The 23m gilded outdoor Maitreya — one of only two giant outdoor Maitreyas in Ladakh.
Likir is on the Leh-Kargil tourist route but most travellers photograph the monastery walls and miss the simple fact that the giant gold Maitreya in the courtyard is one of only two large outdoor Maitreya statues in all of Ladakh.WHY NOBODY KNOWS
The 23-metre (75-foot) gilded copper Maitreya Buddha at Likir was completed in 1999 and stands fully in the open air on a platform in the monastery's upper courtyard. It is one of only two large outdoor Maitreya statues in Ladakh — the other being the 32m Maitreya at Diskit Monastery in Nubra Valley (consecrated by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 2010). All of Ladakh's other major Maitreya statues — at Thikse, Spituk, and the original Likir interior shrine — are housed inside multi-storey temple buildings. The outdoor placement at Likir was a deliberate decision by the monastery to make the figure visible from the village and from the Sham Valley road below. Best photography light is late morning (10-11 AM) when the gold catches the eastern sun across the Indus.
