1,200-year-old Perfection of Wisdom Uncovered in Drepung

July 6, 2012, 2:43 pm

≫ Next: Ear Sleepers and Other Peoplers of an Earlier World

Half of a title page, manuscript of the 100,000 Verse Perfection of Wisdom,
dated ca. 1400, Schøyen Collection, ms. 2371

A few years ago, or well, to speak truly even today, if I were to say in front of a group of Tibetanists that manuscripts were preserved in Central Tibetan monasteries that are older than the Dunhuang documents (well, older than the bulk of them), they would have rolled their eyes, glanced at me askance, then looked away as if waiting to hear what the next joke might be. Today the joke is on them.

One day I hope I may be forgiven for missing the original paper presented at Königswinter on the Rhine back in 2006, seeing the number of parallel sessions that so ineluctably complicate the life of the 21st-century Tibetologist. As part of Panel 22, entitled “Old Treasuries, New Discoveries: Sharing Materials Which Have Recently Come to Light,” held on Tuesday, August 29th, at 16:30 according to the program, was the paper in question, the one I didn’t make it to hear, given by Kawa Sherab Sangpo of Lhasa, with a title that could be translated ‘Introduction to the Lambum that was the High Aspiration of Emperor Tridesongtsen.’*

(*Tridesongtsen (Khri-lde-srong-btsan), was the regnal name (the name more of the reign than of the personal person) of the Emperor better known as Senaleg (Sad-na-legs). His reign is usually made to span the years between 799 and 815 CE. High aspiration generally means a holy object that was made under the instigation and patronage of some respected person although there are examples of images inscribed with the name of a western Tibetan king Nāgarāja that were clearly modelled in Kashmir, and only subsequently taken, as the inscriptions tell us, as the high aspiration of that king.)

I want to emphasize that all the credit for making known the discovery must go to the just-named Kawa Sherab Sangpo, a person I have seen but never spoken to. I am not even the first person to make known his discovery on the English-language blogo-sphere. Credit for that must go to Sam at Early Tibet blog (look here). Let me quote Sam’s blog:

“Manuscripts of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras produced here [in Dunhuang] have been discovered recently in monastic libraries Central Tibet. How do we know they came from Dunhuang? Because they are signed by the same scribes, Chinese scribes, seen in the colophons of the manuscripts found in Dunhuang itself.”

Today my only job (and I think it is job enough) is to report on some, not nearly all, of the information supplied in the Tibetan-language report by Kawa Sherab Sangpo (kindly sent to me by Hildegard Diemberger of Cambridge). Afterward, I’d like to append a section that was written by myself over 20 years ago as part of my doctoral dissertation. I copy this without any more than cosmetic changes because it can demonstrate to a skeptical world that Lambums* have a history in Tibetan history, that it isn’t something someone dreamed up just yesterday.**

(*Bla-’bum is just a short way of calling imperial period — and largely done under imperial patronage — manuscripts of the 100,000-Verse Perfection of Wisdom Sûtra. At least for now we can go with this definition rather that fiddle with the different meanings and associations of the syllable bla, although here it probably just means high or sublime. **And by the way, it does give an example of blood writing.)

Kawa first tells a little history of the translations of the 100,000(or the Mother, the Yum, as Tibetans, and we, too, will call it for short). He says there were six distinct translations into Tibetan, starting with the Memorized Translation done by Lang Khampa Gocha (Rlangs Khams-pa-go-cha). I will not repeat this part, since it largely corresponds to the information you will find in the appendix. I want to go directly to the discovery itself.

The author had for some recent years been traveling about in Central Tibet in search of rare manuscripts. He spent the period from July 2002 through the end of 2004 making lists of texts kept at Drepung Monastery's rich libraries, which resulted in a huge published catalog.*

(*Dpal-brtsegs Bod-yig Dpe-rnying Zhib-’jug-khang, ’Bras-spungs Dgon-du Bzhugs-su Gsol-ba’i Dpe-rnying Dkar-chag, Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 2004), in 2 volumes, pagination continuous.)

It was sometime in June 2003 when he was able to find a volume of the Lambum made by the Dharma King Senaleg. It was marked with the keyletter GA, meaning it was the third volume of the set. In October of that year the KHA volume, the second volume of the set, was also found. In truth, the collection of books where they were found had often been explored in recent years by various researchers, but since these volumes were undecorated and they were not written in letters of silver and gold, they had been overlooked.

The first and main thing that marks these as belonging to a Lambum is an inscription added to the top of the first leaf. There are some small problems in reading it, so in lieu of a proper study I will just give the gist of what it says. It begins: “These four sacred volumes, the high aspiration of the glorious divine Emperor Khri-lde-srong-btsan (Senaleg)...” It continues by saying that these are very great in their blessings, having emerged unburnt from the ashes of the fire that burned Karchung Temple.

Let me insert here the information that Karchung Temple is well known as an imperial period foundation. It even had a monolith (a ‘long stone’ or rdo-ring as Tibetans call them) that was since then misplaced, inscribed with an edict of Senaleg urging the preservation of Buddhist shrines built by himself and by his predecessors.

(*Located quite close to Lhasa, but on the opposite side of the river Kyichu, it has been studied by Hugh Richardson in his book A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions, pp. 72-83. Already when Tucci and Richardson visited the site, there was little left of the temple except for foundations of four chortens that formed part of its complex of buildings. And of course the inscribed monolith. I wonder what became of it. Victor Chan's Tibet Handbook says on p. 489: “The doring has now disappeared, but some accounts claim that fragments are in Lhasa.”)

The next part of the words inscribed on the top leaf of the Lambum is likely to go down hard with some of my readers. I’m thinking of one of you in particular who is very likely in immanent danger of choking on his green tea. It says, “Later on it was checked against one correct example in the monastery of Lding,* and a committee of three** did the checking twice. The letter combinations they did not complete fixing. The translation is that of the Reg-gzigs, so please be careful.”***

(*It is hard to know what is meant by the Lding Monastery, although I find most likely that it means Lding-po-che Monastery in Grwa-nang, one of the valleys formed by south tributaries of the Tsangpo River not too far from Mindroling.) (**I’m not at all sure of this translation of sum-thug, although I found it in a similar context in the colophon to a canonical work, Tohoku no. 1675, in case someone would like to check it.) (***There are signs of fire damage on the physical manuscript itself. In fact, the front and back pages probably had to be replaced due to fire damage. The meaning of the Reg-gzigs [Reg-zig] should be clarified further on in today’s blog.)

Our author comments on this part (at page 63 of his article), saying that the manuscript itself appears to have been in some parts fixed to accord with later spelling standards. His comment is worthy of note, “In the past we Tibetans had a tradition of fixing things with a view to making them nice and polished regardless of their value for researching the original, in accordance with the proverb, ‘If the temple caretaker is good at cleaning, gold images turn to brass’ ”.* But he quickly adds that the changes appear to have been few and minor, and assures us that the text remains overall a trustworthy reflection of its original condition. In any case, it is still marked by many of the characteristics of Old Tibetan manuscripts like those from Dunhuang.**

(*dkon gnyer byi dor mkhas na gser sku rag la gtong ba'i dpe. In fact, this proverb is very well attested in my Bible when it comes to Tibetan proverbs, the book by Christoph Cüppers and Per Sørensen, A Collection of Tibetan Proverbs and Sayings, Franz Steiner Verlag [Stuttgart 1998], p. 5, no. 104.) (**I imagine, or at least I hope, that the editorial process did not include scratching or gouging out text and writing in corrections [as did happen in the age before Tipex], but was limited to patching and replacing the parts of the text missing due to fire damage. I can’t speak for you, but I find fascinating that one of the spellings used in this manuscript that mark it as very likely Old Tibetan is the spelling nam-ka in place of the now ubiquitous spelling nam-mkha' meaning sky. You can go to the OTDO and search in vain (via the search box, of course) in the Old Tibetan texts for nam-mkha', but you will find plenty of examples of nam-ka and nam-kha. In this it resembles the word for light rays, 'od-zer, which is always spelled 'od-gzer in O.T. See the very recent discussion about this at Dorji's blog Philologia Tibetica, dated June 10, 2012.)

As Sam mentioned in the quote supplied above, there are quite a few places where the names of the scribes and editorial correctors are given. In one place is found “Scribed by Khong G.yu-legs. Edited by Dam-tsong. Further edited by Sgron-ma. Tertiary editing by Seng-ge-sde.” Although some of these are very likely Tibetan, some other names elsewhere look very much like Chinese, like Ji-kyin-sum and Je'u-hing-cin. I haven’t had the wherewithal to check if any of these scribe names are also used in Dunhuang manuscripts, but since Sam says it, it must be so.*

(*There is no shortage of manuscripts of the Tibetan-language Mother that were found in Dunhuang, and now kept in London and Paris. The rarely seen catalogue of Lalou would be a great place to find them, since she indexed scribe names. Well, the Poussin catalogue of the Stein Collection has listings of them, too. Perhaps I will look into this some more and get back with you.)

Our author concludes that what we have here is a particular Lambum inscribed during the early-9th-century reign of Senaleg known as the Sbug-’bum, containing within it a version of the Mother translated in the late 8th century. He adduces further reasons for believing in its genuineness, including a literary reference to a fire-damaged Mother manuscript from Karchung.**

(*I’m not sure what Sbug-’bum means, are you? Sbug might mean a tunnel, a pipe or a pouch.) (**This text was itself found in Drepung; I could succeed in locating its title listing in the Drepung catalog, at page 1648, in case anyone would like to check it. Kawa gives the title as Shes-rab-kyi Pha-rol-tu Phyin-pa Stong-phrag-brgya-pa-yi Chad-’jug Nyer-mkho Sgron-me, and dates it to the 13th century. I don’t recognize the author with his name given in Sanskritic or Tibskrit form as “Bikṣhu Maṃgā-la Purṇe,” although I think we may safely translate it back into Tibetan as Dge-slong Bkra-shis-phun-tshogs. This last, by the way, is an example of what I would call a re-Tibetanization of a Sanskritization. You can call it what you want.)

So even while I will never regard myself as an expert in this area, I do hope someone will take inspiration to look closely at the available evidence, as well as evidence that is bound to emerge in the future (the article assures us chances are high that the two missing volumes of the set will eventually show up.) Kawa Sherab Sangpo is to be congratulated for making his discovery known, and also for supplying very impressive evidence-based arguments that are bound to serve as solid basis for discussion in the future, or at least would be if they were only better known. I’ve done my part, for now. Still I do strongly suggest that future Lambum research take advantage of the astounding wealth of text-critical information found in the 1424 CE work of Rongtön.* Meanwhile we may say that, as far as books are concerned, Dunhuang’s monopoly on old is a thing of the past.** And this holds true even if the Lambum of Senaleg was scribed in Dunhuang. The battlefields of history are strewn with such small ironies.

(*I used a separate pecha publication of it for my dissertation, but I don’t seem to have any kind of copy at hand at the moment. Meanwhile, there has been a new publication of Rong-ston’s works that makes it more widely available. Here are the details for the pecha: Rong-ston Shes-bya-kun-rig (1367-1449), Shes-rab-kyi Pha-rol-tu Phyin-pa Stong-phrag-brgya-pa'i 'Grel-pa, Luding Labrang [Manduwala 1985].) (**A final footnote and I’ll try to keep it short and sweet. The initial Tibetan conquest of Dunhuang has been dated to 781 (Fujieda) or 787 (Demiéville) or 788 CE (Imaeda), although recently Horlemann has argued for pushing the date back to somewhere between 755 and 777. The occupation ended in 848. Scribing of Tibetan books continued after that date, and in fact lately there seems to be an emerging consensus that most of the Tibetan material of Dunhuang dates to the post-occupation period.)

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The essential sources:

Kawa Sherab Sangpo (Ska-ba Shes-rab-bzang-po), ed. in chief, Bod-khul-gyi Chos-sde Grags-can Khag-gi Dpe-rnying Dkar-chag, Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 2010). Look at p. 77 for more on Lambum discoveries.

Kawa Sherab Sangpo (Ska-ba Shes-rab-bzang-po), Btsan-po Khri-srong-lde-btsan-gyi [i.e., Khri-lde-srong-btsan-gyi] Thugs-dam Bla-'bum Skor Ngo-sprod Zhu-ba, Krung-go'i Bod Rig-pa, 2nd issue for the year 2009, pp. 55-61. I found this reference at the Bya-ra database, and haven’t seen the precise publication in person, although I’m sure it’s essentially identical to, or the same as, the next-listed title.

Kawa Sherab Sangpo (Ska-ba Shes-rab-bzang-po), Btsan-po Khri-lde-srong-btsan-gyi Thugs-dam Bla-'bum Skor Ngo-sprod Zhu-ba, contained in: Hildegard Diemberger and Karma Phuntsho, eds., Ancient Treasures, New Discoveries, Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung, series vol. 19, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies (Halle 2009), pp. 55-72.

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Appendix

Source: D. Martin, The Emergence of Bon and the Tibetan Polemical Tradition, dissertation, Indiana University (Bloomington 1991), pp. 87-93:

One of the greatest Sa‑skya‑pa intellectuals, Rong‑ston Shes‑bya‑kun‑rig (1367-1449), a Bonpo until age eighteen and reputed author of an anti-Chos polemic discussed elsewhere in these pages, composed, in 1424, a commentary on the Hundred Thousand Prajñāpāramitāentitled, Shes‑rab‑kyi Pha‑rol‑tu Phyin‑pa Stong‑phrag Brgya‑pa'i 'Grel‑pa. It is prefaced by a history of the introduction of the 'Bum (Tibetans know the Hundred Thousand also as the Yum, or 'Mother') into Tibet along with its subsequent translations and revisions. The reading involves some difficulties which could not always be resolved with much certainty, but I believe the content, due to its relevance for present arguments, warrants a provisional translation attempt.[i]Rong‑ston briefly outlines the origins of the Sūtra:

The most extensive version in one hundred million verses exists in the gandharva realm. The extensive version in ten million verses exists in the land of Indra. The extensive version in one hundred thousand verses was brought from the nāgarealm of Nāgārjuna.

As for its transmission to Tibet, Emperor Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan[ii]wanted to bring the sūtra to Tibet, so he gave much gold to Khams‑pa Go‑cha[iii]and sent him to India for that purpose. This was called the Memorized Translation (Thugs 'Gyur) because he [Khams‑pa Go‑cha] memorized the [Indian] text [rather than bringing the text itself] and brought it out in Tibetan. As a memorial (dge‑ba) to the queen, [the king had the translation] written with [his] own blood using goatsmilk as binder. This [text] was called the Red Abridgement[iv]in four parts. Later it was taken to Lhasa and became worn [old?]. It is said to be [contained] in the brick chorten near 'Phrul‑snang temple. Note: There are many recensions of this now in Central Tibet.

Still, the Emperor did not have confidence in [the authenticity of] the Memorized Translation, so he commanded Nyang Iṇḍa‑a‑ro and Sbas Manydzu‑shri to bring [an Indian text] from India. They brought back an Indian text and translated it. [This translation] was called the Authorized Hundred Thousand (Bca' 'Bum). They used indigo goatsmilk binder and this manuscript was called the Blue Abridgement (Ra Gzigs Sngon‑po).[v](A four-part manuscript, it is said to be [preserved] at Samye.) This [manuscript book] was not held together with a sash, but fastened with metal pegs. Hence it was called Having Iron Pegs.[vi]

Even this was not [yet] an extensive translation. So later prince Mu‑tig‑btsan‑po made a resolution [to have one made]. Then Pa‑gor Bai‑ro‑tsa‑na [Vairocana], who had reached the eighth Bodhisattva Level, compared the Indian text with the Having Iron Pegs and did an extensive revision. After he had, for the most part, established the text, he produced a six part manuscript [translation] more extensive than the previous ones. From the name of the binding boards it was called 'Snowy (Kha‑ba‑can) for the Royal Resolution.[vii]This is the Middle [length] High Translation (Bla 'Gyur 'Bring‑po). To the side of the place where it was kept there was a bat's nest. Hence it was called Having Bats (Pha‑wang‑can). This was not true of the original Indian manuscript; it is kept even now at Samye. Rngog Lo also did his translation after looking at the Having Iron Pegs.

Still later, Emperor Ral‑pa‑can invited many [Indian] teachers and they accomplished many great revisions of scriptures and commentaries. These Indians, as well as Tibetan teachers (including Dpal‑rtsegs and others) produced, among other [translations], the most extensive translation which was called Great High Translation. It also was in six parts.[viii]It was named Having Leather Meat Container (Sha‑sgro‑can) because of [the appearance of] its cloth wrapper. Later on, Rngog Lo[ix]would use the Indian manuscript introduced [to Tibet] by Ka [Ka‑ba Dpal‑rtsegs] and Cog [Cog‑ro Klu'i‑rgyal‑mtshan] for his own translation or revision.[x]

Thus Rong‑ston gives evidence for five different historical-textual levels in the Tibetan translations of the Hundred Thousand Prajñāpāramitā culminating in the version of Rngog Lo‑tsā‑ba.[xi]The older levels were preserved in specific manuscripts kept in specified places. He lists no less than sixty-five locations for ancient texts including an 'excavated text' (gter‑ma) at Khra‑'brug.[xii]He then supplies us with means for distinguishing between these various levels of translation both through textual means and by the numbers of chapters contained in particular parts. While this textual study by the great Tibetan scholastic should not be ignored by contemporary Buddhist text scholars, my reasons for citing it are more historical than text-critical. We may see from Rong‑ston's evidence that the early translations could be concealed in chortens and so forth.[xiii]They could then be excavated. The early translations were quite different from each other, but just how different remains to be seen only after a painstaking and detailed study of both the texts and Rong‑ston's study of them.

[i]For another version of the following information, see CRYSTAL MIRROR, vol. 5, pp. 157-158. The parenthetical material in the following translation is by the author Rong‑ston, or indicates Tibetan words or forms used by him. Material in square brackets has been added by myself for clarification.

[ii]SANGPO, Bod‑kyi Rgyal‑rabs (p. 487), cites a Sher Phyin commentary by Tsong‑kha‑pa who in turn cites the no longer extant scripture catalog of 'Phang‑thang to the effect that an extensive commentary on the Hundred Thousand was "written by the King," meaning Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan. [See also CONZE, Prajñāpāramitā, p. 34.] This deserves more investigation since, if proved authentic, it would demonstrate a considerable interest in religion on the part of the Emperor, even if the commentary was 'ghosted'. Some of the Emperor's other works are listed in SANGPO (op. cit.). It seems hardly credible that the Emperor actually composed such a necessarily lengthy work by his own hand. More likely he would have served as director or encourager in its production.

The Phang‑thang catalog was a listing of the scriptures and commentaries in the library of the pillarless temple (ka med‑kyi gtsug‑lag‑khang) with the numbers of verses and volumes in each text (see SANGPO, pp. 519-520). For more Tun‑huang documentary evidence for the importance of Chos, or Buddhism (nang‑gi Chos, Sangs‑rgyas‑kyi Chos) in the time of Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan, see SANGPO (p. 437). The Phang‑thang 'Mansion' (Khang‑mo‑che) was located in the Yarlung Valley (SANGPO, p. 425). Since it is said that the palace of 'Phang‑thang was swept away in a flood in the time of Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan (as stated in 'GOS, Deb‑ther Sngon‑po, pp. 68-9), then the catalog must date from his time (although it could have been rebuilt). It is said that the 'Phang‑thang catalog was compiled in the time of Sad‑na‑legs, and that a third catalog, that of Mchims‑phu library, once existed (see CRYSTAL MIRROR, vol. 7, p. 321).

The Rgya‑cher Bshad‑pa commentary attributed to Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan would seem to be the one now included in the Tanjur as the work of Daṃṣṭrasena (CONZE, Prajñāpāramitā, p. 33). A commentary on the Hundred Thousand is mentioned, along with the Bka' Yang‑dag‑pa'i Tshad‑ma (on which see STEIN, 'Un mention'), as written by the king based on instructions from Śāntarakṣita (see GU‑RU BKRA‑SHIS, Bstan‑pa'i Snying‑po, vol. 1, p. 444.2 and YAR‑LUNG JO‑BO, Chos‑'byung, p. 62). DPA'‑BO, Mkhas‑pa'i Dga'‑ston [1986], p. 401, says,

Although the catalog 'Phang‑thang‑ma speaks of a great commentary on the Hundred Thousand Mother in seventy‑eight fascicles as being made by Khri‑srong, since Allknowing Bu[‑ston] tells us that the catalogues Mchims‑phu‑ma and Ldan‑dkar‑ma both describe it as an Indian text, it is the Hundred Thousand commentary by Daṃṣṭrasena [that is being referred to].

[iii]This Khams‑pa Go‑cha is also important in the story of the first transmission of the 'Bum into Tibet as told in O‑RGYAN‑GLING‑PA, Bka'‑thang Sde Lnga, pp. 752‑754 (chapter 15 of the "Lo Paṇ Bka'i Thang‑yig"). He is listed among the first thirteen Tibetan Buddhist monks in LDE'U, Chos‑'byung, p. 358.

[iv]Ra Gzigs Dmar‑po. I read 'Gzi' for 'Gzigs', which might be translated 'Red Splendid Goat'. The thirteenth century history by LDE'U (Chos‑'byung, p. 362) also tells the story of Ra Gzigs Dmar‑po, but places it, interestingly enough, in the reign of the later Emperor Ral‑pa‑can. A modern account ('BROG‑MI, "Gzhung‑chen Bka' Pod", p. 103) tells that the ink for this manuscript, called Reg‑zig Dmar‑po, was made from Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan's 'vermillion blood' (mtshal) and the milk of a white goat. Reg‑zig is an Old Tibetan word for zin‑bris, 'summary' or 'abridged presentation' (See BLANG, p. 301.3). Thus it seems that the "Ra Gzigs" represents a later attempt to etymologize an obsolete term, and I have chosen my translation accordingly. The reading Reg‑zig is also found in ZHU‑CHEN, Chos‑'byung, p. 103.2; and KONG‑SPRUL, Shes‑bya Kun Khyab, vol. 1, p. 450.

[v]According to 'BROG‑MI, "Gzhung‑chen Pod Lnga" (p. 104), the ink for this manuscript was made from the Emperor's 'burnt hair indigo' mixed with the milk of a white goat. (KONG‑SPRUL, Shes‑bya Kun Khyab, vol. 1, p. 450, agrees.)

[vi]The text has Lcags Thur‑can. It may be that this bears some relation to the word khyung‑thur‑can, used in literary contexts to refer to armor or helmet. (CHANG, Dictionary, p. 266.) The word thur‑ma may mean 'peg, rod, awl, spoon' (among other meanings; ibid., p. 1177). We find mentioned a Lcags Phur‑can handed on to a younger son while the elder son received the abbacy of Smra‑bo‑lcog (an early Nyingma monastery belonging to the descendents of Nyang‑ral Nyi‑ma‑'od‑zer) from their father, Gsang‑bdag Bdud‑'dul. Nothing in the context tells us that Lcags Phur‑can is the name of a Sher Phyin manuscript, although I am at a loss to explain it otherwise. See GU‑RU BKRA‑SHIS, Bstan‑pa'i Snying‑po, vol. 3, p. 409.4.

[vii]Thugs‑dam is a multi‑purpose high honorific word which covers all sorts of high intentions, resolutions and aspirations. One of Khri‑srong‑lde‑brtsan's 'resolutions' was to build Samye. The word is also used in the Old Tibetan text cited in an earlier note. SOG‑BZLOG‑PA, Bka'‑thang Yid‑kyi Mun Sel, p. 88.3, is a bit confusing, but he seems to call the twelve volume (poṭhi) version translated by Vairocana the Rgyal‑po'i Bla 'Bum Sha‑sgro‑can (compare the name of the version made under Ral‑pa‑can, according to Rong‑ston). 'BROG‑MI, "Gzhung‑chen Bka' Pod" (p. 104) agrees, saying that this manuscript translation, which exists at Mchims‑phu, was known as Sha‑sgro‑can, i.e., the name of the manuscript that Rong‑ston attributes to the time of Ral‑pa‑can. KONG‑SPRUL, Shes‑bya Kun Khyab, vol. 1, p. 451, also calls the manuscript translation made by Vairocana the 'Bum Sha‑sgro‑can, but adds that it exists "even now" (i.e., in about 1864) at Mchims‑phu.

[viii]According to 'BROG‑MI, ibid., p. 104, this translation was in sixteen parts.

[ix]'BROG‑MI, ibid., p. 105, says that Rngog Lo Blo‑ldan‑shes‑rab based his revision on a [Sanskrit] text found at Pham‑thing (modern Pharping?) in Nepal.

[x]Text in RONG‑STON, Shes‑rab‑kyi, pp. 5.1 ff. Check for comparison also MKHYEN‑RAB‑RGYA‑MTSHO, History [A], p. 194.2 ff, for history of Prajñāpāramitā translations. DZA-YA, Thob-yig, vol. 4, pp. 404 ff. are also of interest.

[xi]Note the statement to this effect in RONG‑STON, Shes‑rab‑kyi, p. 9.4.

[xii]RONG‑STON, Shes‑rab‑kyi, p. 8.6. The imperial period temple at Khra‑'brug was a common site for textual excavations.

[xiii]For example, in the funerary chorten of 'Jig‑rten‑mgon‑po (as mentioned in a previous note), a Hundred Thousand text, along with Vinaya texts which Atiśa had brought from India, and many relics, among them 'Jig‑rten‑mgon‑po's own skull and brain (see KÖNCHOG GYALTSEN, Prayer Flags, p. 43) were enclosed. We might note also that most guides to the sacred objects at Samye Monastery mention the existence of Hundred Thousandmanuscripts from the imperial period at the Aryapalo Ling Temple.

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Postscript: Since writing the above words, the ’Phang-thang-ma catalog has appeared in print and has even been subject of a major study by Georgios Halkias. (Tap HERE if you would like to see the PDF version.)

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The text on the top leaf of the Lambum of Senaleg (based on p. 61 of the article) in Wylie transcription:

dpal lha btsan po khri lde srong btsan gyi thugs dam glegs bam bzhi pa ’di / skar chung gtsug lag khang mes tshig pa thal ba’i gseb nas ma tshig par byon pa lags byin gyi rlabs shin tu che ba yin no / slad nas lding gi dgon par dpe’ dag pa gcig la gtugs nas sum thug gcig dang lan gnyis byas / yi ge’i sdebs ni bcos pa ma grub / ’gyur ni reg gzigs lags gzab par zhu //

e ma'o / rgyal ba'i thugs dam 'bum po che / 'di ka sgrog pa'i mchod gnas pa rnams kyis gzab par zhu / dar Xres pa dang / go zhing che ba dang dri mas zos pa de lhag par snyi bar gda' bas zur nas bzung la / phyag gnyi gas bsgyur bar zhu / bam po'i khrid de ma byas na legs / 'di kun la gces pa lags so /

This last bit begs people to treat the volumes with care, to hold the pages by their edges and to turn them using both hands. Perhaps I’ll try for a complete translation another time. Meanwhile, take care.

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A final appendix (July 8, 2012):

Was the Lambum of Emperor Senaleg scribed in Dunhuang?

After doing a little experiment, I’m now fairly convinced the answer is Yes.

Method? I simply went to volume 3 of the Lalou catalogue (the volume where most of the Mother manuscripts are listed), took the names of the scribes that were supplied by Kawa and looked them up in the volume index. To make it simple, I’ll tell you the results before I give you the evidence. I do think it quite significant that some of the family/clan names are matches, but the real clincher is that two full names are perfect matches: Phab-ting is found as a scribe name 4 times in Lalou. Phab-dar occurs there twice. Also certainly worthy of note is the fact that in the O.T. Mother manuscript scribal colophons you often find the exact same syntax as found in the Lambum, with the scribe listed first, followed by the three proofreaders/checkers.

The samples of lists of Lambum scribe names are found in Kawa’s article, p. 64. These listings are said to be found in the KHA volume, fols. 35, 44, 55, 75 and so on — in other words, at regular intervals. In each of these little scribal/editor colophons you find first listed a scribe, then a checker (zhus), a further checker (yang zhus) and a tertiary checker (sum zhus). I have marked what I found out by looking at Lalou's catalogue in red, with her catalog nos. in square brackets.

khong g.yu legs bris / √similar names, but not this one.

dam tsong zhus // √similar name Dam-dzong [1429], but not this one.

sgron ma yang zhus // √

seng ge sdes suṃ zhus / √

on fol. 140:

song stag skyes bris // √similar name Song Stag-rma [1452], with many Song family names.

dam tsong zhus // √repeat.

phab ting yang zhus // √the name Phab-ting found 4 times [1324, 1372, 1404, 1429].

ji kyin suṃ zhus / √similar names, but not this one.

Again,

keng g.yu zhe bris // √possibly Keng occurs as a family name, but this name not found.

che'u jing zhus // √not found.

seng ge sdes yang zhus // √repeat.

phab ting sum zhus / √repeat (see above).

Again,

je'u hing cin gis bris // √Je'u occurs a number of times as a family name, but this particular name not found.

dam tsong zhus // √repeat.

ceng se'u yang zhus // √I find the rather similar name Cang Se'u-hwan.

phab dar suṃ zhus // √the name Phab-dar is found twice [1340, 1344].

§ § §

A final final appendix! (Nov. 3, 2012)

I place this photo here just to draw your attention to the added note in the comments. Here you see a photo of an elderly woman doing puja offerings in front of the Kwa Bahal's Perfection of Wisdom manuscript.

I stumbled upon this photo here. I trust my readers will recognize that it is verily a book between those long heavy binding boards.

↧

Ear Sleepers and Other Peoplers of an Earlier World

August 28, 2012, 2:18 am

≫ Next: The City in the Sky Illusion

≪ Previous: 1,200-year-old Perfection of Wisdom Uncovered in Drepung

One of the myths we still find among our contemporaries (I almost said moderns) is this: that everybody in the past thought the world was flat — that is, before Columbus proved to them it wasn’t. We today are categorically superior thanks to our new knowledge that it’s spherical. Say it loud! We’re modern and proud!* Somehow or another this rough and rude version of scientific history has worked its way into so many people’s brains, it’s pathetic. A few more words on that before we get to the ears...

(*During the last half of the 20th century, and probably still earlier, historians have been proclaiming this idea, that all pre-Columbians believed the earth was flat, a myth. But it is the nature of certain types of myths that the role they play in a culture is too important to abandon them. Besides, who would ever think to ask a historian about history? Their long involved answers would just provoke perplexity or put you to sleep, right? But if you have a few minutes to spare and you think I’m talking nonsense about early knowledge of the spherical earth, go see the Stern piece listed below. Then come back.)

I was long eager to get my hands on a copy of McCrindle’s translation of the Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes, and when at last I did I read the whole thing through in about 20 sittings. You may remember Cosmas. He’s the one who in around the mid-6th century seemed to know a few secrets about the Bos grunniens, a creature known in common parlance as the yak. He calls it the Agriobous. We mentioned this earlier on, in Yaks, a Few Useful Bits.

Cosmas assumed very passionately that Christians had (or more accurately ought to have had) the same superior view of the world he had. Clearly, for Cosmas, it’s shaped like a shoe box, only it is divided into a lower compartment where we live, and a higher compartment where we might go, since Jesus made an opening that we can squeeze through if we do the right things. The altitude of our otherwise flat earth gets higher and higher the further north we go (as you go through the climes, you climb!), and the weather (the clime-ate) gets colder. Somewhere up there in the north is a mountain that the sun and moon revolve around. That’s why sometimes you see these celestial luminaries and, well, sometimes you just don’t.

I’m afraid my respect for Cosmas went down a few notches every time I heard him blasting the pagans once again for thinking the world is round and for stubbornly refusing to face the undeniable fact it’s a shoe box. About the only thing that saves his book, really, are some brief passages based on his own travels. This Egyptian, who says a lot of interest for Ethiopian studies, I ought to add, made it all the way to Sri Lanka. Unfortunately he didn’t feel it was interesting enough to tell us more about what he saw on his travels, so obsessed was he by his cosmological arguments.

It was only a few years ago I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama saying to an audience made up of both Tibetans and non-Tibetans that if Vasubandhu, the author of the Abhidharma Treasury, were alive today he would have written his book differently. I’m fairly convinced He meant primarily the 3rd chapter, the one with all that cosmology wrapped around a wee bit of geography. Much of what you find in that chapter is also in Maudgalyāyana’s much older text, the Lokaprajñapti, that may date from a century or two before the Common Era.

Very recently I discovered to my consternation that I wasn’t the first to see the similarities between Vasubandhu’s and Cosmas’ world systems. This had already been the subject of quite a long discussion by none other than the missionary Desideri of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, who was in Tibet at the beginning of the 18th century. I’d like to be able to claim that I’ve read Michael Sweet’s new complete translation of Desideri’s missionary account, but the fact is, although the book is sitting up there on its shelf, I first located the passage through Googlebooks. I will read the book, I promise. But for the moment let me go right to that interesting passage to give you a few tastes of it. It’s too much for me to type, and anyway, I think you ought to go to the book itself. By that I mean the printed one.

[p. 345]

“They [the Tibetans] say that our terraqueous world is not round in the form of a globe, but level, flat, and circular, and at the center of this circle they situate an extremely high and immense mountain called Rirap Chenpo... Around this mt. or very close to it is the principal, largest, and noblest part of the earth that they call Dzambuling, that is, Asia...

“Dzambuling... is surrounded by seven immense circular seas. In the first of these seas are four vast islands, the first located to the north of dzambuling, the second to the south, the third to the west, anmd the fourth to the east... They give out the fallacious belief that the seven seas differ from one another in taste and color... They say that Dzambuling is where the most virtuous human beings are born...

[p. 346]

“They do not maintain that sun, moon and stars move and rotate in the heavens but rather around Rirap Chenpo., and that it takes a period of 24 hours for the sun to make a complete rotation around it...

“From the cosmology as described in the Tibetan's books, one is led to the obvious conclusion that the ancient people and pagans of Hindustan, from whom the Tibetans took most of their books, had adopted in its entirety, or nearly so, the system propounded and explained by the 5th-century Alexandrian author Cosmas the Egyptian. He was also known as Cosmas Indicopleustes, since he had traveled around almost all of India when he was a merchant...

[p. 347]

“According to his system the world and the surface of the earth is a quadrangle, such that its longitude from east to west is twice as great as its latitude from north to south. This is precisely what the Tibetans assert about Dzambuling. He also holds that the earth so shaped is completely enclosed by high walls...

“In order to explain day, night, and eclipses, Cosmas says that in the extreme north of the quadrangular earth there is a very high and massive cone-shaped mountain around which the sun, moon, and stars revolve. When the sun is on the side facing us, it is visible and day, and when it turns around to the other side of the mountain it is night...”

There are similarities between the two geographies. This is especially so if we ignore the big difference in shape: Cosmas has a square shoebox shape that is portrayed in an illustration that goes back to an old manuscript version that was recopied, evidently (that means it’s likely this and the other illustrations, even if recopied as we have them, look a lot like the ones Cosmas put in his book):

Depicting the sun in the west and the sun in the east,
circling the northern mountain. I suppose
India would be on your far right.
The dark area would be the seas
with Persian Gulf, etc.

The Indian and Tibetan Buddhist cosmologies are in the round, at least, with most things coming in circles around other things. But if we limit ourselves to the land mass we live on being located to the south of the cosmic mountain — this being the conical mountain around which the sun and moon regularly circle (rather than around the whole spherical earth) — they are in these broad outlines very much the same. Desideri is right about the generic similarity even if he messed up on a few other things.*

(*Some are details, but his placing four continents in a circle arrayed around Jambu Island is mistaken; Jambu Island is the southern one among those four continents, and it’s triangular in shape, a not-so minor detail, and yet another difference, of which he is at first aware and then fails to notice: For Buddhists the world is not square... Well, a yellow square might be a symbol of the earth element, but that's the earth element, not the world. The square you see in the chart just below is just Mount Meru seen from above. We don’t live on it; we live in Jambu Island. Oh, and the cosmology of Vasubandhu is far older than the time of Cosmas, so the idea that the latter must have been copied by the former is totally untenable...)

Mt. Meru surrounded by the continents
(Jambu Island is in the south on your left)
See the “original” at HAR

Everything I’ve said so far is fairly beside the point, as it has so little to do with those Ear Sleepers. First a personal anecdote that might help bring things together (in my head, even if nobody else’s). Way back in nineteen hundred and ninety-two, I remember seeing a display in the lobby of the university library. There were a bunch of oversized posters commemorating the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by C.C. If you were around then, you will know that there was a lot of justifiable debate about how and in what way various people living in the U.S. would or could or ought to celebrate this occasion.

Standing in front of one of them, I let out an audible gasp. The western world was being berated for (once or now?) thinking that the other peoples in the world were a bunch of ludicrous monsters, people who sleep in their ears, ski on their feet, have eyes in their chests and all that jazz. A group of them was depicted there bigger than life. Clearly it was meaning to tell us that the western world is guilty of the grossest discrimination. Why the gasp? The ignorance took my breath away. The maker of this propaganda (oh, sorry, educational) show didn’t show the least awareness that these alien beings were imported as a group from India by the Greeks,* or that the Greeks passed them on to the medieval western world.

(*It looks like Megasthenes picked up the stories when he was in Pataliputra — that's Patna today — and they were extracted and reviewed later on by Strabo.)

India’s contributions are often neglected or belittled, to be sure, yet I’m not sure India will be all that eager to receive credit in this particular instance. Nevertheless the fact is you do find lists of these unusual peoples in the Indian epic literature, you find them in certain geographical passages in Indian Buddhist literature, and last but not least, you find them here and there in Tibetan literature, both translations and Tibetan compositions.

For a list that was transmitted to us in both Buddhist and Bon texts, look at Figure One, toward the end of the file attached below. Near the end of Fig. 1, you will see (to translate the Tibetan of some of the ethnonyms): Noseless Flat-Faces, Huge Ears Covering Bodies, Winged Ones, Naked No Body Hair, Human Bodies Walking Hunched Over, and Eyes in Chests. The Eyes in Chests are, of course, the Blemmyes. You noticed the Enotocoitae, I hope, although the Sciapods aren’t in evidence here for some unknown and probably unknowable reason.

The article (a rather technical one that I do not recommend to any but your most aberrantly Tibeto-logical of personalities) is one about the history of Tibetan geographic conceptions that I wrote and published a long time ago. It is now posted at Tibetological website, on its own page, here (tap on that word here to go there, or tap on the following, either way).

Tibet at the Center
(Tibetological)

Enjoy yourself with that if you possibly can. If you need me I’ll be snuggling into my own capacious and comfortable ear. If it gets a little chilly, no need for a quilt, I’ll just pull the other one over me. Life is good.

Readings both amazing and necessary

Blo-bzang-yon-tan wrote a piece on a globe kept in Tibet. There’s even a picture of this globe, which is supposed to have been at Labrang Monastery when Gendun Choephel was there. If you read contemporary Tibetan and your computer displays Tibetan unicode correctly, go study it at the Khabdha site and report back to us in the comments section, if you please. This essay goes quite a bit into the history of flat and globular earth theories, including, I see, the shoe box of Cosmas. I think sa'i go-la ('globe of the earth') is a 20th century expression, but go-la is a quite old borrowing from Sanskrit, where it has the same meaning. In my limited experience go-la is always applied to the sphere of the stars, and even then I don’t know if that usage in Tibetan goes further back than around 1700. As far as pre-Columbian Tibetan science is concerned, I think Stag-tshang Lo-tsâ-ba (1405-1477 or 1488) must have thought of the earth as globe-shaped, otherwise his idea about lunar phases being caused by the shadow of the earth wouldn’t make much sense... Would it?

Cosmas Indicopleuthes, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, J.W. McCrindle, tr., Hakluyt Society (London 1897), written in circa 550 CE. If you think you could actually read it on the screen, go here. It’s free.

Carol Delaney, “Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 48, no. 2 (April 2006), pp. 260-292. One of the chief aims of C.C.’s mission was to get enough gold to finance retaking the Holy Land from the Saracens. This is not exactly the story about him that is useful for inspiring young aspiring scientists to daydream about a future life as discoverer. See also Hamdani’s piece listed below.

J. Duncan M. Derrett, “A Blemmya in India,” Numen, vol. 49 (2002), pp. 460-474.

Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S.J., translated by Michael J. Sweet and edited by Leonard Zwilling, Wisdom (Boston 2010). Pages 346-348 are the most relevant for today. Here is a story about the book and its author, translator and editor.

Gendun Choephel (Dge-'dun-chos-'phel) wrote what has become for one sector of Tibetans a significant landmark on their path to the glories and wonders of modernization (and no doubt for some an excuse for rejecting everything of worth in their cultural past, that whole modernist polemic... you either buy the whole modern package or, well, you just don’t... we are familiar with the drill). To connect directly to the page of the Tibet Mirror in question, dated 1938, tap here. Click once on the newspaper page and it will be big enough to actually read it. I think it’s worth seeing even if you don’t want to read the Tibetan.

Abbas Hamdani, “Columbus and the Recovery of Jerusalem,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 99, no. 1 (January 1979), pp. 39‑48, at p. 43.

My note: Columbus took with him on his first voyage a Jewish convert to Christianity by the name Luis de Torres to act as an Arabic interpreter. Upon arrival in Cuba, which Columbus thought was China, he sent Luis into the interior thinking he would locate the court of the Mongol Khan and be able to communicate with him. Columbus' explorations grew out of a medieval Christian crusading mentality, and this fact or facet of his character is now generally ignored in favor of the (secular) scientific discovery ideal that we would like to inculcate in our children.

Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, tr. Stephan A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 2010). Isidore (ca. 560-636 CE) believed the earth was a wheel-shaped disk, which makes him more like a Buddhist than Cosmas was. For his cosmology, see XIV.ii, and for the Panotians of Scythia, “who have such huge ears that they cover all the body,” see XI.iii.19.

Matthew T. Kapstein, “Just Where on Jambudvîpa Are We? New Geographical Knowledge and Old Cosmological Schemes in Eighteenth-Century Tibet,” contained in: Sheldon Pollock, ed., Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800, Duke University Press (Durham 2011), pp. 336-364.

Bacil F. Kirtley, “The Ear-Sleepers: Some Permutations of a Traveler’s Tale,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 76, no. 399 (April 1963), pp. 119-130. The story is surprisingly widespread all the way to the southern tip of South America, but this author still thinks it most likely that the place it was first recorded, India, must have been the place from which it spread. There are dissenting voices who hold that New World peoples had ideas about their other peoples that were in fact similar, but not borrowed. Then there are those like Mason who see this as evidence of the European monologue, Europeans projecting their own accustomed models of alterity on to the subjectivities of other peoples in the absence of any real or significant communication with them...

Berthold Laufer, “Columbus and Cathay, and the Meaning of America to the Orientalist,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 51, no. 2 (June 1931), pp. 87-103.

From p. 96: “Pigafetta who accompanied Magalhaens on the first voyage round the world records a story told him by an old pilot from Maluco: The inhabitants of an island named Aruchete are not more than a cubit high, and have ears as long as their bodies, so that when they lie down one ear serves them for a mattress, and with the other they cover themselves. This is also an old Indo-Hellenistic creation going back to the days of the Mahâbhârata (Karnapravarana, Lambakarna, etc.) and reflected in the Enotocoitai of Ctesias and Megasthenes. As early as the first century B. C. the Long-ears (Tan-erh) also appear in Chinese accounts; their ears are so long that they have to pick them up and carry them over their arms.”

Peter Mason, “Seduction from Afar: Europe’s Inner Indians,” Anthropos, vol. 82 (1987), pp. 581-601.

Craig J. Reynolds, “Buddhist Cosmography in Thai History, with Special Reference to Nineteenth-Century Culture Change,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (February 1976), pp. 203-220.

[p. 219] “The task of rethinking Buddhist cosmography in Siam was accomplished smoothly compared with a similar process underway in Japan, where Buddhists were sometimes hostile to the propositions of Western science. For Siamese Buddhists, the centering of the universe around Mt. Meru never assumed the importance it did for Japanese Buddhists, some of whom defended Buddhist cosmography as late as i88o, fearing that Christianity would undermine Buddhist teaching.”

David P. Stern, “The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus.” Go there here. It seems the author works* for the Goddard Space Flight Center, and NASA. Here is his homepage, if you are an avid Flat Earther and would like to argue with him directly. (*Wait, now I see he’s retired.)

Strabo's Geography, Book XV, may be read here.

Vesna Wallace, “Cosmology, Astronomy and Astrology: A Bibliography.” If you’d like to look into these subjects in Buddhist sources and need some pointers, this is a much recommended bibliographical essay by a professor at Oxford. Go here. Have a look here while you’re at it.

Rudolph Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, Thames and Hudson (New York 1977). A classic study in the field of art history, the relevant chapters are 3, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” and 4, “Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East.”

T.V. Wylie, “Was Christopher Columbus from Shambhala?” Bulletin of the Institute of China Border Area Studies(Taipei), vol. 1 (July 1970), pp. 24‑34. The answer, I suppose, is “Yes.”

Zhang Zhishan, “Columbus and China,” Monumenta Serica, vol. 41 (1993), pp. 177-187. First appearance of the name of Columbus in a Chinese-language work (one composed by Giulio Aleni) is dated to 1623, where his name in Chinese sounds like Gelong. Later sources call him Kelun, Kelunbo, and in more recent times Gelunbo.

A Map of 1660, showing the world
according to Tycho Brahe,
Harmonia Microcosmica

- ~ -

"Columbus ('Kho-lom-'bog) he was of the school of thought of those who considered the realm of the world to be rounded or globular. He is the one who was the first to arrive from Yo-rob to the land of A-ri in the year 1492. He put together four rationales for the world being round, and these were checked and tested by the wise. Twelve years after this a man named A-mi-ri-kha made a map of A-ri and named the country after himself so that even now it's called the land of A-mir-kha. A-mer-kha became independent in 1776, and from then until the present year 1980, 204 years have passed. A bell that was rung on the day she got her independence (rang-btsan) is to be seen even today on display in Phi-lâ-tal-phi-ya."

'kho lom 'bog de ni 'jig rten gyi khams zlum po'am ril ril yin pa'i srol byed yin / de nyid yo rob nas 1492 lor a ri'i sar thog mar sleb mkhan yang red / de nyid 'jig rten khams zlum po yin pa'i rigs pa bzhi bkod 'dug / mkhas rnams brtags dpyad gnang / de las lo 12 'jug a mi ri kha / zer ba'i mi gcig gis a ri'i sa khra bzo bzung lung par rang gi ming btags pas / da lta'i bar a mir kha'i yul lung zhes zer / a mer kha'i lung pa 1776 rang btsan byung nas da lta 1980 bar lo 204 song / rang btsan thob pa'i nyin dung ba'i dril bu phi lā tal phi ya'i 'grems ston khang la da lta'ang yod.

— Sgo-mang Dge-bshes Ngag-dbang-nyi-ma (1907-1990), Works, vol. 6, pp. 573‑574.

- ~ -

Note: If any of this inspires or provokes discussion, please do leave a comment. I'm all ears. Really. Even if it’s only to say you despise me for what I’ve written, it will be so much better than all those spam postings I’ve been getting lately. They always have compliments about the blog, but with back-links to web pages selling Italian leather handbags, trips to Tibet and such. I delete them, of course, but being targeted by them makes me a little sad and wastes my time.

Oh, another thing. If the Sciapods are missing from the Tibetan lists there could be a reason for that, and all this time I’ve been laboring under a false etymology for their name. Isidore (XI.iii.23) says, “The race of Sciopodes are said to live in Ethiopia; they have only one leg, and are wonderfully speedy. The Greeks call them skiopodes (shade-footed ones) because when it is hot they lie on their backs on the ground and are shaded by the great size of their feet.” It seems there was some mental juggling and fumbling going on between the people of the antipodes (with feet facing the opposite direction as ours... Isidore found the idea highly unlikely - IX.ii.133), and people who had feet with the toes facing backward, and the shade footed ones who lived in a place so hot we can’t go there and find out more about it. In maps that came after Isidore, lands of people with wide feet were starting to get their own continent in the unknown zone south of sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps the Asians* weren’t yet familiar with this place either. And like (some of) you, I was imagining how they might have been gliding over the snowy hills in their bare feet.

(*“Asia is named after a certain woman who, among the ancients, had an empire in the east. It lies in a third sector of the globe, bounded in the east by the rising sun, in the south by the Ocean, in the west by the Mediterranean, in the north by Lake Moeotis [i.e., the Sea of Azov] and the river Tanais [i.e. the Don]. It has many provinces and regions, whose names and locations I will briefly explain, beginning with Paradise.” XIV.iii.1. What a nice place to begin.)

↧

The City in the Sky Illusion

September 6, 2012, 6:54 am

≫ Next: Three Recent and Rare Tibetological Books

≪ Previous: Ear Sleepers and Other Peoplers of an Earlier World

Trouble concentrating on your work? Keep seeing things that very probably aren’t there? Or at least aren’t there in the way they would seem to be there? You may be sure you are not alone.

Somehow when I did the blog about the floor/water confusion illusion — the one that explains how the Jokhang Temple got its original name — I overlooked something very important, something we might even call a game changer. It’s often been my experience that just when I thought I had something all figured out, that was practically the same moment when something new came up and the bottom fell out.

Could it be that India is, once again, the source of a Eurasian phenomenon? Does an Indian epic story date further back than the story told about the queen of Sheba? We really must ask this question, although answering it... well...

One thing Lethaby mentioned briefly in the long piece of his quoted in that blog, but that I failed to go into, is the story from the Mahabharata Epic. This surely must count as one of the oldest accounts, or even perhaps the oldest of them all. Duryodhana's humiliation he felt from Draupadi's scornful laughter is sometimes seen as the true cause of the great universal-scale battle at Kuru Field. If you’re not familiar with Indian epic, I’ll just send you to video versions at the end of today’s blog rather than spoil the plot for you. There you will learn about the miraculous city of Indraprastha, built by Vishvakarman, the divine craftsman. When Delhi was founded, Indraprastha was nearby, or at least its ruins were, but now it is believed that New Delhi has long ago swallowed up and digested its original site. If you’ve been to Delhi you would know that some intangible something of Indraprastha still remains there. More on Indraprastha soon, but now let’s look at another city, a city of the disappearing kind.

“The Sampuṭa says:

‘The same as Haricandra’s city,

appearing like play in a dream.’

“There was once a city called Harikela near the ocean in southern India. In the summertime, when rain fell during the night and the sun shone during the day, a reflection appeared in the sky in the shape of the city, down to the exact people and animals. The Indian commentaries on the Sampuṭa say that a reflection appeared of Haricandra (a past king of that country) and his retinue going to Khecara without having discarded their bodies. In any case, that type of appearance arises from the combination of those dependently arisen connections: the rain falling in the night, the clear dawning of the sun in the morning, and the traveling of King Haricandra to Khecara.”

— Source: Cyrus Stearns' fabulous book of translations, Taking the Result as the Path, Library of Tibetan Classics (2006), p. 438, in a section supplying examples of illusory appearances, in a work by Jamyang Khyentsé Wangchuk (1524-1568). Khecara means 'sky life' or heaven.

I doubt anyone has noticed, but illusions have featured regularly in Tibeto-logic blog. Some of these are illusions we share, some are limited to myself, while others are entirely your own, not that you would ever know, or want to know that. Sometimes I think this blog is an illusion. I mean, it shows up on the screen, but is it actually there in the way it appears to be there?

• Videos for your vision (Don’t trust it! The vision I mean. At least not too far):

I recommend this short one (tap there in case you don’t see it appearing just above). Although it’s in Hindi you will understand practically everything if you have spent even one week in India. I mean, I think “Cha-lo!” is the first word every foreign visitor learns during their first trip on an Indian bus. It means "Let's go!"

There is a longer version, if you have time for it — one with English subtitles. It’s in one episode of the television serial version of the Mahabharata done by B.R. Chopra et al., in 94 episodes broadcast between 1988 and 1990. If you were so unfortunate as to need a taxi to the airport when this show was on the air, forget about it; you made a big mistake. You could have shouted Cha-lo! until you went hoarse and the cows came home for all anyone cared. Everybody regardless of their name was glued to TV sets wherever TV sets were to be found. The whole country was practically at a standstill. Go here to episode 44 and try to understand why. Wait about 20-some minutes into it for the watery floor episode.*

(*The linked video has English subtitles. It seems to load slowly, so go put on a pot for tea meanwhile. Only 13 people have viewed it as of today. That may seem like an unlucky number, but not really, and anyway, I predict it will change very soon. With this blog I celebrate the blog with the ultimate in auspicious numbers. This is number 108 since I started Tibeto-logic six years ago, almost to the day. Six years later and Dolma Kyab, a young man who featured in the first Tibeto-logic blog posting, is still in prison as a punishment for writing an unpublished book. My sister, who has written an excellent novel is, the last I heard, free from prison, but her book has not been published. Injustice is injustice regardless of where you find it. Oh, Happy Birthday Kim!)

~ ~ ~

Links for the fun of it:

Phantom cities like Harikela have shown up in other parts of the world. I can’t vouch for the truth of this one, but it sure is interesting.

And what about those legendary missing pagodas at Mahabalipuram in South India that miraculously reappeared during the Tsunami of 2004? Not exactly the same thing, of course, but fascinating anyway. Look here.

There was a magically projected city in the Lotus Sutra. Also not exactly the same thing.

In China a city appeared floating above the river on a cloud. This is the same thing, isn’t it? See this video filmed just last year, although it has elsewhere (look here) been debunked as a fraud. A fraudulent illusion? Who and/or what is deceiving who precisely?

What is a Fata morgana exactly? If it just means an illusion in which objects that are actually there appear to be much larger than is ordinary on the horizon, I’ve seen them plenty of times, and it would seem silly to pretend to debunk them. In that account of Harikela, there is an impressive amount of attention paid to the physical conditions necessary for such illusory visions to arise. But wouldn’t that just go to prove that illusions are very ordinary? natural even? Or that they are very much a part of our ordinary existence? Are we getting confused yet? Oh well, yes, I’d say the confusion goes back very far and runs quite deep. What evidence would make anyone imagine otherwise?

Frontispiece: Not a real Fata morgana, this building on a northern Taipei hilltop might appear to resemble one, which is about as close as I could get photo-wise.

Some amazing artwork
is to be seen
here.
Try not to fall in.

Highly recommended:

A time or two around on the Magical Mystery Tour ride at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen if such a ride exists (did it ever?).

↧

Three Recent and Rare Tibetological Books

September 24, 2012, 11:51 am

≫ Next: Kashgar Tiger

≪ Previous: The City in the Sky Illusion

A snapshot of the Templeman book cover

I assume anyone reading Tibeto-logic already knows how to do internet searches for book titles. They also probably know what are the most likely libraries and commercial sites where those titles might be acquired. I have made — and do make — exceptions to the no-commercial rule occasionally when [1] I can justify to myself that I don’t have any compelling personal or commercial interest in promoting the book* and [2] the book is too likely to be overlooked by those who would find it interesting (translated: worthy books by more obscure or indie publishers). Even then, I don’t think I’ll give you direct links to suppliers. Let’s just say these are rare species, and that this blog is one of those rarely granted hunting licenses — once you do find these books you can proudly display them as hard-won trophies on your shelves, brag to your friends how you battled all odds to get them, and you might even read them if you feel so inclined. Not to stretch the ironically-intended hunting metaphor further, rest assured what you will find here are friendly introductions — not so-called critical book reviews with their yawn-invoking typo hunting — so relax and keep reading, but only if you want to. We start with a tale of magic, an untimely death and of all things frogs.

(*I won’t ask you to buy my sister’s novel, no matter how much I think you should, and no matter how much difficulty I have restraining myself. I have a policy to attempt a strict boundary between Tibeto-logic and commercial concerns. That’s why, among other things, I zealously prescreen each comment to make sure there will be not even one spam posting. I hope you will never see ads on Tibeto-logic. Sometimes we literally have to fight to make our contested little islands on the internet about love of learning instead of commerce. Of late the spammers (the spambots? I doubt their humanity) have gotten quite aggressive, even sending in advertisements in Hindi and Russian using Devanagari and Cyrillic scripts. Why just a few minutes ago I got three different spam postings with links to dozens of women's shoe sellers. They often spout a few compliments — the proverbial deer head placed with care in front of the mule meat — and then back-link to some page selling Italian handbags, the filthy bastardini! This non-advertising policy of mine even extends to books, although this is the hard one. I mean, every reference to a book might in some sense be an advertisement for it. I’ll grant you that.)

Years ago while I was a young student struggling with Tibetan, my class was reading an amazing text about a woman who died and came back from the dead. My teacher insisted on reading one passage of it as saying that the woman had been made deathly ill through black magic after an enemy had put a dead frog under her mattress. The way I read it was that the woman was in the process of dying, and soon after leaving her body she looked down and saw what looked to her like a smelly frog corpse lying there on the bed. Although that’s what it looked like, it was in reality nothing else but her own dead body.

I guess all of us who have been students have experienced these small crises of confidence in our authority figures. Wisdom in hindsight is all well and good, but I must confess that at the time I was upset with my teacher. Now I think I overreacted. Shy person that I was, yet I had the temerity to suggest it would be possible to read it my way. Still he insisted, just to drive in his point adding in an instance of this kind of black magic being performed with frogs in some other place — the details of his argument are no longer clear in my mind. In any case the outcome was good, I better learned to respect people that don’t see things the same way I do, a very useful skill that requires constant testing and honing. And face it, there is no good reason to keep authority figures since we’re all just trying to do our best with what we’ve got under the conditions we find ourselves in.

So, it isn’t out of a sense of pride and vindication — really not — that I warmly welcome and recommend a new book by Daniel Berounsky of Prague. This book with the title The Tibetan Version of the Scripture on the Ten Kings (and the Quest for Chinese Influence on the Tibetan Perception of the Afterlife) covers an impressively large territory. We say this even though it does have a main focus in a single astounding text — one that doesn't really have a title — about the Buddhist hells. This is the kind of text that perhaps should not exist. It is a scripture, yet is not to be found in canonical catalogues of scriptures. It is in Tibetan (and most Tibetan scriptures by far are translated from Indian languages, predominantly Sanskrit), yet it contains clear signs of being translated from Chinese.

The Chinese text on the Ten Kings was subject of a 1994 book by Stephen F. Teiser. (No, it might help, but it isn’t necessary to read Teiser’s book first.) The Tibetan manuscript is graced by what might be considered folkish or naive painted illustrations (done in Tibetan style but with clear Chinese background most evident in the magistrates’ hats and so on, as you can see already on the cover) that are despite or because of that quite pleasing to the eye and fascinating in their content. These miniatures include some of the most gruesome and cruel scenes ever made available to us by the human imagination. (Coming from someone who just watched A Cabin in the Woods, I think my saying that means something.)

Part of the area covered are those revenants that Tibetans call passed-on returners or delog ('das-log), including that self-same woman who saw her body as a frog. Lingza Chökyi was her name. Was that a warm recommendation? Well, yes, it was. And if you want to read the story about the frog, the translation starts on page 58. Still, I should add, since it might create confusion: Through the magic of manuscript variations, the frog (sbal) has become a snake (sbrul). So be warned about that. I like this book very much. I enjoyed the reading of it.

One very unclear photo of the image at Triloknath

The contents of the volume from Monash University edited by David Templeman and entitled New Views of Tibetan Culture have already been described, with a listing of the individual titles and authors, at Indologica blog, here. These are all fine papers, each with its own laudable merits. Myself, I found most immediately fascinating the essay on the famous old Triloknath temple in Chamba by Diana Cousens. I hope you will get a chance to look at this book, otherwise you will be forced to find satisfaction in the fuzzy photo of its famous image you see above. D.C. located on the black market (Huh!?) a sharp and wonderful photo of it without the cloth that usually mostly conceals it. Cousens shows how a remarkable array of local and translocal secular and sectarian concerns converge and diverge on and from this small but culturally-historically (not to mention Buddhalogically) important image and the small temple that houses it — spirit mediums, sheep sacrificers, self-flagellators, dancers, drinkers, volley-ball players, picnickers and linga worshippers share the space with Buddhists. In other places, in other contexts, it is so often the case that disparate perceptions converge on a single object. Interesting to see how these tensions get dealt with, isn’t it...

Not intending to sound as if I’m criticizing the author for not doing what there was never any intention of doing, still I will say as an afterthought that there isn’t very much of the historical background here. That kind of material, although not all that abundant really, may be found elsewhere (especially in some works by Mahesh Sharma, listed at academia.edu, here). If you’re one of those oddballs that like looking into the past, I’d first recommend an old article based on an even older Tibetan-language guidebook to the temple. I have put up a page about it at Tibetological website, here, including a small bibliography. For the insufficiently Tibetolognoscenti, or for those who just try their best to avoid reading German, I send you instead to the life of Götsangpa, one of the early Tibetan visitors to Chamba, at Treasury of Tibetan Lives, here.

Number 3 on our list, but very high in our esteem is Francis Tiso’s Milarepa book. (Look for Francis Tiso in the sidebar for a rather dated CV.) Tibetologists need no introduction to Frank’s work on Jebtsun Milarepa (ca. 1050-1123). He wrote a dissertation over two decades ago entitled A Study of the Buddhist Saint in Relation to the Biographical Tradition of Milarepa, dated 1989, and perhaps available from UMI or Proquest if you have the necessary means. I fear it will be even more difficult to get this newer and further developed volume of Milarepa research: Liberation in One Lifetime: Biographies and Teachings of Milarepa, Proforma (Isernia 2010). Featured at the core of this book (as with the earlier dissertation) is a translation of the 13th-century Milarepa biography written by Gyeltangpa Dechen Dorjé (Rgyal-thang-pa Bde-chen-rdo-rje).

There is quite a lot going on in Milarepa studies in recent days, a lot of papers, books and dissertations, so many that it would be a weariness for all of us if we had to track down every last one of them. We might just mention that one of the most important younger researchers in this area is without a doubt Andrew Quintman. He has made a fresh new English translation of Milarepa’s most-read and best-loved biography (also published in 2010). There is an engagingly written piece* by Ruth Gamble in the just-mentioned volume edited by Templeman, to underscore a highlight or two in what would otherwise be a very long list.

But still, I believe not one among all the hosts of Milarepa-wallahs can very closely approach Tiso’s combination of skills. He is both competent and critical in the academic sense and empathetically engaged in the material in ways that make it resonate on a number of levels. He has an impressive breadth of knowledge, yet keeps his conclusions vulnerable (as one must, but really, how often do you see it?). If upon closer historical investigation we see some of the narratives fall apart, we can simultaneously sense the living forces that anyway made such narratives develop. We can intuit simultaneously what the life of sanctity meant to the tellers of the saint stories, and what it could mean to us. And even in the degenerate times we live in we might conceivably achieve these insights without falling into the early-21st-century Buddhist’s two extremes — those of pitiless de[con]structionism and newage-ish dis[con]figuration of tradition.

(*It has the title Laughing Vajra: The Outcast Clown, Satirical Guru and Smiling Buddha in Milarepa's Songs. It attacks the very good question whether or in what way Milarepa’s humor might be regarded as funny. This is a great contribution to the still-rarely-touched area of Tibetan humor studies. By the way, does anybody know the term Tibetans today are using for comic book? The question came up recently, and I didn’t have an answer handy... I still don’t. While we’re at it, what does the word shog-bkra mean to you?)

§ § §

Afterthought: I feel for the young Tibetanists of the world. There are so many new books coming out all the time. Some of them are just plain wonderful, but then far too often so are the prices. The only solution (short of selling the car, giving up vacations and mortgaging the apartment) is to stay close to a well stocked library without budgetary restraints if such libraries may be said to exist anymore. Perhaps you have one of those in your neighborhood. I feel I ought to reassure you that if you can find any of the three books featured in today’s blog (and I leave the finding up to you), then you are likely to be surprised how little they will cost. I mean, relatively speaking!

↧

Kashgar Tiger

October 30, 2012, 4:42 am

≫ Next: Panchen Lama IV, Kālacakra Prayer

≪ Previous: Three Recent and Rare Tibetological Books

Tibetan Emperor Trisong Detsen (reign ca. 756-797 CE),
with Mañjuśrī attributes of sword and book, Rubin Museum Collection

When Vairocana was a child, he was called, by his father I’d venture, by the name of Kashgar Tiger. This name held a special significance, not that I would expect anyone to know that. Precisely the contrary. The materials for drawing this conclusion are out there, but I believe they have not yet been put together. Some may know there is a two here and another two there, yet they haven’t bothered to add the one with the other to see the result.

If you are one of those highly unusual Tibetanists that haven’t heard the name Vairocana very much, just overlook what little remains of this blog and go directly to the Rangjung Yeshe Wiki to get acquainted ASAP.

I was looking once more at a book I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately, the history by Khepa Deyu, dated soon after 1260 CE. To give the context, Deyu continues an older Nyingma tradition started by Rongzompa in the early 11th century, by supplying his readers with an account of the successive ‘land-falls’ of Buddhist tantra in Tibet during the imperial and post-imperial period (that means, more or less, from the early 8th century through the decades surrounding the year 1000 CE).

I noticed something rather unusual about Deyu’s version. Rongzompa and every other Nyingma writer after him (it seems) have a set of seven such land-falls, while Deyu has ten (see Germano’s article, still the only thing there is about it). Also unlike the others, Deyu starts the chronological series with Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava instead of Buddhaguhya. The section I was looking at is that of the fifth land-fall, the one where Vairocana introduces Tibet to the Great Perfection or Dzogchen teachings of the Mental Class for the very first time.

Did Vairocana exist? No reason to be surprised by the question — I mean, some skeptics have asked just this question about Guru Rinpoche himself. People who are interested in the secular side of early Tibetan history are unwilling to step outside their corpus of secular Dunhuang documents (the OTDO is filled with these, or with non-Buddhist texts, with only one significant exception) to look at Tibetan Buddhist literature, even though by far most of the Dunhuang documents are indeed Buddhist scriptures. They are likely to treat what their colleagues in other realms of the humanities and religious studies are doing with disdain, or just ignore them.* All too predictably, one side is liable to say Guru Rinpoche didn’t exist, while the other side is bound to say he must have.

(*And of course people who are interested in the Dharma and its practices have no patience whatsoever with the secularist historians and their politics. The followers of the Dharma generally don’t even want to know if one or another of their saintly heroes might be mentioned in a stone inscription or in some old manuscript. They have faith and believe, so knowledge is not their problem. I’m not really talking about this type of practitioner today.)

The secularist historians don’t even want to hear a word about the subjects of what they will summarily dismiss as hagiography (even more tainted a word for them than historiography is). Both sides, in my view, can be real spoil-sports, blinkered in significant ways by their world views (that predict for them which items, which texts, are worthy of attention), more liable to head off our quest for truth and meaning than they are to help with it. I hope to show this in the case of one of these Buddhist saints, even if only in what looks like a minor detail, on only one of the multiple levels of conflict here in our Tibetological ghetto’s version of the two cultures.

I have no quick answer about the historicity of Guru Rinpoche, yet I’m quite convinced that Vairocana did exist, since we seem to have plenty enough ‘external verification’. This e.v. means a kind of triangulation used to coordinate points taken from sources of different nature or texts with disparate aims belonging to different lines of transmission. Doing this is supposed to result in greater certainty, to convince even those who are more skeptical than most. That’s what I figure I’m up to at the moment. (In an ideal blog, I would have brought in Bonpo testimony, since their histories also know of a 'Be-ro-tsa-na, but perhaps another time.)

Of course we shouldn’t (and won’t ever again) confuse him with the 12th-century teacher of Mahāmudrā named Vairocana, Vairocanarakṣita, and - a name uniquely his own - Vairocanavajra. We won’t mention that Vairocana again today.

Our late 8th- and early 9th-century Vairocana is attested in the 'Phang-thang-ma catalog of canonical texts kept in the library of the imperial palace of 'Phang-thang (see Halkias, p. 61; his name spelled Dpa'-khor Be-ro-tsa-na). And he is named in a wonderful small Dunhuang document concerned with Phurpa teachings. There he is called Ba-bor Be-ro-tsa, numbered among disciples of Guru Rinpoche (see the old translation by Bischoff and Hartman, p. 23, or the newer translation by Kapstein, p. 158, or the newest, the Mayer tr., to be mentioned later on).

Oh, and although I don’t think we are in a position to prove this just on the basis of a name held in common, our Vairocana could have been the Vairocana credited with inventing the Khotanese alphabet (well, if we can bring him into closer relationship with that part of Central Asia, then the possibility would gain strength, wouldn’t it? See Emmerick’s book, p. 21 et passim).

But let’s move this background to one side and zero in on the strange and funny name that Vairocana had as a child. This name is usually spelled something like Ga[n]-'jag-stag. Very relevant to our arguments, as it will turn out, his father had a funny name, too, something like Pa-gor He-'dod* (Deyu spells it Her-'dod). Odd as the Pa-gor part of it may look, it’s just a place in Tibet (we won’t go into its location right now, since we have so many other things on our plate), so it’s the He-'dod that is hard to understand. And the name of the child Vairocana has the element stag that surely does means tiger(even if spark would be another possibility), but it’s also an element in quite a few Tibetan names of the imperial period, so here it’s the Ga-'jag that is a problem.

(*Maybe it's Welsh hendad, meaning ancestor. Well, do you have any better idea? If his name were Hebdoad, I suppose that would make him some kind of Gnostic or Manichaean. Enough of this fun. I give up, for now.)

Ga-'jag as a place name was long ago identified, in quite another context, with a region in the vicinity of Kashgar in Central Asia. In Christopher I. Beckwith’s by now classic game-changing study of the Tibetan imperial period he noticed, in a footnote (no. 7 on p. 144), that Gan-'jag is simply a transcription of "Ganjak (the country above Kashgar) the language of which was mentioned by the medieval linguist" Kashgari. Someone else’s argument (look at pp. 8-9 the PDF here) prefers to find it closer to the mountain massif known as the Pamirs (there has been more discussion on this in an article by Denwood, not visible to me right now). I’d gladly change my title to Pamir Tiger, I’m just not sure yet. If truth be told, regardless of how it could embarrass me, I’m much more used to associating the name Ganjak with an Armenian historian by the name of Kirakos of Ganjak (d. 1272) and as an ordinary noun ganjak may be Armenian for stomach or gut, right? If you are not clear how far the Pamirs are from Kashgar, just go here, and then type in the box the words “Pamirs Kashgar.” This will show you they are about 200 kilometers apart. But for my purposes today I can afford to leave this quibble about exact location alone, 200 kilometers are not my biggest concern.

The true holy scripture of all secularist Tibetanist historians would have to be the Old Tibetan Annals. It gives yearly dated entries for a goodly span of early Tibetan history, from 641 to 765 CE (a few entries in between are lacking). The entries rarely give more than minimal information about where the Emperor spent the summer or winter, the places government meetings were held, alliances, new appointments of ministers, foreign expeditions and wars... exactly the kind of information craved by political historians, just not enough of it. Now we have a fine and fresh new translation by Brandon Dotson, and it is here, in the entry for the year 756 CE, that we find something very relevant to Vairocana, even if he is not directly mentioned. Judging from this it is quite sure Vairocana's father was an official imperial emissary to Central Asia, whether that means a place closer to Kashgar or the Pamirs, and in a more-or-less perfect time for Vairocana to be born. I'll quote the relevant part of the entry from Dotson’s translation (leaving off his notes and so on):

The Black Ban-'jag, Gog (Wakhan), Shig-nig, and so forth, emissaries of the upper regions, [all] paid homage. Pa-gor Na-'dod and Ce Snang-rtsan were proclaimed as reciprocal emissaries.

(For the Tibetan text, just go to OTDO and then search for "ban 'jag" or "shig nig." Shig-nig has been identified as Shughnan. Gog is of course the Gog of Gog and Magog. Ban-'jag according to Beckwith is just a minor glitch that should be read as Gan-'jag.)

Was I the only one who noticed the similarity between Pa-gor Na-'dod and Pa-gor He-'dod? Granted two such similar names could have been given to different people within the same family (for example, consciously giving a boy a name resembling his grandfather’s). Still, chances are good that one is just a scribal transformation of the other, a problem of the kind that bedevils Tibetanists at every turn, or so it sometimes seems. So it’s very likely that it was Vairocana’s father who was sent to Central Asia.

The name of the child Vairocana that is found in the hagiographies is also found in the Sba bzhed, a work that ought to be regarded (temporarily disregarding the complexities of its internal textual transformation history) among the oldest narrative historical sources we know about, along with the Old Tibetan Chronicles. What is more, this name finds its indirect but sure explanation in the secular bible of the Tibetological historicists, the Old Tibetan Annals. We’ve brought the secularists’ world view into a point of contact with that of the Dzogchen specialists. How do you imagine they will get along? Do you see any reason why they shouldn’t? (Get along, I mean.)

§ § §

Print publications:

Friedrich Bischoff and Charles Hartman, Padmasambhava’s Invention of the Phur-bu: Ms. Pelliot tibétain 44, contained in: Études tibétaines dédiées à la mémoire de Marcelle Lalou, Librarie d'America et d'Orient (Paris 1971) pp. 11-27. —— Forty years later, there is a newer translation of Pelliot tibétain 44 by Matthew Kapstein, and I believe Rob Mayer has done and will one day publish a study of it. Rob Mayer and Cathy Cantwell have written about the text in the 4th chapter of their recent book, Early Tibetan Documents on Phur pa from Dunhuang, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2008). There they supply what may be the first complete translation.

Philip Denwood, The Tibetans in the West, Part Two, Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology, vol. 4, no. 4 (2009), pp. 149-160. This is available if you have an institutional subscription to Brepols. I don’t.

Brandon Dotson, The Old Tibetan Annals: An Annotated Translation of Tibet’s First History, with an annotated cartographical documentation by Guntram Hazod, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2009). The relevant entry is on p. 129.

R.E. Emmerick, Tibetan Texts concerning Khotan, Oxford University Press (London 1967), with "ga-hjag" appearing at pp. 45, 71 and, on p. 94, simply identified as meaning Kashgar.

David Germano, The Seven Descents and the Early History of Rnying-ma Transmissions, contained in: Helmet Eimer and David Germano, eds., The Many Canons of Tibetan Buddhism, Brill (Leiden 2002), pp. 225-263.

Georgios T. Halkias, Tibetan Buddhism Registered: A Catalogue from the Imperial Court of 'Phang-thang, The Eastern Buddhist, new series vol. 36, nos. 1‑2 (2004), pp. 46‑105. You can now read this on your Kindle or whatever by first going to this page at Archive.org.

A.W. Hanson-Barber, The Life and Teachings of Vairocana, doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin (Madison 1984). H-B (on p. 43) finds the Tiger year date of Vairocana's trip to India, at the age of 15, to be the year 765 CE. If this is right he would have been 5 years old when his father was sent on his mission to Kashgar or its neighborhood. It seems at least one source has Pa-gor He-'dod as his uncle, not his father (see p. 50), perhaps even his adoptive uncle.

Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation and Memory, Oxford University Press (Oxford 2000). For a free PDF of an interesting article by this author about the tantra collection of Vairocana, look here. To see a list of titles from that tantra collection, go to TBRC at this page.

Samten G. Karmay, The Great Perfection: A Philosophical and Meditative Teaching of Tibetan Buddhism, E.J. Brill (Leiden 1988). There is a summary of the Great Mask biography of Vairocana at pp. 18-33. There is a freshly published new edition of this book, not yet at my fingertips.

Rob Mayer, Did Vairocana Have Lice? If you’ve been spending sleepless nights wondering about this, look here. You will notice this blog entry inspired quite a lively discussion.

Yudra Nyingpo (G.yu-sgra-snying-po), The Great Image: The Life Story of Vairochana the Translator, tr. by Ani Jinba Palmo, Shambhala (Boston 2004). I call it the Great Mask, not that it matters in the least. For Tibetan texts, try going to TBRC and searching for 'Dra 'bag chen mo. There is even a beautifully woodblock printed edition if you can get access to it.

Sba bzhed. For the text, look here. Then scroll down to p. 58 of it, and what do you see but this? — "pa gor na 'dod {he 'dod kyang zer} kyi bu pa gor bai ro tsa na." This says that Pa-gor Vairocana was son of Pa-gor Na-'dod, who is also, the inserted note says, called He-'dod. This does support and even seems to clinch our idea that the two names point to the same person. Have a look at p. 59, too. Then you may see that the Stein version of the text doesn't have the note, but simply gives the name of Vairocana's father as Pa-gor Na-'dod! The very name that is in the Old Tibetan Annals.

What could the Pamirs have to do
with the peak-of-peaks of Vehicles?

“When one has arrived at the summit of the King of Mountains,

all the lower valleys are seen at once.

“The valleys do not see the nature of the peak.

Just so, the Vajra Heart Ati

is the peak of peaks of Vehicles

which clearly sees the meanings of all the others.

“The lower Vehicles do not see the meaning of this Ati.

That is left for the time when they have arrived-at the naturally-arrived-at

peak.”

— Longchenpa, Chöying Dzö, chapter 7

_________________

Postscript:

I admit, in my efforts to juice up what may be a dry subject, I may have laid down the polemic a little too thickly. The truth is — as I notice just now as I’m poised to click on the “Publish” button — the Vairocana connections between the Sba-bzhed, Dba'-bzhed, Dunhuang text (PT 44) and the Old Tibetan Annals entry for the year 756 CE have been pointed out in a footnote already in a work published 12 years ago, effectively beating me to the punch. I’ll just give you the reference for now and consider my job done:

dBa' bzhed: The Royal Narrative Concerning the Bringing of the Buddha’s Doctrine to Tibet, translation and facsimile edition of the Tibetan text by Pasang Wangdu and Hildegard Diemberger, with a preface by Per K. Sørensen, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2000), p. 70, note 238.

The dBa'-bzhed, by the way, spells the father’s name as Pa-'or Na-'dod. The one connection that is made in today’s blog, and not made in that footnote, is the significance of the Kashgar Tiger name. So, OK, I guess I've at least succeeded in adding one small point for Tibetological consideration.

§ § §

Oh, and one last thing. I forgot to mention before that you can find a brief biography of Vairocana based on Dudjom Rinpoche's history, where else but at the Light of Berotsana webpage? Have a look at this PDF.

↧

Panchen Lama IV, Kālacakra Prayer

December 24, 2012, 12:18 pm

≫ Next: Younghusband's Looting Legacy

≪ Previous: Kashgar Tiger

In the spirit of the season of Holy Days, and to continue an old habit of mine, I'm making available to the world at large a somehow unusual, rare or splendidly crafted Tibetan text that happens to be in my possession. I'm sorry to say I don't know very much about the provenance of this woodblock print. The former owner in Lithuania told me it was bought by him near Lhorong seven years ago. Now with the help of Dropbox and your internet connection, it's also yours. I'm not sure what you will do with it, but my feeling is that it will serve as a source of merit for sentient beings whether or not anyone is paying attention. I thought to translate it for you, but the technical terminology of the Kālacakra Tantra, much of it connected to completion process practices, causes too many problems to even imagine translating it accurately. I guess I know some people who probably could do a fair job of it, so I'll leave it up to them. The paper is rather yellowed, but appears to be thin, smooth and modern, not the daphne paper Tibet was once famous for. The author is the Panchen Lama, the Fourth Panchen Lama to be precise, or Bstan-pa'i-nyi-ma (1781‑1853) the same one that was seen as a child by Samuel Turner in 1783. Here is how Turner described the young man:

"Teshoo Lama was at this time eighteen months old. Though he was unable to speak a word, he made the most expressive signs, and conducted himself with astonishing dignity and decorum. His complexion was of that hue, which in England we should term rather brown, but not without colour. His features were good; he had small black eyes, and an animated expression of countenance; altogether, I thought him one of the handsomest children I had ever seen."

pp. 335-6 in An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama, in Tibet (London 1800). Of course I use the 1971 reprint edition with the cat footprints on the cover, probably unique to my copy.

His collected works are available in nine volumes, although I haven't looked to see if this prayer is findable there or not. If you would like to check it yourself, go to Tibetan Buddhism Resource Center, work RID no. W6205. I typed the text in ordinary Wylie transliteration below. I promise to perfect my unicode Tibetan typing skills before too long. It needs some practice.

To download a scan of the Tibetan woodblock print of the prayer in the form of a PDF, go to

this link.

§ § §

|| || dus kyi 'khor lo'i lam yongs rdzogs kyi smon lam bzhugs so ||

oṃ bde legs su gyur cig ||

lhag bsam dag pa'i yid kyi zla shel ngos ||

dpal ldan dang po'i sangs rgyas dkyil 'khor pa ||

rab bkod mchod bstod bzlas pas mnyes byas pa'i ||

rnam dkar dge tshogs ma lus bsdoms pa'i mthus ||

skye dang skye bar theg mchog dge ba'i bshes ||

dam pa'i mgon gyis bral med rjes bzungs te ||

thun mong lam gyi rim pa'i bdud rtsi yis ||

yid kyi shel bum ma lus gang bar mdzod ||

byis pa ltar 'jug dbang bdun 'jig rten dang ||

'jig rten 'das pa'i dbang chog rnam ba bzhis ||

sku bzhi'i sa bon 'jog cing rim gnyis kyis ||

bsnyen sgrub nyan dang 'chad la dbang bar shog ||

dngos grub rtsa ba dam tshig sdom pa la ||

gnas nas rdo rje bzhi dag go bgos te ||

rdo rje'i shugs dang srung ma drug cu'i tshogs ||

bsgom pas bdud dang bgegs rnams tshar gcod shog ||

rnam thar sgo bzhi'i gnas lugs lhan skyes dang ||

dbyer med goms pas skye 'chi'i srid sbyong zhing ||

mkha' dbyings 'byung bzhi ri rab padma sogs ||

bsgom pas rdo rje'i lus kyi gnas rtogs shog ||

ye shes lnga yi rang bzhin pho brang du ||

sngo ljang las 'khrungs rnam bcas dpa' bo dang ||

rnam med phyag rgyas 'khyud pa'i ting 'dzin gyis ||

tha mal snod bcud ma lus sbyong bar shog ||

snyoms 'jug dga' ba'i sgra yis bskul gyur ba'i ||

dkyil 'khor padmar bzhugs 'ong lha tshogs rnams ||

spros pas bsnyen pa'i dkyil 'khor rgyal po mchog ||

bsgom pas phung sogs dri kun spyod par shog ||

yab yum chags pas bzhu bskul las bzhengs pa'i ||

'khor lo'i tshogs spros ro mnyam dbang bskur sogs ||

rnam dag nyi shus mngon par byang chub pa'i ||

nye bar sgrub pa'i rgyal mchog myur thob shog ||

gtum mo'i me lce sbar ba'i dga' ba bzhi ||

sgrub pa'i yan lag thig le'i rnal 'byor dang ||

mas brtan dga' ba bzhi yis sgrub pa che ||

phra mo'i rnal 'byor myur du 'grub par shog ||

gzugs sgrub sor rtogs bsam gtan rnal 'byor dang ||

srog sgrub srog rtsol 'dzin pa'i rnal 'byor gyis ||

bsgrub pa'i sprul pas 'khor lo'i dga' tshal du ||

stong gzugs lha skur dngos su ldang bar shog ||

las kyi phyag rgyar rol pa'i rjes dran gyis ||

dhû tîr zla nyi'i rdul brtsegs brtan pa las ||

mi 'gyur bde ba nyi khri tshig stong gis ||

ting 'dzin yan lag yongs su rdzogs par shog ||

ces paṇ chen bstan pa'i nyi ma phyogs las rnam rgyal gyis mdzad pa'o ||

- - -

If you have a sense where this woodblock print may have come from, do drop me a line and let me know what you think. I couldn’t locate it in the listings of woodblock prints from various printeries that you can find here. This search-file has been up over at Tibetological website for quite awhile now, and I had thought to introduce it here even if I didn’t get around to it. Of course it is fully findable through an ordinary Google search, so you may have stumbled over it already if you are the sort of person who is very often out there googling for Tibetan book titles.

↧

Younghusband's Looting Legacy

April 5, 2013, 11:29 am

≫ Next: Bon Kanjur Titles

≪ Previous: Panchen Lama IV, Kālacakra Prayer

"THE recent expedition of the British to Lhassa has borne at least one kind of fruit, for it has extracted from forbidden Tibetan monasteries art objects of no common interest. Indeed, according to a well-known collector, more Tibetan objects have been secured during the single year past than during thirty years preceding. And this may well be the case when we consider that the returning members (using the term "members" in its widest sense) of the Younghusband expedition brought back with them the portable treasures of several of the oldest and most conservative Lhamissaries. It is such objects, accordingly, which are finding their way into the hands of the art dealers of Darjeeling, Calcutta and Delhi, and thence through their correspondents into foreign collections ...

— Dean’s 1906 article

It’s been said that in earlier centuries in Europe soldiers were rarely paid much if any salary. That’s why looting* was not only permitted, but encouraged. It was a way of punishing the enemy civilians who after all were likely to be supporting their own armies. It was also a way of holding the unpaid soldiers back from doing more than just contemplating mutiny. The truth is that the Younghusband Expedition felt entitled to take things that were not given to them.

(*Loot is said to be a word of Hindi origin, although plunder itself was not invented in India, just the word.)

Today things may seem different, but then look what happened to museums in Iraq and Afghanistan. The help-yourself attitude is not always confined to low-paid soldiers, but civilians may also want to get in on the game of good fortune.

Recently, the issue of looting took over a whole issue of Inner Asia journal. Particular attention is given to the books looted by soldiers of the Younghusband Expedition. Already a decade earlier, Michael Carrington published his article “Officers, Gentlemen and Thieves: The Looting of Monasteries during the 1903/4 Younghusband Mission to Tibet” in Modern Asian Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (February 2003), pp. 81-109. I very much recommend having a look at all this literature. If you need a quick review of the background, first have a look at Georgios Halkias, The 1904 Younghusband Expedition to Tibet. Then go here for some more. Then go read everything in the bibliography down below in addition to the already-linked issue of Inner Asia. Well, if you could read just a little of it, it’s OK.

Finally, and this is the real point of today’s blog, have a look at the remarkable cataloging project underway* in the U.K. that finally, at long last, after a century of waiting, makes all those looted Tibetan books available to the Tibetan-reading and Tibetological world. Start at the home page of the TMRBM - Tibeto-Mongolian Rare Books and Manuscripts Project - here and investigate the sub-pages to find the online catalogues. Perhaps try this link. These are looted artifacts, of course, which is all the more reason why they ought to be read, studied and enjoyed by everyone.**

(*The cataloging happened in 2004-2007, but the catalog itself may not be finished yet) (**And yes, although we may shamefully hide it in a footnote, we will also contemplate today’s lingering legacies of colonialism’s power and wealth differentials. It doesn’t go without saying, so I said it even if I think it ought to go without saying. Repatriation, we should notice, is one of the stated aims of the cataloging project, although repatriation in the sense of digitalization only? One notes with some interest that the V&A Museum claims copyright to images from Waddell’s looted Old Tantra Collection; more on that below. Can this possibly be their right?)

Literature on Looting

BASHFORD DEAN— Casques of Tibetan High Priests, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 1, no. 7 (June 1906), pp. 97-98.

PARSHOTAM MEHRA— In the Eyes of Its Beholders: The Younghusband Expedition (1903-1904) and Contemporary Media, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 2005), pp. 725-739.

TIM MYATT and Peter d’Sena — Recounting the Past? The Contest between British Historical and New Chinese Interpretations of the Younghusband Mission to Tibet of 1904. International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 6, no. 9 (2008), pp. 107-116. Try looking here.

TIM MYATT — British, Chinese and Tibetan Representations of the Mission to Tibet of 1904, D.Phil. in Tibetan Studies, Oxford University (Oxford 2011).

TIM MYATT — Trinkets, Temples, and Treasures: Tibetan Material Culture and the 1904 British Mission to Tibet. Go here.

§ § §

Afterwords

It took me much longer than expected to get around to putting up today’s blog, but thanks are especially due to Dr. Karma Phuntsho, chief cataloger of the Tibetan texts, who answered some of my questions about the project a few years ago. It covers works from Oxford, Cambridge and Liverpool, primarily. The relatively few books in Liverpool are regardless of their number of special significance, since they include some of the Tibetan-language historical works that were once in the possession of Sir Charles Bell.* I’m not sure about the present status of the catalog[ue]s. If you know something, please inform us in the comment section (you may have to prove you are not a robot, but I believe you can do that... I do it all the time).

(*Not every work listed in these catalogs was looted in 1903-4, as you will notice if you are as observant as I hope you will be. One very interesting title on geomancy was acquired by D. Wright in 1875, for example). (Some of the works were actually catalogued long ago, mostly in handlists that could be very difficult to find in any nearby library. One is Denison Ross, A New Collection of Tibetan Books under the Auspices of Dr. E.D. Ross (Calcutta 1907). This includes a catalogue of Waddell’s manuscript Rnying-ma Rgyud 'Bum. Another is P. Denwood, Catalogue of Tibetan Mss. and Block-prints Outside the Stein Collection in the India Office Library, n.p. (n.pl. 1975), in 145 typed pages (I have a photocopy, although I doubt you do). Some of the Waddell books were in fact ultimately sold to institutions in Germany (perhaps as he suggested these were looted for his personal collection, and not on behalf of the Expedition?), where they were eventually catalogued. See Dieter Schuh, Tibetische Handschriften und Blockdrucke Teil 8 [Sammlung Waddell der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin] (Wiesbaden 1981). Then there is F.W. Thomas, Inventory of the Lhasa Collection of Tibetan Works Amassed by Lieutenant-Colonel L.A. Waddell, 1903-4 and Deposited in the India Office Library, a privately circulated typescript that I’ve never seen, have you? Then there is L.A. Waddell’s own publication that isn’t all that difficult to get ahold of: Tibetan Manuscripts and Books, etc., Collected during the Younghusband Mission to Lhasa, Imperial & Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, vol. 34, no. 67 (July 1912), pp. 80-113. Here Waddell lists 464 ‘texts’ (but he doesn't generally give the correct Tibetan-language titles) Some of Waddell’s books ended up at the Welcome Institute in London: See Marianne Winder, Catalogue of Tibetan Manuscripts and Xylographs, and Catalogue of Thankas, Banners and other Paintings and Drawings in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine(London 1989)... )...

Lastly but most significantly, there is that amazing Waddell-looted set of the Old Tantra Collection that is associated with the name of Rigdzin Tsewang Norbu. The online catalogue was made by Cathy Cantwell, Rob Mayer and Michael Fischer. To explore their “Illustrated Inventory,” start here.

________________________________

“The huge collection of rare, and in many instances, hitherto unknown Tibetan manuscripts and books, which I collected for the Government during Sir Francis Younghusband’s Mission to Lhasa, forms by far the largest and richest collection of Tibetan literature which has ever reached Europe. It was amassed under exceptionally favourable circumstances for acquiring rare manuscripts and volumes otherwise unobtainable ; and it was described at the time when it was displayed in Calcutta as ‘bespeaking infinite care and prodigious labour in collecting’.”

. . .

“By the accessions, however, of my extensive collection, amounting to over 300 mule loads of volumes, comprising many rare, and several hitherto unknown works, this unenviable position has been reversed. The British collection now is, perhaps, outside Tibet, China and St. Petersburg, the richest in the world ; and this, indeed, forms one of not the least solid results of the Mission of Sir Francis Younghusband.”

— Waddell (1912), pp. 80, 83.

________________________________

Note: Tibetan books kept in The British Library itself were not included in the cataloging project, and I am unsure how to access any title listing (apart from the listing by Denwood given above, and Waddell’s not especially usable one). This Help for Researchers is some help. Somewhat beside the point but nevertheless interesting is this list of papers related to Tibet that are kept there. I admit that the following reference has me intrigued, unlikely as it does sound (Which British victory would they be praying for then?). I looked but couldn’t find a digitized form of the document:

P 901/1917 Tibet: Tibetan prayers for British victory [no ref.] 21 Jan 1917-23 Feb 1917

§ § §

Postscript (April 12, 2013):

If I hadn’t been so slEEEpy I wouldn’t have overlooked this important catalog: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts Held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Prepared by John E. Stapleton Driver, c. 1970, and revised by David Barrett, 1993, University of Oxford (Oxford 1993), a typescript in 141 (not 152, unless I count wrong) unnumbered pages, especially since a PDF of it is freely available on the internet, here. I totally forgot I recently wrote a blog about this very same catalog, entitled Marginal Amusements at the Bodleian, just in case you’re interested in marginal amusements. They’re not for everybody.

↧

Bon Kanjur Titles

May 1, 2013, 3:24 am

≫ Next: Padampa's Rosary Divination

≪ Previous: Younghusband's Looting Legacy

A title leaf from the collection of Bon scriptures
(click on the page to expand)

Just last night I put up a listing of titles from the most recent and most recommended published edition of the Bon collection of scriptures. The collection is often called the “Bon Kanjur” or (I’d say even less correctly) “Bonpo Kanjur.” The title listing is something I typed up long ago. However, I have only just now added the Tibetan in unicode letters for the convenience of Tibetans who will more likely surf that way. Most of the details about it are there, so I'll send you over to Tibetological website without much more fuss and bother. There have by now been three publications of the Bon Kanjur, in 154, 192 and 178 volumes. This listing is of the main titles from the 3rd edition in 178 (or 179) volumes. I have added other Bon-related pages at Tibetological without any announcement, like “Bon History Index” and “Transmission Document of Bon.” These things are bound to be of rather restricted interest, so I’d advise you that, unless you are Tibeto-literate, there isn’t very much motive for you to look into them any further. If you are just looking for something to read in English, French, German or Italian about the Bon religion, look here and find something nice.

Here is the page: “Bon Kanjur 3rd Edition.”

§ § §

A note on the frontispiece: If you need a quick review of your cursive Tibetan reading skills, you may appreciate an old Tibeto-logic blog page called “Take the Cursive Test.” The test this time is to read this cursive title, locate it in the title listing, locate the text itself within the collection, and finally, if you still have time and are ready to discover it for yourself, read this Dzogchen classic excavated by Shenchen Luga (གཤེན་ཆེན་ཀླུ་དགའ་) in the Fire Snake year of 1017 CE.

Shang Bell - གཤང་།

Note: I have a general policy not to allow commercial advertising on this blog, but in the case of books, books as unusual as these, books not findable in your local bookstore or online book supplier, or most especially books done by a charitable organization that will use the profits to support the Tibetan Bonpo Monastic Centre in Himachal Pradesh, India, I will make another exception and send you to the Bon Foundation’s website shop, which you will find here. I notice with much interest that they now offer a set of four DVDs containing the complete Bon commentarial collection, the Katen (བཀའ་བརྟེན་).

↧

Padampa's Rosary Divination

May 31, 2013, 11:48 am

≫ Next: Eye Shades

≪ Previous: Bon Kanjur Titles

Every Tibetan knows about divination, and of all the systems used to predict uncertain outcomes, rosary divination is probably the most popular. No doubt one reason for this is that so many Tibetans never go anywhere without their beads, their trengwa (འཕྲེང་བ་).

The simplest form of rosary divination results in very simple yes-or-no answers. Since the equipment is already at hand, it’s easy to get a grasp with thumbs and fingers of both hands on beads on either side of the loop. Then you start counting toward the center moving three beads at a time until you are left with one (positive), two (negative) or three (negative, but possible to change). At this level, it is a lot like flipping a coin.

But here’s where things can get complicated enough you might want to think about keeping a small text to keep track of the larger number of possible answers. What you do is you just repeat the process again, yielding a pair of numbers. It is said that some people even go on to do it a third time to get yet another number. Today’s text attributed to Padampa is for the two-timers only.

‘But wait a minute,’ some of you are thinking, ‘what does divination have to do with Buddhism, and what would it have to do with Padampa?’ both of them valid and related questions that deserve some answer, even if only partial. I recently planted a comment at the blog of Mountain Phoenix (link in the list of readings below), the most sparkling literary jewel of all the Tibet blogs. Let me go over there and quote it for you (emending a few things here and there as is my right).

I see divinations as just one type of manifestation of human sign-consciousness. Humans have been seeking signs in nature since time began, it seems. It's what doctors do when they make a diagnosis, for example. So to dismiss it as superstitious all of a sudden without giving the problem considerable thought seems a little extreme. It's been said that divination was the first professional specialty, even that it was the first of sciences (so if you appreciate the sciences, you ought to respect their origins...). You know the Tibetan term tendril - རྟེན་འབྲེལ་ - is just a shortened version of "interdependent origination" - རྟེན་ཅིང་འབྲེལ་བར་འབྱུང་བ་ - which is all about cause and effect. It's the cause and effect Buddha found out about when reaching Enlightenment. And in a universe of mutually caused (or mutually emergent) phenomena, perhaps 'choice' isn't quite what moderns make it out to be after all, you think? Moderns like to imagine that they can make the best choice completely on their own without contingencies impinging on their much-valued freedoms. Of course this ideal sense of free choice is constantly frustrated — by such things as sickness or injury, for example. And these are just the sorts of things that drive us to do divinations. Anyway, reflecting on this is a good thing, I think.

Well, the more I reflect about it the more I think it’s entirely fair and natural to find a place for divination in Buddhist communities, perhaps even more so than in other religions, where co-emergent synchronicity is not situated at the doctrinal core as it is in Buddhism. Of course the diviner may not be too likely to comprehend in one fell swoop the full sweep of the Dharma Realm, but to sense one of its corners off to one side isn't necessarily counterproductive to Awakening. Why, in any case, did the Buddha include psychic powers (the མངོན་ཤེས་ལྔ་) among the possible outcomes of following his way if he was the rationalist he’s sometimes made out to be?

Then again, it’s true that too much is too much. If like me you’ve had the opportunity to visit Chinese Buddhist temples, it would appear that divination has taken over the central field of Buddhist practice. One of the most obvious of these practices is the dropping of the divination blocks. The shaking of the bamboo sticks before drawing one of them out is also a very noisy business. The rattling and clacking divination sounds of the Chinese Buddhist temple could make it difficult to concentrate on other matters, I’d think. But this makes Chinese quite different from Tibetan temples. Tibetans go to lay specialists called mopa (མོ་པ་ or མོ་མ་) or to high Rinpoches for tukdam (ཐུགས་དམ་), but in either case, it’s done with a degree of privacy, and likely not happening inside the shrine hall.

It is true that, as in Chinese Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism there are a large number of possible ways of doing divinations, just that the set is a different set, with only partial intersection. Barbara Gerke, in her recent book Long Lives and Untimely Deaths, one I would very much like to read free of the impediments (བར་ཆད་) placed on it in Googlebooks, has a footnote swiftly and nicely outlining both the types and the studies done about them, so it ought to be quoted:

“Ekvall (1963: 34-35) describes various types of mo using dice, rosaries, songs, pebbles, butter lamps, or scapulas of sheep; Chime Radha Rinpoche (1981: 3-37) mentions Tibetan divinations employing visions, arrows, rosaries, dice, butter-lamps, and bird behavior. There are several studies on Tibetan divination, for example, Laufer (1914) on Tibetan bird divinations, Mortensen (2003) on raven augury, Orofino (1994) on divination with mirrors, and Rona-Tas (1956) on divination with dice.”

To tell another truth, to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t seem especially likely that Padampa actually initiated or even used any of the divination practices attributed to him. He had other preoccupations. Of course, I’m working with a picture of his life and person that comes primarily from the Peacemaking Collection that I’ve spoken about before, in the form of a 1245 CE manuscript. Even if not impossible, it doesn’t seem probable, and there seems to be little direct evidence as far as I have seen.* But then it wasn’t Raymond Moody, author of Life after Life that finally convinced me that there is indeed life after life, but rather it was Jan Assmann in his book Moses the Egyptian. Assmann shows very nicely the directions a person’s life can take after their death, particularly if they are destined, like Moses, to become a bigger-than-life cultural figure. I’ve been thinking for quite a long time now that what I ought to be thinking about doing in the study of the life of Padampa is to consider him as a cultural figure with a life that had a life of its own. That would mean not rejecting anything at all that is connected to his name. That would mean including the divination and magical medical texts. In effect, I would be relinquishing the search for the historical Padampa, and pursuing instead the life of Padampa throughout history. Several divination texts have been attributed to Padampa. I don’t pretend to have traced them all, but apart from the rosary divination, copied from the manuscript kept in the Johan van Manen Collection in the Leiden University Library, I have also typed in (but in Wylie-style Romanization) two brief texts devoted to finger divination and, even more curious and still briefer, one on stone divination.

(*There is in fact a little evidence, so I keep an open mind, hoping to look more closely at these things some other day. The Blue Annals does make a reference to Padampa's pebble divination.)

So, down below you will find the incomplete Padampa text on rosary divination typed out for you in unicode Tibetan script. (I tried to do it without introducing any corrections of my own, what is sometimes called texto style. I even follow its nonstandard punctuation standards. I did this because I was not granted permission to supply the original scans of the manuscript.) You will notice one thing right away if you are a person who reads Tibetan, which is that it is very oddly spelled. I have to admit I also have a lot of problem with that, but I’m afraid when you are dealing with popular subjects like this is, eccentric spellings are inevitable. Just try to make your peace with it and do your best. I don’t want to spoil the fun for you, so I will only do a quick and creaky translation of the beginning only (I cheat about something right away, reading ‘three’ as ‘two’... I think where you see cha you ought to read phywa...). The rest is up to you. So for now, I’ll just say, like the Italians, Buon auguri! and like the Tibetans, བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས་!

The Rosary Divination of Padampa

In this practice of the rosary divination of Padampa, you must first of all do the Refuge Taking. Then repeat as many times as you can the mantras Oṃ shakya mu ne ye svāhāḥ. Oṃ hra hra mu ne svāhāḥ. Oṃ ha sha mu ne svā hā. Then breathe on your rosary. Imagine that your right hand is Sha-ri-bu and that your left hand is Me'u-'gal-bu.* [1v]

Divide the rosary in two (not three) halves at some point, and stack the beads three by three. If the result is that one is on top of one, it means that xxxxx (something cut off [or punished?] will continue?), it means that the dry mountain has water bursting out of it. It means that the dried up tree has leaves sprouting on it. It means that running away will result in freedom. It means that an issueless woman will bear a child. [2v]

It means the poor man will find wealth....

(*That means Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyaṇa, the two disciples of Buddha, often depicted on either side of Him.)

།།ཕ་དམ་པ་སངས་རྒྱས་ཀྱི་འཕྲུངས་མོ་བཞུགྶོ།།

[1v]འདིར་ཕ་དམ་པའི་འཕྲེངས་མོ་འདི་ལ་ཐེག་མར་སྐྱབས་འགྲོ་བྱས་ནས་།།ཨོཾ་ཤཀྱ་མུ་ནེ་ཡེ་སྭཱ་ཧཱཿ།ཨོཾཧྲ་ཧྲ་མུ་ནེ་སྭཱ་ཧཱཿ།ཿཨོཾ་ཧ་ཤ་མུ་ནེ་སྭཱ་ཧཱཿ།ཅི་མང་དུ་བཟླས་།།དེ་ནས་འཕྲེངས་བ་ལ་ཕུ་བཏབ་ནས་ལག་པ་གཡས་ཤ་རི་བུ་དང་།གཡོན་མེའུ་འགལ་བུ་རུ་སྒོམ་།

[2r]འཕྲེངས་བ་གསུམ་སུ་ཅད་གསུམ་དུས་རྩེགས་ལ་།།གཅིག་ཐོག་དུ་གཅིག་བྱུང་ན་།།ཐེབས་པ་ཆད་པ་ཐུང་པའི་ངོ་།།རི་སྐམ་པོ་ལ་ཆུ་སྡོལ་པའི་ངོ་།།ཤིང་སྐམ་པོ་ལ་ལོ་འདབས་སྐྱེས་པའི་ངོས་།།བྲོ་ནས་ཐར་པའི་ངོ་།།རབ་ཆད་མ་ལ་བུ་སྐྱེས་པའི་ངོ་།།

[2v]དབུལ་པོ་ལ་ནོར་སྙེད་པའི་ངོ་།།སྔ་ནས་ཟིན་པའི་ངོ་།།བཙལ་ནས་སྙེད་པའི་ངོ་།།ཁྱིམ་ཆ་ལ་གཡང་ཆག་པའི་ངོ་།།སྲོག་ཆ་ལ་སྲོག་མོ་ཚ་པའི་ངོ་།།མགྲོན་ཆ་ལ་མགྲོན་པོ་ཡོང་པའི་ངོས་།།གང་ལ་བཏབ་ཀྱང་མོ་བཟང་།།གཅིག་ཐོག་དུ་གཉིས་བྱུང་ན་།།མུན་ནག་དང་མྱ་ངན་ཡོད་།།ཐབས་བརྩོ་དང་འཁྲུག་པ་འོང་པའི་ངོ་།།མི་ཕྱུག་ཆུ་ལ་སྒྲོལ་དོན་བྱས་ན་རང་ཆུའི་ཁྱེར་གཉེན་ཡོད་།།བུ་མེད་ལ་མི་གཙང་པའི་ལྷ་གནོད་པ་ཉེ་ཕྱོག་ཕྱོག་ན་མོད་བྱེད་པ་དང་།་གླེག་བམ་འདོན་

[3r]ལྷ་མ་དགའ་པའི་ལྷ་ལ་གསོལ་ཁ་ཐོང་།།ནད་པ་ཡོད་ན་ཁྲུས་བྱེད་།།ཁ་སྨྲར་ཡོད་ན་མི་ཁ་ཐོང་།།གཏོར་བ་མི་རྙེད་།།དགྲ་ཆ་ལ་དགྲ་མིང་།།སྲོག་ཆ་ལ་དབང་ཐང་ཆུད་།།རིམ་འགྲོ་ལ་འབད་མོ་ངན་ནོ།༔།གཅིག་ཐོག་དུ་གསུམ་བྱུང་ན་།བྱེ་མེའི་རི་ལ་གསེར་གྱི་ལྗང་པ་སྐྱེས་།།ཡལ་གའི་རྩེ་ལ་ཁུ་ཡུག་གསུང་སྙན་རྒྱུར་།ཡུག་ས་མོ་ལ་ཁྱོ་བོ་སྙེད་།།དབུལ་པའི་བུ་ལ་ནོར་སྙེད་།།ཅི་ལ་བཏབ་ཀྱང་བཟང་།

[3v]གཉིས་ཐོག་དུ་གཅིག་བྱུང་ན་།།རི་བོ་རྩེ་ཤིང་ནག་འཚལ་རྒྱས་།།རྒྱལ་བློན་དབང་དུ་འདུས་།བསམས་པའི་དོན་འགྲུབ་།།གཏམ་སྙན་ཐོས་།འགྲོན་པོ་གྲོག་བཅས་འོང་།དོན་ཆ་འགྲུབ་།ནང་པ་ཡོང་ན་ཟས་མི་གཙང་པའི་ལེན་།།རྒྱལ་པོ་གནོད་།རྣམས་འཇོམས་ཀྱི་འཁྲུས་བྱེད་།།གསེར་འོད་འདོན་།།གཞན་གང་ལ་བཏབ་ཀྱང་བཟང་།།གཉིས་ཐོག་དུ་གཉིས་བྱུང་ན་།ཐབས་མོད་དང་གཏོར་ཀླགས་ཡོད་པའི་ངོ་།།ཀླུ་བུར་དུ་ནད་བྱུང་པའི་ངོ་།།དགྲ་འདུག་པ་

[4r]ཚ་ཚ་ལོ་གྲང་ཐོབས་།།བཟུངས་སྡུསཱདོན་།།གང་ལ་བཏབ་ཀྱང་མོ་ངན་ནོ་།།གཉིས་ཐོག་དུ་གསུམ་བྱུང་ན་།།གསེར་གྱི་སྤང་ལ་གཡུའི་ལོ་འདབས་རྒྱས་།།མི་ངན་གཏམ་སྙན་འཚོར་།།གླག་སྙེན་ཁྱམ་པོ་ལ་ཡུལ་སྙེད་།།གྲོག་མེད་གྲོག་སྙེད་།།ཟས་ནོར་གང་ལ་གཡང་ཆག་།།ནོར་རྒྱུན་འདོན་།།དགྲ་ཆ་ལ་ཡིད་ཆག་པ་དགྲ་ལ་སྙིང་རྗེས་སྒོམ་།།དོན་ཆ་གྲོགས་ཆ་སྲོག་ཆ་ཁྱིམ་ཆ་ཀུན་ལ་བཟང་།།འགྲོན་པོ་

[4v]ལམ་དུ་ཞུག་ཡིད་ལ་བསམ་པའི་དོན་འགྲུབ་ཉལ་མཆོག་མོ་བཟང་།།གསུམ་ཐོག་ཏུ་གཅིག་བྱུང་ན་།།ལྷ་བཟང་པོས་མགོས་ཞིང་།།དགྲ་ལ་ཕུར་འགལ་ཚུར་མི་ཚུགས་།།ཕྲལ་དུ་ལས་སེམས་བདེ་ཀྱང་།།ཕུག་སུ་རྒྱབ་བརྟེན་བཟུང་།།ནང་པ་ཡོད་ན་ལྷ་བསྲུངས་དང་ལྷ་མཆོད་བྱས་།།རྒྱས་སྟོད་པ་འདོན་།།སྲོག་ལ་ཉེས་སྐྱོན་མེད་།།སྲིད་ཆ་ལ་སྲིད་འཕེལ་།།གྲོག་ཆ་དགྲ་ཆ་འགྲོན་ཆ་ཀུན་ལ་བཟང་།།གསུམ་ཐོག་ཏུ་གཉིས་བྱུང་ན་།།བཞིས་ལྷ་བཟང་གཞན་དྲིན་མི་ཤེས་།།

Complete transcription of the incomplete text and partial translation done with permission of the Leiden University Library, Collection Institute Kern, 2740/M 463. With heartfelt gratitude to the librarians who made this possible.

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Phadampa's Finger, Stone and Arrow Divinations

Source: Mo Dpe Phyogs-bsdus Snang Srid Gsal-ba'i Me-long, Ngagyur Nyingma Institute (Mysore 2000/2001), in 316 pp. at pp. 38-39. The identical two titles may be found in a small pecha volume entitled Bkra-shis-tshe-ring-ma'i 'Phrul Mos Gtsos-pa'i Mo Dpe Phan-bde'i 'Byung-gnas, no publisher, no date (ca. 1992?), in 206 pages, purchased in Kathmandu in 1993, at pp. 57-60. (This same volume has a brief rosary divination attributed to Atisha that seems to have been printed a number of times. It is quite different from our Padampa text, visualizing the right hand as the lunar disk, and the left hand as the solar disk, with a number of other differences. However, in its interpretations of the results, there is very much in common. So it would be profitable to study it in conjunction with the Padampa text...)

mdzub mo lnga yi mo bzhugs so //

mtheb chen shing gi khams /

mdzub mo me yi khams /

gung mo sa yi khams /

srin lag lcags kyi khams /

mthe'u chung chu yi khams so //

thog mar mtheb chen ston na / gdon phywa sa bdag dang rgyal po srin mos gnod / na tsha dpung pa dang kha thed pa og ma na / shes pa 'thibs pa'i na tsha yong / 'khon dang mi gtsang ba la gzab chu gtsang ster / grib dang mi gtsang bas len / khrus dang bshags pa byas pas phan no //

mdzub mo ston na / gdon phywa btsan dang ma mos gnod / na tsha mig dang kha lce na / 'khor la mya ngan drag po cig yong nyen 'dug / sngar byung na des thub / ma byung na yong nyen yod / cho ga dang rim gro ci rig bya / klu bdud klu btsan gyi zhal bsgyur bya'o //

gung mo ston na / gdon phywa rgyal po dang bdud kyis gnod / nad glo bur du na / zing 'thab yong / bdud kyi zhal bsgyur dang dkar po drug mdos bya'o //

srin lag ston na / gdon phywa btsan dang 'dre mo sa srin dang shing srin gyis gnod / nad ni dmu chu yong / dmar ngo dang khrag ngo yong / 'khon dang 'thab sa'i bar du mi 'gro / klu dang bsen mo'i cho ga bya / skyes pa yin na btsan drag pos 'go ba yin no //

mthe'u chung ston na / gdon phywa mtsho sman dang ma mos gnod / bud med kyi phyir 'gron pa'i 'dres gnod / srin mo dang sa bdag gdong rtsub nas gnod / khyim du brag nag skyes na mi ston / sa bdag dang sa srin sdong bu'i cho ga bya'o //

pha dam pa sangs rgyas kyis mdzad pa mdzub lnga'i mo rdzogs so //

pp. 40-41:

rdo mo'i mngon shes bzhugs so //

na mo gu ru pha dam pa rin po che la phyag 'tshal lo //

mkhyen pa rdo mo'i mngon shes gsal bar ston cig //

de la rang pha dam par sgom la / mi gcig gi rdo gcig khyer la shog zer / de la dang po phyogs ston pa ni / rdo shar nas byung na / gdon du rgyal pos gnod rgyal po mchod / rdo lho nas 'byung na / gshin 'dre dang ma mos gnod / bsam pa grub grogs phywa bzang / rdo nub nas 'byung na / btsan dang klu yis gnod / srin mo yis mdos bya / mo 'bring tsam yin / rdo byang nas 'byung na / bdud dang rgyal pos gnod / bdud dang rgyal po mchod /

da ni kha dog ston pa ni / rang gis gsol ba'i lha yis gnod / mi gtsang ba'i sna len byed / rdo ser po 'byung na / rgyal po dang the'u rang gis gnod / rgyal don bya sgro thon / rdo dmar po 'byung na / btsan dang dkon mchog la mchod pa 'bul / rdo nag po 'byung na / bdud kyis gnod / rdo sngon po 'byung na / klus yis gnod klu mchod bya / spangs skongs dang klu bum thon gtor ma btang / rdo dkar po 'byung na / rgyal srin mo'i dgu mdos bya / rdo ser po 'byung dang phyed dmar 'byung na / btsan dang rgyal pos gnod / rdo dmar po dang sngon po 'byung na / klu dang bdud kyis gnod / rdo zlum po 'byung na / bsam pa grub / rdo dmar po 'byung na mo ci la btab pas bzang ngo // legs so // //

I don’t have access to the arrow divination text yet. I’ve noticed a title of a Stuttgart manuscript,* Dam-pa Sangs-rgyas-kyis mdzad-pa’i Mda’ Mo, with the mda’ mo evidently meaning ‘arrow divination.’ This text seems to employ feathers and arrows. It may have actually been Phadampa's practice, to do divination with a bamboo in one hand and feather in the other, as we may note in one single passage of the Peacemaking Collection, unfortunately without the least indication of how the divination was performed. Chances are it was a form of rhabdomancy working on the same general principles as belomancy...

(*See Emil Schlagintweit, Verzeichnis der tibetischen Handschriften der Königlich Württembergischen Landesbibliothek zu Stuttgart, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Klasse der königliche bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München, Jahrgang 1904 (1905), pp. 245-270, at pp. 262-263 (you may see this for yourself at Internet Archive). The text ends with the words “dam pa'i mda' mo thong ba gdong gsal mngon shes me long.” Any information on its present whereabouts would be much appreciated.)

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Eye Shades

August 11, 2013, 8:58 am

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Apologies, dear reader, for the shady snapshot. It was taken under dark conditions in the Choijin Lama Temple in downtown Ulaan Baatar a few days ago. Just seeing this image (not the photo of it) was so exciting for me I was glad to fork over the astronomical camera fee of 25,000 tugruks. I’m supposing you’re already wondering about the title of today’s blog (is it about eye makeup? eyemasks for napping on the plane?) and what it could have to do with this fuzzy photo. Although this small item you can barely make out here has been subject to small but I would say significant confusions, I’ll hold you in suspense no longer than the absolute minimum time necessary, meaning no time at all.

The Yisun dictionary, at the end of its 3 (or 2, or 1) volumes, has among its illustrations something it calls mig-ra, and it looks like this:

I think mig-ra must etymologize as eye wall;
that is, unless you have some better idea.

Rather than calling them shades, perhaps they are better described as snow goggles or sun-reflecting-off-the-snow glasses (sans glass, of course). Anyway, they are used specifically for protecting the eyes from going blind from the glare of the sun on the snow, a condition naturally known as snow blindness.

Three centuries ago, the Jesuit missionary Desideri had this to say about them (in Michael Sweet's fresh new translation, p. 172):

“To protect the eyes from being damaged by the reflection of the sun's rays off the snows through which one has to travel, they use protectors resembling concave nets woven from black horsehair or the black hair of mountain oxen. Lacking these my eyes pained me greatly for some days, and I was in danger of losing my sight when my companions suggested that I rub my eyes with snow over and over, which proved to be the remedy.”

I find personally that hot towels can be very soothing to sore eyes, but I could also swear that the cause of the complaint can at times supply the cure.

William W. Rockhill, one of the most preeminent of the early North American Tibetologists, not only said this,

“The following day we managed, after much hard work through the deep, soft snow, to reach the summit of the Zonyig la (Altitude, 16,300 feet)... The sky was clear, so the radiation of the sun on the snow caused us much discomfort, though we wore the horsehair eye-shades used in the country, and by the time we made camp in the Ranyik Valley, three of us were nearly blind.”

he even illustrated a set of mig-ra together with a case specially designed to hold it:

Although they do look rather abnormally large, I believe the mig-ra is the thing there on the head of the Karma Kagyü master Go-shri Dpal-’byor-don-grub, as he is depicted in David Jackson’s book, pp. 200-201, and not a “distinctive black-lobed headdress” as it is there infelicitously described. Here is a version of one of these thangkas found through a Google image search:

See, too, Christian Luczanits’s article for a reproduction of a “hitherto unidentified Sakya teacher of c. 1400 with a black net attached to the front of his hat.” I take the liberty of photographing the face of this image:

So sorry, wrong image. Let me try that again:

For those who by chance or innocence or total weirdness didn’t recognize His Holiness in shades, I assure you that what you saw there was none other than He Himself, styling some mean sunblocking instruments in Amsterdam, famous in world history for the invention of optical devices, being home of, among others, Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), who proved that light doesn’t hit us all at once, but takes a bit of time. I could have told you that.

The Dalai Lama wears a white cowboy hat presented to him by Calgary Mayor David Bronconnier after arriving in Calgary, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009. Its honourees range from the Dalai Lama to Dr. Phil and now Prince William and Kate are about to join the ranks of Calgary's "white hatters."Custom-made, white Smithbilt cowboy hats have come to symbolize the city and will be presented to the couple as part of the traditional welcome when they arrive Thursday afternoon at the international airport for the final leg of their royal tour. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

Here, too, we see Him wearing one of His very many hats. One of my favorites? The Calgary white cowboy hat. But anyway, these are hats, and a little bit off and over the subject.

There’s still a different type of eye shade that shouldn’t be confused with the mig-ra, since actually it’s more like a fringe. You might see it worn by Tibetan Lamas during initiation rites (when they are wearing the དབང་རྫས་), as well as on Siberian shamans when they go into trance. You decide what that means, if you can.

I believe the word for this special kind of eye-covering fringe is dom-ra,* which would seem to mean bear wall, although the Yisun dictionary, in the previously mentioned section of illustrations, depicts what may be a special kind of dom-ra it knows as gzi-dom (གཟི་དོམ་).

(*Goldstein’s latest dictionary has an entry for དོམ་ར་: “a bear skin band worn with the fur hanging over the eyes to prevent snow blindness.” For གཟི་དོམ་ there is nothing at all. I can point to one example of usage of the word dom-ra in Roerich’s Blue Annals, p. 888, that you can check if you’re curious.)

Does that name mean glare bear? I’d welcome clarification on this point. I’d love clarification on any point, actually. My idea is that the dom-ra may be placed above the eyes to protect them, but unlike the mig-ra it isn’t placed over the eyes, is it? I guess you can see what I’m getting at.

• • •

Publications & web sources cited:

Alexander Gardner, “The First Gyeltsab, Peljor Dondrub.” Look here, and take note of the shades.

David Jackson, Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style, Rubin Museum of Art (New York City 2009), at pp. 200-201, with reproductions of two paintings of Go-shri Dpal-’byor-don-grub (གོ་ཤྲཱི་དཔལ་འབྱོར་དོན་གྲུབ་), regarded as the first Gyaltsab Rinpoche (རྒྱལ་ཚབ་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་) of the Karma Kagyü (ཀརྨ་བཀའ་བརྒྱུད་) order. You can find a bit on him at this TBRC page, but much more in the Gardner entry from Treasury of Tibetan Lives just now noticed above.

Christian Luczanits, “Art-Historical Aspects of Dating Tibetan Art,” contained in: Ingrid Kreide-Damani, ed., Dating Tibetan Art, Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag (Wiesbaden 2003), pp. 25-57, at p. 46.

Rgod-tshang-pa Mgon-po-rdo-rje (1189-1258 CE). In a listing of several publications of his collected and selected works, one typed by yours truly (for which, look here) there are several short titles devoted to the mig-ra that I ought to have a look at. I’ll report back to you when I have done this. These works would have a bearing on a question not yet asked about the age of the object in Tibetan cultural history. (There are some possible but problematic mentions in Old Tibetan documents that ought to be considered.) [August 21, 2013: Oh my, this is interesting. I'll have to put up a new blog on it, but in these 13th-century texts it is quite clear the mig-ra is used to shield the eyes of sentient beings from the intense light emanating from the eyes of the yogi wearing them (or it?)... It doesn't protect the eyes of the wearer from the glare of the light; just the contrary, it protects other people from the glare of the wearer's eyes... Very interesting... especially in light of what came up in the comments section, below... And yes, there is another motive for shading the eyes I haven't talked about, one much in evidence with Hollywood celebrities.]

William Woodville Rockhill (1854-1914), The Land of the Lamas: Notes of a Journey through China, Mongolia and Tibet, Longmans, Green and Co. (London 1891), quote at pp. 201-202, with illustration on p. 175. Even better is another work by Rockhill entitled Notes on the Ethnology of Tibet, fortunately (since I have no print copy) archived on the internet here. Once there, go to the text on p. 722, and plate 30 that comes just after it.

Jeff Watt, “Eye Coverings.” A much-recommended page at "Himalayan Art Resources."

Zhang Yisun (1893-1983), et al., Bod Rgya Tshig-mdzod Chen-mo, Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 1985). I realize Yisun is not the family name, but I use it anyway because it is more distinctive.

• • •

Nobody should be too surprised that there are some sites on the internet devoted to the hats of His Holiness. Try a google-box search for "Dalai Lama's Hats" and you'll see what pops up. One in particular I hesitate to link you to, even though the photo collection is a fine one, since some of the pictures have been doctored, and the text that goes with them is largely inspired by gangsta rap, which isn't everybody's idea of respect, or even good taste. Oh well, here it is since you insist, although older people who aren't used to this language ought to stay home and avoid going there. Now go blame its blogger. On a lighter note, some fashion writers have had the temerity to question or cautiously laud His progressive sense of style in His choice of head accessories, in particular the visors, like this one. One blog questions His tendency to always wear the hat of the home team, and there is really something to this when you think about it (besides, have a look at this photographic evidence overwhelmingly in favor of what could otherwise appear to be a feeble thesis).

• • •

“Modern dark spectacles have nothing on primitive eye-shades. In the Arctic split bones or pieces of wood protect the eyes from snow-blindness; woven eye-shades of all shapes are common in Melanesia and Polynesia and in South America, with thin black-felt veils as their Tibetan counterparts.”

For the archived source of the quote, look here.


•  •  •

Next time you're in Ulan Bator, check out the amazing Choijin (in Tibetan ཆོས་སྐྱོང་) Temple if you can possibly spare the time. It’s just south of the blue sky.

In the face of so much brilliance, you may need your eye protection. And if you do go there, be so kind as to check the lost and found for my prescription reading glasses. I might have left them there. They had green rims and I do miss them.

↧

Tantra's Ineluctable Logic?

November 8, 2013, 7:29 am

≫ Next: Good Grief! Gurdjieff in Tibet?

≪ Previous: Eye Shades

Buddhist wisdom is simply wisdom. It isn’t necessarily any the more wise for being Buddhist. I know my Buddhist friends may not like me saying that, but I’m not all so sure how Buddhist they are to begin with... anyway I have observed how Buddhists do require conversion to Buddhism time and time again. There a commonplace wisdom that wisdom comes with age, an expression I passionately detested when I was younger (along the same lines: “When you’re older you’ll understand...”).

Today I’d venture there is some truth in it. For instance I’ve seen that young people just don’t know that failure is success. They only see the failure, and don’t appreciate the opportunity it nearly always presents them. When you get a present, you ought to be saying ‘Thank you!’ Seeing how badly they take defeat always looks so-o-oh pathetic you almost want to feel sorry for the bastards. When people concede defeat (or put themselves at risk) in order to help another person, they become so much bigger for that, they come out winners, don’t they? Young people fail to recognize these simple wisdoms over and over again until they’re too old to benefit from them anymore. So then they might think they have to express their well thought-out thoughts to the young people, young people who just won’t buy it whether they’re getting charged for it or not.

Listen children! Failure keeps us growing and prevents us from getting stuck. Period, full stop. Stop your whining. The one who loses the argument is the one who learns the most, is indeed the successful one. These are things we either know from experience or don’t know at all... Not that anybody really ever grows up all that much. That’s why reincarnation, if it didn’t exist, would have to be invented. We always have a lot further to go than one life can normally allow time for.

An older person I know, one even older than yours truly, was recently asked what he would like to teach young people, and the first thing that he thought of was this, “There is no such thing as a wrong thought.” I’ll admit I was a little taken aback by that, perhaps out of a knee-jerk moralistic impulse (I’m an occasional victim, I’ll confess), but I could also see the tantric logic in it. The serpent in the primordial garden convinced us with the help of a drugged apple — to follow an interesting reading of Genesis — that there is a difference between the good thoughts and the bad thoughts, that there’s something godlike about knowing this. Ever since then we’ve been filled with inner turmoil, tortured by indecision about what would be the right thing to do (and the right thing to think).

The real problem isn’t this so much as that we’ve placed ourselves at the mercy of our thoughts, whether good or bad, and act impulsively or even unconsciously most of the time... it’s a problem of awareness and awakening, the rules be damned. We’re here to live, not to be managed or observed or judged. We don’t meditate in order to force ourselves to listen to the mini-fascist in our own minds... Or do we? ‘You kids behave, and watch those thoughts, they’ll get you into a world of trouble,’ we tell them out of the selfish and probably futile hope they won’t bother us while we’re up to our important adult business. Who tells them to release their grips on those hooks they’ve got sticking into them? Who tells them to jump over those walls they've had built around them or they built around themselves? Who helps them see the bigger and more meaningful connections between what they’ve got inside and what’s going on outside? Who tells them that real ethics have to come spontaneously out of an awakened goodness inside and not imposed by some dull authority outside? Dull authorities make us dull fellows who need to be told what we ought to find of interest instead of finding out on our own.

Well, true, I hear you... just as bad are the fate-focussed people who think life is a computer game full of insurmountable obstacles and insist on living it like it is one, as if there were no question our aims are the only ones there are, but at the same time aims that will probably never be achieved, or at least not achieved enough. This attitude itself is a big part of what gets in our way. We can’t stop and reflect, let alone admit that we’re on a fast flight to nowhere of significance. That’s why tantric logic is a life requirement, as crazy and radical as it may sometimes seem to some.

No doubt I’ll be criticized for appending these dangerous ideas from Āryadeva, the tantric teacher of the 7th century or so, in a set of verses called Treatise on Mind Purification. It’s a book without an outline, moving from subject to subject kind of like our minds are always doing whether we notice or not. But these particular verses do share a common theme, if you can detect it. I’ll call it tantric logic to put a name to its many faces. As much as it might seem counter-intuitive, it’s a whole lot more important than going to those hundred places before you die. And just between friends, it isn’t about justifying the selfish actions of your cheating heart. Don’t even go that way. It’s in that direction that the bigger dangers lie.

“Water in the ear can be removed by water,

a thorn can be removed with a thorn.

Just so the wise know how to remove

desire with desire.

Just as the laundryman uses dirt

to purify a dirty garment,

a wise person also uses

dirt to clean dirt itself.

As the dust motes on a mirror

when wiped help make it clean,

so, to rely on the wise,

faults are overcome by faults.

If a metal ball is put in water

it sinks to the bottom,

but if it is shaped into the right vessel,

it not only doesn’t sink, it holds up others.

In some way a mind that is the right vessel,

through the workings of wisdom and means,

gets disentangled while acting on impulse

and disentangles others as well.

When a confused consciousness uses it

desire is the chains themselves.

When wise persons use it

desire brings them all the way to freedom.

All the world knows

that milk cures poisonings,

but if a snake drinks it

its poison is multiplied.

The swan knows how to sip out the milk

from a mixture of water and milk.

The wise person, while acting in the

poisoned sensory realms, is freed.

If done according to procedures,

even poison can be made into the acqua vitae,

while children who don’t know how to eat

butter or molasses can be poisoned by them.

Yet to someone who cleanses their own mind

with the appropriate measures

its unthinkable, unimaginable

pure nature shines bright.

Even the smallest flame,

making use of the butter, wick, etc.,

clear, pure and steady

dispels the most obdurate darkness.

The Banyan seed though small

under the right conditions

will grow into a giant tree

with roots, branches and flowers.

When mustard is mixed with mineral powders

a different color is produced.

In a similar way the wise know the Dharma Realm

through the workings of wisdom and means.

Butter and honey in equal proportions

can be a harmful combination,

but when taken in the right way,

it can be the best nutritional program.

Putting mercury in copper

makes it perfectly golden.

Just so the application of true Total Knowledge

makes mental complexes into something worthwhile.”

§ § §

When I made this partial translation back in around 1990, I was staying in Nepal and had access to a classic work of Indian Tibetology, an edition by P. B. Patel of the Cittaviśuddhiprakaraṇa of Āryadeva: Sanskrit and Tibetan Texts, Visva‑Bharati Research Publications (Santiniketan 1949). I wish I had it now, since it served as the basis for the translation you just saw. In times since those days in Kathmandu two other translations have appeared, and I will very soon supply references to try and help those who might find the exercise of comparison fun or curious. For Wedemeyer’s version of these particular verses, see his pages 365ff; and for Varghese’s, pages 236ff.

Christian Wedemeyer, Vajrayāna and Its Doubles: A Critical Historiography, Exposition, and Translation of the Tantric Works of Āryadeva, doctoral dissertation, Columbia University (New York, April 1999).

Mathew Varghese, Principles of Buddhist Tantra: A Discourse on Cittaviśuddhi‑prakaraṇa of Āryadeva, Munshiram Manoharlal (New Delhi 2008).

If you have the Dergé Tanjur handy,* you can see the Tibetan text here: Cittaviśuddhiprakaraṇa (Sems-kyi sgrib-pa rnam-par sbyong-ba zhes bya-ba’i rab-tu byed-pa). Tôh. no. 1804. Dergé Tanjur, tantra (rgyud) section, vol. NGI, folios 106v.7‑112r.3. Translated by Jñānākara and Tshul-khrims-rgyal-ba in around the early- to mid-11th century.

(*Actually, everybody in the world who has an internet connection can get to it almost immediately here at the TBRC.)

Today's blog was written under the lingering influence of a book called Consecrated Venom by Caryl Johnston, who finds refreshingly interesting things to say about the Adam and Eve story in Genesis.

§ § §

I will train [myself] to take the defeat upon myself

And offer the victory to others.

Langritangpa

§ § §

Postscript: I won’t vouch for the third verse from the last being precisely correct. I’m thinking it isn’t. It’s very possible this verse is the source for a similar one by Sakya Pandita that we saw in an earlier blog. In that one we saw that when you combine (white/ invisible) borates/ borax with (yellow) curcumin/ turmeric, you get stuff called Rosocyanine and Rubrocurcumin, which ought to be which color? If you don’t remember, have a look here. Meanwhile, if anybody needs me, I’ll be here in my laboratory. Perhaps you would like to try the experiment for yourself? First get together the necessary ingredients, then do as the scientist does in this video or perhaps this one.

Hmmm, should we be heading for the book to see if the reading is correct? (or to the library to search out what other text it was copying from?) or should we be going out into the laboratory of life to see if there is something true and effective in it?

Cham Dancers in Ulan Bator

Illustrations further up: Pearl Potential and the Banyan Tree.

§ § §

Somebody nice nicely sent me a nice copy of the Patel edition, so I'll type in my Tibetan version of Patel's Tibetan version for those who may want it (leaving off Patel's notes), starting at verse 37 on p. 24 and ending with verse 51 on p. 27 (perhaps I'll put in Patel's Sanskrit later on):

རྣ་ལས་ཆུ་ལ་ཆུ་ཉིད་དང་།
ཚེར་མ་ཟུག་ལ་ཆར་མ་ཉིད།
དེ་བཞིན་ཆགས་པ་ཆགས་ཉིད་ཀྱིས།
མཁས་པ་རྣམས་ཀྱིས་འཛི་ནཔར་བྱེད།།

དཔེར་ན་ཁྲུས་མཁན་དྲི་མ་ཡས།
གོས་ཀྱི་དྲི་མ་མེད་པར་བྱེད།
མཁས་པའི་བདག་ཉིད་དེ་ལྟར་ན།
དྲི་མ་ཉིད་ཀྱིས་དྲི་མ་སེལ།།

ཇི་ལྟར་མེ་ལོང་རྡུལ་དག་ལ།
ཕྱིས་པས་དག་པར་འགྱུར་བ་ཡིན།
དེ་བཞིན་མཁས་པས་བསྟེན་པ་ཡིས།།
སྐྱོན་གྱིས་སྐྱོན་རྣམས་འཇོམས་པར་བྱེད།།

ལྕགས་ཀྱི་གོང་བུ་ཆུར་བཅུག་ན།
ཇི་ལྟར་གཏིང་དུ་འགྲོ་བར་འགྱུར།
དེ་ཉིད་སྣོད་དུ་བྱས་པས་སུ།
བདག་དང་གཞན་ཡང་སྒྲོལ་བར་བྱེད།།

དེ་བཞིན་སྣོད་དུ་བྱས་པའི་སེམས།
ཤེས་རབ་ཐབས་ཀྱི་ཆོ་ག་ཡིས།
འདོད་པས་སྤྱོད་བཞིན་གྲོལ་བར་འགྱུར།
གཞན་དག་ཀྱང་ནི་གྲོལ་བར་བྱེད།།

རྣམ་ཤེས་ངན་པས་བསྟན་བྱས་ན།
འདོད་པ་ཆིང་བ་ཉིད་དུ་འགྱུར།
དེ་ཉིད་མཁས་པས་བསྟེན་བྱས་ནས།
འདོད་པ་ཐར་པར་རབ་ཏུ་སྒྲུབ།།

འོ་མས་དུག་ནི་ཞིག་གྱུར་བ།
འཇིག་རྟེན་ཀུན་ལ་རབ་ཏུ་གྲགས།
དེ་ཉིད་སྦྲུལ་གྱིས་འཐུངས་ནས་ནི།
དུག་ནི་ཤིན་ཏུ་འཕེལ་བར་བྱེད།།

ཇི་ལྟར་ཆུ་དང་འོ་མ་འདྲེས།
ངང་བ་འོ་མ་འཐུང་བར་མཁས།
དེ་བཞིན་དུག་བཅས་ཡུལ་དག་པས།
མཁས་པས་སྤྱད་ནས་གྲོལ་བར་བྱེད།།

ཇི་ལྟར་ཆོ་ག་བཞིན་སྤྱོད་ན།
དུག་ཀྱང་བདུད་རྩིར་འགྱུར་བ་ཡིན།
བྱིས་པ་རྣམས་མར་བུ་རམ་སོགས།
བཟའ་མ་ལེགས་པ་དུག་ཏུ་འགྱུར།།

གང་དག་སེམས་ནི་འདི་ཡིད་ཀྱང་།
གཏན་ཚིགས་བཟང་པོས་སྦྱང་བྱས་ན།
རྣམ་པར་མི་རྟོག་དམིགས་མེད་པ།
རང་བཞིན་དྲི་མེད་རབ་ཏུ་སྣང་།།

ཇི་ལྟར་མེ་ནི་ཆུང་ངུ་ཡང་།
མར་དང་སྡོང་སོགས་འདུས་བྱས་པས།
སྣང་བ་དྲི་མེད་མི་གཡོ་བ།
བརྟན་པའི་མུན་རྣམས་འཇིག་པར་འགྱུར།།

དཔེར་ན་ནྱ་གྲོ་དའི་ས་བོན།
ཆུང་ཡང་རྐྱེན་དང་ལྡན་པ་ན།
རྩ་བ་ཡལ་ག་མེ་ཏོག་ལྡན།
ཆེན་པོའི་ཤིང་དུ་འཕེལ་བར་བྱེད།།

ཡུང་དང་རྡོ་ཐལ་སྦྱར་བ་ལས།
ཁ་དོག་གཞན་ཞིག་འབྱུང་བར་འགྱུར།
ཤེས་རབ་ཐབས་ཀྱི་ཆོ་ག་ཡིས།
ཆོས་དབྱིངས་མཁས་པ་དེ་ལྟར་ཤེས།།

མར་དང་སྦྲང་རྩི་མཉམ་པར་ལྡན།
དེ་དུག་ཉིད་དུ་འགྱུར་བ་ཡིན།
དེ་ཉིད་ཆོ་ག་བཞིན་སྤྱད་ན།
བཅུད་ཀྱི་ལེན་གྱི་མཆོག་ཏུ་འགྱུར།།

དངུལ་ཆུས་རེག་པའི་ཟངས་མ་ནི།
ཇི་ལྟར་སྐྱོན་མེད་གསེར་དུ་འགྱུར།
དེ་བཞིན་ཡང་དག་ཡེ་ཤེས་ནི།
སྦྱངས་པས་ཉོན་རྨོངས་བཟང་པོར་བྱེད།།

One PS: I notice the yung in verse 49 is in the Sanskrit version haridrā, and that means curcuma, or turmeric if you prefer (so the ‘mustard’ translation is not accurate), while for the rdo-thal [mineral powder] of the Tibetan, the Sanskrit has cūrṇa, which ought to mean chalk or [mineral] lime. So I’m not 100% the chemistry experiment here is identical to Sa-paṇ’s. Only 90% maybe.

Another PS: A. Annapoorani, K.R. Anilakumar, Farhath Khanum, N. Anjaneya Murthy & A.S. Bawa, "Studies on the Physicochemical Characteristics of Heated Honey, Honey Mixed with Ghee and Their Food Consumption Pattern by Rats,"Ayu: An International Quarterly Journal of Research in Ayurveda, vol. 31, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 141-146. It's yogurt Tibetans say should only be eaten uncooked, and about this rule our tandoori cooks seem to know nothing.

Yet another PS: Vijaya Deshpande, "Transmutation of Base-Metals into Gold as Described in the Text Rasārṇavakalpa and Its Comparison with the Parallel Chinese Methods,"Indian Journal of History of Sciences, vol. 19, no. 2 (1984), pp. 186-192.

↧

Good Grief! Gurdjieff in Tibet?

December 25, 2013, 1:14 pm

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Did George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866-1949) ever visit Tibet? I recognize the problem that some of you may simply not know why you ought to care, and I empathize with you, but keep in mind that there are people out there who do care, people who may even care far too much. As a Tibetanist they may want to get answers from you. What are you going to tell them? That's not Gurdjieff here in the frontispiece, and neither is it Dorjiev, but the truth is, Dorjiev and Gurdjieff have been confused in the past. One author, otherwise quite a good one I think,* unhelpfully decided that while Gurdjieff in fact isn’t Dorjiev, it’s Dorjiev’s follower Norzunoff that is Gurdjieff. In either case, if either identification were true, it would follow that Gurdjieff did in fact visit Tibet. (Well, since both Dorjiev and Norzunoff most definitely did.)

(*James Webb, The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York 1980).)

Agwan Dorjiev (ངག་དབང་རྡོ་རྗེ་)

Ovshe Norzunoff
Le Tour de Monde(1904)

Gurdjieff

There is one person I know of who claimed to know for a fact that Gurdjieff was in Tibet, and that's the smoking man you see up there at the top of the blog. His name was Achmed Abdullah. How did Achmed know Gurdjieff had been to Tibet? Because he (A.A.) had seen him (G.I.G.) there, in Lhasa.

Now surely Gurdjieff was from the general area of Caucasus-Georgia-Armenia-Turkey (his parentage was Greek and Armenian), and not from Buriatia, as is implied in the quote you will see just below. His surname anyway suggests that he or his family must have originated in Georgia. The name Dorjiev has a quite different origin, since as is the style even today among Mongolians, it is a slightly modified form of the frequent Tibetan name element Dorjé (རྡོ་རྗེ་).*

(*For a bit on the possessive suffix -ov/-off/-ev/-eff used to form Slavic surnames, try looking here. Like surnames everywhere, they may [among other possibilities] be based on place of origin. Dorjiev's name was formed on the assumption that Dorjé was in some way his surname when of course it was not. It’s an integral part of his given name.)

The following quote is taken from Rom Landau (1899-1974), God Is My Adventure (1935?), p. 188:

‘I so often hear about his [Gurdjieff’s] experiences in Tibet,’ I replied: “but I am somewhat suspicious of those Tibetan tales. Every other messiah, from Mme. Blavatsky onwards, claims to have gathered knowledge in the mountains of Tibet. How do you know that Gurdjieff has actually ever been there?’

‘I happen to possess first-hand proofs. Some years ago there was a luncheon in New York, given, if I remember aright, for Gurdjieff. A number of distinguished men had been invited, among others the writer, Achmed Abdullah, who told me that he had never seen Gurdjieff before, but that he was very much looking forward to meeting this unusual Armenian. When Gurdjieff entered the room Achmed Abdullah turned to me and whispered: “I have met that man before. Do you know who he really is? Before the war he was in Lhassa as an agent of the Russian Secret Service. I was in Lhassa at the same time, and in a way we worked against each other.” So, you see, it is quite true that Gurdjieff had been at the very fountain of esoteric knowledge. Some people say he was in Lhassa as a Secret Service agent, in order to disguise the real purpose of his visit, which was to learn the supernatural methods of the Lamas. Other people maintain that his esoteric studies were only a pretext behind which he could hide his political activities. But who can tell?’

And the following letter is copied from the same book, p. 202:

Captain Achmed Abdullah.

Fifth Avenue House,

Sunday. New York City.

DEAR SIR,

As to Gurdjieff, I have no way of proving that I am right except that I know I am right. When I knew him, thirty years ago, in Tibet, he was, besides being the young Dalai Lama’s chief tutor, the main Russian political agent for Tibet. A Russian Buriat by race and a Buddhist by religion, his learning was enormous, his influence in Lhassa very great, since he collected the tribute of the Baikal Tartars for the Dalai Lama’s exchequer, and he was given the high title of Tsannyis Khan-po. In Russia he was known as Hambro Akvan Dorzhieff; to the British Intelligence as Lama Dorjieff. When we invaded Tibet, he disappeared with the Dalai in the general direction of outer Mongolia. He spoke Russian, Tibetan, Tartar, Tadjik, Chinese, Greek, strongly accented French and rather fantastic English. As to his age well I would say ageless. A great man who, though he dabbled in Russian imperialistic politics, did so I have an idea more or less in the spirit of jest. I met Gurdjieff, almost thirty years later, at dinner in the house of a mutual friend, John O’Hara Cosgrave, former editor of the New York World, in New York. I was convinced that he was Lama Dorjieff. I told him so and he winked. We spoke in Tadjik. I am a fairly wise man. But I wish I knew the things which Gurdjieff has forgotten.

Very faithfully,

A. ABDULLAH.

I don’t have any definitive disproof of this often-made identification, but I sincerely doubt Gurdjieff ever made it to Lhasa. If you want to pursue this will-o’-the-wisp further, I'd recommend this essay by Paul Beekman Taylor entitled “Gurdjieff and Prince Ozay.” Here the identity problems get, if anything, even thicker.

It’s true that Achmed’s information about Dorjiev is sufficiently accurate and believable, based on what we can know from independent sources. What isn’t so believable is he had sufficient reason to equate him with Gurdjieff. Achmed's accuracy makes me tend to believe that he might have actually been in Lhasa, seen Dorjiev there or at least heard a great deal about him, but his assertion of the single personhood of Gurdjieff-Dorjiev is, as he says, not something he can prove. And this equation our independent sources can disprove, especially now that a number of sources about Dorjiev's last years have been made known to the world at large.

It isn’t even all that clear to me that Gurdjieff unequivocally claimed that he had been in Lhasa or any other part of Tibet proper. What he did claim is that he received ultra-esoteric teachings (that formed the [or a] basis of his own teachings, including the well-known dances) at an almost entirely inaccessible location somewhere in the vicinity of the Pamirs from a group called the Sarmoung Brotherhood. They had yet another ‘sister’ monastery on the northern slopes of the Himalayas called Olman Monastery. I'm not sure if he claimed to go to this Olman Monastery, but even then I am the opposite of clear when it comes to knowing where the “northern slopes of the Himalayas” might be.* I’ve seen some say Gurdjieff claimed he had a “Tibetan marriage” and his eldest son became the head of a lamaserie, although I’m not sure how to trace back the authorities for it, or if it’s all that interesting. Is it?

(*See p. 313 in William James Thompson, J.G. Bennett's Interpretation of the Teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Study of Transmission in the Fourth Way, doctoral dissertation, University of Lancaster (1995). The southern slopes of the Himalayas are much more easily located. For all I know the northern slopes of the Himalayas could be all the way up beyond the Kunlun Mountains, somewhere near the palace of the Queen Mother of the West.)

Well, we do all have problems with identity. That much is true and undeniable.

§ § §

References:

Rom Landau, God Is My Adventure: A Book on Modern Mystics Masters and Teachers, Faber and Faber (London 1935, 1941).

Douglas Fairbanks in “The Thief of Bagdad, an Arabian Nights Fantasy,” 1924 movie, its screenplay by Nadir Khan, aka Achmed Abdullah, aka Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, the man who knew how to identify people. Well, I’d say Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) was a very interesting character in his own right. I think we should take what he said with liberal doses of salt. Name changers see everyone else as name changers, you think maybe? Hollywood people know all there is to know about projection.

In general, I very much admire the acting done on both screen and stage under the directorship of Peter Brook, so if even just for that, I’d much recommend seeing “Meetings with Remarkable Men.” Here you can find what looks like a complete version of the film. Or try here.

And finally, if you are serious about wanting to know something about Dorjiev (1853-1938), I would seriously recommend this and/or the following book or the article by Andreyev. We know how Dorjiev spent the last decades of his life, and No, he did not spend them pretending to be Gurdjieff!

Jampa Samten and Nikolay Tsyrempilov, From Tibet Confidentially: Secret Correspondence of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to Agvan Dorzjiev, 1911-1925, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (Dharamsala 2012).

Alexandre I. Andreyev, An Unknown Russian Memoir by Aagvan Dorjiev, Inner Asia, vol. 3 (2001), pp. 27-39. This has a survey of now-available sources on the life of Dorjiev. Several other works by the same author ought to be listed, if I had more energy, including the book cited in the appendix down below.

For some remarkable historic photographs of the Buddhist temple Dorjiev founded in St. Petersburg, look here. For a sketch of the temple's history, try here.

For the birthplace of Gurdjieff, look here, where it says "Gurdjieff was born in the Armenian city of Alexandropol, which is now called Gyumri." The birthdate would seem to be up in the air.

§ § §

Appendix: The Death of Dorjiev

Source: Alexandre Andreyev, Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy, 1918-1930s, Brill (Leiden 2003), p. 361:

"In January 1937, Dorzhiev, accompanied by his attendant, Lama Dugar Jimbiev, left Leningrad for Buryatia. There he hoped to spend his last days in a solitary retreat as Buddhist monks do, in his house at the medical school of the Atsagat Datsang, near Verkneudinsk. However his hopes were not to be fulfilled. On 13 November the Buryat was arrested in his home and put into prison in Verkheudinsk. He was accused of high treason (spying for Japan), terrorist and subversive activities, preparation of armed rebellion, and several more anti-Soviet crimes. Two weeks later, shortly after his one and only interrogation, Dorzhiev was taken to a hospital ward. There, on January 29, 1938, he died."

Gurdjieff died during the morning of October 29, 1949, in France. His last words? "Bravo America."

Answer me this: How can two people who are one and the same person die such different deaths?

↧

The Tibetan Invention of the Cell Phone

January 31, 2014, 10:31 am

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≪ Previous: Good Grief! Gurdjieff in Tibet?

Sure, I think I can recognize the likely sources of your hesitancy. You’re thinking to yourself, ‘What? Not another rave about ancient Tibetan technology and out-of-place artefacts!’ Well, yes, I guess it is, sort of. I know you’ve been bamboozled before, and that’s what makes it hard for you to trust other people with their strange ideas ever again. But I do plan to have a look into the sources of authority, and the authority of that authority, if I have time for it. Before that I want to quote from something you will have to agree is a most impressive testimony to Tibetan knowledge of the cell phone long before it became the quotidian headache it is today. The source is a very reputable one. In fact, it’s the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, volume 26, part 2 published in the year 1940, in an article by Captain V. d'Auvergne, M.C., D.C.M., M.S.M., entitled “My Experiences in Tibet.” Notice that date nearly 75 years ago when your grandparents were mere saplings. Now go ask them what kind of phones they were using way back then. I’m sure they’ll still remember if they remember anything at all.

Another thing you should notice is that right in the title, we already know that it isn’t just some official talking head or armchair observer... No, this person was there and personally experienced what he’s talking about. There, on pages 109 through 111, you may read, and I quote:

“While staying at the Moru-amo Lhaga, seated one afternoon in the Zug-kang with Pezu Lama, who on account of his great age went by the simple name of Goppoo (which means — old man), he suddenly stopped talking and held himself as if to listen—then from the breast of his tin-lo (robe) withdrew a small metal cylinder-shaped article about 8" in length by 2" in diameter, from one end of which he removed a cover, and held the open end to his ear for a moment, then reversed it and opened the other end, into which he spoke a sentence or two in a whispering voice, after which he closed the instrument and returned it to his robe. On seeing my astonishment and curiosity that I could not hide — he calmly informed me that he was talking to his young brother who was a lama away north in the Tzagan Ora Mountains, over 200 miles from Moru-amo. I felt so confused on hearing this, that the only remark I could manage to think of was to ask him what might be the age of his young brother? ‘Oh!’ he replied in a slighting manner, ‘he is not 120 as yet.’ I thought it best not to ask any more questions, but during the months of my convalescence with the Dzurmo, I mentioned this matter. He smilingly informed me that it was a simple little convenience called the L'en sang-wa (or secret messenger) at one time extensively in use with the ancient Gyal-Dzom. The little instruments were made in pairs only, and by some process—en rapport—with each other in such a manner that certain very delicate vibratory action was set up by the voice on the fine tissues of the other. An instrument was no use without its particular pair. The chemical from which the tissues were prepared was of some kind of composite mineral, and vegetable extraction, the secret of which was jealously guarded by the ancient Gyal-Dzom, but it appears that the secret leaked out and seems to have filtered down the ages, but still carefully guarded by a few of the elect. I learned later that the tissues of the instruments deteriorated after a certain time, but could always be renewed by chemical treatment. Here again is interesting work for research.”

The Tibetan name the Captain gives for the secret messenger is l'en sang-wa. I guess that is likely to be Tibetan lan gsang-ba, and that it means something more like secret response.

Did you ever hear of the Baghdad battery? The Dendera lightbulbs? Well, if you haven’t, you ought to look into it. I see that our trusty Captain also found lightbulbs in Tibet.

“Approaching one of the lights, I found that it was but a lump of common stone-crystal about 4" in diameter placed on a plate of some kind of metal, grey in colour, about half an inch thick and one foot in diameter, all of which was hung by bronze wire loops from an arm at right angles from a wooden upright. Over and around the plate ran an ornamental tracing in thin lines of gold hieroglyphics resembling the characters on the cave writings. Needless to say, I was keen to get an explanation...”

Keen is the word for you, too, if you are like me. In case you need this reassurance, everything does have a reasonable explanation. Whether you’ll be ready to accept it or not, I’m not so ready to say.

“The Che-sho willingly informed me that the sound of the gong penetrated the metal plate from which a vibrating force emanated, that had the effect of infusing to the crystal particles a bright luminous glow that gradually grew to a certain intensity in accordance with the volume of vibratory sound. If the gong was struck with a metal hammer, the glow would be so great that the human eye could not stand it without a head covering of thick cloth—and still neither the crystal or plate had a particle of heat.

“Che-sho said that he had no knowledge of what kind of metal the plate or the gong was made of, as they were received in his Monastery hundreds of years ago. He could not say from where or from whom; but personally, I have no doubt that it is another of the ancient Gyal-Dzom's scientific secrets.”

As if we hadn’t had our fill of amazing information, the Captain tells us about the dong-are Kong-mi, his Tibetan name for the Abominable Snowmen. I’m guessing there is a small fault in the typography, and emend it to dong-dre Kong-mi; then it comes closer to meaning what he says it means, which is devil snowmen. Still, I’d prefer the translation bear snow men, assuming the true spelling to be dom-dred gangs-mi. That much seems reasonable. I also liked the vines that were made to grow so rapidly — ten feet in one day — they could be made to form bridges. That sounds very useful, so long as it’s not the dreaded kudzu vine. Forget about cell phones; I’d be overjoyed to learn that Tibetans never invented anything so harmful.

If you want to know when the first real walky-talky was invented, look here. Interesting...

§ § §

I don't know much about the author, except that he wrote two books (or that just one book?) that are still available from used book dealers:

Zindari A daughter of the Indian Frontier and other Thrilling Tales of the Indian Frontier by Captain V. D'Auvergne (1939).

Folk-Tales of the Indian Frontier I’m not so sure if this title isn’t just one of the many reprints of the just-listed book.

I guess I should have included sound-activated light switches among the subjects of today’s blog. Next time maybe I’ll go into the issue of when the first Tibetan man-lifting kites may have been invented. If you are like me — and I guess you are like me more or less — I know you won’t want to miss it.

↧

Bird Dogs of Tibet

March 10, 2014, 12:17 pm

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Yes, I know there are a lot of examples of hybrid animals in Tibetan lore, like combinations of sea creatures and mammals, carp-headed otters and the like, not all of them nearly as cute as what you see above. Some of them like the makara, in Tibetan the chusin (ཆུ་སྲིན་), come from India, true enough. But I really didn’t intend to talk about them today; I’m looking in a different direction altogether. I just came back from what may be the most impressive bird sanctuary in the world, so you may understand I’m still under the spell. What I do want to talk about are dogs raised (and perhaps also hatched) in bird nests. To put it another way, the scene would have to look a lot more like this:

Something I read in an article by Antonio Terrone perked my interest when it came out not so long ago. It’s about one of the most famous Lamas in the Tibetan plateau in recent decades, the now sadly departed Khenpo Jigpun་༼མཁན་པོ་འཇིགས་ཕུན་༽. Terrone quotes from Gyurme Dorje’s much-used travel guide, Tibet Handbook, at p. 611. However, my edition of that book must be a different one, because I found it on page 620 in mine:

"Khenpo Jikpun is well-known for obtaining the ‘bird-dogs’ of Tibet, a tiny dog which is reputably* found in the nest of cliff-nesting birds, and has the power to detect poison in food! He presented one to the Dalai Lama on a recent visit to India. He has also travelled widely in Europe and North America."

(*I guess he means reputedly. I should email the author to be sure.)

I was surprised once again a few weeks ago when I came across another quote, this one a translation of a bit by the 11th-century Turkologist Kashgari as translated by the modern Turkologist Robert Dankoff in an oldish article of his.

“Perhaps,” says Dankoff, “the strangest lore in the Diwan concerns baraq, the shaggy dog (kalb ahlab)”:

“The Turks claim that when the vulture grows old it lays two eggs and then hatches them. From one emerges this dog, called Baraq — it is the swiftest of running dogs and the most reliable in the hunt; from the other emerges a chick, the last of its chicks.”

Well, I wager you’ve already admitted that the ideas are similar. Yes of course, apart from the difference that while one has the ability to detect poison the other can run like the wind. Several Turkic groups were living in close proximity to Tibet for quite a long time, not to mention Kashgari himself. So I don’t know if there is enough chance of finding an answer to justify placing the question how and where the bird-dog exchanges may have come about. I’m afraid I know little more than what I’ve told you already. Still, I somehow regard it as impressive enough to warrant a short blog like this one you see hanging in front of your glazed-over eyeballs, wearily rolling backward in their sockets in utter disbelief at this late-night shaggy dog story. All I can say in my defense is that the dog might not be all that shaggy after all. Go on and stick that in your pipe and smoke it, esteemed professors.

§ § §

You must surely be demanding to see sources of authority for these amazing claims. Here you go:

Robert Dankoff, “Kâsgarî on the Beliefs and Superstitions of the Turks,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 95, no.1 (January 1975), pp. 68-80, at p. 79.*

(*There are quite a few other things in Dankoff’s article suggesting some remarkably deep Tibeto-Turkic relations. I’m sure you already know that the oldest Tibetan texts display knowledge of the Turks they know as དྲུ་གུ་. However, I will save that for another time, one more convenient to me.)

Gyurme Dorje, Tibet Handbook with Bhutan, Passport Books (Lincolnwood 1996), at p. 620.

Antonio Terrone, “Visions, Arcane Claims and Hidden Treasures: Charisma and Authority in a Present-day Gter-ston,” contained in: P. Christiaan Klieger, ed., Tibet, Self & the Tibetan Diaspora: Voices of Difference, Brill (Leiden 2002), pp. 213-228, at p. 222.

§ § §

PS: Googlebooks tells me there is something about a Shaggy Dog Shaman in Julian Baldick's book Animal and Shaman. His name was Baraq Baba. He was a Turkic Muslim and he lived in around the year 1300.

“We are told that Baraq Baba and his followers were beardless, but with long moustaches, and wore felt hats with two horns. Around their necks hung cows’ knuckle bones painted with henna, crooked sticks and little bells. They would beat drums and play other instruments...”

This is complete news to me, but he sounds entertaining.

If you read Turkish better than I do, have a look at this Vikipedia entry. To believe the entry about him in Encyclopaedia Iranica* as I tend to do, Baraq Baba’s name means just the opposite of shaggy dog; it means hairless dog. To tell the truth, disregarding hair for now, he resembles more than a little the young Götsangpa. Maybe it’s just the horned hat* and the showbiz attitude. Hmm... and they lived at nearly the same time, didn’t they?

(*I’m not sure you can get there, but give it a try here.)
(*For more on that see the blog on Birdhorns.)

↧

The Road to Imeus

April 19, 2014, 8:52 am

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≪ Previous: Bird Dogs of Tibet

Somewhere in the final section, at the right-hand side (the eastern end),
of the Peutinger Table

I no longer harbor the least regret for the time spent in my high school Latin classes. No doubt they were a torture in some ways. I particularly remember how the back row of the classroom, made up entirely of boys, would break out in interminable peals of hilarity every time anyone had to pronounce the word factum, which was often. My teacher who had taught Latin to my aunt always succeeded in her efforts to remain unembarrassed, even impassive, until the laughter finally faded away and we could go back to work identifying genitive endings and the like. I found this scene tiresomely predictable. But I have to say that once we got past the Gallic Wars and moved on to other things, like Virgil and particularly Ovid's Metamorphoses, I enjoyed it very much.

I do in truth make use of Latin every day in ways both obvious and subliminal, but I haven’t gone on to look at western classics all that much, since I soon after lost myself in Sanskrit, a little later on in Tibetan language study. Last night being exceptional, I happened to catch a fascinating lecture in the field of early cartography by a young and evidently brilliant classicist named Scott Johnson. To jot a bit of what he said on a thumbnail, he spoke about a very long scroll of a world map, in the form of a faithful 13th-century hand-copy now kept in Vienna, of a circa 300 CE original. It’s 22 feet long and one foot high; that means the geographical features are severely squeezed north-to-south, while it's west-to-east coverage extends from the British Isles to Sri Lanka. Labeled in Latin, it is best known by the name of “The Peutinger Table.” Like so many other early maps, it was intended as a route map, labeling landmarks and possible stops along the way.

So, anyway, to get to my point before you can move your cursor over the “view the next blog...” As the Tibeto-centric type of person I have become, I was intrigued to see on the map, far to the east, a set of mountains marked “Mons.Imeus.” (Tibetan readers will notice and appreciate the tsheg-like dots dividing the words). This I knew has to be a form of the better-known name Himalaya (Snow Treasury) or, more likely, Himavan (Snowy). Disbelief will be dispelled with a glance at today’s frontispiece, near the middle, beneath the burn hole. There you see it clear as day, a ca. 300 CE reference to the Tibetan world.

I went to look again at C.I. Beckwith’s dissertation, thinking that was a place I had seen the name, but what I did find on its page 33 is that Hemodos (=Emodon) is the name of the mountains to the north of India according to the classical authors; it is obvious they could only mean the main line of the Himâlayas. Perhaps this Hemodos and Imeus are just different ways of recording the same name? For more spellings check the Pleiades website, here, although I can’t tell you how the Caucasus Mountains got in there (once something slips into the pool of data it can be nigh impossible to fish it out again). Anyway, Beckwith saw Imaos (etc.) as referring to the mountain complex of the Pamirs (plus the T'ien-shan), with Hemodos (etc.) being the name of the Himalayas. I think he was probably right, although I wouldn’t mind to hear different ideas if you have any. The classical western world knew something of the Himálayan Mountains towering over India, but to find out what little they knew about the Tibetans living up above them on the Himalayan Plateau, you have no better place to look than Beckwith’s dissertation, still unpublished after all these years. (And no, we’re not talking about any old gold digging ants.)

As an afterthought, in hindsight I can say that even reading the Gallic Wars at a young age had its good effect. It soured me forever to the very idea of devoting my life to the study of war, and made me resolve to trace the ways of peace, while simultaneously and without fear of contradiction admiring those who make themselves into obstacles for injustices. My heroes are the ones who stop wars, or create the conditions that keep them from happening. The wealthy and powerful are the ones who have to try the hardest to earn our respect in this respect, their wealth or their power alone just doesn’t cut it.

A bit of the Madaba Mosaic Map, 6th century

§ § §

References for your reference

Christopher I. Beckwith, A Study of the Early Medieval Chinese, Latin and Tibetan Historical Sources on Pre-Imperial Tibet, doctoral dissertation, Indiana University (Bloomington 1977).

Scott Johnson, “From Ptolemy to Pilgrimage: Images of Late Antiquity in Geography, Travel and Cartography.” Library of Congress Kluge lecture, viewable at YouTube HERE.

Nakamura Hiroshi, “Old Chinese World Maps Preserved by the Koreans,” Imago Mundi, vol. 4 (1947), pp. 3-22. Try to get it from JSTOR through a subscribing institution, or find a library that has the journal. In this old article, at p. 21, you can see a copy of the old map with the Tibetan letters on it; it’s also illustrated in Schwartzberg’s article as well as Teramoto's, but you can get to it even more quickly HERE. Somebody should do a better study of it from a Tibetological perspective. Is anyone listening?

Sam van Schaik will before long publish a fascinating study of the Grünwedel maps. I’m fairly sure you don't know what those are, but I’m not about to steal Sam’s thunder. Well, maybe a tiny bit.

Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Cartography of Greater Tibet and Mongolia,” contained in: J.B. Harley and D. Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 2, pt. 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and South Asian Societies, University of Chicago Press (1994), pp. 607-681. I’m fairly jolted by the discovery that you can download this as a free PDF file from the publisher of the book, HERE. Most bona fide made-in-Tibet maps aren't all that old, and most of them, like the Peutinger Table, are route maps. They often show highlights of the scenery flattened out on either side of the route, and the route usually follows river courses, and this for obvious reasons given the otherwise highly mountainous terrain.

Teramoto Enga (1872-1949), “Waga kokushi to Toban to no Kankei” [Early Relations between Tibet and Japan — in Japanese], Otani Gakuho, vol. 12, no. 4 (1931), pp. 44-83. On the old Tibetan map kept in Japan, where it was brought by Enchin in around the 840’s to 850’s. I’ve never seen and don’t have access to this article, but I was thinking you might want to keep an eye out for it.

§ § §

The Peutinger Table has some great websites devoted to it. Of course there is always the Wikipedia, the most-consulted reference work in the world today. But instead of that go directly to the real experts, like this one and this one and finally this one, a Roman route planner, fun to play with, entirely replotted onto a thoroughly modern map. There are more, of course, but you might also want to look into (by schmoogling the names) the 420-430 CE Notitia Dignitatum and most impressively, the Rome city map called Forma Urbis Romae from around 200 CE. This last-mentioned has an amazingly complex history of fragmentation and reconstruction that can be traced in delightfully maddening detail here.

§ § §

"Imaeus corresponds roughly with the Himalaya, considered by the ancients to be one of the mountains of the great Asian chain which they called Taurus."

Source: An essay entitled “The Geography of Orosius.”

“Imaeus, corresponding to "Ιμαος and related forms in Greek texts, renders the Pkt form *Himava- «snowy» or the corresponding Skt Himavant- (nom. sg. Himavän)...” “Notice that montes Hemodi (Greek τα Ήμωδα δρη) is the equivalent of Pkt *Hemöda-, Skt Haimavata-, equally «snowy»; intended are two parts of the Himalayan range.”

Source: Erik Seldeslachts, “Translated Loans and Loan Translations as Evidence of Graeco-Indian Bilingualism in Antiquity,” L'antiquité classique, vol. 67 (1998), pp. 273-299, at p. 274.

Afterthoughts

Today's blog title alludes to a famous episode known as “The Road to Emmaus.” If that doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry about it overly much. It’s another of those places clearly marked on the map yet very probably impossible to find, so you can just forget about the GPS, give it a toss.

Maybe next time, or the time after, I’ll try to convince you of an even much earlier sign that a Himalayan product was well known to the middle eastern and classical western world. I’m enjoying the aroma of it even as we speak. Until then, be confident of good things coming our way.

Said to be in Kham (hard to read the tiny letters),
this shows what a typical traditional Tibetan map (ས་བཀྲ་) looks like,
somewhat topographical

↧

Released! Tibskrit 2014

April 22, 2014, 2:55 am

≫ Next: Flip-flops so to Speak

≪ Previous: The Road to Imeus

If you know Tibskrit already, or if you’re keeping Tibskrit 2011 on your laptop taking it with you wherever you go, this updated version is meant for you. I know I promised it would pass the 1,000,000 word mark. Still, I hope you won’t complain too bitterly if it falls slightly short of that perfect number. That’s a lot of typing to do in just ten years, and I assure you that every one of those keystrokes was performed by one of my poor, and by now sore, fingers and thumbs. I hope you appreciate the home-made garage-band quality of it and will excuse an occasional rough edge.

This is a reference work meant for people involved in Asian Studies or Buddhist Studies of some kind or another. Its chief usefulness will be — as its title implies — for people who are involved in literary studies in Sanskrit and/or Tibetan languages. For more explanations and apologies, just download the file and read the introductory part. Then the next time you want to know if there has been a study or translation of a particular work, if there is information on a particular writer, you can check to see if there is something here that can help you find out more. All you have to do is do an ordinary word search through the file. You don’t even need to be connected to the internet to do it.

Why not just do a Schmoogle-search for it? you may be asking. Because it’s designed such that you get a compact set of references instead of 100,000 hits, mostly carbon copies. That said, go ahead and Schmoogle and search through Tibskrit, too. I mention some other important resources in the file itself (only in .doc format with 13 megabytes), sooo....

If you are ready for the direct download of Tibskrit 2014, go HERE. (That means click once or twice on that underlined word. And if it doesn't work for you, try it again tomorrow.)

For a general page with a messy list of download links, including this one, go HERE (this is only in case the just-given link may have expired).

Nota bene! Nobody in the universe has permission to upload this file to a site that charges for, or requires paid membership for, downloads (that includes you, Scribd! and you, lanoo2552!).

For the old blog (dated February 2, 2011) on the release of Tibskrit 2011, you can look here.

Horsetails

↧

Flip-flops so to Speak

June 9, 2014, 9:49 am

≫ Next: Couples Constantly Facing Off

≪ Previous: Released! Tibskrit 2014

— Today's blog entry is dedicated to frustrated dissertation writers everywhere.

I’m not sure if the Google-bots aren’t going to build a huge firewall around Tibeto-logic after they’ve finished word-checking the blog entry below. Yeah, so what if they do? My main concern would be the school kids in the Philippines may no longer be able to get to the one about the Monkey and the Turtle/Croc (I sometimes wonder how many school teachers over there have gotten assignments that were simply cut-and-pasted from it). Their interest, an interesting subject all by itself, has made it the most-accessed Tibeto-logic blog entry ever. So it won’t matter all that much if this particular one turns out to be a big flop just because it’s on such an unpopular subject. What you’ll find below is a modified form of a posting to a members-only Ning group on Bon religion several years ago where it remains no doubt to this day inaccessible (I’ve even forgotten my password), so I thought I would bring it out in the open. Given the topic, I couldn’t find a family-friendly photo to use as a frontispiece, so I was thinking I would go with something a little more abstract this time (just remember what they say about Freud's cigar, that it might just be a cigar or then again, it might be a turtle’s head). And I apologize to everyone who would prefer bluntly direct language, since I’ve censored myself somewhat, just not so much as to worry that my meanings might be missed. I think it’s funnier that way. Have fun. Or be offended and disgusted if that's what you're into these days.

Dear Zzists,

As promised, be warned that this communication contains toned-down filth that you can very probably handle... Well, unless you are overly prudish or fundamentalish. If so I’m sad for you and will pray that you get better with time. The bilingual Zhang-zhung—Tibetan glossary of Zhu has this delightful bit of doggerel in Zhang-zhung. He seems to be playing around here in this last part of the glossary, having a bit of fun, perhaps even making the sentences & verses up based on his own knowledge of ZZ language (most of his work is demonstrably extracted from the text of the Abhidharmic Bon scripture known as the Mdzod-phug). One indication among others this may have been made up by Zhu is just the fact that pad-ma,a Tibetan transcription of Indic padma(the lotus, of course, but here metaphorically used for the 'female sign'), is parading as a Zhang-zhung word, and I believe this kind of misrecognition of Sanskrit as Zhang-zhung is something that happened more and more as time went on:

cug no ni nam tha wer tse

wir som (lbir som) tsa med pad ma ra

di byil sa cim [sa cis?] nyum no ti

ku ri dhing ning ra pi cod

and he supplies this Tibetan translation for it:

'dod chags mi rnams pho mtshan che

'dod log bu med [bud med] mo mtshan dmar

khrel med ming po sbyor ngan dran

mi 'dzem sring mo ma legs spyod

I venture to translate the Tibetan like this:
Lustful men [have] big male genitals. / Women with wrong desires have red female genitals. / The shameless brother thinks about bad union. / The immodest sister practices 'not nice.'

I think I translated that about as tastefully as could be expected or hoped for. I won’t discuss each Zhang-zhung word. Otherwise we’ll get way off course. I want to just discuss the ZZ word tha-wer, which is the one that was just now (see above) translated into Tibetan as pho-mtshan ('male marker'). I only got into this because years ago (guess it was 1991) when I handed in my dissertation I was chided by one of my advisers for being too prudish when translating the list of the 32 marks/signs of Lord Shenrab (they in large part do correspond to the 32 marks of the Buddha that are much better known to the world, and differ in some remarkable ways, but that’s not my point here), from the Khams-’bring[middle-lengthed version of the Khams-brgyadscripture], the passage in question being bodily mark number 26: gsang-ba’i the-ber sbubs-su nub-pa rta dang blang po [glang po] ’gra-ba [’dra-ba] lags-so,which I translated "His private the-beris hidden in a sheath like the horse's and elephant’s."

For the item in context, look at this Tibeto-logic blog page.

It still pains me being called a prude, a wound that may never ever heal. I mean, for crying out loud, I actually used the words "d***** d***" later on in the damn’d thing, not that anybody read that far. If they had I’m sure I would have heard about it, perhaps never heard the end of it. It’s not that I’m all that proud I did it. I put something much more outrageous in my dissertation, but took it out at the last minute. In this case, I’m glad I did. I had the crazy idea to test my advisers, to see how far they got into the text, thinking if they saw this doosie, they wouldn’t be able to notsay something about it. That way I would actually know if they made it as far as page 279. I’ve heard of other dissertationitis sufferers doing similar kinds of things, so my craziness was at least not unique, and I’m not as weird as you were thinking, am I? Well, am I?

Anyway, I simply left the word the-ber untranslated, not out of modesty mind you, but because at the time I wasn’t aware of this word being used in any other context. Really, I wasn’t even sure if it was supposed to be Tibetan or Zhang-zhung or what. It was just a mystery, its meaning divined from its context. But now in hindsight I can see that Zhu believed it was (with a different spelling) a true Zhang-zhung word, and now I know that Hummel (in his book On Zhang-zhung, LTWA, Dharamsala, 2000, p. 11), who of course based himself on Zhu, has the spelling the-wer, alternative reading tha-wer, with the Tibetan equivalent pho-mtshan, and with a slight attempt at interpretation based on the "wer" element, since it is ZZ for 'arrow,' symbol of manhood, etc. (Well, yes, OK, but wer could even more likely mean 'king'...)

At least it is true what Hummel says, that the word occurs twice in Zhu, once spelled tha-wer, and once spelled the-wer, but both times glossed with Tibetan word pho-mtshan, that very literally means male sign, so I'm not sure how arrows or kings would enter into it. Part of my problem is that all the Tibeto-Burman evidence for words for penis that I had been able to locate anywhere seemed to more-and-less resemble Tibetan མཇེ་ / mje(which anatomically speaking would not include the scrotum, but the word-collecting that finally fed into the STEDT database appears careless in this regard). The Chinese points in the same direction, too, since it seems there is nothing like tha-wer/the-ber there to be found. Even taking into account the possibility of genital flip-flop (this is a phenomenon you will have to ask a real Tibeto-Burmanist, not me, to explain to you, or, even if it won’t be nearly as much fun, you could do the 2nd best thing and schmoogle for it; I know Karen does it [by Karen I mean the language of course, dummy, What did you think I meant?]) I have failed over the years to find a candidate for a cognate word in any Tibeto-Burman (or any other kind of) language. That is, until yesterday.

For some reason or another, instead of daydreaming about gorgeous supermodels with outstanding personal assets and minimal fabric over them, I was idly looking through an ancient article by John Avery, "Ao Naga Language of Southern Assam,"American Journal of Philology, vol. 7, no. 3 (1886), pp. 344-366. Ao, a Tibeto-Burman language, is spoken by several thousand Nagas in Assam close to the Burmese border. There is an Ao entry in — Where else? — Wikipedia. So anyway, what Avery (on p. 347) says is that there is an Ao-language word frequently used to indicate the male gender of persons, and that word is tebur (noticing, too, that a similar word, tebong, is used to indicate male gender of animals).

Well, that's the only bit I've been able to come up with that could help argue that the ZZ the-bermight have some real honest-to-g-d Tibeto-Burman background. Any other ideas? I fully realize that looking as far away as the Nagas might be considered a bit of a stretch.

Badly yours,

D

PS: The STEDT database has quite a variety of Tibeto-Burman words for penis on display. It’s interesting — I’d go so far as to say totally relevant — that the syllable the with this meaning is found in the Karenic languages.*
(And I suppose it is just barely possible that the the* could owe something to a PIE form such as **twen* (for ‘tail’). For **twen* see Douglas Q. Adams, Studies in Tocharian Vocabulary IV, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 106 (1986), pp. 339-341, at p. 340.)

§•§•§

Postscript: I wish I could say that I’ve read this short article with the following title, but I don’t have it. As you can see, it must be exactly on topic: Paul K. Benedict, “A Further (Unexpurgated) Note on Karen Genital Flip-flop,” Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 6, no. 1 (1981), pp. 103-104. What the original expurgated note was I have no way of telling. But I do have Benedict's other paper, "A Note on Genital De-Flip-flopping, with an Apology to Tsou boki,"Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 17, no. 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 155-157. If short ones are not to your liking, you may want to read a long paper about Zhang-zhung. If you don’t mind the punishment, look here. And if that makes you too tired to think, and you’re ready to plunge into the lexical materials, look here. A blog here at Tibeto-logic introduced these things in a brief and perhaps for that reason more friendly way, I don’t know. FYI: My sublimated Freudianism isn’t meant to be serious, and anyway, I’m sure if my issues aren't resolved by now, they’re simply intractable. (Or I’m just being resistant to therapy, you decide.)

↧

Couples Constantly Facing Off

July 16, 2014, 4:02 am

≫ Next: In Praise of Beer

≪ Previous: Flip-flops so to Speak

Light side and Dark side of the mountain

modern གཏན་ཞལ་ > སྟངས་ཞལ་ > ancient སྟངས་དབྱལ་?

This བློག་ is for Dorji over at Philologia Tibetica. We share an incurable disorder known as Logophilia, among its symptoms an immediate and spontaneous impulse to do funny things with words. For us, logos and Legos are cultural equivalents. Our best excuse for having this fun is, anyway, that words have always been doing funny things with themselves. Sometimes we can catch them in the act. Today I produce one of the smoking guns.

To start with, Tibetan language has a strong tendency to make pair compounds, in which two substantives are simply crammed together to make a new word (often dropping 2nd syllables altogether in the process). Sometimes this is just an 'and' type of compound, sometimes a way of making abstract nouns. These are often contrasting pairs, forming what we might call antonym compounds. For example, the term hope-fear, or re-dogs (རེ་དོགས་) just comes out meaning everything on a scale ranging from the highest hopes to the darkest fears. We can fairly well translate a pair compound such as this with English anxiety, perhaps more accurately meaning levels of anxiety about what good or bad thing might happen in the future. But we could, and this is my point, simply translate it as hope[s] and fear[s]. Take your pick.

Something occurred to me while I was getting some expert help from PD ironing out problems in a very long translation I've been working on for what seems like forever now. This minor revelation was: That the modern Tibetan tongue has a word that has evolved in its spelling at certain stages in its history until we get the modern word gtan-zhal (གཏན་ཞལ་). Gtan-zhal is a word of very doubtful etymology even if the individual syllables may mean constant and face. It is nowadays a word for couple, used in relatively formal contexts in the meaning husband and wife. I suppose constant face makes some kind of sense, or could be made to make sense, in the sense that your partner could be a person who is constantly in your face about this or that, or something similar, which may ring true, even if that doesn't necessarily make it the truth.

The real story is that the form gtan-zhal is preceded, in early times, by the spelling stangs-zhal (སྟངས་ཞལ་),* with this spelling found a number of times in the Pillar Testament, a history of imperial Tibet of the 7th century that seems to date from the 11th century more or less. Tradition tells that it was extracted from a pillar in the Jokhang in the mid-11th century.

(*I'm ignoring an entry for btang-dpyal [བཏང་དཔྱལ་] in Btsan-lha's dictionary, a word he finds in the biography of Pho-lha-nas, dated 1733, where it could be a conscious archaism. We really must ignore it since it threatens the smooth flow of historic change we want to chart out here.)

The form stangs-zhal demonstrates continuity, it's our "missing link." Preceding it by centuries is the form stangs-dbyal, found in the most famous historical source of all the Old Tibetan documents in Dunhuang, the Old Tibetan Annals, in its entry for the year 710 CE, as well as in the inscription on the old bell at the temple of Samyé. Not only that, but perhaps this is the point I most want to stress: the literature of the Bon religion continued to use this term without a break for the last thousand years at the very least. (I'd give some more examples of such words, but perhaps we'll leave it for now.)

We find ourselves in a peculiar situation here, since the word itself in a certain sense remained constant through time. Its pronunciation changed somewhat, probably due to dialect influences, and the pronunciation change had its effect on the spelling... Until it became virtually unrecognizable, both syllables re-spelled as if to thwart meaningful etymologies.

Old Tibetan has another very interesting pair compound, gdags-sribs (གདགས་སྲིབས་), which means the lighted and the shadowed sides of the mountain, very much like the ancient idea behind yin-yang in Chinese culture. The syllable srib[s] is related to a number of other Tibetan words with related meanings like sgrib-pa. Here it means shadowy (night) side of the mountain. The explanation of the syllable gdags is a little more obscure, since it usually means designation or labeling. I think it's related to an Old Tibetan word for the sun, gdugs, preserved in the modern word for parasol.

Following Emel Esin, I would ask, If Bonpos are preserving this ancient proto-Tibeto-Sino-Turkic idea that seems to go back before the days of Buddhism in any of those countries, what other such truly pre-Buddhist archaic cultural features might they be preserving? A question for another day.

§ § §

For the early Turkic concept of kararig and yaruk, see Emel Esin's book, A History of Pre-Islamic and Early-Islamic Turkish Culture, Ünal Matbaasi (Istanbul 1980), p. 97. Esin's idea that this cosmological pair concept may go far back in history as a kind of areal phenomenon is believable, but of course questionable. It could belong to more recent times, the Turkic and Tibetan ideas reflecting one-way influence from the Sinosphere. This needs a lot of thought, especially since Stein has pointed out textual translations from Chinese where the Tibetan terms are used to translate the Chinese concept... meaning what? That the Tibetan term had no existence prior to the translation event? How can we know one way or the other?

For the discussions of these terms by Rolf Stein, see his Rolf Stein's Tibetica Antiqua with Additional Materials, tr. Arthur P. McKeown, Brill (Leiden 2010), pp. 21, 61, 63. Today I learned the words adret and ubac. For enlightenment, look here. Stein pointed out the two-time occurrence of the stangs-dbyal in a Nyingma scripture, the famous Guhyagarbha Tantra. Going over to RK&TS, I couldn't locate a single further scriptural occurrence in the entire Kanjur and Tanjur. If I had searched through the Bon scriptures (as if that were even possible) I could have come up with hundreds, even thousands.

I haven't discussed medical usages of the pair gdags-srib. To follow the dictionaries, in the examination room the physician is regarded as gdags, while the patient is srib; in pulse examinations, the upper part of the pulse-taking fingers used to diagnose problems in the five solid organs is gdags, while the lower side of the same fingers used to diagnose the six container organs is srib; in respiration the outward flowing breath is gdags while the inhalation is srib.

For the word stangs-dbyal in the inscription of the bell at Samyé, there is a remarkable discussion in Hugh E. Richardson, A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions, Royal Asiatic Society (London 1985), p. 35, and this the curious are encouraged to look up. Here Richardson even connects it to the modern term gtan-zhal. This virtually means I discovered nothing at all, and this entire blog has been a completely unnecessary sacrifice of digital ink. No, please, not again!?

↧

In Praise of Beer

July 25, 2014, 11:35 am

≫ Next: Name Dropping, It Happens

≪ Previous: Couples Constantly Facing Off

We’ve mentioned Lama Pagpa (འཕགས་པ་) at least once in an earlier blog, on account of his successful lobbying effort with Qubilai Khan to end the culling (“weeding”) of the Chinese peasantry. Unwanted Chinese populations were gotten out of the way by hurling them into the river. Not once in all her long history has China ever deigned to say one simple Thank you for Pagpa’s compassionate intervention. Quite the contrary, since the Yüan dynasty they’ve been concocting and repeating the most derogatory stereotypes of the evil Tibetan monk.

In today’s blog, in an effort to lighten things up (or to reach a particular low point, depending on perspective), we translate — for what I believe is the very first time ever — Pagpa’s remarkable verses on the virtues of a good beer. I wonder about the circumstances of its writing, but to tell you the truth I have no idea. The Mongols originally drank a lot of kumis made by milking mares and fermenting their milk, but after going out into the wider world where still other alcoholic beverages were available, they found all of them to their liking. One sign of their belief in variety was the famous drink fountain they had made for their drinking parties at the capital in the Mongol heartland along the Orkhon River, the city of Karakoram. As you can see in the artist’s rendition, it had a trumpet-blowing angel at the top and four spouts for four different kinds of intoxicating brews. Some of the Mongol rulers probably drank themselves to death, and it may not be an exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for drink addiction they may have gone on to rule Eurasia far into the future. Again, depending on perspective, moderation may not always be all that much of a good thing.

However much our modern Mongolists may like to play down this aspect (sometimes you guys can be overprotective, admit it!), the Mongols in those days were famous for wiping out whole cities. Just look at what they did to Aleppo and Baghdad. Yet rather than slaughtering useful people, like goldsmiths in particular, they took them along with them and rewarded them handsomely for their impressive skills. One of these fortunate fellows was a Frenchman they picked up in Hungary by the name of Guillaume Boucher. I much admire and recommend a charming little book about him by Leonardo Olschki. I doubt anyone has bothered to put it up on the internet, so may I suggest you find a nice library in your neighborhood and sit down to read it? Well, at least consider it. They don’t write ’em like this anymore.

Some may doubt that a holy person like Pagpa ever advocated beer drinking. But I think the fact it is included in his collected works, his kambum (བཀའ་འབུམ་), is enough to recommend its authenticity, not quite enough to guarantee it (are there any absolute guarantees in this life? I mean, besides death and taxes...).

I confess I tried to do something in the way of making Pagpa’s verses in English approach the poetic level of the original, allowing myself to soar ever so slightly above the deadly thud of literality, but no promises of success there. If you don’t like my rendering, feel free to give it a hand, but you’ll need to keep another hand free to pour the next round. I think you can handle it.

Flask of Ambrosia: Verses in Praise of Beer

By 'Phags-pa (1235–1280 CE)

Homage to the Wrath King Swirling Nectar, Amṛtakuṇḍalin!

The essence of earth that sustains the lives of beings,

likewise the collections of flowers and fruits,

with the yeast starter prepared with varied tinctures and herbs

and the very stuff that serves as cleanser of beings, the pure water,

the vessels, required conditions, and varied recipes work together to

bring it to complete maturity over a good length of time

bringing out the pure essence of the pure essence.

These are its perfect causes and conditions.

It seems as if ornamented by strings of pearls,

but these strings are of bubbles shining like the sheerest crystal.

Seeing it is a glory for the eyes,

hearing its bubbly chil-chilsound

a glory for the ears, with its fragrance

satisfying the organ that has the sense of smell,

its every taste both glory and pleasure for the tongue.

Depending if the weather is cold or hot, it brings on warmth

or coolness to our sense of touch, so we feel comfortable.

It is a sun for exorcising the dark tinges of suffering,

a moon that generates the coolness of happiness and contentment.

It is a wind that fans the flames of insight,

is the most glorious prod to eloquence for would-be speakers.

It generates vowed behavior in those entering into battle,

and increases the pleasure of those possessed by desire.

Yet this same drink, for minds desirous of peace,

endows its drinkers with holy meditative absorptions.

For these reasons this is offered as a drink.

It forms the very heart of wealth and leisure.

So it is a thing worthy to be offered,

and ought to be given to those worthy of the gift.

— Verses of praise to beer, Flask of Ambrosia.

༄༅། །ཆང་ལ་བསྔགས་པ་བདུད་རྩིའི་བུམ་པ་བཞུགས། །

༄༅། །ཨོཾ་སྭསྟི་སིདྡྷཾ།

ཁྲོ་བོའི་རྒྱལ་པོ་བདུད་རྩི་འཁྱིལ་པ་ལ་ཕྱག་འཚལ་ལོ།།

ས་ཡི་སྙིང་པོ་འགྲོ་བའི་ཉེར་འཚོ་དང་།།
དེ་བཞིན་མེ་ཏོག་འབྲས་བུའི་ཚོགས་རྣམས་དང་།།
རྩི་སྨན་སྣ་ཚོགས་སྦྱོར་བའི་ཕབས་དང་ནི།།
འགྲོ་བའི་དག་བྱེད་གྱུར་པའི་ཆུ་གཙང་རྣམས།།

སྣོད་དང་རྐྱེན་དང་སྣ་ཚོགས་སྦྱོར་བ་དང་།།
དུས་ཀྱི་འགྱུར་བ་བཟང་པོས་ཡོངས་སྨིན་པར།།
བྱས་ཤིང་དྭངས་མའི་དྭངས་མ་ལེགས་བྱུང་བས།།
འདི་ཡི་རྒྱུ་རྐྱེན་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ་ཡིན།།

ཆེར་དྭངས་ཤེལ་ལྟར་སྣང་བའི་ལྦུ་བ་ཡི།།
ཕྲེང་བ་མུ་ཏིག་ཕྲེང་བས་སྤྲས་འདྲ་བ།།
མཐོང་བས་མིག་གི་དཔལ་ཏེ་ཆིལ་ཆིལ་སྒྲ།།
ཐོས་པས་རྣ་བའི་དཔལ་ལ་བསུང་ངད་ཀྱིས།།

དྲི་འཛིན་དབང་པོ་ཚིམ་པར་བྱེད་པ་ཡིན།།
ཀུན་ནས་མྱངས་པས་ལྕེ་ཡི་དཔལ་ཡང་བདེ།།
གྲང་དང་ཚ་བའི་ཚེ་ན་དྲོད་དང་ནི།།
བསིལ་བྱེད་ལུས་ཀྱི་དབང་པོ་བདེ་བའི་རྒྱུ།།

མྱ་ངན་ཐིབས་པ་སེལ་བའི་ཉི་མ་སྟེ།།
དགའ་བདེའི་བསིལ་བ་བསྐྱེད་པའི་ཟླ་བ་ཡིན།།
ཤེས་རབ་མེ་ལྕེ་འབར་བྱེད་རླུང་ཡིན་ལ།།
སྨྲ་འདོད་རྣམས་ཀྱི་སྤོབས་པའི་དཔལ་ཡང་ཡིན།།

གཡུལ་ངོར་ཞུགས་པའི་བརྟུལ་ཞུགས་སྐྱེད་བྱེད་ཅིང་།།
འདོད་ལྡན་རྣམས་ཀྱི་བདེ་བའང་རྒྱས་བྱེད་ཡིན།།
ཞིར་འདོད་རྣམས་ཀྱི་རྒྱུད་ལ་འདི་ཡིས་ནི།།
ཏིང་འཛིན་དམ་པ་ལྷུག་པར་བསྐྱེད་པ་ཡིན།།

དེ་ཕྱིར་འདི་ནི་བཏུང་བའི་ཕུལ་ཡང་ཡིན།།
ལོངས་སྤྱོད་རྣམས་ཀྱི་སྙིང་པོར་གྱུར་པ་ཡིན།།
དེ་སླད་འདི་ནི་མཆོད་འོས་མཆོད་པ་དང་།།
སྦྱིན་འོས་རྣམས་ལ་སྦྱིན་པར་བྱ་བ་ཡིན།།

ཆང་ལ་བསྔགས་པའི་རབ་ཏུ་བྱེད་པ་བདུད་རྩིའི་བུམ་པ་ཞེས་བྱ་བ་ཨི་ཐི།། །།

± ± ±

Reading matter for curious beer-emboldened souls

For the basis of the text you see above, you can look here. For a biography of the author, go to The Treasury of Lives, and to this particular page of it. I also recommend this PDF.

Leonard Olschki, Guillaume Boucher, a French Artist at the Court of the Khans, John Hopkins Press (Baltimore 1946). Much to be recommended, as is another book by the same author on a different subject called The Myth of Felt.

Olschki's note on his Illustration 3:

“This picture shows the reconstruction of Mangu Khan's magic fountain as described by Friar William of Rubruck and engraved by an anonymous chalcographer for Pierre Bergeron's Voyages faits principalement en Asie, published at The Hague in 1735. The lively illustration faithfully reproduces all the details enumerated by the missionary and shows in its background a fantastic image of Mangu Khan sitting on his throne like a Buddha, but stretching out his right hand to the butler who carries the cup to him while another butler goes down the steps on the opposite side.”

Oh, and check out those humongous basins!

Sarolta Tatár, “The Iconography of the Karakoram Fountain,” available at academia.edu, here. Boucher's silver tree if not fully automated was still a rather complicated contraption, its working involving some human participation. In classical Indic terms, that makes it a perfectly fine example of a yantra. (No matter how much head-scratching it may bring to machine historians.)

Bod-grong-pa, The Dispute between Tea and Chang (Ja-chang lha-mo'i bstan-bcos), translated by Alexander Fedotov & Sangye T. Naga, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (Dharamsala 1993). Translation of Ja'i lha mo shes rab sgrol ma dang chang gi lha mo bde ldan bdud rtsi gnyis kyi dbar kha shags 'thab pa'i bstan bcos — ཇའི་ལྷ་མོ་ཤེས་རབ་སྒྲོལ་མ་དང་ཆང་གི་ལྷ་མོ་བདེ་ལྡན་བདུད་རྩི་གཉིས་ཀྱི་དབར་ཁ་ཤགས་འཐབ་པའི་བསྟན་བཅོས་.

John Ardussi, “Brewing and Drinking the Beer of Enlightenment,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 97, no. 2 (April - June 1977), pp. 115-124.

Ezra Dyer, “In Praise of Beer: A Heartfelt Paean to Humanity’s Greatest Achievement.” Oh, my! This popped up with a Schmoogle-search. In prose, but not all that unpoetical.

Shen Weirong, “Magic Power, Sorcery and Evil Spirit: The Image of Tibetan Monks in Chinese Literature during the Yuan Dynasty,” contained in: Christoph Cüppers, ed., The Relation between Religion and State (chos srid zung 'brel) in Traditional Tibet, Lumbini International Research Institute (Lumbini 2004), pp. 189-227. If you read French, you might also try Isabella Charleux, “Les 'lamas' vus de Chine: fascination et répulsion,” Extrême-Orient Extrême-occident, vol. 24 (2002), pp. 133-151.

There are a number of Tibetan works on the evils of beer, including one attributed to Padampa Sangyé I thought I would write about sometime if I get the chance.

I noticed a title of something that is obviously a praise of a tasty beer in the catalogue of the Bodleian collection: Zhim dngar chang gi yon tan phun sum tshogs — ཞིམ་དངར་ཆང་གི་ཡོན་ཏན་ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་— Bodleian Catalogue, p. 85. That isn't a title, just words of the refrain of a short set of verses with 9 syllables to the line, like ours. I leave that for the writer of Bod Blog to blog on about. Cheers, Charles!

Disclaimer: This blog was written free of any financial incentives whatsoever from the Guinness company (they warned me I've got to say that).

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Name Dropping, It Happens

August 8, 2014, 4:33 am

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Drive carefully, unidentified llama ahead

I apologize for those last couple of blogs about trivial matters you probably know enough about already. You know, like the one last month encouraging the consumption of mildly intoxicating beverages. Today for a change I think we’re all more than ready for a fresh and heady flask of straight-up Tibetology. What do you say? This isn’t supposed to be Sesame Street, is it? Sometimes I, too, forget where I am. So I say it’s high time we recalled our quest and get back on the Yellow Brick Road.

I was enjoying reading a piece about Tibetan law by our friend Christoph Cueppers, and one of the main things that stuck in my mind afterwards was in a footnote near its end. There Christoph compares introductory verses of the legal document known as the Great Law Code (ཁྲིམས་ཡིག་ཆེན་མོ་ — try looking here) in two different versions.

In one of them we have a line very clearly naming the Tsang King named Karma Tenkyong Wangpo (ཀརྨ་བསྟན་སྐྱོང་དབང་པོ་) as the promulgator of this legal code. In the other version that very same line containing the name gets removed and replaced with a general expression that means something like ‘edict of the kings who rule according to Dharma’ (notice that plural!). In other words, a name no longer convenient to preserve got dropped from the text. On purpose. Apparently the Ganden Phodrang (དགའ་ལྡན་ཕོ་བྲང་) government no longer regarded it as desirable to allow credit for this legal code to a past ruler they might with good reason regard as their original opponent. I’m not entirely sure it is correct what I am suggesting here, but I do think it’s worthy of reflection and of course, as the Tibetologists always want to add, with a bit of weariness in their voices, further research.

Even more recently, meaning just a few days ago, I was surprised to find still another dropped name, although in this case it is more difficult to imagine what would have motivated it.

I was going through the Sammlung Waddell that has been very kindly and nicely put up on the internet for the whole world to see by the good people at the State Library in Berlin. One beautiful woodblock print that captured my attention was Waddell no. 36a. Its title is: O rgyan gu ru padma 'byung gnas kyi rnam par thar pa : gter ston chen po o rgyan gling pa : mnga' bdag nyang ral : gu ru chos dbang bcas nas gdan drangs pa'i bka' thang gter kha gsum bsgrigs mthong ba don ldan (ཨོ་རྒྱན་གུ་རུ་པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་པར་ཐར་པ་༔གཏེར་སྟོན་ཆེན་པོ་ཨོ་རྒྱན་གླིང་པ་༔མངའ་བདག་ཉང་རལ་༔གུ་རུ་ཆོས་དབང་བཅས་ནས་གདན་དྲངས་པའི་བཀའ་ཐང་གཏེར་ཁ་གསུམ་བསྒྲིགས་མཐོང་བ་དོན་ལྡན་), a xylograph in 275 folios. The title tells us it is a combination of three different biographies of Padmasambhava, those of the Great Tertön known as Orgyen Lingpa, of the Sovereign Nyangral and of Guru Chöwang.

I looked in the colophon and got quite frustrated trying to locate the name of the compiler. So I went back to the general discussion of the biographies of Padmasambhava done so long ago by Vostrikov in his Tibetan Historical Literature, p. 32-49. Believe it or not, at the very beginning he makes much mention of a version that combines three other versions, with an author he names as 'Od-gsal rdo-rje snying-po. Although famous for his reliability in general, I had to part company somewhat with him here.

The text reads 'od-gsal rdo-rje snying-po'i rnal-'byor-pa (འོད་གསལ་རྡོ་རྗེ་སྙིང་པོའི་རྣལ་འབྱོར་པ་), or yogi of the clear light adamantine heart. I do not take this for a proper name at all, although I suppose it could be an initiation name or more likely just an epithet belonging to some otherwise not identifiable person. Vostrikov nicely supplies for us the Tibetan text of the compiler’s colophon with a translation, along with Grünwedel’s German attempt to translate the same before him. He definitely improves on Grünwedel’s, perhaps needless to say. Little more seems to have been written about this version of the Guru Rinpoche biography, and I searched for further references to it in vain.* Given the great interest in Guru Rinpoche, why has this biography been so highly ignored?

*(Well, I guess Franz-Karl Ehrhard makes fleeting use of a karchag or དཀར་ཆགས་ associated with the title Rnam-thar Ga'u-ma, རྣམ་ཐར་གའུ་མ་.)

Title page of the woodblock print from the State Library, Berlin

As it turns out, what surely is a manuscript version of this very Guru Rinpoche biography has been published in India some years ago. Twice actually (once in cursive and once not in cursive). One of the two (look here at TBRC for the details) is a reprint of a cursive manuscript. It seems as if disguised under this severely shortened title: Slob dpon padma 'byung gnas kyi rnam thar mthong ba don ldan (སློབ་དཔོན་པདྨ་འབྱུང་གནས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་ཐར་མཐོང་བ་དོན་ལྡན་). My point is: when we go to the end of it and locate the colophon lo and behold it gives an actual personal name immediately after that epithet yogi of the clear light adamantine heart, and this name is Gnubs-kyi Sngags-'chang Ratna-shrî (གནུབས་ཀྱི་སྔགས་འཆང་རཏྣ་ཤྲཱི་, its p. 522.7), and notice on right side of the following page a drawing of one “Sngags-'chang Rin-chen-dpal-bzang” (སྔགས་འཆང་རིན་ཆེན་དཔལ་བཟང་).

Who is this Mantra Keeper of the Nub clan by the name of Rinchen Pel? I have no idea, really, not off the top of my head. I’ll have to look into it. Maybe tomorrow.

Well, today it’s tomorrow (or at any rate was tomorrow yesterday), and I believe I have the answer, although it starts to get complicated, and I’m not sure it’s entirely airtight. So maybe I’ll leave it for still another day. Anyway, if my sinister plan was successful, I did at least cheat you into looking at the Waddell Collection in its online incarnation.

But why, you ask, did the xylographic edition drop the part with his name? Finding the identity of the unknown Lama could suggest some answer to that further mystery. Maybe not. We’ll see.

§ § §

Some sources mentioned

Christoph Cüppers, Gtsang khrims yig chen mo, a Tibetan Legal Code Kept at the National Archives of Nepal, Abhilekha, vol. 30 (Nepali samvat 2069; 2012 CE), pp. 87-106. Includes facsimile of the cursive text.

Christoph Cüppers, The Transliteration of the Gtsang khrims yig chen mo, a Tibetan Legal Code Kept at the National Archives of Nepal, Abhilekha, vol. 31 (Nepali samvat 2070; 2013 CE), pp. 84-115. Transcription plus vocabulary index. In earlier days, if you weren't actually there in the Valley, it could be nigh impossible to obtain articles published in Nepalese journals, but hey, one more reason to be thankful for "academia.edu."

Dieter Schuh, Tibetische Handschriften und Blockdrucke Teil 8 (Sammlung Waddell der Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin), (Wiesbaden 1981). Waddell 36a is described on pages 86-88.

Andrei I. Vostrikov, Tibetan Historical Literature, tr. from the Russian by Harish Chandra Gupta, Soviet Indology Series no. 4 (Calcutta 1970), Russian original published in 1962, posthumously, as the author was executed in 1937. This book doesn't seem to be provided in any form over the internet, sorry to say.

If you would like to explore the contents of the Sammlung Waddell for yourself, I recommend going to this webpage. Then place the name of Waddell in the searchbox and see what pops up. Keep scrolling down and going from one page to the next until you have seen everything. You can try to go directly to the Padmasambhava biography by pressing here.

A page from the Sammlung

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