Long before the British arrived, a small Buddhist monastery stood on the hilltop now called Observatory Hill. The name Darjeeling is usually traced to the Tibetan Dorje Ling, the place of the dorje or thunderbolt, the ritual sceptre of Tibetan Buddhism. Many say it was the name of that monastery.
The Mahakal temple on the same summit is said to have been founded in 1782 by Lama Dorjey Rinzing. Today it is a rare shrine where Hindu priests and Buddhist lamas worship side by side. Shiva lingams sit next to Buddhist images, and the hilltop is hung with thousands of prayer flags.
In 1835 the East India Company leased the ridge from the Chogyal of Sikkim as a sanatorium, and the town grew around Observatory Hill and Chowrasta. The old monastery was moved away, but the shrine on the summit stayed. The town that grew up around it soon had a sanatorium, churches, boarding schools and, after 1881, a railway station, but local people kept climbing the hill to worship as they always had.
Walk up from Chowrasta in the early morning and you will see Nepali Hindus ringing bells, Tibetan grandmothers turning prayer wheels and children running between them. Watch out for the monkeys, which take any food left in sight. Prayer flags and temple bells together make it one of the clearest pictures of how faiths share space in the Darjeeling hills.
Sources
- Darjeeling (Wikipedia)
- Mahakal temple (Wikipedia)
- Told locally in Darjeeling
Legends are retold differently from village to village. Where a story is told locally rather than written down, we say so.
