Chicks Raised on Diamonds

I have heard that the use of the semicolon is in rapid decline, even in danger of disappearing altogether. This is a pity, as it was a useful way of signifying that something further is going to be said on the topic just introduced. There probably isn’t the least reason for our concern; there are a lot more significant problems requiring our attention. One of these is the possible use by our feathered friends of diamonds and such as foods or food supplements. I hear what you are saying. I cannot come up with a good answer for you right now; it is no doubt true that few are aware there is a problem. Even artificial intelligence doesn’t admit, at this point in its history, that there is one. But already at the turn of the 12th century, Padampa asked the following rhetorical (?) question, one that feels more like a Zen koan or a riddle.

gzan du pha lam sgug pa’i bya de gang yin su yis mthong bar ’gyur //

“This bird that gulps diamonds for feed, what is it? Who has seen it?”

So reads one of his cryptic sayings collected by his student Kunga and then better organized by Kunga’s own student Patsab, the most likely author of the commentary. My first inclination is to attempt to understand the import of the saying without relying on the commentary. As first item of business, I would correct the sgug-pa (‘awaiting’) of the text to sgum-pa (possibly also spelled rgum-pa) as the revision is necessary for it to make sense; in any case it suits the context very finely. Sgum-pa, not an often encountered word by any means, means birdfeed, whether that might be the kind the bird finds scattered out for it on the ground, or the same already gulped up and stored in its craw, ready to dispense to its chicks. Padampa uses this word in other bird-related contexts. So in brief my first inclination, based on what I know of Padampa, is that he is alluding to the invisible store of secret precepts kept by the spiritual teacher that can be passed on to the next generation. It is about spiritual transmission in a broad sense, and just how direct it can be.

But it would most surely be a pity to leave it at that without seeing what the commentator has to say, even if he would at least on the surface seem to conclude, after all that is meanwhile said and done, that it is really all about encouraging moderation in diet.

The commentary, at Zhijé Collection, vol. 1, p. 422, line 4, says:

zan du pha lam zhes pa ni / dbus kyi ri bo mchog rab kyi bang rim gong ma'i steng na ye shes kyi bya khyung yod skad / de'i 'og ma na las kyi bya khyung yod skad / de klu za ba yin skad / de'i 'og ma na bya ke ke ru bya ba yod / de'i phrug gu la mas gzan du / gzhan gang yang mi ster bar dang po rdzas pha lam gcig btsal nas byin pas / phyis lto gzhan gang yang mi dgos par / de gcig pu des chog pa yin par 'dug /

gser gyi ri bdun la yang bya mang po yod pas / la la mu tig dang* / mu men la lto byed skad / la la shel la lto byed / de lta bu las sogs pa'i lto rnams kyis la las lo kha yar gyi lto thub / la las gnyis gnyis gsum gsum thub / la las zla ba kha yar thub pa yod 'dug / de dang 'dra bar lto 'dun dung dung mi bya gsungs / 

“ ‘Diamonds for feed’ — On top of the upper terraces of the highest mountain of Magadha is said to live the Full Knowledge Garuḍa. In the lower terraces live[s] the Karma Garuḍa[s], said to eat nāgas.* Even lower down we find the bird called the kekeru (ke-ke-ru).** Its chicks receive from their mother a single diamond without getting any other food at all, and later on they need no other feed at all. That single feeding is enough for them.

“There are also many birds in the seven golden mountains. Some of them are said to eat pearls (mu-tig) and lapis lazuli (mu-men).*** Some eat crystal. With these and other types of feed, some can go for a year, and others for two or three years. Some are able to go for a whole month. Like them you shouldn’t be too concerned about food.”

(*For the eternal enmity between garuḍa and nāga, a common motif in Indian literature, see in particular the drama by Harṣadeva entitled Nāgānanda. **Mvy. no. 5949: ke-ke-ru, Skt. karketana, or karkatna, name of a precious stone of white colour. For more on this, see below. ***Mu-men might be used to translate Skt. vairāṭa. Some want to understand mu-men to be a type of sapphire, or an inferior grade of diamond.)

Sinbad uses his turban to tie himself to the Rok bird's leg.
Pinwell woodcut

The story told on the 549th night of the Thousand and One Nights is one about Sinbad the Sailor. Sinbad sets out on his second sea adventure and gets left behind on an island full of Rok eggs. He ties himself, using his turban, to the leg of a Rok and gets carried into a valley of huge snakes that the Roks feed on. He tells how this normally inaccessible valley was covered with diamonds that could be harvested by traveling merchants who had devised a clever method. The merchants would throw pieces of meat into the valley, then the Rok birds would carry the meat — with some diamonds sticking to it — to their nests to feed their chicks. Then the merchants would snatch the diamonds from the nest at their first opportunity. Knowing this, Sinbad tied himself to one of the pieces of meat so that the Rok lifted him up together with a whole bag full of diamonds he had collected. In short, he returns to Baghdad a very wealthy man.

Of course I recommend reading Burton’s rendering instead of the cramped retelling on display here. If that were the only comparable story to be told, that would be the end of our comparison. What Padampa’s commentator and the Sinbad story have in common is a natural enmity between snake and giant bird (the nāga and garuḍa). They could share, it may seem, the idea that the snakes are guardians of the precious stones. In Sinbad’s story, and this might be an important point, the baby birds never seem to devour the stones (but as we will see in other versions, the adult birds might). Oh, and where one is about a valley, the other is about a mountain.

Berthold Laufer long ago pointed out still other Eurasian stories ranging from China to Greece (yet oddly not much in evidence in India), and we could also point to some folk concepts surrounding diamond mining in South Africa.

Laufer found an early source in China, in a work called Memoirs of the Four Worthies or Lords of the Liang Dynasty. It tells of a forested island in the Western Sea (the Mediterranean) of Fulin (i.e., Byzantium) where the people are expert gem workers. In its northwestern direction is a ravine more than a thousand feet deep. The people throw flesh into the valley. The birds swoop down and catch the meat in their beaks, and the precious stones drop out of the meat in the process.

But this Chinese story was preceded by a 4th-century Greek story told by Epiphanius, a Cypriot bishop, in a work more generally about the twelve jewels inset into the breastplate of Jerusalem’s high priest. The story told in this Greek text agrees with the somewhat later Chinese story with its deep valley into which flesh is thrown, while the birds take up the flesh as food inadvertently bringing precious stones up with them that can then be collected.

A text Laufer believed to be the oldest Arabic minerological text, one by so-called “pseudo-Aristotle” composed in mid-9th century, makes it explicitly about Diamonds and has snakes guarding the stones. I will send you to read Laufer’s account for yourself, just to say that the 9th-century Arabic story was retold by the Persian poet Nizami (1141-1203). Then a Chinese source of the Sung period adds the interesting detail that the diamonds come from the land of the Uighurs, where the eagles gobble up the meat precious stones and all, and the diamonds come out no worse for wear in their droppings to then be collected here and there in the Gobi desert north of the Yellow River. 

The idea the diamonds might be foraged from the bird droppings is repeated in the diary of a Chinese envoy sent to visit Hulagu n Persia in 1259, and yet again in the famous and fabulous Il Milioni of Marco Polo. Laufer’s research reached further and further into the literature of Eurasia, and we will not follow him down every highway and alleyway he took, even if I have to say: His not entirely tangential footnotes on the shamir and the vajra are compelling all on their own.

So, finally, we can say that in a time that roughly corresponds to the time of our commentator, we do find surfacing a story about the birds actually eating the diamonds; well yes, maybe not on purpose, but incidentally together with the meat, the food they really wanted. 

And what of that bird named the kekeru, the very bird, as our commentator informs us, that feeds diamonds to its chicks? For this I send you outside Tibeto-logic to a newly posted blog of Dorji Wangchuk of Hamburg. See what he has to say about it and then come back here. It was Dorji’s blog that cornered me into putting up this blog in the first place. So go to The Ketaka Conundrum and try and come to terms with how the name of a precious stone could turn into the name of a bird, but come back here before you get too tangled up in it.

It might not be relevant, but poultry keepers know they often peck at shiny things. The shiny things include bits of quartz and glass and so forth. They swallow this grit so their gizzards can do their task of masticating food for the toothless creatures they are before it hits the stomach. Did people see this and imagine they were eating precious stones like diamonds? I wonder.

Today — well, since around the 1920’s or ’30’s — people often associate diamonds with weddings, and those diamonds are very finely carved and polished.* Earlier people did regard the diamond very highly, but they may not have had much experience with any of the finely faceted kinds, just the natural crystals. And they didn’t use them as much for jewelry as for tools.** The diamond awl (drill, saw, sandpaper...), in use for at least two millennia in the Roman and Indian realms, served particularly for drilling holes and for polishing other gems besides diamonds. It could cut through anything without damage to itself, this being its chief virtue.

(*On the construction of excess value for diamonds, see Proctor’s essay. **Laufer’s treatise, of course, but also Gorelick’s essay.)

And what, if anything, does any of this have to do with Padampa’s statement we started with? You tell me. But let me add a word or two. Perhaps the main source of diamonds in early Eurasia was Golconda in Andhra, in the upstream areas of the Krishna River river system. It seems that Padampa came from Andhra, from a port area on the coast (the Carasimha place of his birth has not yet been positively identified to my satisfaction). He shows elsewhere that he was quite aware of the use of the diamond as cutting tool. At the same time he seems to believe in the remarkable hardness of the turtle shell. I have to say that his knowledge of sea turtles argues for his childhood being spent near the sea. 

Look at another line in that same work by Padampa we quoted from at the beginning:

rus sbal khog pa pha lam rdzas kyi rdo rjes bcag pa ngo mtshar che //

“That the stomach shell of the turtle should be able to cut the Vajra of diamond substance is a great marvel.”

I realize there is something in the grammar trying to force us into a misreading. Clearly what the wonder is is this: that something like the turtle’s stomach shell (the plastron, known as a cutting tool since early times) could cut through the Vajra made with diamond material, and not the other way around.*

(*In effect, I allow a mid-12th century commentary to correct all the now-available versions of the root text dating to mid-13th century and later. The commentator had access to an earlier version of the text than any we now have.)

The commentator, sharing this understanding, says,

rus sbal zhes pa ni / g.yu dang mu tig dang shel las sogs pa'i dngos po bzong zhing sra ba la bzo byed pa ni / pha lam gyis byed pa yin la / pha lam la bzo byed pa ni / rus sbal gyi khog pas byed pa yin pas/ ngo mtshar che la / de bzhin gang zag 'ga' zhig rang mtho zhing bzang por rlom yang / bla ma dam pa'i gdams ngag gtad pa med pa 'dra bas kyang rang rgyud grol cing / yon tan skye ba ngo mtshar ba'i dpe'o / / 

“ ‘Turtle’ — When you are working with materials such as turquoise, pearl or crystal, the fine details are done using diamond. But if you’re working with diamond, you do it with the stomach [shell] of the turtle. This is quite amazing. Likewise, there are a few persons with high estimations of their own status and goodness who don’t seem to take the authentic guru’s precepts seriously, but nevertheless free their own minds and turn out to be talented. This is quite amazing.”

I have to confess, it is true that I am every bit as amazed as our commentator suggests I ought to be. So in conclusion, even if it breaks every rule, I would like to end with this final semi-colon — ;

Biolithobibliogastrical notes with a few suggested readings and excerpts

• Are you curious to know what scientists are saying about mineral formations inside the bodies of mammals, birds and humans? Just do a web search for “biomineralization” or “gastroliths” and leave me alone. Thanks to Michael Walter for recommending some of these written sources about diamonds and snakes. If you are out searching the internet, don’t miss this nicely written commentary by "sunagainstgold" on Reddit. I should give biblio details for the Padampa text and its commentary, but right now I am busy working to complete translations of both. The first might get the English title, “Stream of Symbolic Language,” and the second, “Symbolic Language Disentangled.”

J. Benoit, “The African Dragon Stones: Geomyths about Snakes and the Origin of Diamonds in South Africa,” Geoheritage, vol. 17 (2025), no. 62, in 7 pages. Available with free and open access here. See also the Jeffreys and Walhouse essays listed below. 

I find it remarkable how in worldwide folklore geo processes we today would normally associate (as did classical Greeks) with underground caves can also take place inside living creatures. But then it may be worthwhile pondering in what ways our earth might be conceived of as a living being such as we are. See also our earlier blog about Horse Eggs.

Buddhagupta (Sangs-rgyas-sbas-pa), Sbas-pa'i Rgum-chung. See Namkhai Norbu, Sbas pa'i rgum chung: The Small Collection of Hidden Precepts, a Study of an Ancient Manuscript on Dzogchen fron Tun huang, Shang Shung Edizioni (Arcidosso 1984). For the English see E. dell’Angelo, tr., The Little Hidden Harvest, Shang Shung Edizioni (Arcidosso 1996), or the translation by Karen Liljenberg, a PDF for free download at http://www.zangthal.co.uk, with the title “Small Hidden Grain.” 

As yet no translator has, as far as I am aware, caught the meaning of the early Tibetan syllable rgum (also spelled sgum). Give them some time.

Richard F. Burton, The Arabian Nights Entertainment. I do recommend you read the second voyage of Sinbad. The most convenient way is simply to go to the “Sacred-Texts” website at this particular page

Christopher John Duffin, “Alectorius: The Cock’s Stone,” Folklore, vol. 118 no. 3 (December 2007), pp. 325-341. See also Forbes, below.

——, “The Western Lapidary Tradition in Early Geological Literature: Medicinal and Magical Minerals,” Geology Today, vol. 21, no. 2 (March 2005), pp. 58-63. Although largely about medicinal use of minerals, interesting for underlining some early geological ideas that indeed did draw conclusions based on observation.

Thomas R. Forbes, “The Capon Stone,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 49, no. 1 (January 1973), pp. 46-51. Crystalline stones called alectoriae were said already by Pliny to be findable in the stomachs of roosters. These would be the poultry equivalent of the “Horse Eggs” we blogged about before. Of course chickens, being toothless, ingest grains of sand that assist the gizzard, a kind of pre-stomach, in processing rougher foods. I am not sure how to locate the key to open this lock, but there may be something in this that once fed into our legend of the diamond eating bird. See also the just listed 2007 essay by Duffin.

Leonard Gorelick & A. John Gwinnett, “Diamonds from India to Rome and Beyond,” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 92, no. 4 (October 1988), pp. 547-552. This develops on the diamonds-as-tools theme familiar to us already from Laufer, q.v., although Laufer calls them “diamond-points.”

Harṣadeva (Dga'-ba'i-lha, 600-647 CE), King of Kashmir, Nāgānanda (Klu kun-tu dga'-ba zhes bya-ba'i zlos-gar), Tôhoku no. 4154; Dergé Tanjur, vol. U, folios 225r.2-252r.7. Translation done at Sa-skya by Shong-ston Rdo-rje-rgyal-mtshan and Lakṣmīkara, at the behest of Dpon-chen Shākya-bzang-po (d. 1270).

M.D.W. Jeffreys, “Snake Stones,” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 41, no. 165 (October 1942), pp. 250-253. This, along with the Walhouse essay that is more on ideas in the Indian subcontinent, suggests widespread associations between wealth-protecting serpents and their often magical stones. These stones might be found ornamenting their heads, or found inside them — or the snakes might protect and own the stones in still other ways.

Samuli Juntunen, “Sindbad the Sailor,” an essay posted at researchgate.net.

Berthold Laufer, The Diamond: A Study in Chinese and Hellenistic Folk-Lore, Field Museum Museum of Natural History Publication 184 (Chicago 1915). Now over a century old, this is still by far the most recommended writing if you would like to pursue the subject further. For a free PDF, go to archive.org. See p. 11 for his specific discussion of Sinbad the Sailor.

D. Martin, “Crystals and Images from Bodies, Hearts and Tongues from Fire: Points of Relic Controversy from Tibetan History,” contained in: Tibetan Studies, Naritasan Shinshoji (Narita 1992), vol. 1, pp. 183-191. On competing Tibetan ideas about the signs of saintly death.

Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, Dover Publications (New York 1993), vol. 2, pp. 360-361:

“It is in this kingdom [of Mutfili] that diamonds are got ; and I will tell you how. There are certain lofty mountains in those parts ; and when the winter rains fall, which are very heavy, the waters come roaring down the mountains in great torrents. When the rains are over, and the waters from the mountains have ceased to flow, they search the beds of the torrents and find plenty of diamonds. In summer also there are plenty to be found in the mountains, but the heat of the sun is so great that it is scarcely possible to go thither, nor is there then a drop of water to be found. Moreover in those mountains great serpents are rife to a marvellous degree, besides other vermin, and this owing to the great heat. The serpents are also the most venomous in existence, insomuch that any one going to that region runs fearful peril ; for many have been destroyed by these evil reptiles.

“Now among these mountains there are certain great and deep valleys, to the bottom of which there is no access. Wherefore the men who go in search of the diamonds take with them pieces of flesh, as lean as they can get, and these they cast into the bottom of a valley. Now there are numbers of white eagles that haunt those mountains and feed upon the serpents. When the eagles see the meat thrown down they pounce upon it and carry it up to some rocky hill-top where they begin to rend it. But there are men on the watch, and as soon as they see that the eagles have settled they raise a loud shouting to drive them away. And when the eagles are thus frightened away the men recover the pieces of meat, and find them full of diamonds which have stuck to the meat down in the bottom. For the abundance of diamonds down there in the depths of the valleys is astonishing, but nobody can get down ; and if one could, it would be only to be incontinently devoured by the serpents which are so rife there.

“There is also another way of getting the diamonds. The people go to the nests of those white eagles, of which there are many, and in their droppings they find plenty of diamonds which the birds have swallowed in devouring the meat that was cast into the valleys. And, when the eagles themselves are taken, diamonds are found in their stomachs.

“So now I have told you three different ways in which these stones are found. No other country but this kingdom of Mutfili produces them, but there they are found both abundantly and of large size. Those that are brought to our part of the world are only the refuse, as it were, of the finer and larger stones. For the flower of the diamonds and other large gems, as well as the largest pearls, are all carried to the Great Kaan and other Kings and Princes of those regions; in truth they possess all the great treasures of the world.”

On the kingdom of Mutfili/Mutifili, see Paul Pelliot’s Notes on Marco Polo, pp. 787-788; it is normally identified as the Andhran seaport used for shipping the diamonds found in the Golconda mines. It is likely Marco Polo landed at this seaport in 1292 on his return journey to Italy.

Robert N. Proctor, “Anti-Agate: The Great Diamond Hoax and the Semiprecious Stone Scam,” Configurations, vol. 9 (2001), pp. 381-412, at p. 387:

“For most of recorded history, all known diamonds (in our sense) came from India—mostly from one single valley, in fact, in the Kingdom of Golconda in the gorge cut by the Krisna River in what is now the state of Hyderabad.”

On page 388, Proctor helpfully points out that diamonds tend to stick to grease, which could explain why diamonds would adhere to cuts of meat, helping us with one significant element of the Diamond Valley story.

Jetze Touber, “Stones of Passion: Stones in the Internal Organs as Liminal Phenomena between Medical and Religious Knowledge in Renaissance Italy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 74, no. 1 (January 2013), pp. 23-44. There was a time when Italy of the Late Middle Ages counted among the recognized signs of a saintly death the formation of stones in bodily remains recovered post mortem. This may bear contrasting with a Tibetan phenomena called ring-bsrel, although these last tend to appear on external surfaces, particularly on bone, generally seen after cremation and not after autopsy. Tibetanists will take notice how visual images related to the devotional practices of the deceased Italian saint might be imprinted on various parts of the body’s interior. This phenomenon Tibetan relic literature simply calls [honorific] Body (Sku). It is a pity to admit it, but I know of no Tibetan passage that intelligibly details any theories of mineral production. Italians knew of a few, including ideas about astral interference. In any case, some early Italians did imagine a macrocosm-microcosm parallel process taking place both in the caves of the earth and in the interior of the body. This I learned to my amazement.

M.J. Walhouse, “Archaeology Notes II.—Folklore,—Snake-stones,” Indian Antiquary, vol. 4 (1875), pp 45-46. For a very recent newspaper article debunking the “pearls” in the heads of cobras, look here.

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A note on illustrations

The first and last are just two photos of birds I took in recent decades in faraway places, the first in Jerusalem and the last in Koh Samui.