation of Buddhism on the Tibetan Plateau, including the conversion of local deities into protectors of Buddhism. He is also believed to have visited other areas of the Himalayas, including parts of present-day Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh in India, and Nepal and Bhutan. While Guru Rinpoche’s fame has been promulgated through his biographies and association with ritual and institutional traditions, there are also rich repositories of local written and oral traditions that discuss his visits to different regions. He also left behind teachings to inspire later Buddhist practices in these regions. These teachings have been recovered as objects and texts, known as treasures (terma), from the landscape and in visionary episodes by Buddhist practitioners with karmic connections to the Guru, who are known as treasure revealers (terton).

In a number of places that he visited, Guru Rinpoche designated particular locations as Hidden Lands (beyul) that would function as safe havens for Buddhist communities in times of need (fig. 2).2 In treasure literature and traditions, Sikkim was known as the Beyul Dremojong, or the Hidden Land of Rice, and it was “opened” in several stages by treasure revealers fleeing civil strife on the Tibetan Plateau. The treasure revealers inspired waves of Tibetan migrants to relocate to Sikkim. The migrants became known as the Lhopo community, and in Sikkim, they lived together with a number of ethnic groups, including Lepchas (also known as the Rong in their own language, the first Indigenous people of the region). In the seventeenth century, a treasure revealer named Lhatsun Namkha Jigme (1597–1650) visited Sikkim where he supported the enthronement of local chieftain Puntsok Namgyel (1604–1670) as the first dharma king (chogyel) of the Namgyal dynasty that nominally ruled Sikkim until 1975, when Sikkim became part of India.3

Today, Sikkim is a culturally diverse state that is famed for its mountain vistas and pristine natural sites. Demographic change has caused Buddhist communities to become a minority in the state, as Hindus now make up the majority of the population, along with practitioners of a diverse variety of other religions, including Indigenous religions, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements. Despite this, Buddhism continues to be overrepresented in tourist marketing materials and in state-sponsored tourist sites.4 Many of these sites overlap with traditional pilgrimage routes that include historically significant monasteries and temples, as well as caves, rivers, and lakes that make up the sacred landscape of the Hidden Land that is presided over by Kanchendzonga, the world’s third-highest mountain, seen as the protector deity of the state.5 The monumental Guru Rinpoche statue represents a new type of Buddhist tourist site in the state; political and business groups have built such sites in consultation with Buddhist authorities, with emphases on profit, leisure, and marketability as well as piety, for Buddhist and non-Buddhist visitors alike.6

Tradition and Modernity in Presenting the Guru

Part of what allows for the giant Guru Rinpoche statue at Namchi to appeal to multiple audiences, including pilgrims, tourists, and those in-between, is its style. The 135-foot statue is enormous and looms over visitors. Made from concrete and painted with rose-gold and golden paint, it is visible from hilltops throughout Sikkim, standing as a grand invocation of the continued blessings of Guru Rinpoche in the Hidden Land of Rice.

The design of the statue incorporates traditional stylistic elements with modern fabrication technology. Guru Rinpoche is often represented in this position in Buddhist art, sitting cross-legged, with a vajra in his right hand, representing his indestructible wisdom, and a skull cup, or kapala, or bowl, on his lap, holding the amrita of wisdom (fig. 3). On his right shoulder rests a trident, or khatvanga, and he is wearing his famous lotus-shaped hat, his long ears decorated with round shell earrings. Guru Rinpoche’s facial expression is strong and wide-eyed, representing his attention to and awareness of everything taking place around him. He is seated on a lotus throne, atop a base that contains a meeting hall (fig. 4).

The inclusion of the traditional elements in the design of the statue stemmed from the participation of Buddhist authorities from the beginning of the design process. In Sikkim, popular oral lore attributes the original idea for the Guru Rinpoche statue to Dodrupchen Rinpoche (1927–2022), a widely respected Tibetan lama who resided in Gangtok. Building large statues has long been seen as meritorious in Buddhism; important examples include the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan, dated to the first century, and the Leshan Giant Buddha of Sichuan, China, which dates to the eighth century. Dodrupchen Rinpoche had told his students that a statue of Guru Rinpoche would bring auspicious results for the state, along with protection from negative forces. In Buddhist traditions, statues are often attributed with the agency of the divine beings that they represent, particularly if they are constructed with appropriate ritual processes, especially consecrations (rabne) that are considered to awaken the statue.7

Shifting Scales of Intention in the Making of Guru Rinpoche

Other elements of the construction of Guru Rinpoche, however, were far from traditional. The original design of the statue was undertaken in the late 1990s by Naresh Kumar Verma, an Indian statue designer based in Gurugram who specializes in large statues built from contemporary materials.8 Although the construction was supervised by Lopon Lhundrup, a Bhutanese statue maker, and undertaken by Sikkimese contractors, the original idea of making an enormous statue from concrete resonated with similar projects appearing throughout Asia starting in the 1970s.9 The trend began due to the availability of concrete and fiberglass, and developments in Asian industries and local economies that allowed for the construction of massive projects.10 In India, such projects have been supported by industrialists and entrepreneurs as well as politicians; they reflect new modes for the deployment of nationalist aspirations and entanglements between religion and secularism.11 Elsewhere in the Himalayas, in the Indian states of Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh and the nations of Nepal and Bhutan, giant statues of Guru Rinpoche and other Buddhist figures have also been constructed as monuments to both traditional Buddhism and modernity (figs. 5 and 6).

On a local level, many Sikkimese people also connect the building of Guru Rinpoche to the long-reigning chief minister of Sikkim, Pawan Kumar Chamling, who was in office from 1994 until 2019. Chamling supported the building of Guru Rinpoche near his home constituency in order to promote tourism in Namchi, but he was also aware of the significance of the historical precedents of political leaders who promoted Buddhism, and religion more generally, as ways to be perceived as meritorious and concerned about the spiritual, as well as physical, welfare of their subjects.12 Chamling and his government invited the Dalai Lama to inaugurate the statue in 2004, and afterwards also supported the building of a 130-foot (39.6 meter) Shakyamuni Buddha statue in Ravangla, South Sikkim, that was completed in 2013 (fig. 7),13 and a 137-foot (41.8 meter) statue of Avalokiteshvara in Pelling, West Sikkim, that was completed in 2018.14 Besies the construction of this statue geared toward his Buddhist constituents, Chamling’s Sikkim Democratic Front Government presided over the building of a 108-foot (32.9 meter) statue of Shiva at Solophok Hill, near Namchi, that was completed in 2011 (fig. 8).15

The political patronage behind these projects has led to discussions about intention, since historically, intention was important for ensuring good results from undertaking religiously motivated projects in Buddhist communities. However, connections between politics and economics in the making of Guru Rinpoche and other large-scale statues in Sikkim have not stopped local communities, Buddhist and otherwise, from developing a genuine appreciation and even affection for these astounding concrete interventions in the landscape. Local visitors bring offerings to the statues, including scarves, incense, and prostrations, and hold these statues as capable of bringing about spiritual transformation, just as other historically significant empowered sites and objects do in the Hidden Land.