The Potala Palace is a dzong fortress in Lhasa, Tibet.It was the winter palace of the Dalai Lamas from 1649 to 1959, has been a museum since then, and a World Heritage Site since 1994.. The palace is named after Mount Potalaka, the mythical abode of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. The 5th Dalai Lama started its construction in 1645 after one of his spiritual advisers, Konchog …

Reincarnation, also known as rebirth or transmigration, is the philosophical or religious concept that the non-physical essence of a living being begins a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death. Resurrection is a similar process hypothesized by some religions, in which a soul comes back to life in the same body. In most beliefs involving reincarnation, the …

Roman mythology is the body of myths of ancient Rome as represented in the literature and visual arts of the Romans.One of a wide variety of genres of Roman folklore, Roman mythology may also refer to the modern study of these representations, and to the subject matter as represented in the literature and art of other cultures in any period. Roman mythology draws …

Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the …

A mantra (Pali: manta) or mantram (मन्त्रम्) is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit, Pali and other languages believed by practitioners to have religious, magical or spiritual powers. Some mantras have a syntactic structure and literal meaning, while others do not.. The earliest mantras were composed in …

Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.. The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by one or …

A stupa (Sanskrit: स्तूप, lit. 'heap', IAST: stūpa) is a mound-like or hemispherical structure containing relics (such as śarīra – typically the remains of Buddhist monks or nuns) that is used as a place of meditation. In Buddhism, circumambulation or pradakhshina has been an important ritual and devotional practice since the earliest times, and stupas always have a pradakhshina …

The 14th Dalai Lama (spiritual name Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, known as Tenzin Gyatso (Tibetan: བསྟན་འཛིན་རྒྱ་མཚོ་, Wylie: bsTan-'dzin rgya-mtsho); né Lhamo Thondup), known as Gyalwa Rinpoche to the Tibetan people, is the current Dalai Lama.He is the highest spiritual leader and former head of state of Tibet. He was born on 6 July 1935, or in …

The two main traditions of Indian classical music are Carnatic music, which is practised predominantly in the peninsular (southern) regions, and Hindustani music, which is found in the northern, eastern and central regions.The basic concepts of this music includes Shruti (microtones), Swaras (notes), Alankar (ornamentations), Raga (melodies improvised from …

The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries). According to Tournadre (2014), there are 50 languages, which split into over 200 dialects or could be group into 8 dialect continua. These languages are spoken in the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas in Gilgit-Baltistan, Aksai Chin, Ladakh, Nepal, Himachal …