Tibeto-logic

New Works on the Works of Lama Zhang

2012-01-12T11:24:00.000Z

Zhang Yudragpa: Detail of a tapestry portrait

Today’ssmall blog effort, I feel it is fair to warn you, is likely to be of limitedinterest to all but the most dyed-in-the-wool Tibeto-logical specialists. Even then, I don’t have a whole lot oftime to sit and chat. There are so many things on my plate, I hope you’llexcuse me if I excuse myself so I can dig in, or should I say bite the bullet, in the hope of completing one or another of myseveral assignments, at least. Don’t even say the word ‘deadline’ withinearshot if you know what’s good for you. I’m not in the mood to hear it. Isuppose you might even get a particularly nasty reaction if you’re not careful.Be forewarned.

Enoughof these idle threats with nothing to back them up. If you find yourselfcurious to find out a little bit about the man this fuss is all about, look atLama Zhang's biography in Treasury of Lives. For now I’m just going to list some outstanding new works about ZhangRinpoche* and his Works that haveappeared since the turn of the millennium. Then I will announce the firstpublic release of a bibliographical survey of his Works that I’ve been working on for quite some time now.I’m thinking a couple of you will find it of interest, and among those, one ortwo will find it useful for some good purpose or another. Those numbers soundmore than adequate to me.

(*The full and usual form of thename of the initiator of the lineage of the Tselpa Kagyü [Tshal-pa Bka'-brgyud] is properlyspelled using the Wylie system as Zhang G.yu-brag-pa Brtson-’grus-grags-pa[1123-1193 CE], and as far as I’m concerned that’s the name that he ought to beremembered by in history, although you may prefer a phoneticized version, likeZhang Yudragpa Tsondrüdragpa or the like. There are hundreds of variations onhis name, many of them of his own making. Still, if we want to keep thingsshort and simple, I see no reason why we shouldn’t speak of him as either LamaZhang or Zhang Rinpoche, do you?)

Here is the list —

1. Karl-Heinz Everding, Der Gung thang dkarchag: Die Geschichte des tibetischen Herrschergeschlechtes von Tshal Gung thangund der Tshal pa bKa’ brgyud pa-Schule, VGH Wissenschaftsverlag (Bonn 2000). This publicationcontains Romanization and German translation of a Tibetan Guidebook on the history and holy objectscontained in the monastery of Tsel Gungtang that was composed by theDge-lugs-pa author ’Jog-ri-ba Ngag-dbang-bstan-’dzin-’phrin-las-rnam-rgyal (b.1748) in the year 1782 at a time when Gung-thang was under the administrationof Sera Monastery. To read a little more about this publication, press here.

2. Per K. Sørensen & Guntram Hazod, in cooperationwith Tsering Gyalpo, Rulers on the Celestial Plain: Ecclesiastic and SecularHegemony in Medieval Tibet, a Study of Tshal Gung-thang, Verlag der ÖsterreichischenAkademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2007), in 2 volumes with 1011 pages! Thiscontains an English translation of the same Guidebook by ’Jog-ri, but in addition tothat it contains such a wealth of information in its introduction and multipleappendices — not to mention the many maps and great color photographs — that itmay take Tibetology many decades to begin to absorb it all, let alone catch up. For a review by Bryan Cuevas, look here.

3. Carl S. Yamamoto, Vision and Violence: LamaZhang and the Dialectics of Political Authority and Religious Charisma inTwelfth-Century Central Tibet, doctoral dissertation, Department of Religious Studies,University of Virginia (May 2009). Although a work of high academic standards,it will certainly be published as a book very soon, and when it is I imaginemany will find it to be the most accessible book yet on the subject of ZhangRinpoche. For an abstract, look here.

The newest book on Lama Zhang

4. Gra-bzhi Mig-dmar-tshe-ring (b. 1983), TshalGung-thang Gtsug-lag-khang-gi Dkar-chag Skyid-chu'i Rang-mdangs, Bod-ljongs Mi-dmangs Dpe-skrun-khang (Lhasa 2011), in383 pages. I suppose the title could be translated “The Kyichu River's Inherent Glow: Guide to the Temple of TselGungtang,” although it is much much more than a guidebook, with so muchinformation about the temple and monastery during more than eight centuries ofits existence. It pleases me very much to know that someone in Tibet is interested in doingthis work. It has some small color illustrations and among these perhaps themost worthy of notice are the before-and-after photos of Zhang Rinpoche'sfunerary chorten, now reduced to a pile of rubble. You can see it in the following old photo; it's the larger chorten on your right. Lama Zhang had just finished building its lower steps when he died in 1193.

Tsel Gungtang, negative of photo by Hugh Richardson

So,I would like to suggest that those who want to go to the web version of thecatalog of Zhang Rinpoche’s works, try going here(a link at the bottom of each file will lead you to the next). Or if you areimpatient and want to immediately download the complete catalog in either [1] Word file or [2] PDF format, all you need to do is click one or both ofthe links just given, which ought to transport you to Dropbox (I hope someone willlet me know if this works OK, since it’s my first experiment with this mode offile distribution; the file is supposed to truly exist there, even now, insomething that takes the form of a cloud, ready to be precipitated down ontoyour personal machinery). The download should be quick. It's only about 265 pages long. I wanted to put up the Gung-thang Dkar-chag, but haven’t succeeded yet.* For now, I’ll just say:Good luck and gods’ speed, until we find the time to blog again.

(*Oh, wait a minute. Try here.)

A modern (or restored?) representation of Lama Zhang,
Tsel Gungtang Monastery

~ ~ ~

The frontispiece is from a very old fabric artwork that was preserved in the Potala Palace and is apparently now in the museum near the Norbu Lingka in Lhasa. It has an inscription on the back that has been and will be the subject of much discussion, but it does identify the main subject (“Dpal-ldan G.yu-brag-pa”), leaving no doubt that it is meant to represent Lama Zhang. This artwork may date from around the 15th century, but at the same time it may be a very faithful copy of an earlier artwork (perhaps a painting) dating much closer to the time of Lama Zhang. The details remain to be worked out. It has by now been published a number of times, but perhaps best is Bod-kyi Thang-ga at p. 62 (the catalog entry in this book says it was woven in the time of the late Sung).

Yes, there is a heaven. If you are the sort of person who derives enjoyment from looking at listings of Wylie-transcribed Tibetan titles in Gsung-'bum-s and Bka'-'bum-s, you can find quite a few of them here. If you are that sort of person, you are my sort of person.

- - -

And one more thing. If you’d like to read an English translation of what may very well be Zhang Rinpoche’s most famous literary work, try to download these three files (each word is a different file, and you'll have to join the three puzzle pieces back together to form one thing) through Dropbox. If it isn’t working, you can complain. Please do.

Two Proto-Berlitz Phrasebooks

2011-12-31T22:16:00.000Z

Source: HERE.

Sometimes when you are reading two books at the same time you can find yourself faced with some interesting juxtapositions, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t venture to say my two examples of early phrasebooks are entirely identical or parallel, but they do demonstrate a certain level of human commonality that probably doesn’t especially need to be pointed out to anyone, although I suppose there could be exceptions...

There is an especially long and richly detailed biography (for so it calls itself) of what may be the city holy for more people in the world than any other, although I’m not completely sure about that. I’m talking about Simon Sebag Montefiore's book Jerusalem, the Biography. Near the middle of the book, reached only after weeks of bedtime reading, I came across an amusing passage about a pilgrim, a German knight (Ritter) of the Rhineland named Arnold von Harff. He made for himself lists of handy words and phrases in various languages, including both Arabic and Hebrew. I guess it’s clear he hoped these phrases would help him, as well as others, to better communicate with the local inhabitants of the countries he visited. Here are some phrases that leave only a little doubt what kind of business he was hoping to conduct:

"How much will you give me?
I will give you a gulden.
Are you a Jew?
Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.
Good madam, I am already in your bed."

This Herr von Harff was one pilgrim with plenty of pluck, and not just middling-to-average pickup lines. Among his other accomplishments (and quite apart from his evident heteronormalcy and Judaeophobia), he managed to go up on the — then as now Islamic — Noble Sanctuary (Haram as-Sharif) in disguise, making him look like a kind of proto-Sir Richard Burton.

Meanwhile, moving to the other end of the Eurasian world and back half a millennium further in human history, we learn from Sam van Schaik and Imre Galambos's even newer book Manuscripts and Travellers that there exists, until this day, a bilingual Sanskrit and Khotanese phrasebook for pilgrims on their way to China. You can almost hear the interrogating tone of the immigration officer:

"And where are you going now?

I am going to China.

What business do you have in China?

I’m going to see the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī .

When are you coming back?

I’m going to China, then I’ll return."

I’ll skip over some of the rest of the dialogue, in order not to spoil it for you. There is mention of a Tibetan monk suspected by a border official of being a liar. The following three lines may or may not be about him, but it does seem so:

“He is dear to many women.
He goes about a lot.
He makes love...

Bring a bowl! The Tibetan teacher has become ill.”

It’s evident that Tibetan monks, or at the very least traveling facsimiles of Tibetan monks, had developed a shady reputation in late-10th-century Khotan. Well, to judge from this phrasebook, which may have had humorous intent as well... At least one of these Tibetan monks seems to have had problems keeping down Khotanese road food, perhaps a common enough predicament after all.

No need to mention the notoriety

of medieval European appetites

set loose in the Outremer

on their way to the Holy Sepulcher.

Of course, the Central Asia traveler’s assumed destination was the place most holy to the bodhisattva of wisdom and learning Mañjuśrī. It seemed like everyone wanted to go to Wutai Shan in those earlier days. Vairocanavajra went there, as did Padampa Sanggyé before him. I hope to go some day as well.

Mañjuśrī holding the Ruyi scepter,
seen in Taipei, June 2011.
Notice the lion.

Sources:

Robert Elsie, Texts and Documents of Albanian History. This online essay is more concerned with the early documentation of Albanian language, but it does have a nice brief discussion of the phrasebook of Arnold of Harff, that included “words and phrases in Croatian, Albanian, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Hungarian, Basque and Breton.” Of course von Harff was not the originator of the genre; there were Latin-Greek bilingual phrasebooks in the time of the Roman Empire, as I seem to recall from somewhere.

Kelly Lynne Maynard, I want to buy it in the Albanian Glossary of Arnold von Harff, Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 107, no. 2 (2009), pp. 231-252. Try to access it here. Still more articles can be located that have to do with von Harff if you will only search for them. There are also translations of his journal that are more and less available.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem, the Biography, Alfred A. Knopf (New York 2011), at p. 298.

Sam van Schaik and Imre Galambos, Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-century Buddhist Pilgrim, De Gruyter (Berlin 2012), at pages 141-3.

Here is something about a 10th-century German phrasebook, although mostly about one from the time of World War II. Here is an amusing piece about Berlitz phrasebooks, but by far the most amusing phrasebook incident ever is one I once read in a book by “Australian photojournalist” Sorrel Wilby, shortly before I closed the covers of the book forever (I think the book still exists in a sibling library in central Michigan). Her Journey across Tibet is not something I could ever bring myself to recommend. Sorry Sorrel, but if this is any consolation, it could just be me. We have to take that into account.

Not running a commercial operation here, I didn’t really intend to make an advertisement for Berlitz, and in fact my favorite phrasebook is one they didn’t publish: Wicked Italian for the Traveler by Howard Tomb, Workman Publishing (NY 1989). There are lots of usable gems there, but try this one out the next time you unexpectedly find yourself in Italy. First the phonetic version, which you should pronounce aloud, within hearing of your loved ones, particularly if you have never studied Italian before:

Eel pro-FOND-oh mee-STAIR-oh dee cho key sty dee-CHEND-oh me een-FWOKE-ah eel KWORE-ay.

Il profondo mistero di ciò che stai dicendo mi infuoca il cuore.*

§ § §

Happy New Year/Sylvester to everyone who has ever read Tibeto-logic, and equally to everyone who never has! And if you see our old friend Arno, tell him I’m sorry, I hope he’ll forgive me, and Please come back. I’ve been at this for over five years now, and will, before many more months have gone by, reach the 100th blog entry. Trying to think of something special to do for numero 100 besides just more of the same-old same-old... Any ideas? Should I redecorate? Or is that too superficial?

˙ǝɹıɟ uo ʇɹɐǝɥ ʎɯ sʇǝs pıɐs ʇsnɾ noʎ ɹǝʌǝʇɐɥʍ ɟo ʎɹǝʇsʎɯ punoɟoɹd ǝɥʇ*

Happy 2012 (it's not the end of the world, you know, although it may be the end of the world you know...).

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Postscript (January 2, 2012)

I forgot to say anything about Tibetan-language phrasebooks. So here's my collection of Lonely Planets. Someone told me there have been five, which must mean I’m missing one, but actually, to follow what it says inside the books, there have only been four editions up to and including the one of 2008. Is there a new one I haven’t heard about?

1st edition, October 1987 — by Melvyn G. Goldstein, with the help of Gelek Rinpoche & Trinley Dorje	2nd edition, June 1996 — by Sandup Tsering & Melvyn C. Goldstein
3rd edition, May 2002 — by Sandup Tsering	4th edition, February 2008 — by "Phrasebooks" & Sandup Tsering.

Someday somebody will write a history of Tibetan language learning that will include these things.

Has anyone noticed any good or passably good Tibetan phrasebooks on-line? This one is very interesting, a little awkward to use just because it’s so technologically advanced it takes my primitive machine a long time to maneuver from one phrase list to the other.

Marginal Amusement at the Bodleian

2011-12-21T18:16:00.000Z

Earlier today, under inspiration from the latest blog entry from Janus, I was doing an internet search for ‘Hero Capable [of overcoming all comers all at] Once,’ or, in the original tongue, Dpa'-bo Chig-thub. What to my great surprise could possibly pop up, but a rare catalog of Tibetan manuscripts and so forth that are kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. It’s so rare it’s not even a publication, really, just a typescript done, as you might expect, on a typewriter. I could hardly believe my eyes. What could explain this outrageously good fortune?

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts Held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, prepared by John E. Stapleton Driver in ca. 1970, and revised by David Barrett, 1993. Total page count: 152.

Some very thoughtful person put it up for us in a searchable PDF format. Here.

You can find something entertaining already, 4 pages into it (there are no page numbers) in the entry for MS.Tibet.a.1, described as "a meditation text," with the title Bla mgon dbyer med kyi rnal 'byor thun mongs ma yin pa nyamsu len tshul rin chen dbang gi rgyal po'i do shal.

Someone wrote on the title page (I give it 'as is,' except for changing it into Wylie): 'di mang gi yi ge phal cher ma dag pa dang 'ga zhig rang zo byas pa'ang mang tsam 'dug pas zhu dag tong tshod mi 'dug go. This is there translated, “As the text in this is generally corrupt and in a good many cases even made up, there’s no end to correcting it.”

A second person wrote on the title page in a different hand: 'di 'bri mkhan dang khyed rang gnyis ka ma dag pas skyon dan[g] .... rang bzo byed mkhan gtso bo khyed rang 'dra. — khyed 'dra bas zhus dag gtong ba las ma gtang ba dga 'dug. This is translated, “Of the writer of this and yourself, the chief introducer of corruptions and inventions seems to be yourself." — "Rather than have someone like you make corrections, they were better not made at all.”

And finally, at the end of the text, somebody wrote (in English? Well, no Tibetan is given): “It would shame you if a scholar were to see such a corrupt text, so I suggest you burn it.”

The original text was purchased in 1885 from two of the Schlagintweit brothers: R.H. and A. If you are like me you may well have trouble keeping straight which of the five Schlagintweit brothers was which, in which case this webpage would be a big help.

But what about the person given as the author of the text, the monk Legshé Ludrub (Legs-bshad-klu-sgrub)?

A quick search of TBRC and a few other places turned up neither the title of this guruyoga text nor its author. Who can he be? Where’s our good Doctor Watson?

John E. Stapleton Driver, in case you don’t remember, was the one who translated R.A. Stein’s Tibetan Civilization into English.

As part of this catalog, you can find some of the papers that were left behind by W.Y. Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) — famous editor of such well known works as The Tibetan Book of the Dead — after his own entry into the bar-do. Among these papers are some draft translations by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdrup.

Some of the Tibetan books here came from Solomon C. Malan (1812-1894), a friend and student of Csoma de Körös. For more about this, see P.J. Marczell, The Tibetan Mss. of theMalan Bequest in the Bodleian and Their Relation to the Life and Works of CsomaKörösi, Studia Asiatica, vol. 2, nos. 1-2 (2000), pp. 55-71. Get it for free (or not!) here.

Other materials came from Samuel Turner (1749-1802), author of An Account of an Embassyto the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet (London 1800).



”A.D. 1806. 




”Fifty pounds were paid for some ' Tibetan MSS.' of Capt. Samuel Turner,E.I C.S., who had been sent by Warren Hastings,on a mission to the Grand Llama, in 1785. Of this mission he published an account, in a quarto volume, in 1800. His MSS. consist chiefly of nine bundles of papers and letters in the Persian and Tartar languages, written in the last century, together with a few Chinese printed books. Capt. Turner died Jan. 2, 1802; but as one of his sisters was married to Prof. White,* it was probably through him that the papers were now purchased.”

For the source, look here.

(*My note: I guess this means Joseph White, since he did indeed marry Mary Turner, sister of Samuel.)

For more about this, see the late Michael Aris’s article, ANote on the Resources for Tibetan Studies at Oxford, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 10, no. 6 (May 1982), pp. 368-375. Or look at this page of the Bodleian's own website (scroll down the page to the section about Tibet).

Even if they do have street lamps in Oxford, this is not one of them.
Look up the word panopticon for a clue.
Wasn't it invented by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832),
and isn't he the one they still keep locked up in a closet
in London University? None of it makes sense to me. Not really.

If the kind person who did this is still in a generous mood, I suggest they put up two other rare catalogs of Tibetan manuscripts that exist (however seldom) in typescripts. They are:

P. Denwood, Catalogue of Tibetan Mss and Block-prints outside the Stein Collection in the India Office Library (1975), in 145 pages. For a reference, look here.

E. Gene Smith, Universityof Washington Tibetan Catalogue, vols. 1-2 (Seattle 1969). For a reference, look here.

Or is this asking too much?

Overlooking something?

Who took the photos? I must confess, it was moi. All 4 were taken in Oxford, around the time of the Xth IATS in 2003.

Update — December 31, 2011

For an update with important further information by Charles Manson, particularly the part about an upcoming online catalogue of the Bodleian's Tibetan collection, look here.

No Prophet in Buddhism?

2011-11-10T17:41:00.004Z

You might well wonder what any normally Tibeto-centric Tibeto-logician would be doing spending his evenings leafing through a — well, not-so-recent — book about a Muslim theologian and Sufi contemplative by the name of Simnani. Wonder no more. For decades now I have been intrigued by the fact that for a time Buddhist teachers called Bakshis were active in the Middle East. We know that Simnani had very much contact with those self-same Bakshis. As I think I will be able to show — if not now, on another day — he was one of the most visible contact points that allowed some aspects of cultural-religious electrical currents to flow into the western parts of Eurasia in a crucial time in her history. Am I being too grandiose? Trying to be dramatic? A little overexcited, no doubt. Forgive me.

It is well known, to a few at least, that in the last part of the 13th century there were certain Kagyü lineages that were allied with the Mongol royal house of Hulegu (reigned 1256-1265) and his immediate successors, receiving their patronage and protection. Hulegu’s son Khaidu (1236-1301) even led (or sent?) western Turk troops — what Tibetans call Stod Hor — into Tibet (see Everding’s article). Despite a few such Mongolian armed incursions, Tibet was never actually occupied by Mongol forces during China's Yüan dynasty like China was.

From 1256 to 1295, apart from a brief two-year interlude, the Ilkhanid realm was ruled by Buddhists. They held a great deal of the Middle East from their center in Tabriz, in northwestern Iran. I labeled this bad map to show its imprecise location, although you are probably better off to see the map of the Ilkhanid realm (at its greatest extent) at Wikipedia, where you can see that it actually did cover quite a big part of the area you see on the map just below.

Most writers on the subject repeat the idea that there were Tibetan Lamas among the Bakshis. But for years now I’ve been on the lookout for anyone named (let’s say) Jamyang, Kunga or Tenzin among them, and so far no good luck. Although I’ve asked some real experts in the field to look into the matter, they never did get back to me. They may have been right for not taking me seriously. People have always complained that they’re not sure when I’m joking.

Well, there is the surprising story, told in the Berzin Archive, about Emperor Arghun’s brother Gaikhatu who succeeded him as Il Khan. Someone (usually they say, with apparent good reason, this someone must’ve been a Tibetan monk) gave Gaikhatu the 100% Tibetan name Rinchen Dorje.

He liked this Tibetan name well enough to put it, in Mongolian and sometimes in Arabic script, on many of the coins he had minted in Tabriz (you can see quite a few examples on the internet if you look for them). The following lustrous gold example, one of many, is supposed to have his name on it (I apologize that I am unable to read it, but I found it here).

He did make one disastrous political mistake. He introduced Chinese paper money into the Middle East. It looks as if he just took the Chinese paper bills and overstamped them. Or did he directly copy the money, Chinese inscriptions and all? Paper doesn’t have half the glitter of gold, and none of the jingle, so it didn’t catch on, to say the least. Exactly the opposite. And Gaikhatu lost his position, so to speak, when he was assassinated. Arghun’s sons soon succeeded Gaikhatu, but they stopped supporting Buddhism and converted to Islam.

Did you ever have one of those minor epiphanies, the kind that seizes you, gives you a kind of electrical jolt, even before you have time to think about the reason? It has happened to me more than a few times in museums, actually, come to think of it. But once when I was touring, together with a Tibetan monk, the al-Quds al-Sharif sanctuaries on what non-Muslims are more likely to know as the Temple Mount, we had scarcely entered the Islamic Museum off to the side of al-Aksa Mosque, when both of us found ourselves astoundedly fixated on the same thing at the same time. It was an artistic motif around the base of a large metal candle holder. It was just so closely similar to the lotus base that you see under practically every Indo-Tibetan divine image, only more in the Tibetan style, or perhaps even more in the style of the Swat Valley bronzes.

Full description here.

The monk and I had identical epiphanies at the very same moment. Stopping to inspect the museum label, we could read that the inscription engraved on it contained the name of Arslan.* This touched something off. Some hidden alarm button?

(*Aslan, or Arslan, means 'lion' in both Turkic languages and Mongolian.)

Despite what may have seemed like a moment of clarity, I was puzzled and the more I find out the more puzzling it becomes, really. If this use of the lotus design is a result of Mongol (or just vaguely Central Asian) influence, the reign of this Arslan (1203-1239) is almost too early. He ruled quite a huge area from his capital of Mardin, a still remarkably well preserved historical mountaintop city in southeastern Turkey with a breathtaking view over the Syrian plains. Since that time, I’ve become more accustomed to seeing East and Central Asian artistic influences in Middle Eastern art (see especially the book by Kadoi listed below). There is even a body of literature tracing Ilkhanid eastern artistic influences on early Italian painters like Giotto (see Tanaka's article).

You can’t exactly see it in this low-resolution photo, but if you look in the lower right corner, the scene of the Roman soldiers gambling over possession of the robe, you will see the robe has golden bands in its design, and on the bands (if you don’t want to take my word for it, I think you can actually make them out on the fringed garment of the person standing to the robe's left side) are Phagspa letters. I visited the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua a few years ago, but with the 15-minute limit (preceded by an hour in a dessication chamber) it is really very difficult to take it all in, let alone notice all the details. I have to confess I didn’t notice any Phagspa script when I was there. I was far too overwhelmed by the art.

The Crucifixion, by Giotto of Bondoni (1266-1337),
Scrovegni Chapel, Padova, Italia

Now Simnani belonged to a family with a number of members who served in the court of Arghun, and Simnani himself was no exception. Yet he had an interest in Sufi meditations from a young age, specifically inspired by Kubra and his school, the Kubrawiya, with its strong emphasis on visionary experiences of lights which Simnani himself would further develop in his later years. Kubra didn’t live to see the rule of the Mongols. It is said he died in hand-to-hand combat with the Mongols when they invaded Khwarezm in 1220.

Now I see the hour is getting late and I want to get this in the mail before I miss my bedtime, so just let me say these few words about Simnani and we will call it a day. As you may know, the Mongols were in the habit of holding inter-religious discussions (debates, if you prefer) in their courts. The general idea is that Mongolians had their own shamanic ideas; other religions they had trouble comprehending — they found them curious — so they would enlist the smartest people around to try to explain them. A number of early Mongol rulers married Christians. Arghun’s mother was one of them, and there are yet other reasons for his willingness to deal with Christians... as well as Muslims, and needless to say Buddhists. I believe Arghun’s Buddhism was not just superficial.

The following describes an event of April 1288. It was probably the first, but definitely not the last, time Buddhist relics were displayed in the Middle East:

“Buka’s envoys brought backwith them to Persia one of the relics so much esteemed among the Buddhists,called Sharil. These are hardpieces of a substance which is said to be found in the ashes of some saintlypersons when cremated. Von Hammersays that Buddha's heart was supposed to be made of bone and not of flesh,similarly with the hearts of great men, and that the sharil is really held tobe the ossified heart of the cremated person. Arghun, we are told, treated this relic with the greatesthonour, gold was strewn over it, while a feast was duly celebrated.” — Howorth, History of theMongols, pt. 3, p. 321, as cited in Numen, vol. 41 (1994), pp. 284-285.

Arghun sometimes had Simnani hold religious discussions with the Buddhist Bakshis. The usual story is that they belonged to a number of nationalities, not only Tibetans but also Indians, Uighurs, Chinese and so on. They say that Simnani would win these debates because he was able to convince his audience that the Buddhists didn’t really know about their own religion.

"Arghun then called for a Buddhist monk and ordered him to engage Simnani in a debate, but Simnani defeated the Buddhist by demonstrating that he was ignorant of the true meaning of the Buddha’s teachings." (Elias, p. 26)

Although generally antipathetic to Buddhism — he believed the main problem with Buddhism is that it has no prophets — he was actually fond of one particular Bakshi, and this Bakshi (surprise, surprise) has a personal name attached. He was an Indian who was called Bakhshī Parinda (Elias, p. 18).

Parinda was supposed to be from a monastic community of Somnāth in coastal Gujerat, although Mayer believes itmay be a similarly-named place in Bengal. I differ with them both. I think this is probably the same monastic institution, in what would nowadays be Orissa, that the famous Vairocanavajra (subject of a great study by Kurtis Schaeffer) belonged to before he went to Tibet and translated Doha songs into Tibetan in around the 1240’s or so.

Not sure what to make of the name Parinda, I’m inclined to think it might be a reformed version of the Indic name Varendra (a common enough personal name with the meaning ‘True Indra’). Simnani confessed that he regarded Parinda as, to quote Elias, “spiritually very advanced despite his non-Muslim status.”

All this was intended as hardly anything more than an introduction to still different matters, touching on religious devotional and meditative practices and visions that I regard as more interesting than anything you have heard here so far. I do hope you did find it interesting anyway.

§ § §

Interrelated matters worth exploring:

Hamid Algar, "Kubrā, Shaykh Abu 'l-Djannāb Aḥmad b. ʿUmar Nadjm al-Dīn," Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, P. Bearman, et al., eds. Brill (Leiden 2011). Brill Online.

Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in the Ilkhanate, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42 (1999), pp. 27-46. See especially p. 32, relevant to Simnani's relations with Buddhists.

Arezou Azad, Three Rock-Cut Cave Sites in Iran and Their Ilkhanid Buddhist Aspects Reconsidered, contained in: Anna Akasoy, et al., eds., Islam and Tibet: Interactions along the Musk Routes, Ashgate (Farnham 2011), pp. 209-230, and plates 10.1 through 10.11. This article does not establish that, as has sometimes been speculated in the past, the caves in question were definitely Buddhist, but neither does it eliminate the possibility. Other articles in the same volume are relevant, not only the introduction by Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, but also the contributions by Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (see p. 100 for a bit on lotus-type designs on metal pots) and Paul Buell (on connections in the field of medicine and cooking).

Jamal J.Elias, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of 'Alā' ad-dawlaas-Simnānī, SUNY Press(Albany 1995). Seventy-nine of Simnani's works (excluding epistles) have survived, and very little has been written about them in English apart from this book, and a bit translated from the French of Henry Corbin.

Karl-Heinz Everding, The Mongol States and Their Struggle for Dominance over Tibet in the 13th Century, contained in: Henk Blezer, ed., Tibet, Past and Present: Tibetan Studies I, Brill (Leiden 2002), pp. 109-128. On p. 120 are what may be the most horrifying scenes in all of pre-modern Tibetan history. Here it is evidently Khaidu who is hiding under the Tibetan[ized] name Ga-du Rin-chen.

Jean MauriceFiey, Esquisse d'une bibliographie sur le patriarche turco‑mongol Yahwalaha III(1281‑1317) et son maître Rabbam bar Sawma, envoyé du Khan Arghun au pape etaux princes européens en 1287‑1288, Proche‑orient Chrétien, vol. 38 (1988), pp. 221‑228. Morris Rossabi has written a whole book about Mar Sauma, and I hope to see it before long.

Yuka Kadoi, Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh 2009).

Toby Mayer,Yogic-Ṣūfī Homologies: The Case of the "Six Principles" Yoga ofNāropa and the Kubrawiyya, The Muslim World, vol. 100 (April 2010), pp. 268-286. I believe you can get free access to it here. (Or if not, go here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ and then search for it from there.)

Leo Jungeon Oh, Islamicised Pseudo-Buddhist Iconography in Ilkhanid Royal Manuscripts. Persica, vol. 20 (2005), pp. 91-154. The thesis of this long and rather confusing paper (well, I found it so) is that there were Asian artistic influences on paintings produced for the Ilkhanid court.

Elliot Sperling, Hülegü and Tibet, Acta Orientalia Hungarica, vol. 44 (1990), pp. 145-158. As pointed out at the very beginning of this Tibetological article, the Ilkhanid ruler Hülegü was known inside Tibet by his name Hu-la-hu (or more simply Hu-la), he was known as one who patronized the Phagmodru school of the Kagyupas, and as the “King of Upper Hor” which this author identifies with the Chagatais. Given this is so, chances are that the Tibetan Bakshis may well have been Drigung monks, so Drigung histories — and histories of other lineages stemming from the Phagmodru school — would be logical places to look for clues about them, you would think.

Hidemishi Tanaka, Giottoand the Influences of the Mongols and Chinese on His Art: A New Analysis of theLegend of St. Francis and the Fresco Paintings of the Scrovegni Chapel, Art History(Tohoku University, Japan) (1984) 1-38 [in English]. Other writings on related subjects by the same author have appeared in English, Japanese and Italian. Among the most intriguing is one entitled Oriental Scripts in thePaintings of Giotto's Period, Gazettedes Beaux-Arts, series 6, vol. 113 (1989), pp. 214-226. You can actually recognize some of the 'Phags-pa script letters in some of these paintings, which is about as clear a sign of Mongolian influence as you could possibly wish for. Of course there is now a Wiki page on the subject, with interesting illustrations. But better if you have a look at this Babelstone blog.

David Ohanessian (1927),
also responsible for the frontispiece

P.S. (Nov. 14, 2011):

I forgot to mention that there was another South Asian Bakshi with a name working in Tabriz. This was the relatively well-known Kashmiri Buddhist teacher Kamalaśrī, who helped the illustrious and industrious but ill-fated Rashid ad-Din with his stories about the life of the Buddha. Some have identified him with Padampa Sanggyé, who has Kamalaśrī (as well as Kamalaśīla) as a monastic given name. For chronological reasons their identification is simply impossible. Two centuries separate them. Well, if Padampa was 600 years old when he came to Tibet, as is sometimes told, he would have had to live another 200 years to be off visiting eastern Iran, now, wouldn’t he? That hardly seems likely. I’ll refrain from listing all the bibliography for this problem for the moment. Or if you insist on having something to read, be my guest and check out Karl Jahn’s article in Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 2 [1956], pp. 81-128.)

P.P.S. (Nov. 25, 2011):

Just to add to the list of Bakshis with names, we also are aware of names of two that came from China. I’ll just repeat here something you find in the comments section below:

Johan Elverskog's book Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia 2010), p. 149, says that Rashid ad-Din had in addition to the Kashmiri Buddhist teacher Kamalaśrī two Chinese collaborators named Litaji and Kamsun (quoting Thomas Allsen's book Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, p. 92; here you can see that it would be quite difficult to find out the actual Chinese names behind these names...).

P.P.P.S:

That a couple of Chinese would have been in Tabriz isn’t in itself all that newsworthy. You also have the cases of Rabban Sauma and his disciple who came from the general area of Khanbaliq (OK, Dadu or Peking if you prefer or insist) both of them of Turkic stock. The disciple, Yaballaha III,* was made Patriarch of the Nestorian Christian world. As soon as I can lay hands on a copy of Morris Rossabi’s book on the subject I plan to read the whole thing through in several sittings.**

(*He was supposed to be Uighur Turkish by birth, was known by the Greek name Markos as a young person, and had the ability to speak Mongolian, a skill that definitely helped to endear him to the Ilkhanid Emperor. The two of them, Sauma and Markos, set off from China on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but things didn’t turn out quite as they had planned. Sauma’s name is supposed to be of Syriac origins with the meaning of Faster [that means one who fasts, but you knew that].)

(**Morris Rossabi, Voyagerfrom Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West, Kodansha [Tokyo 1992].)

P.P.P.P.S (NOV. 27, 2011), added to illustrate one of the comments, below.

Figure from Tanaka's article, p. 221, a detail from Giotto's Crucifixion,
Scrovegni Chapel, Padova,
with Tanaka's interpretation below.

Figure from Tanaka's article, p. 221,

with Tanaka's interpretation below.

Sample of early P'agspa script (edict dated 1277 or 1289), after Precious Deposits, vol. 3.
P'agspa script was invented in 1269.

Tibetan Proper Name Index

2011-10-15T20:31:00.003+01:00

For nearly 30 years I’ve been collecting references to Tibetan personal and place names from all kinds of sources, but generally from works in Tibetan language. Even the couple of devoted Tibeto-Logic readers that have stayed with me all this time may not be aware of the fact, but one of the primary reasons I started this blog five years ago was to create a platform for the distribution of the reference works I’ve been working on. There were obstacles to overcome, not least of all the limitations of the blog format, which forced me to open a webpage called Tibetological. Most of the larger ones, like Tibskrit and Tibschol, and TibHist, too, have already been posted at Tibetological website (or uploaded to a download site and then linked at Tibetological). TibVocab has been made part of the 'translation tool' at THlib.*

(*Even after all these years THlib hasn’t managed to put up the bibliographical references, which I believe to be absolutely essential for what is after all largely a citation dictionary. The absence of the key also means that many of the entries are only semi-intelligible. Although there is a dedicated bibliography for TibVocab that I could easily make available to anyone who wants it, many of the same abbreviated references used there are also used in PropNames.)

My vanity usually forbids me from admitting to selfish motivations, unless cornered, but in this case I can say that one motive is clear, which is to preserve for the future a body of data that might otherwise be in danger of getting lost. That would be work wasted... *my* work. But seriously, this isn’t the kind of reference work that will be easily consulted by a great number of people. So there is no good reason to worry about it, is there? Vanity-wise, I mean.

You will know if you can benefit from it or not. If you not only studied a little Tibetan in the past and know how to look up words in a Tibetan dictionary, but also developed some talent for converting Wylie transcription to Tibetan script in your mind, you’re already ready to make serious use of “PropNames” as I call it for short. If not, I would advise you to wait.

It is taking me a lot of time, time I don’t really have, to fix up the pages and make them presentable, and double-check things where it seems necessary. So even if I’d like to say that the 100 pages of the first fascicle will quickly be followed by a second 100, other matters are pressing for my attention. I haven’t even been able to complete the first letter of the alphabet. So I put this up mainly as an encouragement to myself, to keep working on it.

If you are ready to go there, the first 100 pages of PropNames are here.

The bibliographical key, which PropNames simply cannot do without, is here.

I'm sure I’ll hear some complaints about it, but I don’t mind. I’ve found it very useful as a research tool over the years, and I’m confident the Tibetologists for whom it is intended, particularly younger and more energetic researchers, will find it useful as well. Well, yes, that means when the full 1,600-page work is finally made available, as it will be, I promise. You can hold me to it.

Bietala (1683)

PS: I’m sorry, as A.W. pointed out to me, that until today I only supplied links to the "html" at Tibetological, where the Word files overloaded my storage limits, as a flashing sign so kindly informed me. (This being a free account, how can I complain?) Well, for Part One you may go to Megaupload here. For the bibliographical key, try here.* I try my best to keep these links to upload sites up-to-date here, at a page of Tibetological website. But I understand there are limits to the number of downloads permitted during a certain period of time, as well as limits on the time the file will be kept there if nobody has bothered to download it. If you do not succeed in downloading a file, put it off for another day. If it still doesn’t work for you, I will be glad to do what I can do about it, which probably isn’t very much.

(*January, 2012: As you may know, Megaupload was taken down from the web. Along with it went all my download links. At the moment, only the HTML versions of the PropNames files are available.)

•

No Jewel (as such) Fell in Tibet

2011-10-13T20:22:00.001+01:00

Near Oberndorf in Tirol, August 2008

I just finished reading the very thing I recommended in the last blog, the article entitled, “The Wish-Granting Jewel: Exploring the Buddhist Origins of the Holy Grail.”

I must say, I still do much recommend it overall. That India’s story of the Wish-Granting Jewel is not only older than, but could well have informed, through intermediaries, the Western European Grail stories appears to be likely. Yet beyond that I’m not eager to accept guesswork scenarios that may be deemed to somehow plausibly account for the transmission, and I don’t think our author expects us to do anything more than entertain the possibilities. I would be very surprised if he did. However, in one key point it seems to me — from a Tibeto-logical perspective mind you — to fall flat. If you will bear with me for a few minutes you will see [1] that in earliest sources on the event of the items falling on the roof of Lha Totori’s palace (look here), there is not even a mention of the Wish-granting Jewel. [2] In later sources, that *do* make use of the term Wish-granting Jewel, it is still the case that it was not a jewel, as such, that fell from the sky.

Verily I tell you, I am not the expert to be telling you about this, but in the Eschenbach (he's dated to decades surrounding 1200 CE) version of the Grail legend, what we today usually imagine as a chalice (perhaps one with a relic of the blood of Jesus crucified, or in any case an object with strong Eucharistic symbolism, not to mention its association with all those medieval tales of knightly chivalry and valor) was a jewel, not a cup. I’m only saying this as a favor to people who haven’t read the article yet... so they’ll have an idea about what I’m going on and on about.

I’m not going to put my dear friends and readers through a gruelingly obsessive survey of every single word in every single historical work. One reason is, well, I don’t have to. Stein and Sørensen have already supplied very nearly all of the more important sources for all those willing to look into them. Since Stein, although less thorough than Sørensen in supplying references, draws upon the material in greater detail, I will refer you to those pages in his Tibetica Antiqua (bibliographical details below for all who demand them).

What we learn from Stein’s listing is that the earliest use of the Wish-granting Jewel word (here given as Sanskrit in Tibetan transcription, “Tshindhama-ṇi”) is in the famous history of 1373 that is in fact the one translated by Sørensen. This source doesn’t say exactly what it means by Cintāmaṇi. But even here it most definitely isn’t a jewel per se, but a tsatsa mold. True, people often stumble badly over the odd word that is used here for ‘mold,’ which is [b]skol-phor. Stein in translation reads as bolus, but looking back at the original French version we read bol. Checking the closest handy dictionary, I see that the ‘English’ (here meaning Latin, of course, but ultimately Greek) translation of French bol as bolus might have fallen upon the wrong choice of meaning. The French can mean both a ball of nutritive substances (like a pill) similar to bolus, but it may also mean a bowl or basin. I believe Stein intended the latter, mainly because I think it is nearer to the truth. I myself feel quite certain about the meaning of the word, because I’ve encountered it once in the Zhijé Collection and several times in the works of the 12th-century Kagyü teacher Zhang Yudragpa, as for instance in the following sentence:

skor phor la ri mo myed na 'byi 'byi tsha tshar myi 'gyur.

I don’t know any other way to translate this than this:

“If there is no design in the mold (skor-phor), the ball ('byi-'byi) will not turn into a tsatsa.”

— See Zhijé Collection, vol. 2, p. 270.

Perhaps better than any longwinded explanation, this picture ought to tell you what the mold would have likely looked like:

Two tsatsa molds, called tsapar in modern Tibetan

What fell from the sky was (apparently) a dhāraṇī in chapter 12 (or chapter 14, depending on the version; it is absent from the shortest version) of the Golden Light Scripture (Suvarṇaprabhāsa Sūtra). However, it is also possible that the mold was intended to make clay moldings of an image of the particular form of Avalokiteśvara called Cintāmaṇi. It depends on which account you are reading. If I had time and energy to go into this in more depth, I would definitely want to study the chapters devoted to this form of Avalokiteśvara in the Mani Kambum (Ma-ṇi Bka'-'bum) collection.

My point here is that it wasn’t until a century and a half after Eschenbach* that an account of something that has to do (somehow) with the Wish-granting Jewel was said to have fallen from the sky in Tibet. Therefore it will be very hard for us to hold on to the idea that Eschenbach's account would have been inspired by the Tibetan story. Argument over.

(*This statement has to be modified since it proves incorrect; see the comment section below. October 20, 2011.)

But just to tidy up and tie one loose end, I should say that I’m not 100% sure that there is absolutely *no* Tibetan account that could be correctly translated as saying that a Cintāmaṇi, among other things, descended on the Yambu Lakhang in the Yarlung Valley in very early times. However, van der Sluijs gives (on his p. 6, note 35) only one source supporting this, and I know of none. I think I can demonstrate that this is not an especially good source for founding any arguments. It appears to be based primarily* on the English translation of Emil Schlagintweit’s book Buddhism in Tibet... (1863, p. 64, where we find the word “gem”), in its turn based on Isaac J. Schmidt’s translation (1829) of the Mongolian-language history by “Ssanang Ssetsen” (for the bibliography, look here). At the moment, I don’t see the profit in pursuing this particular paper trail further, especially if you consider what can happen to translations that go from Tibetan to Mongolian to German to English.

(*Well, he also gives as a source the better-known English translation of the Kun-bzang Bla-ma'i Zhal-lung, which says, at p. 341, that the object in question was "...an image called the Cintamani, representing the body of the Buddhas..." If you do go to the book [or Googlebook], have a peek at the footnote, which has something amusing and informative to say about how Tibetan scholars differ on what this object really was...)

To wind this down to a close, since I’m nearly out of typing energy, not to mention the mental focus, I’ll just say that our quest for the Grail in Tibet leads to this dead end, or perhaps into thin air. No jewel fell from the sky onto a Tibetan palace. Even if it had, it wouldn’t have done so soon enough to inspire Eschenbach. Lha Totori is not Titurel. If you believe this conclusion is grievously unacceptable, I hereby challenge you to prove me wrong by coming up with a datable Tibetan source that would demonstrate otherwise. You’ll find me mounted on my trusty steed by the banks of the Tsangpo, lance drawn and ready, not to mention my lustrous shield.

§ § §

Written resources:

Hugh Richardson, "The Dharma that Came Down from Heaven" — A Tun-huang Fragment, contained as chapter 10 in: High Peaks, Pure Earth: Collected Writings on Tibetan History and Culture, ed. by Michael Aris, Serindia (London 1998), pp. 74-81. Translation of a Dunhuang text entitled "Gnam babs kyi dar ma."

Per K. Sørensen, Tibetan Buddhist Historiography, The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies: An Annotated Translation of the XIVth Century Tibetan Chronicle rGyal-rabs gsal-ba'i me-long, Harrassowitz Verlag (Wiesbaden 1994), pp. 137-8 (note 356), 150, 534-5.

Rolf A. Stein, Tibetica Antiqua IV: The Tradition Relative to the Debut of Buddhism in Tibet, contained in: Rolf Stein's Tibetica Antiqua: With Additional Materials, tr. by Arthur McKeown, Brill (Leiden 2010), pp. 191-230, with the main listing, the one made use of in this blog, found on pp. 220-224. This was originally published in French, under the title "Tibetica Antiqua IV. La tradition relative au début du Bouddhisme au Tibet," Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient, vol. 75 (1986), pp. 169-196. You may be able to access the French version at Persée website (try pressing here).

An example of a clay tsatsa (tsha-tsha)

P.S. The story of the books (etc.) falling on the roof of Lha Totori’s palace was prefigured by the falling of books (the Mahåyoga tantras), in India, on the roof of King IndrabhËti (in Tibetan sources often called “King Dza”).

P.S.S. One significant point I thought I could make in the blog, basing myself on Stein's essay, got overturned in the comments section, so you had better go ahead and read the comments this time, by which I mean particularly the one from our old and true friend Sam from Early Tibet blog. I’m still a little sore from the well-landed lance blow to my left shoulder, but I think I’ll recover in time for the next jousting season. The main thesis, that no jewel as such fell in Tibet, remains unaffected, as stable as Mount Meru.

Is the Wishing Jewel the Holy Grail We Seek?

2011-10-08T20:51:00.004+01:00

Nicholas Roerich (1933), White Stone (Sign of Chintamani
or Horse of Happiness)

ཡིད་བཞིན་ནོར་བུའི་དགོས་པ་གང་ཡིན་ལྟོས༎

yid bzhin nor bu'i dgos pa gang yin ltos //

What use is a Wishgranting Jewel? Look into it!

— Padampa's Mahāmudropadeśavajraguhyagīti.

Dergé Tanjur - Tôh. no. 2440.

Today’s blog isn’t meant as much more than an alert for a new article that deserves notice. Not because I think it’s the answer to everything, just that it may be the most detailed and serious study yet of a very interesting problem in Eurasian cultural history. And not because I know the author. I have no idea who he is, except that his name is Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs, and he lives in Surrey in the UK. (Oh, wait, I think I found a photo and a website here. Maybe he’s in the U.S., or somewhere else in the world? You know, it really is hard keeping up with those young people these days...)

His widely ranging article opens the latest (2011) issue of the well-known [Euro-]medievalist journal called Viator (issue no. 2 of vol. 42).

The title is, and I can’t emphasize this boldly enough, The Wish-Granting Jewel: Exploring the Buddhist Origins of the Holy Grail.

Here is the official abstract:

“It is argued that the specific portrayal of the Holy Grail as a miraculous gemstone, first found in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, was ultimately inspired by the concept of the cintāmani or “wish-granting jewel” in the literature of India. Traditions regarding this object were popular in Buddhist folklore and parallels with the Grail literature are drawn from Japan, Indonesia, Śrī Lankā, and especially Tibet. Lha Thothori Nyentsen, king of Tibet, is identified as a plausible model for Titurel, the Fisher King. Parallels drawn from the legendary biography and the extant allegorical writings of Padmasambhava, a Gnostic, alchemist and warrior-monk revered as the principal founder of Tibetan Buddhism, extend to the entire core narrative of Parzival’s quest. It is suggested that these traditions reached medieval literati as a part of the astronomical, astrological, and alchemical corpus that was conveyed from India to Baghdād by Kanaka, translated into Arabic by Māshā’allāh, and rendered into Hebrew by Abraham ibn ‘Ezra.”

If your academic library has kept its JSTOR subscriptions up to date, go there and find it. If not, you may need to take your photocopy card with you, or use the interlibrary loan. When you’ve read it, come back here and put up your comments. I’ll do the same. Is this what we’ve been looking for? Have we reached the end of our quest? Will light come flooding into the most obscure corners of the world?

•

• •

Don Croner’s blog about the three-ball motif in Ottoman carpets possibly being the Triratna is here. (I wonder if the Triratna, representing the Three Jewels — Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha — might have gotten crossed somewhere along the way with the Wishgranting Jewel or Cintamāṇi? Not that I don’t empathize with and even share in the confusion, but one very simple thing ought to be clear, or made clear. The Wishgranting Jewel is a single jewel. The Triratna is the Three Jewels, represented by, well, three jewels. The Roerichs in the early ’30’s had a campaign to make the triple ball into a symbol to mark and protect cultural monuments in order to prevent their destruction in war. A most excellent idea that hasn’t gotten all that much attention, really, although if humanity would just grow up, learn from past mistakes, and abandon this other form of child sacrifice altogether, that would make even more sense. If it interests you, by all means look here. What, you may be asking, do the triple balls have to do with the Triratna? The three balls were standing for art, science and religion in the Roerichian system, the last I heard.

I must say, though, a Wishgranting Jewel isn’t just any old jewel. It is to be found only with extreme difficulty (remember that long and rambling sea captains’ blog?), and once found must be treated in very special ways. Otherwise it isn’t going to grant much of anything. It has to be ritually bathed, attached to the tip of a Victory Banner (Gyeltsen) and honored with incense and offerings. Then a solemn aspiration prayer (monlam) has to be made. Most or all of these elements are to be found wherever and whenever the Cintamāṇi appears, which is, to say the least, in very few places and seldom. For a typical story, look here, at p. 34 and following. As long as you have this entire scenario straight in your mind, I will allow you go to on and say that either one or all three of the Three Jewels are (metaphorically speaking!) a Wishfulfilling Gem. No problem. Just p-l-e-a-s-e don’t rush into it too quickly.

• • •

For more visual and verbal information about the three ball motif than you are likely to be willing or able to process, have the patience to download this PDF. I believe the author is Julie (Julianna) Lees, the owner of this presently-linked site full of really great photo albums (enter at your peril, since exiting may not be so easy once you get started admiring what you will find there). And no... no, I know what you're thinking, but I don’t know this person either.

yid bzhin nor bu'i gter thob pas //

rmongs pa'i dbul ba sel bar byed // gsungs so // • //

When you've found your treasure of a Wishgranting Jewel,

make use of it to get rid of the poverty of confusion.

Padampa's Vajraḍākinīgīti

(Dpal rdo rje mkha' 'gro ma'i mgur).

Dergé Tanjur - Tôh. no. 2441.

If All the Land Were Paper...

2011-09-19T19:14:00.014+01:00

Nicholas Roerich's Книга мудрости — Book of Wisdom

...and all the ocean ink.

I was amazed to discover for myself recently some older works of literature that weigh in on an interesting turn of phrase — an extended metaphor — used in the 12th century by the Tibetan Kagyü teacher Phagmodrupa. I translated it and published it once or twice some years ago. It goes like this, following my old translation:

“The learned scholars cut away the veils [of words] with words

and establish the objects of knowing...

Make forests into pens, oceans into ink,

land into paper, and still there would be no

end to their writing.

Yogins do not establish external objectivities;

they establish the mind.

The mind established, its objects establish themselves.”

The search got underway in earnest when I read the following passage (put in lines of blank verse by myself) from Howard Schwartz's book Tree of Souls. The quote is quoted from a work called Akdamut Piyyut by Rabbi Meir ben Yitzhak Nehorai, composed in Worms, Germany in ca. 1100:

“If all the heavens were parchment,

if all the trees were pens,

if all the seas were ink, and

if every creature were a scribe,

they would not suffice to expound

the greatness of God.”

Or here is a rhyming and perhaps therefore more poetic version I found in a PDF on the internet (the original is in Aramaic). The English is said to be, in part at least, by Frederick M. Lehman*:

“Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above,

Would drain the ocean dry.

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.”

(*Linn, p. 960, and Köhler before him, attribute the identical verses to Isaac Watts [1674-1748], an inveterate rhymester, and very probably the most famous English-language Protestant Christian hymn writer of all time. I don’t have the wherewithal to solve this authorship problem at the moment. For all I know the story that Lehman copied it, or most of it, from a copy made from the wall of a mental institution after the death of the inmate who wrote it could be true. Look here — a sectarian Christian message is to be expected — and go on wondering. Or look on p. 57 of this PDF of an old 1876 book about hymn history, where it says that the lines, all eight of them, were by a “partially insane” person “at Cirencester, in 1779.” Nothing about any writing on the wall here.)

It’s possible the saying goes back quite far in Jewish tradition (more on Islamic tradition in a moment), even as far back as the 1st century CE, with a quote I’ve taken from a book by Jacob Neusner, A Life of Yohanan Ben Zakkai (p. 46):

“If all the heavens were parchment, and all the trees pens,

and all the oceans ink, they would not suffice to write down

the wisdom which I have learned from my masters,

and I took away from them no more

than a fly takes from the sea when it bathes.”

So, too, says Neusner, his student Eliezer ben Hyrcanus said:

“If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds pens,

and all men scribes, they could not write down

all the Scripture and Mishnah I studied,

nor what I learned from the sages in the academy.

Yet I carried away from my teachers no more than does

a man who dips his finger in the sea,

and I gave away to my disciples no more than

a paintbrush takes from the tube.”

Neusner gives as one of the sources an article by Irving Linn very appropriately entitled, “If all the sky were parchment.” Linn consciously followed, and paid homage to, the earlier research of Reinhold Köhler, “Und wenn der Himmel wär Papier” Both of these works have been graciously made available on the internet.

The same complex imagery is used in al-Qur'an. Here below you can see it inscribed in Arabic on a stone inkpot. The words are from the Chapter of the Cave, verse 109:

10th Century Iran, from the Nasser D. Khalili Collection

“If the ocean were ink
(wherewith to write out)
The words of my Lord,
Sooner would the ocean be
Exhausted than would the words
Of my Lord, even if we
Added another ocean
Like it, for its aid.”

By now you’re probably convinced that the 12th-century Phagmodrupa must have heard it from Arab or Jewish immigrants or merchants in Central Asia, somewhere on the opposite banks of the Sambatyon. I rather somewhat doubt it, to tell the unvarnished truth.

Linn says that the earliest appearance in Hebrew was in the first half-century of the first millennium CE in the sayings of Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, founder of the academy at Jabneh. Things become a little murkier when you see Linn go on to say (on p. 954) that the Rabbi “introduces the mention of pens, and that these pens are made from trees,” a feature, he says, not found in the Indian examples... Uh, oh! Then where do those pens come from? How, then, did they get to Tibet?

What Indian examples? you are probably thinking.

Linn — and Köhler (due to information supplied to him by Theodor Benfey) before him — found old Indian sources in stories about Krishna, in the Atthāna Jātaka (Jātaka of the Impossibilities), and in the Vāsavadattā by Subandhu. In the Krishna legend, the writing material is the earth, but in Subandhu’s poetic work, it’s the sky. And it’s true, at least in the versions I’ve seen so far, that the Indian sources don’t seem to do anything about the pens being made from trees, as we find in Jewish sources, in one of the two Quranic sources (chapter 31, verse 27) and in Phagmodrupa. Both Linn and Köhler seem to think that the image is of Indian origins, brought to Europe by the wandering Jews who, due to their wanderings, are the most likely intermediaries. At the moment, it’s my own mind that’s doing the wandering.

Anyway, it isn’t my job to solve all your puzzles for you, so if you’d kindly go off and try to solve this “Who dunnit first” mystery, I’ll be happy to listen to every theory you may care to come up with. Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be off at work on an upcoming blog about the Aristotelean categories, another clearly apparent case of still-underdemonstrated interdependence between far-flung corners of Eurasia. I hope you’ll be glad to hear that. I have my doubts.

- - -

Reinhold Köhler, “Und wenn der Himmel wär Papier,” contained in: Kleinere Schriften (Berlin 1900), vol. 3, pp. 293-318. This was reprinted from Orient und Occident, vol. 2 (1863), pp. 546-559.

Irving Linn, “If All the Sky were Parchment,” Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), vol. 52, no. 4 (Dec. 1938), pp. 951-970.

D. Martin, “A Twelfth-Century Tibetan Classic of Mahāmudrā, The Path of Ultimate Profundity: The Great Seal Instructions of Zhang,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 15, no. 2 (1992), pp. 243-319, at p. 249, where the quote is found. The Tibetan text of it is in 'Jig-rten-mgon-po, Works, vol. 4, p. 404 (the earlier reference to p. 408 was mistaken).

- - -

Quiz: Which major religions have been involved in the telling of this story? Let's see... Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism... Did I forget any?

- - -

Here's how the Tibetan reads, first in Wylie transliteration, and secondly, if all goes well, in unicode Tibetan script:

de yang mkhas pa paṇḍi ta rnams tshig gis bdar sha bcad nas //
shes pa'i yul 'di rnams gtan la 'bebs pa yin te // ... ...

rtsi shing nags tshal la smyug gu byas //
rgya mtsho chen po snag tshar byas //
sa chen po la shog bur byas shing bris kyang mi zad pa yin gsung //
rnal 'byor pa ku sa li ni //
phyi rol gyi yul gtan la mi 'bebs te //
yul sna tshogs rnams kyang rang gi sems kyi rnam 'phrul yin //
sems gtan la 'bebs pa yin //
sems gtan la phebs na yul gtan la rang phebs su 'ong ste /

དེ་ཡང་མཁས་པ་པཎྜི་ཏ་རྣམས་ཚིག་གིས་བདར་ཤ་བཅད་ནས།། ཤེས་པའི་ཡུལ་འདི་རྣམས་གཏན་ལ་འབེབས་པ་ཡིན་ཏེ།། ... ...

རྩི་ཤིང་ནགས་ཚལ་ལ་སྨྱུག་གུ་བྱས།། རྒྱ་མཚོ་ཆེན་པོ་སྣག་ཚར་བྱས།། ས་ཆེན་པོ་ལ་ཤོག་བུར་བྱས་ཤིང་བྲིས་ཀྱང་མི་ཟད་པ་ཡིན་གསུང་།། རྣལ་འབྱོར་པ་ཀུ་ས་ལི་ནི།། ཕྱི་རོལ་གྱི་ཡུལ་གཏན་ལ་མི་འབེབས་ཏེ།། ཡུལ་སྣ་ཚོགས་རྣམས་ཀྱང་རང་གི་སེམས་ཀྱི་རྣམ་འཕྲུལ་ཡིན།། སེམས་གཏན་ལ་འབེབས་པ་ཡིན།། སེམས་གཏན་ལ་ཕེབས་ན་ཡུལ་གཏན་ལ་རང་ཕེབས་སུ་འོང་སྟེ།

I had a huge jolt of déjà vu the first time I set eyes on this painting by Nicholas Roerich (a friend sent it to me as a postcard), since I had already seen something very much like it in a dream of my earliest childhood. Only the giant book of my dream was more like floating in space than located anywhere. And the point of it seemed to be that it was written in an alphabet that I didn’t understand, or even recognize... at least not yet. Roerich, with his wife Helena, was co-founder in 1920 of something called Agni Yoga.

Nicholas Roerich's, Book of Doves

On the Book of the Doves, look at this video
featuring Armenologist James Russell

"A great book fell from heaven..."

“It is He Who has sent down on you this (glorious) Book.”

— al-Qur'an, book 3, verse 7.

KEEP reading in THE COMMENTS!

New Old Histories

2011-08-13T19:18:00.011+01:00

Two ragdung players at Tharlam Monastery, Bodhanath 2011; it is said the ragdung was invented for the ceremonial welcoming of Jowo Jé Atiśa into Tibet in 1042 CE - the name rag-dung means brass conch.

I doubt anyone remembers, but I once seriously blogged about an old history that all of a sudden became available some years ago. That was the Dge-ye history, and the Dge-ye history is in fact one of those numbered among the hundreds of historical and biographical works that we will be seeing in facsimile editions and computer-font paperback reprints over the next year or two from the editorial house of Dpal-brtsegs in Lhasa. All these books, I believe, come from the Drepung Monastery libraries,* that until a few years ago were completely closed off from everyone, it seemed. But then a huge 2-volume catalog was published (Drepung Catalog), and since then some select titles from this ocean of texts have been getting reprinted in one form or another.

(* I should clarify that in the introduction to the small paperback Table of Contents that accompanies the History Set, you find a statement that 50% are from the libraries of Drepung, 30% from other Tibetan monasteries, 10% from private individuals, and a further 10% from foreign libraries.)

The History Set (I’ll just call it “HS” - bibliographical information below) I’m talking about is published in traditional pecha format, but on nice smooth white paper, and thankfully not the brown grocery bag quality paper so much used in Tibet in recent years (sorry to complain about it, but the lack of contrast is really very hard on your eyes when you try reading it for long periods).

I may tell you about more of the important new-old histories another time, but for the moment I will limit myself to the content of volume 19. Perhaps the most exciting new old history, in my book, would be the Kālacakra history by Chag Lo “the Third.”

This history appeared in the bibliography Tibetan Histories, published by Serindia (London 1997, now out of print, apparently), like this:

-133-

late 1400’s

Chag Lo Rin-chen-chos-rgyal, Dus-’khor Chos-’byung Dpag-bsam Snye-ma. A history of Kâlacakra Tantra. Ref.: MHTL, no. 12258. Mdo-smad Chos-’byung: “Chag Lo Gsum-pa Rin-chen-chos-rgyal-gyi Dus-’khor Chos-’byung.” In Mkhas-pa’i Dga’-ston (Lokesh Chandra’s edition, part 3, p. 842), we read: “Chag Lo Gsum-pa’i Dus-’khor Chos-’byung” (compare Helmut Hoffmann, “Kâlacakra Studies I: Addenda et Corrigenda,” Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 15 [1971], pp. 298-301). This refers to a history of Kâlacakra by “a/the third Chag Lo.” Evidently we are to understand by this that he should not be confused with, and probably dates from a later time than, the two famous Chag Translators: Chag Lo Dgra-bcom (1153-1216) and Chag Lo Chos-rje-dpal (1197-1264), the former being the uncle of the latter. We may at least surmise from all of this that our history has to date from somewhere between the 13th and early 16th centuries. It seems most likely that our author is the Rin-chen-chos-rgyal (b. 1447) who became abbot of Rte’u-ra in 1460 (Blue Annals, p. 1060). This Rte’u-ra Monastery had served as the headquarters for both of the famous teachers named Chag Lo (and it does make sense, then, that one of the members of the abbatial succession would be called a ‘third Chag Lo’)...

(For even more information about this history, see the online Addenda, scrolling down to entry no. 133.)

Congratulations to Dpal-brtsegs for a great job of producing these books, and thank you for making it possible to read hitherto unavailable historical texts that are bound to be found fantastically fascinating for persons of Tibeto-logical interests.

(I have a general policy not to put up links to commercial enterprises, but with book suppliers this is sometimes difficult, and anyway, in this particular case I would be neglecting to point you in the direction of some very important information, in fact two PDFs that tell you the content of the first 60 volumes of the set. Look here. And prepare yourself to be amazed at what you will find. And forgive me for violating my principles... What? Again?)

~ ~ ~

Drepung 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).

HS — Dpal-brtsegs Bod-yig Dpe-rnying Zhib-’jug Khang, ed., Bod-kyi Lo-rgyus Rnam-thar Phyogs-bsgrigs (‘Collection of Tibetan Histories and Biographies’), Mtsho-sngon Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Xining 2011), 30 volumes published so far, with another 60 or more said to be forthcoming. The HS of the abbreviation just stands for “history set.”

§ § §

Vol. 19 (dza):

1 - Chag Lo Rin-chen-chos-rgyal, Dus-’khor Chos-’byung Dpag-bsam Snye-ma. HS, vol. 19 (dza), pp. 1-458. Notice how, strangely enough, at fol. 106 (meaning page 212) the xylographic printing gives way to manuscript cursive (on line 4) and the text continues on the next folio marked 123 (this and all remaining pages are in cursive). I made a chapter outline (found below), which ought to give a general idea about what is to be found in this history. The colophon doesn’t mention a date of composition, although it does give a problematic date for the carving of the woodblocks. I'm quite sure that the composition must date to somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 CE, since the author’s dates are usually given at 1447 CE, and the colophon mentions a behester (bskul-pa-po) by the name of Skal-bzang-chos-kyi-rgya-mtsho'i-sde. The latter is well known as author in 1494 of a biography of the Buddha that was behested by whom? Well, believe it or not! None other than our history writer Chag Lo the Third.*

(*For dating arguments, see Franz-Karl Ehrhard's article in The Birth of the Buddha, Lumbini International Research Institute, Lumbini 2010, pp. 358-360.)

2 - Dpal Dus-kyi-’khor-lo'i Spyi-bshad Mkhas-pa’i Mgul-rgyan [p. 459, with marginal notation ka, as if it were the first part of some set]. HS, vol. 19 (dza), pp. 459-573. Here is the complete overly-brief colophon from p. 573: dpal khang lo tsa'i skye ba mkhas mchog gzhan phan dbang po'i sdes mdzad pa'o. This says it was composed by a supreme scholar Gzhan-phan-dbang-po’i-sde, a rebirth of Dpal-khang Lo-tsa-ba (the well-known lexicographer). I’m hoping to learn more about this author, who probably flourished in about the same time as Chag Lo III, or possibly a little later.

§ § §

A chapter outline of Chag Lo III's history:

Ch. 1: Sangs rgyas kyis gsungs pa. How it was spoken by the Buddha. 1-41.

Ch. 2: Sa bcu'i byang chub sems dpas bka' bsdus shing 'grel pas bkral ba. How the Bodhisattvas of the ten Grounds gathered the Word and commentated on it with their commentaries. 41-63.

Ch. 3: Grub chen rnams kyis thugs nyams su bzhes shing paṇ chen rnams kyis 'bel gtam gyis gtan la phab pa. How the accomplished ones took the practices to heart and the panditas established the teachings with their fine compositions. 63-102.

Ch. 4: Lo tsā bas bod skad du bsgyur ba. How the translators translated it into Tibetan. 102-107.

Ch. 5: No chapter title given. The seven schools of Kālacakra transmission in Tibet.

1. Gyi-jo School. 107.

2. 'Bro School. 107.

3. Rwa School. 263.

4. Tsa-mi School. 347.

5. Paṇ-chen Śākyaśrī School. 404.

-. Chag School. 412 (?).

7. Śābara School. 427.

Pechas in Wrappings

P.S. In case anyone missed it who shouldn’t have, another vitally important source of new old histories is this recent one:

Per K. Sørensen and Sonam Dolma, Rare Texts from Tibet: Seven Sources for the Ecclesiastic History of Medieval Tibet, Lumbini International Research Institute (Lumbini 2007).

§ § §

Postscript:

In case you wonder why this book is supposed to be all that important. I would say there are a lot of reasons, the main one being the coverage it gives for some of the less well-known transmission lineages of the Kâlacakra. Just as a teaser for some of you real history freaks out there, I recommend having a look at page 60 (line 3) which tells us there was a king of Ta-zhig named Mer-mu-le-hab in the time of Sad-na-legs. Chag Lo then adds that this information can be known from the inscribed stone (the rdo-ring) located at the tomb of Sad-na-legs. Skeptics can have a look for themselves, but the inscribed stone at Sad-na-legs’ tomb has been silted over during the intervening centuries, and the lower lines could only be read after much digging and then only with difficulty. Hugh Richardson in his book A Corpus of Early Tibetan Inscriptions (pp. 84-91) did his best, but lines 30-46 are in large part missing, a word here and there, so few of them that Richardson didn’t even attempt a translation. Among those scattered words we may see mention of Turks (Dru-gu) and Upper (Western) Uigurs (Stod Hor). In the clearly now-existing words, it tells us that Sad-na-legs “extended his powerful commands and his dominions to the four quarters and the eight directions.” It is usually the case that the western quarter is represented by the Persians (for whom Ta-zhig is the form used in Old Tibetan texts, with the later spelling being Stag-gzig[s]). I don’t want to pound too vigorously on this point. After all, I haven't identified who this Mer-mu-le-hab might be. What I can tell you is that it is quite possible, nay likely, that having this history at the disposal of historians might help them to fill out a missing detail or two in an early 9th century inscription that serves as one of the primary sources for early Tibetan history. Enough said... for now.*

(*Well, I seem to be having one whale of a time putting in a last word so I can get this thing posted and be done with it. But perhaps needlessly said there is more to this story. Richardson, in his original article on this particular rdo-ring (JRAS 1969, possible to locate in JSTOR), gives a passage from the Rgyal-po Bka'-thang that supplies the names of two Ta-zhig kings, La-mer-mu and Hab-gdal... Those two names have a distinct similarity to our one name! Some have suggested this La-mer-mu might be 'Amr ibn Muslim, while others think it could be al-Mahmun, a 9th-century Abbasid caliph... Well, at least the reign dates of al-Maʾmūn, 813-833, puts him right in the correct time frame to be in some kind of contact with Sad-na-legs. Hab-gdal sure looks like Hephthalites to me, won’t you agree?)

§ § §

Source: B.A. Litvinsky, et al., eds., History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume III: The Crossroads of Civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750, Motilal Banarsidass (Delhi 1999), p. 382:

“The memory of the taxes paid by the Arabs has also been preserved in the Tibetan historical tradition according to which two Ta-zig (=Arab) kings, La-mer-mu and Hab-gdal, ‘having taken kindly to Tibetan command, paid punctually without fail their gems and wealth'. (Thomas 1935: I 273) La-mer-mu may be an abridged form of the name ‘Amr b. Muslim, while Hab-gdal may have preserved the memory of ‘Abdallah b. al-Zubair. The latter evidence may also illustrate the successful resistance of the Gandharan population against the Arab conquest. However, the struggle was not decided here but in the far north at Talas, where the Arabs and Türks won a decisive victory over the Chinese army in 751."

I have to say that this paragraph is a little confusing, since it would seem something was settled in 751 over matters that had to do with the reign of Sad-na-legs in the early decades of the 9th century. Let's see what Thomas actually published in the work just cited, which is indeed a translated excerpt from the Rgyal-po Bka'-thang, chapter 7:

“In the west the Ta-zig kings there established, king La-mer-mu and Hab-gdal, having taken kindly to Tibetan command, paid punctually without fail their gems and wealth and five-loads of medicaments and acceptable provisions. Under Tibetan sway they made their state to flourish : the orders issued to themselves they heard with respect.”

I left off Thomas’ footnotes, but here's the relevant note on the names (his note 6): “La-mer-mu and Hab-gdal. Hab-gdal represents, perhaps, the Hephthalite kingdom of the Pamir (supra, p. 150-1), though it might be = ‘Abdu 'llah. La-mer-mu presents difficulty. It can scarcely denote Hârûn al-Rashîd : can it possibly be a corruption of Mâwarâ-un-nahr, which in the form [Stag-gzig-] Mu-wer[-gyi-rgyal-po] we find elsewhere as a designation of the Musalman power ? See Klaproth, Sprache und Schrift der Uigur, p. 34.”

Here's the same passage as it occurs in that popular edition of the Bka'-thang Sde-lnga published by Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang in 1986 (1990 reprint), p. 118:

nub phyogs ta zig rgyal po bzhugs pa yang //

rgyal po la mer mu dang hab gdal gyis //
bod kyi bka' la gces par bzung nas ni //
rin cen nor dang sman gyi lnga dos dang //
kha zas gces pa dus las ma yol phul //
bod kyi mnga' 'og chab srid dam par mdzad //
rang gi bka' bstsal gang yin gus pas nyan //

ནུབ་ཕྱོགས་ཏ་ཟིག་རྒྱལ་པོ་བཞུགས་པ་ཡང་༎

རྒྱལ་པོ་ལ་མེར་མུ་དང་ཧབ་གདལ་གྱིས༎

བོད་ཀྱི་བཀའ་ལ་གཅེས་པར་བཟུང་ནས་ནི༎

རིན་ཅེན་ནོར་དང་སྨན་གྱི་ལྔ་དོས་དང་༎

ཁ་ཟས་གཅེས་པ་དུས་ལས་མ་ཡོལ་ཕུལ༎

བོད་ཀྱི་མངའ་འོག་ཆབ་སྲིད་དམ་པར་མཛད༎

རང་གི་བཀའ་བསྩལ་གང་ཡིན་གུས་པས་ཉན༎

Thomas’ translation isn’t easily faulted for inaccuracy as far as I can see, and the idea that the rulers in Merv were for awhile in a tribute-bearing relationship with Lhasa in the early decades of the 9th century isn’t particularly implausible. Is it?

End of Tibetology in Sight

2011-07-10T15:42:00.010+01:00

Photo by F.S. Chapman, Lhasa 1936

At the risk of instigating largely gratuitous Schadenfreude on the part of a whole slew of opponents of our reputedly hallowed discipline, a recent development causes me to call the very idea of continuation into question. What use are we Tibetologists if all the words of Tibetan literature have become instantly Googleable?

I’ll admit, I myself may be (in my own small way) part of the problem, and I don’t have any idea about a solution short of shutting down the worldwide web. Still, I’ll ramble on a bit about this thing tugging away at the back of my mind.

I know some of you are thinking, well...errrh, ‘I never even once had occasion to call upon the services of a Tibetologist anyway, so what’s the use of them? Why be concerned if they no longer find things to keep them busy?’ True enough, it’s not as if by extracting their noses from their books there is imminent danger of them rushing out and making a nuisance of themselves with normal citizens out in the streets. So what is the problem? ‘Put them in wireless-free retirement homes ASAP! They won’t be missed.’

I hear you. Still, I’m thinking, What is a researcher to do now that practically everything is done for her or him? No need to search the day away, scanning frantically with our g-d-given eyeballs, page after page for a single citation. Even first-year Tibetan language students will be able to find out in an instant how many times a word or phrase is used in the entire 108-volume (or so) collection of Buddhist scriptures in Tibetan translations that we know as the Kanjur or Bka'-'gyur (‘translations of the Word of Buddha’)... and not only that, but also in the more-than 200-volume [or so] set of Tibetan translations of the mainly India-composed works that further illuminate the Kanjur texts known as the Tenjur or Bstan-'gyur (‘translations of the treatises’).

Now those 1st-year students will be instantly producing cutting edge research in this no-longer existent field — no sooner done than published in free but refereed internet journals of repute — that would have taken their fathers (and of course their grandfathers and mothers) years of painstaking eyesight-destroying research, even assuming they could get so far before entering the intermediate states of the bardos.

With all this talk I’ve just been stalling for time, hesitating to let anyone know that there is such a resource out there ready for their use, one that I had nothing to do with creating, and one with which I have no financial ties whatsoever. In fact, I wonder why I would send anyone there at all, since it would appear that it’s putting not only me, but all of us, out of a work... Unless by work you mean being a google-box click fool permanently wired to the internet, one who will perhaps forget what it once felt like to unwrap a dpe-cha and flip through its long paper pages, contemplating meanings.

Go HERE and then I’ll be quiet.

My, that quiet sounds nice, now, doesn’t it!

Three Jewels on Fire

For those who may need fuller instructions, I should say to go to this URL based in Vienna, Austria:

http://www.istb.univie.ac.at/kanjur/

(I’ve also put this link in the “Tibetological Toolbox” in the sidebar, over to your right, for your future reference.)

Then tap on the words “Full eTexts Kanjur” that you will find there.

Then type the word or phrase you want to find (in Wylie transcription exactly as you wish to find it... no need to add boolean operators or quote marks) in the box provided.

And if you find it useful, as most of you no doubt will, thank profusely the people who came together to make it happen, including the many hands that produced the ocean of eTexts it sails over.

If you have experience or knowledge of this site, or know about similar projects in the works, please send us your comments, since we’d love to learn more.

A demonstration, if one be needed:

I was especially interested in a verb bdungs-pa, which means, according to the Btsan-lha dictionary, bsad-pa (‘killed’). But as I’ve found it in the Mkhas-pa Lde'u history (pp. 52, 236), it can’t possibly have this meaning, but rather has something to do with stringing a bow, as in gzhu rang bdungs, which must mean: the bow [that] strung itself. (One of a set of weapons with amazing powers, something we’ll talk about another time.) Some glossaries seem to think it means nocking or loading the bow with the notch of an arrow. However, in certain sources it is clear that it means stringing the bow, and not loading it with an arrow, since it takes place a good while before the actual archery competition (in the life of the Buddha as told in the famous Lalitavistara). rgyal bus gzhu blangs te bdungs nas gzhu rgyud sbrengs pa'i sgra 'brug skad ltar zer te. (But note the verb sbrengs-pa here also means stringing of the bow.) I noticed this phrase on p. 98 of the modern book reprint of the Sutra of the Wise and the Fool (Mdzangs-blun) I picked up earlier this year in Nepal.

So my idea is that it ought to mean the stringing of the bow, but that some authors might have thought it meant loading the arrow on to the bow. If only the lexicons are to blame, it’s one thing, but what about real Tibetan translators and authors? Did they ever understand it that way?

Let’s see what happens when we make use of this new search tool for the Kanjur and Tanjur! (I’ll come back here when I find something out.)

Oh, my. It may be an unusual word, but not quite as rare as I had imagined. We get three occurrences in the Vinayavastu, and two in the Vinayavibhaṅga.

It occurs once in the Udayanavatsa Rāja Paripṛcchā. It occurs in five other sûtras, sometimes multiple (2, 3 or even 5) times each.

It appears in five different tantra scriptures.

Here's a short example of a context from one of the sûtras. It’s the Drin-lan bsab-pa'i mdo, ‘Repaying the Kindness [of Buddha] Sûtra,’ which I believe is one of those relatively rare canonical translations done from Chinese):

de nas rngon pa des gzhu bdungs/ mda' ltong du bcug...

“Then that hunter strung the bow and loaded [the string with] the arrow notch.”

This certainly supports the idea that it means ‘to string’ and not ‘to nock.’ I’d have to study all the other examples to know if other texts might argue for the other interpretation (I didn’t notice one right off). My point here is that you can take an unusual word of problematic meaning and see how it functions in every possible context in the Kanjur and Tanjur.* It’s likely that with some effort you will be enabled to come to a conclusion of proven reliability. Getting through those occasional tough spots can make all the difference for the accuracy of a translation. And no, dictionaries don’t have all the meanings you need. And sometimes, as in this example, they have meanings nobody needs.

(*Well, I can’t answer the question of whether full coverage is provided or not, and even if it is [as it seems], there is still the problem of miss-readings and typos that certainly can get in the way of our certainty about the results when using databases of any sort.)

Roof-top tomb mosaic,

Galla Placidia Mausoleum

Ravenna

Padampa Portrait - Part Two

2011-06-11T16:03:00.008+01:00

Detail of the Padampa lineage painting,
+1 level - click to expand - © Sotheby's

Today we will continue from the last blog where we talked about the content of the middle register with its central figure being none other Padampa himself. Now we proceed to move gradually, one level at a time, upward to see who among the Indian teachers of Padampa we may encounter there.

Above you see six circles (go ahead and download it so you can see the details), each enclosing a group of Padampa’s teachers. If you look closely you will see that the first and last of the six circles contain 5 female figures each, while the four middle circles (the 2nd through the 5th) each contain 11 male figures. Each circle includes a central figure, and the identification of the central figure gives us a key to identifying the group of persons depicted around them. The total number of figures depicted here adds up to 54, which is the correct number for the frequently mentioned group of “54 male and female common siddha teachers of the authorization transmissions” (thun-mong lung-gi bla-ma grub-thob pho mo lnga-bcu-rtsa-bzhi). The word ‘common’ here just means that these teachers were not uniquely Padampa’s but had other students as well. It does not mean ordinary. If you remember, we have a Dharmaśrī text (Dh) that gives a more detailed version of the earlier Jamyang Gonpo text (JG). Both texts treat this as a lineage tree visualization, with the meditator at the center, although they are different in their order, creating a mild and not-all-that lethal confusion. Like our two authorities, we will save the women teachers for later, and start with the 2nd circle. JG says that to the meditator’s back is a group of eleven lamas for the knowledge of philosophy and grammar made up of Klu-sgrub-snying-po and so on. JG has no full listing of names, but this is supplied by Dh. I’ve added what I believe to be the correct Sanskrit forms of the names, although not always with the kind of complete confidence that might be desired by some of you:

[D1] Klu-sgrub-snying-po. Nāgārjunagarbha or Nāgārjunasāra.

[D2] Shes-rab-bzang-po. Prajñābhadra.

[D3] Yon-tan-'od. Guṇaprabha.

[D4] Chos-grags. Dharmakīrti.

[D5] Ā-ka-ri-siddhi. Ākarasiddhi.

[D6] Shangka-ra. Śaṅkara.

[D7] Ye-shes-snying-po. Jñānagarbha.

[D8] Thogs-med. Asaṅga.

[D9] Ārya-de-ba. Āryadeva.

[D10] Zhi-ba-lha. Śāntideva.

[D11] Gser-gling-pa. Suvarṇadvīpin.

Klu-sgrub-snying-po is none other than the Nāgārjuna figure with the multiple snakes forming a cover over his head (look closely and you will see them) in the center of the 2nd circle.

If the next group (the 3rd circle) is not at all clear in the painting, we may nevertheless surmise that it must be the group centered on Saraha. He is not often depicted without an arrow, and you don't see any arrow held by any of the other central figures, so this group must be his. (I hope you followed this somewhat tortuous logic. Anyway, the seating posture appears to be the one usually adopted by Saraha.) Here is Dh's listing of the group visualized in front of the meditator, the eleven lamas of the symbolic [transmission of] Great Sealing:

[A1] Sa-ra-ha. Saraha.

[A2] Tsārya-pa. Caryāpa.

[A3] Gu-ṇa-ti. Guṇati?

[A4] Tog-tse-pa. Kuddāla.

[A5] Ko-ṣha-pa. Koṣapa?

[A6] Sha-ba-ta. Śabari?

[A7] Mai-tri-pa. Maitripā.

[A8] Phā-ga-ra-siddhi. Sāgarasiddhi.

[A9] Nyi-ma-sbas-pa. Ravigupta.

[A10] Ā-ka-ra-siddhi. Ākarasiddhi.

[A11] Ratna-badzra. Ratnavajra.

With only two remaining, it might seem a problem to decide which is which, but I believe the group centered around Buddhaguhya must be the one represented in the non-tantric style, while the one circled around the portly yogi must be the one centered around Saroruhavajra (Mtsho-skyes-rdo-rje), the Hevajra Tantra author, and Hevajra is usually regarded as a Mother Tantra. So the group in the 4th circle must be the one that includes these persons listed in Dh, visualized to the meditator’s left side. They are called the 11 lamas of the Mother Tantra experience of bliss (ma rgyud bde ba nyams kyi bla ma bcu gcig):

[C1] Mtsho-skyes-rdo-rje. Saroruhavajra.

[C2] Indra-bhū-ti. Indrabhūti.

[C3] Ḍombhi-pa. Ḍombipa.

[C4] Rdo-rje-dril-bu-pa. Vajraghaṇṭapa.

[C5] Ti-li-pa. Tilopa.

[C6] Nag-po-zhabs. Kṛṣṇapa.

[C7] Sgeg-pa-rdo-rje. Lalitavajra.

[C8] Lū-i-pa. Lūyipa.

[C9] Bi-rū-pa. Virūpa.

[C10] Kun-snying (i.e., Kun-dga'-snying-po). Ānandagarbha.

[C11] Ku-ku-ra-pa. Kukuripa.

The 5th circle contains the group headed by Buddhaguhya. Its members are listed by Dh under the descriptive name “the 11 lamas of the Father Tantra winds of motility.”

[B1] Sangs-rgyas-gsang-ba. Buddhaguhya.

[B2] Padma-badzra. Padmavajra.

[B3] Ngag-gi-dbang-phyug. Vāgīśvara.

[B4] Go-dha-ri. Godhari? Elsewhere spelled Gu-bha-ri and Ghu-da-ri-pa.

[B5] Karma-badzra. Karmavajra.

[B6] Dza-ba-ti. Jabaripa.

[B7] Ye-shes-zhabs. Jñānapāda

[B8] Klu-byang. Nāgabodhi.

[B9] Swa-nantā. Ānanda?

[B10] Kṛṣhṇa-pa. Kṛṣṇapa.

[B11] Ba-su-dha-ri. Vasudhārin.

Now for the group of 10 women teachers divided between the first and last circles. I have no iconographic means to distinguish which is which at the moment, so I will just list them as one group. They are called “the ten skygoers who are lams of direct introduction to awareness” (mkha' 'gro ma rig pa ngo sprod kyi bla ma bcu):

[E1] Ḍā-ki Su-kha-siddhi. Sukhāsiddhī.

[E2] Ri-khrod-ma. Śabarī.

[E3] Padmo-zhabs. Padmopāda?

[E4] Ku-mu-da. Kumudā.

[E5] Bde-ba'i-'byung-gnas. Sukhākara.

[E6] Ganggā-bzang-mo. Gaṅgābhadrī.

[E7] Tsi-to-ma. Cintā.

[E8] La-kṣhi-ma. Lakṣmī.

[E9] Shing-lo-ma. Parṇā?

[E10] There ought to be ten in the list, but I can only count nine. The missing one would be Dri-med-ma. In Sanskrit, Vimalā.

Oh my sore back! We’re not nearly done yet with the upper part of the painting, and I’ve already gotten tired. It was a lot more work than I had thought it would be, and I’m not sure how much you are really appreciating it. I can hear some people saying, ‘Too much information already!’ Let me just put off the rest for now and take a short rest.

At least we’ve gotten through one more very significant part of the painting and identified the figures that are included in the six circles immediately above the figure of Padampa. This is the main group of his Indian teachers according to the sources. If you want to know whether Padampa met these teachers in the flesh or in vision (some, like Saraha, surely must have lived long before him), I don’t have much of an answer that would satisfy everyone. Perhaps it makes better sense to observe that all these teachers’ names appear in texts that were of primary importance to the Zhijé school, in particular the trilogy called the Gold Ball, Silver Ball and Crystal Ball. If you want to know more about these texts, look in the bibliography and look up the references for yourself if you will.

I plan to go ahead with the rest of the painting, although I’m not so sure I will put it all up here on Tibeto-logic blog. I can say that each of the groups of figures above Padampa has something to do with revealing or transmitting specific teachings that are represented in the form of texts in the Zhijé Collection.

I do think a careful consideration of the group of Tibetan students of Padampa in the lower part of the painting might have interesting implications for reconsidering the date of the painting. So maybe we’ll look at that part next time instead of moving up into the higher levels.

§ § §

Bibliography:

Kurtis Schaeffer, Crystal Orbs and Arcane Treasuries: Tibetan Anthologies of Buddhist Tantric Songs from the Tradition of Pha Dam pa sangs rgyas, Acta Orientalia (Oslo), vol. 68 (2007), pp. 5-73. Here on pp. 20-22, you may find English translations of incipit and colophon for three texts that explicitly state that they are teachings of the “54 male and female teachers.” The same three texts may be found in the publication that follows, pp. 1-16.

Mkhas-grub Khyung-po-rnal-'byor et al., Zhi byed dang shangs pa'i chos skor, Dpal brtsegs bod yig dpe rnying zhib 'jug khang, Bod ljongs mi dmangs dpe skrun khang (Lhasa 2010). This is a small and handsome paperback volume, no. 7 in the series called Mkhyen brtse'i 'od snang, containing several of the key Zhijé texts in a nicely edited form with very clear print, making them easier to read. All of the Zhijé texts included in this book have been published previously. I mention it here because it’s inexpensive and accessible.

The Zhijé Collection, as I call it for short, is the most important available resource on Padampa and his Zhijé teachings by far (originally in 4 volumes, but published in 5). TBRC (Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center) makes it available in PDFs, which is wonderful, but they catalog it under the name Zhi byed snga bar phyi gsum gyi skor. This incorrect title implies that it includes the early and middle transmission texts of the Zhijé, when in fact it has the texts of the later transmission alone.*

(*This means primarily the one transmitted by Kunga, although there were 3 other disciples of Padampa who held transmissions that are also called “later” and that had smaller text collections that have not surfaced yet, although they certainly existed in earlier times.)

To get to the Zhijé Collection, try this link, or if that doesn’t work, try this one (http://www.tbrc.org/) and type “W23911” in their search box. In the future, if a Tibetan title for the collection is needed, I think it ought to reflect the title that is actually there on the manuscript. Although difficult to read in the reprint edition, it is more legible in the microfilm version of the text that was made independently by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. What we find there is this: Dam chos snying po zhi byed las / rgyud phyi snyan rgyud zab khyad ma bzhugs // glang skor bzim chung phyag pe'o [~glang 'khor gzim chung phyag dpe'o]. If a short title is needed, I recommend Zab khyad ma, which means [the manuscript - or the transmission it represents - called] Exceptionally Profound.

§ § §

Note: No sooner had I posted this blog than I thought I have to take back my idea about calling the entire Zhijé Collection under the name Zab khyad ma. Actually, although it only appears in the microfilm of the text (like so many other things, actually), there is a colophon at the end of the first volume (ka) of the original manuscript that brings the Zab khyad ma to an end. In other words, this title only applies to the teachings of Padampa and his Indian teachers, and not to the responsa (zhu-lan) texts etc. of Kunga and later members of the lineage that fill up the rest of the collection (and the greater bulk of it). Another point that may seem small, the information in this colophon applies only to the first volume, and ought to be understood as a copying of an earlier (now ‘lost’) textual entity that had the same content as the first volume... OK, enough of that for now.

A Padampa Portrait Painting: The Middle

2011-06-01T08:12:00.001+01:00

Zhije Lineage Tree, photo courtesy of Sotheby's
(click on the photo for an enlargement [I hope] -
click on the enlargement for a super-sized version -
The copyright for the image remains with Sotheby's)

My, isn't this an amazingly beautiful painting? Just ignore the stuff I'm writing here and go back to look some more at that painting. Some of the figures are so alive, you imagine they might talk to you or step off the page. Even if it is only partly there, it is really remarkable for so many reasons. Even if you didn't know the central figure was Padampa (and I do know that it's Padampa as you will see) it would be fascinating.

Now that we've seen and said how beautiful it is, let's look into what can be known about this historically richly important painting. The first thing that I believe can be known without a doubt is that the central figure is Padampa. I would know this if only the central figure, nothing else, were visible in it. Equally, if only the surrounding figures were visible while the central figure was left blank, I could tell you who the person in the blank space ought to be, so much am I sure of this identification. But you may need to read further into this blog if you want to learn at least some of the sources of my conviction, not least among which is an early text that basically tells you what the Zhije lineage tree would look like if you were to visualize it. The text is very likely to date from somewhere close to the same time as the painting itself. But please don't do as I know some are inclined to do and assume that the painting must have proceeded out of the text. It could be that the painting is older. Try to keep an opened mind. We'll go where the evidence leads us.

First, some necessary disclaimers:

I don't have any connection to the art trade, let alone any art auctioning houses. I wouldn't call myself a collector, or if I am, I never owned any art that cost me more than one hundred dollars, which I guess from some perspectives would label me as pathetic. I have nothing to gain or lose if anything I might say would have an effect on the future placement of this painting or the livelihood of its owners, although my best hope is that it will go to a public institution (like a museum) that will take care of it well. I find it a matter both for pride and alarm that Tibetan paintings have already a few years ago pushed through the million dollar ceiling.

Well... This kind of neutrality is important. With no economic interests, I can speak freely but perhaps, too, you might feel a little more inclined to believe what I have to say, although it's hard to feel too sure of it. I won't even pretend to be neutral about Padampa. What would he think about all this high-level commerce going on around his person? If you need to ask this question, it's clear you have yet to be introduced.

I was surprised to see this painting on auction, although I wasn't surprised that it existed. I knew about it back in around 2004 or 2005, when I corresponded about it with A.H. It was A.H. (I will put your complete name here if you will permit me) who brought it to my attention for the first time and sent me some photographs. I very much wanted to study it and write about it, but the owner at the time, it appears, was not interested. He wanted to keep its existence a secret. I must admit, I was a little annoyed by this decision, especially since I was at the time writing up an article, meanwhile published, on the iconography of Padampa.

Now compare the central figure in the painting with the figure on your left in this ink drawing dating to the mid-13th century:

Ink drawn miniature - Padampa ("Dam-pa") on your left, his student Kunga on your right -
from vol. 2 (kha), folio 15, the Zhijé Collection scribed in 1245 or so

When you compare the two Padampas illustrated here so far, you see a few remarkable things in common. First of all visualize the thrones away as irrelevant. Then look at the interesting and unusual ‘lobed’ hair on top of his head (more on this later) with what looks like several small braids splayed out over the shoulders. Look a little closer and notice the skimpy beard in both portraits.

Wait, let me try and put a detail of the painted head up here for you so you won’t have to scroll back and forth so much:

The hand gestures (the mudrâs) are different, but then they are different in all the images in the Zhijé Collection (I’ve only put one example here; others may be seen in the Martin article listed below). Both are seen sitting in what might best be described as a sitting bag, otherwise they both are basically naked. I’m not an expert on this subject, but I imagine the style of Padampa’s loincloth in the painting resembles better the simpler style of underwear, with string or twisted cloth tied at the sides, used in South India (kaupina seems to be the word for it) than the somewhat more complicated langot[i] used in the north. I won’t embarrass myself by exposing more of my ignorance on this particular matter, although I would warmly welcome clarification from those more knowledgeable. If it is in fact an item of South Indian attire depicted here, there is something wonderful about knowing this. It lends a touch of South Indian authenticity to his portrayal.

I promised to return to the hair. Perhaps you are already aware that Padampa is normally portrayed in more recent Tibetan art with something closely resembling the standard “Buddha curls.” In early art, as well as this text that must date to mid 13th century, we find something different:

“Imagine the precious holy Indian Dampa with a body of dark brown color with a reddish cast, his hair rising up like elm tree [leaves?], wearing a varicolored loincloth, his hands held in a cross-pointed (tips crossed?) gesture [capable] of pressing down all of phenomenal existence if he pressed down with them or raising it up if he raised them.”*

(*For the source, see the work by ’Jam-dbyangs-mgon-po listed below, p. 413. This passage was cited already in Martin’s 2006 article, pp. 118-119. The Tibetan text will be examined a little further on in this blog.)

Let’s think about what this passage says. Ignore for the time being the mudrâ, since the fact is the language of the description isn’t clear, and in early representations his gestures haven’t become fixed yet. Then notice it says that his body was “of dark brown color with a reddish cast.” This rather exact description of skin tone seems to be followed out in the painting. If that idea leaves you plagued by doubts, notice the mention of the loincloth, not often seen in Padampa portraits (although I get your point, it doesn’t seem to be very ‘variegated’ in color as the text would have it). Is it possible that this text played a role in the making of the painting?

I’m not sure we can answer the question. Still, in the attempt we may learn something. Besides, if some large part of the information in the text corresponds with what is in the painting, it ought to be enough for us. I think the information that enters into the painting has the same general source as that that enters into the text, so one may be used to illuminate (or in some cases perhaps add to or correct) the other.

Well, what I’ve just described is a major project that may takes more effort and time than I can give to it. I think we will have to take a lot of texts into account to explain the painting in its entirety. Two cases in point are the identity of the two divine mandala arrays on either side of Padampa, but on his same mid-level part of the painting. Let's start with the one on his right (your left):

Detail of divine assemblage on the central figure’s right side

Although I haven’t yet located any text about her, neither among the Tanjur texts by Padampa nor in the Zhijé Collection, it appears we must identify the central figure as Rdo-rje-gtum-mo, with the four surrounding figures being the las-mkhan-ma. Basing ourselves on the Dharmaśrī text in the Gdams-ngag Mdzod, vol. 13, p. 251, they are:

1. In the southeastern quarter, lion-faced.
2. In the southwestern quarter, tiger-faced.
3. In the northwestern quarter, monkey-faced.
4. In the northeastern quarter, wolf-faced.

Given that east is usually the direction closest to the viewer, the orientation may need to be tipped 90° or so one way or another... Do you think the textual information fits the animal heads in the painting?

Divine assemblage on the central figure’s left side

On Padampa’s left side is a different divine assemblage, with a form of Vajravārāhī at the center. In this case we do have a Padampa text in the Tanjur. It’s this one: Rdo-rje-phag-mo’i sgrub-thabs — Toh. 2328, found in vol. ZHI, fol. 269, where she is described like this:

rnam par dag pa lha'i sku zhal gcig phyag gnyis pa gri gug dang thod pa dang kha ṭwāṃ gi 'dzin pa / sku mdog dmar ba la dur khrod chas kyis brgyan pa zhabs g.yas bskum pa / g.yon brkyang bas dus mtshan ma mnan pa / gar dgu'i nyams kyis bzhugs pa bsgom par bya'o //

To translate quickly:

“Visualize a perfectly immaculate divine form of one face and two arms holding chopper and skullcup and khatvanga, her body red in color ornamented with the cemetery items, her right leg bent, the right extended pressing down Kālarātri (Dus-mtshan-ma), displaying all nine communicable dramatic emotions (rāsa).”

The main different aspect of this portrayal is that Vajravārāhī has a sow’s head alone. Usually the sow’s head is off to the side of a human face. The single representation that exists for her among the ink drawings in the Zhijé Collection, doesn’t appear to show any sow’s face at all, but it isn’t all that clear. It is at least of interest because the loose scarf floats around her in a very similar way to the one in the painting. The legs are reversed, you may notice.

Now that we’ve finished with the central register, we’ll talk about the figures both visible and invisible in the upper register, along with the group primarily made up of Tibetan followers of the Zhijé lineage down below Padampa, in an upcoming blog posting. Until then...

- - -

Here is the description of “Lot 85” of the Stuart Carey Welch collection, Part II, at the Sotheby’s site. Try to get there soon in case the link expires.

Although Stuart Carey Welch was born long before me, we were born in the same city. For an obituary look here. He specialized in Indian Mughal and Islamic art, and taught for 35 years at Harvard. I once had one of his books as the only assigned textbook in an Islamic art class, which is the main reason I remember his name. He was definitely one who felt that one could appreciate art and art history well enough without being encumbered by the language used in the culture that produced the art. Perhaps that helped to make his book more suitable for an undergraduate course, if I may be forgiven for trying my best to put this all in a better light.

Not everyone joined in the “chorus of praise” for Sotheby’s record-breaking sale (i.e., earnings) of the Islamic art in the Welch collection that took place in April. Here is what Souren Melikian had to say about it. Souren Melikian, by the way, is one of the most formidable scholars on the subject of early Iranian and Islamic connections with Buddhism and Buddhist art, and on the history of Iranian Buddhism in general. His criticism of the auction houses in recent years has placed them on the defensive, which is probably why they more than anyone need to hear what he has to say. I’m just passing on this information. I’m not eager to criticize auction houses or the people who bid in them, not today. Today, if you don’t mind, I’ll feign neutrality and keep my opinions to myself.

§ § §

More to read, as if you can’t find enough, and even more discussions of tediously minor issues that have to do with trees, hair and the like:

On the iconography of Padampa, see D. Martin, Padampa Sangye: A History of Representation of a South Indian Siddha in Tibet. Contained in: Rob Linrothe, ed., Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas, Rubin Museum of Art (New York 2006), pp. 108-123. There is a brief but substantial iconographical study of Padampa (Pha Dam-pa Sangs-rgyas) contained in Lokesh Chandra, Transcendental Art of Tibet, International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan (New Delhi 1996), pp. 97-8, revised in Lokesh Chandra, Dictionary of Buddhist Iconography, International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan (New Delhi 2003) vol. 9, pp. 2619-20.

'Jam-dbyangs-mgon-po, Grub-chen Dam-pa Sangs-rgyas-nas Brgyud-pa'i Dam-chos Sdug-bsngal Zhi-byed-kyi Lam Lnga'i Khrid-yig Dri-med Snang-ba Grub-pa Mchog-gi Zhal-lung, contained in Gdams-ngag Mdzod: A Treasury of Precious Methods and Instructions of the Major and Minor Buddhist Traditions of Tibet, Brought Together and Structured into a Coherent System by 'Jam-mgon Kong-sprul, Lama Ngodrup and Sherab Drimey (Paro 1979-1981), vol. 13, pp. 409-438. About the author of this text, which is misattributed in the Table of Contents, look here and here. Following is the text of the passage translated above, although I also consulted a parallel in the same volume. This passage is on p. 413: rje btsun dam pa rgya gar rin po che sku mdog smug la dmar ba'i mdangs chags pa / dbu skra bho lo ltar gzengs pa / sku la ras khra bo'i am gar ga gsol ba / snang srid thams cad mnan na non pa / btegs na theg pa / phyag rgya rtse bsnol du lag ge ba. This differs from, and deserves comparison with, the parallel in the same volume at p. 369 buried in a lengthy work by Smin-gling Lo-chen Dharmaśrī (1654-1717): rje btsun dam pa rgya gar rin po che sku mdog smug la dmar ba'i mdangs chags pa / dbu skra yo 'bog gi sdong po ltar gzengs pa / sku la ras khra bo'i ang rag gsol ba / snang srid thams cad mnan na non pa / btegs na theg pa / phyag rgya rtsa bsnol du bzhugs par bsam mo. I located in medical reference books the Tibetan word yo-'bog, identified as Ulmus pumila: Siberian elm. I thought it ought to mean the rather serrated lobes of the leaves, but here it clearly says that his hair rises up like the trunk (or just the whole tree) of the Siberian elm. I couldn't identify the bho-la found in the other text, although I suppose it could be Zhangzhung language for rabbit, or, as found in other T-B languages, a word for thumb (just grasping at straws here, friend).

There is, if truth be told, a small body of literature about hair - and the absence of hair - among Buddhists. But perhaps the most interesting for present contexts is Benjamin Bogin, The Dreadlocks Treatise: On Tantric Hairstyles in Tibetan Buddhism, History of Religions, vol. 48, no. 2 (November 2008), pp. 85-109 (references to further literature on hair may be found here).

Are you surprised that there is actually a blogger site devoted to traditional Indian underwear and loincloths in particular? When you get over your amazement, you can find it here. The Tibetan words for loincloth used in the two versions of that early description of Padampa are am-gar-ga (probable better reading: am-ga-rag) and ang-rag. I've never seen the first spelling, even in the corrected reading of it, while the second is seen occasionally, but not all that often. Tibetans in the past have been known to wear the loincloth, although it’s not the usual fashion. As suggested by one Bengali scholar whom I’ll mention in a moment, it seems to be limited to Tibetan yogi types and not everyday wear by ordinary people. I’ve been assured that traditional Tibetans wore something they call[ed] a smad-g.yog, which just means a lower [body] wrap, and as the name suggests it's just a piece of cloth wrapped like a very short skirt around the waist without — how shall we say it — any support mechanism. In his often but not always reliable (in my humble opinion) listing of Indic loan words in Tibetan, Vidhushekhara Bhattacharya, Loan Words in Tibetan, Archiv Orientalni, vol. 6 (1934), pp. 353-357, at p. 356, no. 74, says that an-'ga'-rag, another spelling I haven’t encountered, means “the trousers worn as an under-garment by Tantric priests in Tibet, cf. Hindi aṅgarkhā, Skt. aṅgarakṣā.” The Sanskrit word he gives means literally limb protection, and that might appear to suit the loincloth somehow, come to think of it, but my Monier-Williams dictionary gives a closely similar word as meaning limbs protector, which is to say coat of mail. An epigraphical dictionary says it means [the king's] bodyguard. Other sources translate it as coat or even turban. The Hindi word he gives is not in my Hindi dictionary. So, well, I don’t know if Bhattacharya is right on this or not, although the reading am-ga-rag would seem to help him, if this is the right reading and if it would in fact represent an earlier and not-yet-so-Tibetanized form of the presumably borrowed word. No plausible Tibetan etymology of the two syllables ang and rag rises up to suggest itself, so let’s bet more than even odds it really is a borrowing of some kind or another. Still, I haven’t succeeded in finding any source for the notion that Sanskrit aṅgarakṣā means underwear. I’ll keep looking.

- - -

Note: I’ve timed the posting of this blog for the day after the painting is to be auctioned. If you think about my possible reasons for doing this, I don’t think you’ll be too far off.

Happy Birthday, Larry!

Future of Learning in the Himalayas

2011-05-29T05:00:00.005+01:00

Patan Durbar, Nepal

“That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”

- Entry for ‘Education’ from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.

Tibetan intellectuals are passionate about promoting education. Practically every person in the Himalayan world that has managed to receive a higher level of education is guaranteed to be concerned with the educational possibilities of people back home. I’ve seen this to be true so many times both inside Tibet and in neighboring countries with Tibetan populations. Inside Tibet, especially, they are bound to support schools taught in Tibetan-language medium, or at least those offering classes at suitable levels of Tibetan literacy. Until a few years ago a large number of Tibetan parents, including Party cadres in Lhasa, were willing to risk sending their children over the Himalayas to Dharamsala, to the Tibetan Children's Village in particular, as their only hope for the children receiving an education with real Tibetan content. The alternative? Culturally alienated Sinified children. These days not only is it more and more strongly forbidden to send the children to Dharamsala, it has also become much more difficult and dangerous with the increasingly strict border controls. Now it is all the more vital that Tibetan medium education be promoted in Tibet. And moves by the PRC authorities in recent years have been going in very discouraging directions.

In Nepal, at large, education is a huge concern. I remember 20 years ago they used to say that the number of Nepalese unable to read stood at 70%. Now I understand it’s more like 50%, which seems to me like a woefully inadequate improvement, especially given the requirement of reading for most reasonably good occupations available in the early 21st century. Still poor after all these years, this gradually developing democracy has been preoccupied for the last decade with a Maoist insurgency. Now they, the Maoists, have been brought into the government, and if for this reason only there would be hope of more positive developments. Still, the fighting against them took so much energy and resources away from much-needed infrastructural improvements that these days Nepal can only produce half as much electricity as it needs (explaining those daily hours of “load shedding”),* and public education is so abominable that nobody wants their children to waste their time with it. Part of the problem with education in Nepal is just that so many parents are too poor to allow their children to spend much if any time on it. Their earning power, although small, is more important. Child labor can still be seen everywhere these days, especially in the metalworking shops. Forbidding child labor won’t help much to get at the root of the complex of problems. Education would seem to come much closer.**

(*By way of contrast, nearby Bhutan has plenty of extra hydroelectric power, and makes much profit diverting the excess to the Indian grid. The dams and generators were, I believe, largely built with Indian financing. **Don’t be too surprised if I say that education can also be a source of certain kinds problems. For example: It’s well known that successful rural education programs promote migration to urban areas leading to increased unemployment, housing problems...)

I’m still trying to remember ever once meeting a learned Ladakhi who didn’t have a hand in building or managing one or more schools. I haven’t been in Ladakh myself, although I’ve visited neighboring valleys just south of it. I haven’t been to Bhutan, either. Of course I’d love to go. Who wouldn’t?

So this is what I have in mind. I’ve found out about two schools, one in Nepal and one in Ladakh, both of them intent on instilling Buddhist values, both run by intelligent, idealistic and trustworthy people, and both much in need of help. Actually, the Ladakhi school, which I haven’t seen, appears to be in much sadder shape financially than the one I visited in Kathmandu.* Its classes are taught mainly in Ladakhi-Tibetan (there are classes in Hindi, Urdu and English), while the Kathmandu school, like very many private schools there, is taught in English medium. If you also feel the concern and see the need to act, I’d like to ask you to conspire with me, not only with the idea to help them out financially if possible, but also to visit the schools and try to find out more about their conditions and needs and then, of course, to spread the news to a few other people so that more can get done.

(*Both schools already have well established physical buildings and have been in existence for some decades by now.)

All you have to do is send a comment in the comment box below. I won’t publish your comment (I screen comments... they never go up automatically). But if you will send me an email contact, I will write back with the details of what I know about one or both schools and we will form an informal email group that will share information and ideas about how we can help these children in a more private way, without any fanfare and without a penny wasted on overhead or administration (I won’t be handling anyone’s money for them). I’d especially like to hear from you if you are planning to travel to Ladakh or Nepal in the near future. Helping is important, but it’s also important to do it in a smart way.

§ § §

An open door at Oxford?

If you are interested in supporting an organization that builds new schools in the Himalayan region (meaning primarily eastern Tibet and Nepal), I’m particularly impressed by what Karuna-Shechen has been doing, especially their support for Bamboo Schools in Nepal (read this story). Of course there are other school support organizations at work.

I recommend this page at Cultural Survival website.

Catriona Bass has written up some solid research on the state[s] of education inside Tibet during the late 20th century. If you are seriously interested in the topic, try her book Education in Tibet: Policy and Practice since 1950, TIN and Zed Books (London 1998).

For some insight into the state of Nepalese educational institutions, both public and private, look here.

People sometimes succeed by chance,

yet no one would think of them as wise.

When the worm is finished with its meal,

if letters appear it's still no scribe.

ma dpyad pa las don grub pa //

byung yang mdzangs par su zhig brtsi //

srin bu dag gis zos pa'i rjes //

yi ger byung yang yig mkhan min //

མ་དཔྱད་པ་ལས་དོན་གྲུབ་པ༎
བྱུང་ཡང་མཛངས་པར་སུ་ཞིག་བརྩི༎
སྲིན་བུ་དག་གིས་ཟོས་པའི་རྗེས༎
ཡི་གེར་བྱུང་ཡང་ཡིག་མཁན་མིན༎

- Sa-skya Legs-bshad, ch. 3, v. 27

Been Serving Leniently, Have You?

2011-05-28T17:33:00.001+01:00

Fixing the Peacock Pedestal at Swayambhu Nath
('Phags-pa Shing-kun, Spring 2011)

I spent some time in Nepal at the IBA this Spring reading through a Sakya commentary on the famous 12th-century work, the Mind Training in Seven Topics (Blo-sbyong Don-bdun-ma) by Chekhawa (Mchad-kha-ba). Of course, being that old, the root text is full of those outdated ‘old vocabulary’ items that Tibetans call da-nying (brda’-rnying), which may at times make the reading a little difficult, even if it was quite simple language for people living then. But one line in particular has often been translated so badly it is hard to even begin... “Do not serve the central object leniently.”

Here’s the line in Wylie:

gzhung bzang po ma bsten /

Now the same in real Tibetan letters:

གཞུང་བཟང་པོ་མ་བསྟེན།

The main sticking point here is the expression gzhung bzang-po, not found in many dictionaries.* You might want to understand the gzhung to mean a governing center, a capital city, a main textbook for a particular subject, or the like. But when you say that a person has a good gzhung you are referring to her or his long-term character in conjunction with behavior, I think something very like what we mean by integrity in English. In modern Tibetan gzhung bzang seems to be a near-equivalent to gzhung drang, which might mean an ‘honest core,’ which again suggests the English word integrity. Some more recent translators of the Seven Topics have opted for loyalty, which might also work. Others translate as consistency or sense of duty (I’ll have to look more into this and think about it some more; I’m not pretending to cover the whole range of possible translation choices). These other translations aren’t necessarily less right, let alone wrong. I’m not sure enough to pass judgment on them. But yes, choosing one over the other does make a difference in the meaning.

(*Try the Dag yig gsar bsgrigs [reprinted at least eleven times since 1989], part 5 of the entry for gzhung on pp. 680-681, where gzhung is defined as mi'i rang gshis dang kun spyod kyi ming ste : mi gzhung bzang / khrel gzhung can / mi gzhung drang zhes pa lta bu.)

What I am sure of is that not serving the central object leniently is very, very misleading. To then go on and make a commentary on the English as if it made any sense at all, is wrong on an even deeper level. It simply compounds the error. But then for later translators to simply copy it, or pretend to improve on it by shifting the wording toward a meaning they prefer, is mind-bendingly deceptive for both the translator and the translation consumer. Both we the translators and they the consumers deserve better.

To translate the commentary passage written by the famous Khampa scholar Ngagga (or Ngogga):

gzhung bzang po ma bsten / zhes pa ni / pha rol pos rang la gnod par byas pa 'khon du bzung nas 'khon 'dzin de las nam yang mi ldog pa / dper na 'jig rten pa'i mi gzhung bzang po can des dus tshod ji tsam song yang rang la ltos pa mi brjed pa dang 'dra bas 'khon 'dzin spangs la ma bsten pa / gnod pa'i lan du slar yang phan 'dogs pa'i bsam sbyor dang ldan par bya'o //

“When the opposing party has done something to injure you that resulted in your holding a grudge against them there is no way you will ever get out of the feuding that will result from it. To give an example, a worldly person who is regarded as one with integrity, no matter how much time has gone by, will never forget his obligations. Therefore give up feuding and don’t make use of it. Rather, in response to injury you must time and again react with good plans about how you can help the other person.”

I imagine that most persons who have sadly found themselves seriously under-exposed to the logic of Lojong won't understand the more subtle point of this commentary, but rather imagine they see a contradiction in it, ‘How can the person of integrity who repays good deeds be used as an example that applies to a person who holds a grudge?’

It’s saying that the person who has harmed you has done you a great favor that needs to be repaid if you are (in fact) a person of good character, and not just what this-world-lings regard as a person of good character. (If you didn’t follow the reasoning here, try reading the commentary again more slowly, or explore its context.)

Lojong is sustained, and even made to thrive, under negative circumstances (rkyen ngan). Its serious practitioners (not those who proudly proclaim themselves practitioners) are beholden to the people who contribute to their attempts to realize non-self, since the bad things done to them serve as expedients on the Path to Enlightenment (lam 'khyer).*

(*One response often heard from the incredulous this-world-ling who first hears about Lojong is, ‘Impossible! This is just inviting people to walk on you!’ While in a sense true, bear in mind that Lojong practitioners are not supposed to let other people know they are practicing it, so it isn't as if they are tempting fate and saying, ‘Go ahead. Come and get me. Give it your best shot!’ Also, they aren’t masochists who seek ego gratification from provoking their own suffering. Everyday life presents ample opportunities. I doubt the truth of this requires much reflection.)

Now when we look back at the root verse and read, perhaps in a new way, the line “Don't make use of a good character,” we are forced to rethink it.

It’s actually telling you not to hold grudges, isn’t it?

There is no contradiction. Still, your understanding heads in one direction, then the other, and back again... Perhaps the theory that translation is impossible is attempting to prove itself true. Perhaps its very falsehood proves its truth?

Sun setting above Nagarjun Hill
(Glang-ru Lung-bstan-pa)

Here is one of the coolest and most fun Tibetan Buddhism websites ever. No joke! One student told me about it, but it was too difficult for me to access in Nepal. It allows you to instantly compare seven different translations of the Seven Point Mind Training. Go here and try it for yourself. If you want to go directly to this particular line, try pressing here once or twice. Once there, wave your mouse over the seven boxed letters next to the following words "Do not serve the central object leniently." By doing this you will quickly see seven different translations for the line flash in front of your eyes one right after the other. Now try it with some of the other lines and see how consistent (or not) the translations are with each other. One thing you might discover to your amazement is that often people seem to have worked on the English translations that have already been done in the past rather than approaching the Tibetan freshly. This is a shame. But I suppose we are all guilty of it in some degree since our ‘readings’ of the Tibetan texts may be consciously or unconsciously affected by our past readings of translations. I know it has happened to me.

Khenpo Appey (Mkhan-po A-pad Rin-po-che), Blo syong don bdun ma'i bka' khrid, a pamphlet published in Nepal in 45 pages, distributed free of charge, with the date given in the Tibetan Royal era year of 2137, which would correspond to 2010 CE. On p. 25, you may read what he has to say about our line:

gzhung bzang po ma bsten / ces dper na mi gshis ka bzang po zhig yin na rang la phan btags pa de ga dus yin kyang mi brjed pa sems la nyar sdod kyi red / de bzhin du gnod pa byas pa de 'khon du bzung nas ga dus yang ma brjed par sems kyi nang du nyar sdod kyi red / de lta bu gzhung yun ring du ma bzung zhes pa'i don red //

Khenpo Ngagga (Mkhan-po Ngag-dga’ — the colophon names him as Mkhyen-rab-blo-ldan), Blo sbyong don bdun ma'i rtsa ba'i 'bru 'grel skal bzang rkang drug rol ba'i pad tshal, an unpublished pamphlet based on a computer printout (this might have appeared in a Manduwala 1985 publication that I haven’t seen yet). The author and the late Ven. Khenpo Appey were contemporaries, well known to each other, both being disciples of Ajam Rinpoche.

Chekhawa’s work is certainly to be counted in the handful of Tibetan texts that might be described as most translated, together with the Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama. Practically every last Tibetan Buddhologist has tried their hand at it, although not quite every attempt resulted in a major Snow Lion or Wisdom publication. I think the interest could be explained in several ways. One is that it is a very popular teaching text employed by Tibetan Buddhist teachers wherever they might be and regardless of their tradition. Another is just the high level of psychological insight it displays, something you appreciate more and more each time you go back to it. How can a text so simply (in its times) and abruptly stated contain such sophisticated understandings of the ways the human mind works? By being so old it defies evolution and makes us consider the possibility that here, at least, intelligent design has been at work.

Note: I used this font converter page to make the unicode Tibetan script out of Wylie input. You can use it, too, especially if Wylie creates obstacles for your reading comprehension.

One alternative text that I located in the Blo sbyong brgya rtsa has the different reading gzhung bzang mi bsten, which I'm tempted to translate — ‘Not all that literally!’ you may object — as ‘Good character (or integrity) isn’t going to cut it.’

Of late Tibetan Buddhists have begun to catch the fever of Translation Studies, which has long been playing in various academic realms. This goes along with huge plans, recently evolving onto a grandiose scale, to translate the entirety of the Tibetan-language Kanjur and Tanjur collections into English, on which we’ll talk some other time, OK?