20km away from Serthar county seat, ascending along a valley called Larong Gou, it sees the splendid shrine of Serthar Buddhist Institute.
In 1980, Jigme Phuntsok, a Nyingma lama from the Dhok region of Kham, known by followers as a 'living buddha' and believed to be the reincarnation of a holy figure, founded the Serthar Buddhist Institute in an entirely uninhabited valley.
The Serthar Buddhism institute has become one of the largest and most influential centers for the study of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. Despite its extremely remote location, at an altitude of 4,000 meters, in an ethnic Tibetan region of Sichuan Province, more than 500 miles by dirt road from the nearest city, Serthar has attracted 8500 students at the site.
One of the most surprising elements of Serthar is that more than half of those who come to study are women. Entry is limited at the relatively small nunneries that exist in areas populated by Tibetans, but Serthar is open to virtually anyone who is a genuine student of Khenpo Jikphun's brand of Buddhism. Another surprise at Serthar is that it attracts ethnic Chinese students as well as Tibetans. Of the over 8,000 students here, roughly 1000 are ethnic Chinese and students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, who attend separate classes taught in Mandarin, while larger classes are taught in Tibetan.
Nearly every day, Tibetan monks and nuns wearing blood-red robes arrive at this distant outpost after a long trek through a forbidding range of mountains. Drawn by word that a brilliant teacher resides here, they climb a twisting path up a narrow valley to find a freshly built metropolis of Buddhist worship. It is a stunning sight in an otherwise barren setting and a potent symbol of the revival in Tibetan Buddhism under way here.
A vast assembly of log cabins, spartan inside and out, covers a pair of steep hillsides, which will surprise every new visitor. At dusk, crowds of monks and nuns buzz in conversation, their hair shorn and their gazes serene, as they gather for evening prayers outside a ramshackle collection of meeting halls that are connected by a criss-cross of muddy pathways.