We headed west of Arunachal and zig-zagged our way up the breath-taking view of Sela Pass to reach the “celestial paradise in a clear night” – Tawang Monastery or Gaden Namgyal Lhatse in Tibetan. After the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the Tawang Monastery, at 3000 metres above sea level, is the second largest in the world, but according to a monk, it is the largest functioning monastery in the world. We only needed to take walk through the grounds of the monastery to understand what he meant.
I could not help but compare it to those we visited in Qinghai and Shangri-La, and Tawang felt completely different. The narrow alleyways were marked by smells and stains of human inhabitants; there were monks of all sizes going about their daily life, that included daily morning prayer; and it did not have the glorious golden rooftops and newest renovation we saw in China. In another word it was not commercial. It felt lived-in and homely. At first, I was disappointed by the organic and earthly feeling that poured out of Tawang Monastery but only when I encountered genuineness did my eyes open to the falsehood of the past.