Katok

Katok was an important Nyingma monastery in eastern Kham, with scholarly traditions that remained vigorous through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, leadership passed into the hereditary Drung line, transmitted between uncles and nephews. The rise of the Degé kingdom in the seventeenth century brought a different relationship between monastery, land and political authority. Degé rulers sent the treasure revealers Dundül Dorjé and Longsel Nyingpo to Katok; their revealed teachings became central to its religious programme, while the earlier leadership was displaced. An eighteenth-century document records a division of the monastery’s farms with Degé. Later, Getsé Mahapandita Gyurmé Tsewang Chokdrup, who lived from 1761 to 1829, revived study of the Kama, the transmitted teachings, and composed liturgies for the treasure traditions. Katok’s early nineteenth-century religious life thus combined renewed scholarship with the ritual legacies of its seventeenth-century reformers.