Chimi Lhakhang

Chimi Lhakhang stands on a low round hillock in the fields below Lobesa, between Punakha and Wangdue Phodrang. It is small, and the walk to it — twenty to thirty minutes across paddy from the road at Sopsokha — is half the visit.

Drukpa Kunley, the Divine Madman

The temple belongs to Drukpa Kunley (1455–1529), the wandering yogi known as the Divine Madman, whose teaching method was obscenity, drink and scandal, and who is one of the best-loved figures in Bhutan for exactly that reason. Tradition says he subdued a demoness who had been troubling travellers at Dochula and trapped her in a rock at this spot. The temple was built over that site in 1499 by his cousin, the fourteenth Drukpa hierarch Ngawang Chogyel.

The fertility blessing

Chimi Lhakhang is known across the country as a fertility temple. Childless couples come from Bhutan and abroad to receive a blessing from the resident lama, given with a wooden phallus and a bow said to have belonged to Drukpa Kunley, and the temple keeps an album of photographs of children born afterwards. The phallus imagery painted on the houses in the villages you walk through belongs to the same tradition — protective rather than merely bawdy.

The walk

The path leaves the highway, crosses a stream and climbs gently through Sopsokha and Pana villages to the temple's flagstone courtyard, ringed with prayer flags. It is flat, easy and exposed, so it is hot at midday and beautiful in the low light of late afternoon. Most Punakha itineraries pair it with Punakha Dzong on the same day.