Engraved plate of the Tashi Jong monastery courtyard

Our tradition

Scrolls, herbs, and a Happy Valley

Lama Chodpa incense is the meeting of two Himalayan lineages: centuries-old Tibetan monastic recipes and the Vedic herbal knowledge of the Gaddi nomadic community.

Over sixty years ago the 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche — Dhokhampa Kalzang Dongyu Nyima — settled Tibetan refugees in the small Gaddi village of Jhikli Bheth, in the Kangra foothills of Himachal Pradesh. In 1968 he founded Tashi Jong, “the Happy Valley,” as a craft community and a seat of Khampagar in exile: a shedra, a ritual college, and a retreat centre of the Drukpa Kagyu tradition.

The coalescence of the two groups’ traditions, rituals, herbs, and dedication to service became Lama Chodpa incense. Ancient recipes held in scrolls at the monastery were blended with the seasonal harvesting of sacred medicinal plants, and with ethno-botanic research by the world-renowned scientist Dr. Nag.

Terraced Himalayan village fields in the Kangra foothills

Jhikli Bheth and the Gaddi

The Gaddi are a nomadic Himalayan tribal community whose seasonal movement across these hills has long included the gathering of medicinal herbs. That knowledge is preserved here through artisanal production: herbs are wild-harvested without ecological damage, dried, and stoneground.

Tashi Jong sits at the centre of the village — a residential craft settlement of Tibetan families beside the monastery, about ten kilometres from Palampur, in Baijnath tehsil.

Nothing but herbs and water

Tibetan tradition is strict about the making. Ingredients are used in exact proportions, some of them blessed. They are ground one by one with pestle and mortar, blended by hand, mixed into a paste, squeezed into five- or eight-inch lengths, and sun-dried on the monastery roof.

There is no wood stick. No sawdust. No perfume, additive, or bonding agent. The wrapping paper is handmade by a Tibetan community in northern India and printed in Tashi Jong. Each bundle is closed with the monastery’s wax seal.

Hands grinding medicinal herbs in a stone mortar

Handmade paper being folded around incense sticks

A year of blessing

All herbs are sacred. One particular ingredient is the object of a ten-day ceremony attended by more than 300 monks. It is then placed in the Dharma Protection chamber and blessed daily for a year by a Togden meditation master before it is included in the incense.

Lama Chodpa is a non-profit humanitarian project of The Eden's Rose Foundation. Proceeds support community development and dharma activity for Tibetan refugee and Indian communities in the Himalayas.

Shop the four formulas