I spent my second full day in Lhasa visiting the two biggest Buddhist monasteries on the city's outskirts. Drepung and Sera are two of the six main monasteries of the Gelugpa (yellow hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism. A third of the six, Ganden Monastery, is a somewhat further out from Lhasa on not on my itinerary. I don’t fully understand the different hat sects in Tibetan Buddhism, but as well as yellow hats there are black hat and red hat sects with other names and other monasteries.

Drepung is said to have once been the world’s largest monastery with 11,000 resident monks at one point . It pretty much escaped destruction by the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution so remains mostly intact and nowadays has about 600 resident monks. Similar to the other big monasteries I visited, Drepung is huge. The picture fees were relatively low at Drepung and monks rather lackadaisical about collecting them, so I have far more building interior pictures than at the other monasteries. Drepung is built on a hillside several miles outside of Lhasa and requires a guide to visit so turned out to also be very untouristly.

In the afternoon as a group we took a public bus to Sera Monastery. Normally such an outing on the tour that’s paid for by "kitty" would be on the truck, but in this case getting Sura into and out of the Yak Hotel’s parking courtyard was too much of a challenge to bother with for a short side trip. Sera also has about 600 resident monks, down from over 5,000 before the Chinese invasion.

Sera is well on the tourist circuit and is known for monk’s debate time every afternoon which is open to the public. A large group of monks gather in the courtyard outside the assembly hall and debate each other on theological questions. “What are they debating about?” I wondered. Is it how many angels can dance on the top of the head of a pin? Or are they debating whether Tibet has or has not always been a part of China? The debating is accompanied by a lot of hand slaps and smacks which apparently indicate whether the novice answered the quiz question correctly or not. At times the debates looked quite heated. Then the debating suddenly stopped, and the monks sat down in facing rows and some small circles for prayer time with reading and chanting.