Losar (Tibetan: ལོ་སར་, Wylie: lo-sar; "new year"[1]) also known as Tibetan New Year, is a festival in Tibetan Buddhism.[2] The holiday is celebrated on various dates depending on location (Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, India) tradition.[3][4] The holiday is a new year's festival, celebrated on the first day of the lunisolar Tibetan calendar, which corresponds to a date in February or March in the Gregorian calendar.[1] In 2024, the new year commenced on 10 February and celebrations ran until the 12th of the same month. It also commenced the Year of the Male Wood Dragon.

The Eight Great Events (ashtammaha-pratharya)[2] are a set of episodes in the life of Gautama Buddha that by the time of the Pala Empire of North India around the 9th century had become established as the standard group of narrative scenes to encapsulate the Buddha's life and teachings. As such they were frequently represented in Buddhist art, either individually or as a group, and recounted and interpreted in Buddhist discourses. The Eight Great Events are: the Birth of the Buddha, the Enlightenment, the First Sermon, the Monkey's offering of honey, the Taming of Nalagiri the elephant, the Descent from Tavatimsa Heaven, the Miracle at Sravasti and his death or Parinirvana.[3] Each event had taken place at a specific location, which had become a place of pilgrimage,[4] and there was a matching set of "Eight Great Places", "Attha-mahathanani" in Pali, where the events took place. Apart from his birth in modern Nepal (just, some 10 km from the border), all the events took place in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh in north-east India.