The rock ‘n’ roller and the sacred time capsule
Amid the flickering glow of butter lamps, Kashmiri-style bodhisattvas with almond-shaped eyes and exquisite limbs seem to sway—their jewel-toned pigments unchanged since the 10th century. This is no ordinary sanctuary. It is a living monument to a lost Buddhist renaissance hidden in the Himalayas. And for 35 years, one man has moved through these sacred halls with the quiet intensity of a monk in meditation.
This is German photographer Peter van Ham, whose journey from rock and roll drummer to guardian of Tabo’s divine light was as improbable as the monastery’s survival through centuries of isolation.
High up in the Spiti Valley, where the air thins and time blurs, stands Tabo Monastery. It is a relic of a forgotten Buddhist golden age. To call it a mere monastery would be like calling the Library of Alexandria just another archive. Founded in 996 CE, its walls embody centuries of devotion, artistry and political intrigue, where Kashmiri artists blended their intricate, sensual style with Himalayan simplicity and colors. The result? A cosmic fusion of two great Buddhist civilizations, frozen in pigment and form.
Van Ham has documented it all. Frame by frame, mandala by mandala, he has translated its sacred whispers into a visual feast for the modern world. His story is not just about art or photography; it’s about what happens when a seeker stumbles upon a hidden key to enlightenment.
The Alexandria of the Himalayas
Imagine a library where the books are not written in ink but in color, aesthetic form and divine gaze. Where every mural is a meditation manual, and every statue is an invitation to look inward.
This is Tabo: where the first and second diffusions of Buddhism in Tibet intertwine like a double vajra.
For centuries, it was nearly forgotten, buried in the silence of the Himalayan mountains. Then along came Peter van Ham, a former drummer who traded stage lights for butter lamps, chasing not fame but something far rarer: a glimpse into the mind of enlightenment itself.
From rock performances to hearing the Dharma’s call
In the 1980s, Peter was chasing rockstar dreams in Los Angeles: the adrenaline, the crowds, the relentless touring. But the neon glow of fame left him hollow. “I burned out from that narcissistic, extroverted, superficial life. It was like falling into a hole,” he recalls. There was a deeper hunger, something he could not name. Then, a friend’s advice struck like a temple gong: “Go to India.”
In 1986, he arrived in Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama’s exiled community. There, he encountered Tibetans who carried on their culture faithfully: chanting, painting, debating Buddhist philosophy. Their steadfast faith overwhelmed him. “I was deeply touched,” he says. “I wanted to understand Tibetan Buddhism, not just observe it.”
He wandered into ashrams and studied with various mentors, but it was Tibetan Buddhism’s fierce poetry—its wrathful deities alongside serene bodhisattvas—that gripped him. The mandalas, in particular, fascinated him. “This was very fine execution of art,” says Peter. They weren’t just pretty designs, but “an insight into the philosophy behind,” he declared. They were blueprints of the mind.
In 1987, whispers of Tabo’s three-dimensional mandalas lured him north. But the Himalayas and their resident deities test before they reveal. Closed borders and altitude sickness forced him back home. For six years, the memory of that unfinished journey gnawed at him. Then, in 1993, Spiti’s isolation lifted. Peter was among the first outsiders permitted entry.
Tabo: where deities whisper
What he found left him breathless.
Inside the dimly lit dukhang (assembly hall), bodhisattva statues stood in quiet solidarity—deliberately smaller than human height. The deities were seen as extensions of the meditator’s mind. As Peter explains, “Only later did monasteries build colossal Buddhas to inspire awe.” Tabo’s humility is its subversion of showiness and pomposity: a reminder that enlightenment was once an intimate dialogue, not a spectacle.
The monastery’s unique construction amplifies this intimacy. Unlike later Tibetan temples with towering central Buddhas, Tabo’s human-scale statues and murals pull you into a secretive conversation. Hundreds of painted eyes—compassionate bodhisattvas, fierce protectors—create a visual symphony. It is as if hundreds of enlightened beings are silently reflecting every spectrum of one’s psyche. “I could feel there are certain sculptures which speak more to me than others,” reflects Peter, and I sense his eyes looking into a distant past. “And silence was the best way to tune in to my intuition to feel what they mean.”
“You do not gaze up at the divine here,” the photographer further says. “You stand eye-to-eye with it. All the figures around you as you enter the hall represents aspects of yourself, because Vairocana the indiscriminate, all-encompassing light, is actually your real personality, your true essence. The figures around help you to attain this enlightenment.”
The alchemy of Tabo’s art: a dying tradition resurrected
What makes Tabo’s art extraordinary is its cultural alchemy. The murals showcase a style never seen before or since. Namely, the style is a fusion of Kashmiri elegance and Himalayan austerity.
The Kashmiri influence reveals itself in flowing drapery and sensuous forms, their garments clinging to divine bodies with a graceful aesthetic that is reminiscent of Gupta-era India. The pigments—lapis lazuli blues, malachite greens, cochineal reds—were hauled across mountain passes by merchants and monks. “These artists used a shading technique that makes figures step forward from the walls,” Peter notes. It is a feat that still stuns art historians and lovers of the visual.
The Himalayan tradition grounds them in a kind of spartan, meditative simplicity. Deities’ elongated eyes don’t gaze outward but inward, their expressions balancing serenity and ferocity. This wasn’t just cultural exchange—it was resurrection. The Kashmiri artists, likely refugees fleeing Buddhism’s collapse in their homeland, found patrons in the kings of Guge. “Tabo became a sanctuary for a vanishing tradition,” Peter explains. “What they created here exists nowhere else.”
The photographer’s ritual: drumbeats in the chanting chambers
Peter’s early training as a percussionist became unexpectedly vital. In Tabo’s sacred darkness, he developed a ritual: “Inhale. Hold. Click. Exhale.” The discipline of waiting for the perfect moment, that suspended heartbeat between movements, was something he’d learned in recording studios. Now he applied it to capturing butter lamp flames dancing across a bodhisattva’s face.
“There’s a particular quality of darkness in Tabo,” he recalls. “Not the absence of light, but its opposite: a darkness so rich it becomes luminous.” Working alone for hours, his shutter’s click became a meditative metronome. The silence between exposures felt like the space between drumbeats, where the music breathes.
One of his most striking images from his Phase One camera, which enjoys exceptional image quality is of a four-headed, Sarvavid Vairochana from the Serkhang (Golden Temple). It emerges from the shadows, Kashmiri-style jewellery glinting while Himalayan flames encircle him. He is surrounded by the full set of deities belonging to the Vajradhatu Mandala that are seen as clay sculptures in the Tsugla Khang. That photo took hours to compose because the butter lamps kept dying. But when the light finally hit, it was like the deity suddenly woke up.
The Guge Kingdom’s last testament
Tabo is a living archive of the Guge kingdom’s golden age. In the 10th century, its kings, descendants of Tibet’s fallen empire, commissioned 108 temples by Rinchen Zangpo as spiritual and political anchors. Tabo was their southeastern stronghold, blending the Vairocana-centred imperial cult of the First Diffusion with the Second Diffusion’s emergent tantric orthodoxy. But some 600 years later, the Guge kingdom collapsed, swallowed by war and shifting alliances. Its temples faded into obscurity; their stories preserved only in revered whispers. “The Guge kings knew they were building for eternal good karma,” Peter reflects.
But even eternity has its seasons.
The weight of a thousand gazes
To stand in Tabo’s main hall is to surrender to a glorious visual alchemy. The mandala of Vairocana, the Great Sun Buddha and central object of the old imperial cult of Tibet’s Yarlung dynasty, anchors the space, his all-seeing eyes holding room for every other gaze. Lotus-holding bodhisattvas flank the walls, their eyes pulling you inward. “The more you look, the more you feel looked into,” Peter says. “Until that sacred hollow opens in the viewer’s chest, where all projections fall away.”
His photographs capture this dynamic. In one image, light spills across a wrathful protector’s face, revealing not just pigment but the invisible aura connecting viewer and deity. “These aren’t just artworks,” he insists. “Everything we perceive in our life, there is something beyond, the transitoriness of being and phenomenon.” They’re fractal mirrors, showing us that reality is simply a collage of perceptions.
The higher calling: a bridge across time
Today, Peter’s prodigious output matches the initial passion with which he answered his calling. His 17 books and global exhibitions serve as a bridge, translating esoteric Himalayan art for modern audiences while preserving its spiritual core. His book Mandala: In Search of Enlightenment (2022), dissects how these sacred diagrams dissolve the illusion of separation. “A mandala is the model, an illusion, an ancient wisdom. Once you realize its meaning you arrive a new level of consciousness beyond,” he explains. Perhaps a mandala is a map to altered consciousness, a reminder that we’re all notes on the same eternal chord.
Yet he remains a humble interpreter, describing his work is just finger-pointing at the moon. But in private, he speaks like a lama: “The mystic aspect only reveals in this altered state of mind.”
We cling to our individuality, our fear. True reality is an all-encompassing consciousness—light itself.
The mandala unbroken
As our conversation ends, Peter gestures to one of his favorite photographs of Tabo’s Vajradhatu Mandala—a cosmic diagram in a kaleidoscope of intricate colors. Through his lens, Tabo’s light spills onto museum walls and smartphone screens, whispering: “Look closer. The map is within.”
From rockstar to Dharma guardian, Peter van Ham’s journey mirrors the mandala’s paradox—a seeker forever circling the center, yet already home.
And Tabo? Like the Guge kings who built it, it refuses to fade.
* Peter van Ham’s exhibition, “Tabo: Into the Light,” is now showing at Tibet House, New York, accompanied by his internationally published book “Tabo – Gods of Light: The Indo-Tibetan Masterpiece” (Hirmer, Munich). His archival work has funded critical preservation efforts at the monastery, ensuring its whispers endure for another millennium.
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