Doughballs

Scapegoat - Photo by Natesh Ramasamy

TODAY’S BLOG is about how I found, to my amazement, a very clear and specific ritual practice shared by ancient Mesopotamia and Tibet until modern times. Looking back on it, I shouldn’t have been so surprised since it fits into a tight semantic circle of Tibeto-Mesopotamian word-connections earlier defined as “Bricks, Brilliance and Baking.” But I’m convinced there is one thing that makes this new revelation special: It not only connects a discrete ritual practice in both localities done with closely identical motives, it also goes along with a striking word borrowing. This co-incidence goes far toward confirming a transmission from Iraq to Tibet that may otherwise seem too far fetched to consider.

One Losar (“New Year”) I was celebrating at the home of a Tibetan friend, a layman who was not all that religious, perhaps even borderline agnostic. Still, he served us the Guthuk Soup and “most importantly” (his words) he took our sins outside. ‘How did he do that?’ you may well be thinking. He gave us each a small ball of dough which we rubbed on our necks to pick up some of the filth that does tend to accumulate there and then we handed them back to him. He took them with a small tray holding a rudely fashioned dough figure outside, and even if I didn’t see it done this time, he should have taken the whole lot to a crossroad and set it on fire. I hoped he wouldn’t get caught doing it. It wasn’t exactly a Tibetan cultural crossroad we were living in, after all. People would have looked askance, to say the least, at any bonfires blazing up at a busy traffic interchange.

The scapegoat complex came up in a recent blog, in the comments section, and I may not even need to point out that placing your sins (ethical impurities, pollutions, ills) onto something else that will take it away from you is very much along the lines of what we mean by a scapegoat ritual. The original (?) scapegoat ritual may have involved an actual goat for all we know, but we do use the term for a wider range of ritual actions that work analogously, with or without the goat. Indeed, in the contemporary language of corporate blame assessment, the word scapegoat is used quite a lot... Really, far too much.

Of course, the very term scapegoat puts us to thinking about the Middle East where such complexes are still common enough, and where we popularly imagine it all originated. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised to come across doughballs there. Here is how it happened.

I was reading a chapter from the Cambridge Histories Online, in a volume entitled The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present, the first chapter entitled “The Ancient Near East” composed by Daniel Schwemer. Schwemer distinguishes two types of rituals, the first one, ‘witch purifications’ that involves incinerating an effigy of the witch made of clay and wax. This kind of ritual is called maqlû. But the one that concerns us more at this moment is the other, different but related, type of ritual called šurpu. Let me quote p. 35, in the general context of undoing curses by ritual means: 

“Whereas the burning of the witches’ figurines dominates the proceedings of maqlû, the ritual šurpu aims at removing the patient’s impurity that has been caused by his or her own transgressions. It is not figurines representing the patient’s enemies, but the consequences of his or her own actions that have to be eliminated and are destroyed by fire. Thus, the performance of šurpu includes the burning of dough that is applied to and wiped off of the patient’s body. The patient throws various items representing his or her crimes into the fire, among them garlic peels.” [The added emphasis is my own.]

As if the identity of ritual actions, objects and objectives weren’t enough, Tibetan has borrowed this very word šurpu from Akkadian, and it fits into another (similar yet not identical) ritual context done with a different motive — food offerings to hungry ghosts and the spirits of the departed — in which barley flour (perhaps mixed with butter and/or other food substances to make a dough) is singed rather than incinerated.

The Tibetan word (or words) that means to singe or scorch in that ritual by the same name is bshur-ba, with imperative form shur-cig! And it obviously belongs to the same verb group as another verb with similar meaning gsur-ba. I won't bother you with the lexicons and what they say, but save the philological exercises for another time. The gsur ritual itself involves burning grain, but the motive is feeding hungry spirits. It was long ago described by Panglung Rinpoche in a short essay on the subject.

So to sum up, here is why I think here we have an excellent case for Mesopotamia-Tibet transmission. First, an identical object, the doughball, is made use of in closely identical ritual actions, the rubbing and the burning. Secondly, both rites are done out of the same motives, to purify the person of sin and similar blights. Third, we see that a different Tibetan grain burning rite, one with a different aim, bears the name of the very Mesopotamian rite that involves the rubbing and burning of the doughball. And the final blow to skepticism, I think, is the fact that this word that means ‘burning’ in Akkadian and ‘scorching, singeing’ in Tibetan fits seamlessly inside of an already-identified semantic circle of apparent borrowings that include words for blazing (bar|’bar) and brilliance (zil|zil).

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Further ruminations, a little bibliography, and a few significant links

Sometimes, in order to switch gears and get a fresh start, we need to clean up some of the messes from the past. Rituals — as well as confession, restitution and reconciliation not accompanied by rituals — can certainly help. Notice how Leviticus 5 is immediately followed by a chapter on actual (not just ritual) restitution.* Apologies done, regrets expressed, while giving people back what is rightfully theirs usually must precede other efforts to smoothe things over between us.

(*The actual annual scapegoat ritual that used a real goat, intended for collective iniquity, is not all that relevant for us right now. For it, see Leviticus 16.)

To see how the very important Bon monastery known as Menri (སྨན་རི་) celebrates New Year, look here. Here they use strings instead of doughballs, but I do remember participating in a community ritual at Dolanji many years ago (not at New Year, n.b.) in which both strings and doughballs were used (everyone holds the same string, which is then cut so that each person is left holding a piece of it).

You can find other elaborate accounts of New Year rituals, including more than one way of using the doughballs, here.

With Rosh Ha-Shana upon us, to some of us it will be of special interest that the traditions of making challah bread for ritual purposes include a step in which a small doughball is taken from the large one and purposely burned. It’s this small doughball that the word challah properly refers to. This post-temple practice is consciously connected with a temple practice of daily incinerating doughballs on the fire altar.

As part of the sin purifying atonement practices leading up to Rosh Ha-Shana, many have the practice of throwing small crumbs of bread into a stream of flowing water while reciting confessional prayers. For more, try Schmoogling for "Tashlich" (send off, dispatch) or have a quick look at this news story. And if you have a little more time a particularly well done essay is this one. It’s a popular practice, and as such it doesn’t receive blanket approval from all religious authorities. It’s interesting how it uses the element of water, not fire, and crumbs instead of dough or grain, but anyway, I think you can sense a connection.

Tibetan names for dough are zan and spag. Uses include as a kind of cotton ball for spreading oil on babies, or animals, especially horses to make their fur coats shine. Also, for divination (or drawing of names from a hat). “Aleuromancy” is a word I wanted to slip into the discussion somewhere, so this is as good a chance as any. It’s supposed to be a type of divination done by slipping inscribed slips of paper into doughballs, kind of like the fortune cookies distributed after meals at Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The Guthuk dumplings of Tibetan New Year have objects, not inscriptions, placed in them.

John V. Bellezza, “Zenpar: Tibetan Wooden Moulds for the Creation of Dough Figures in Esoteric Rituals,” Collector's World. Color illustrations of zan-par. I believe this was also published in Arts of Asia, vol. 47, no. 5 (September 2017), p. 132. There is a bibliography on the subject here: http://www.francobellino.com/?p=2338.

Isabel Cranz, Atonement and Purification: Priestly and Assyro-Babylonian Perspectives on Sin and Its Consequences, Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen 2017). I’d like to say I’ve read this book, since it is precisely on topic, but anyway I hope I can read it soon and get back with you.

Zara Fleming, “An Introduction to Zan par (Tibetan wooden moulds),” Tibet Journal, vol. 27, nos. 1-2 (Spring 2002), pp. 197-216.

Zara Fleming, “The Ritual Significance of Zan-par,” contained in: Erberto F. Lo Bue, ed., Art in Tibet: Issues in Traditional Tibetan Art from the Seventh to the Twentieth Century, Brill (Leiden 2011), pp. 161-170. I’m not sure how these stamped dough figures figure into our discussion, but I imagine they ought to, somehow, if not now, some other time.

Jampa L. Panglung, “On the Origin of the Tsha-gsur Ceremony,” contained in: Barbara N. Aziz and Matthew Kapstein, eds., Soundings in Tibetan Civilization, Manohar (Delhi 1985), pp. 268-271. There is a Tibetan controversy within the Gelugpa school about whether “Hot Sur” (or as Panglung suggests, perhaps “Burnt Food”) ritual offering is Buddhist in its origins or not, with the Fifth Dalai Lama saying it’s not justifiable in Buddhist scripture, while the later Bstan-dar Lha-rams-pa argues it is. The brief essay ends with notice of a Dunhuang text nicely demonstrating that the word and its associated context goes back at least to the Tibetan imperial era.

Erica Reiner, Šurpu: A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations, Weidner (Graz 1958). This includes English translations.

Francis James Michael Simons, Burn Your Way to Success; Studies in the Mesopotamian Ritual and Incantation Series Śurpu, doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham (2017). I list this because of its useful survey of the literature. It doesn’t seem to have anything else specifically relevant for us at the moment. Tibetanists will find instruction in Mesopotamian use of juniper as an incense or fumigant for purifying large areas, just as Tibetans do in bsangs burning rites. The Mesopotamians even had a way of blessing the juniper for use in ritual. This study emphasizes juniper and cedar use for controlling and repelling insects, although this has never, as far as I know, featured in discussions about the Tibetan practice.

Wikipedia has a worthy entry on the Mesopotamian rite that you can see here.

Alexandra Witze, “Barley Fueled Farmers’ Spread onto Tibetan Plateau: Cold-Tolerant Crop enabled High-Altitude Agriculture some 3,600 Years ago,” Nature News, an internet journal. Try this link. Well, I for one regard the knowledge of just when barley cultivation started in Tibet as key to the issue of when grain baking, toasting, barley beer making and the like could have also had their start. I doubt this article will have the final word on the subject, but it does give us food to think about.

The Tibetan conversant can benefit from this video that depicts and interviews people about several of the dough-related parts of Tibetan New Year rituals. Go ahead and click on it:

 

བོད་ཆོལ་ཁ་གསུམ་གྱི་དགུ་གཏོར་ངོ་སྤྲོད།

This video of Gutor (Torma Rite of the Twenty-Ninth Day, just before New Year) shows outstandingly astounding cham dances, but you have to wait to the very last minute to see the torma burning.

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Particularly for people who are not confirmed Bible-lovers I recommend, as a friend already recommended to me, to go read Leviticus chapter 5 carefully. There you will see that its sin-dispelling practice had both a bloody meat aspect and a bread-dough/grain aspect. This dyad of red and white elements, the blood and the grain, the wine and the bread, can be traced back to the original sacrifices of Cain and Abel in Bereshit, with Cain representing the preoccupation with field agriculture, and Abel the animal husbandry. There is a lot to puzzle over regardless of your beliefs, but I suggest putting on alien binoculars for a change before switching back to normal setting.

And finally, especially for the Tibeto-theoreticians, I’d like them to observe something. We’ve probably become too comfortable in our view that the ancient blood sacrifices were (entirely or largely) ‘replaced’ by grain and dough sacrifices as time went on, particularly the dough figures of animals and so on that we often see in Tibetan rituals. Even if there may be grains of truth in this common idea, we should permit ourselves to be bewildered by the simultaneous presence of dough and blood sacrifice that we see in Leviticus 5. I mean, the doughballs and dough figures could have been there all along, am I right? One didn’t have to replace or substitute for the other.

PS: These days I have so much tedious work to do I don’t have time to read books much, but before I go to sleep at night I read some pages of two very different books about Genesis: Gary A. Anderson’s The Genesis of Perfection and Catherine L. McDowell’s The Image of God in the Garden of Eden. I’ve already found dozens of subjects for a Tibeto-logician to blog about, but if I don’t promise to write them, I won’t commit any sin if I don’t, will I? Each of the two books is mind-altering in its own way. I’ve always been intrigued by the creation account, so much that I have trouble reaching other parts of the Hebrew scriptures. It doesn’t matter if you think it presents a true history of things, to me it’s more about how it provokes a lot of questions and presents a number of puzzles. Even if you were to read it as the opening of a best-selling novel.

Hare Year Greetings

Miniature from a manuscript of the Jataka stories that were written by the Third Karmapa

Well, at long last Losar, Tibetan New Year, is nearly upon us. (Don’t panic. I said nearly. You’ve still got time to deep fry those kabtse.)

It might sound too much like a shampoo commercial if I  were going to wish you a Happy Hare Year. Anyway, in the interest of precision, Tibetans don’t wish people a “happy” year. They like to share both the happiness and the sorrow of their friends and family. What they do wish is something they call tashi (bkra-shis), and we might call auspiciousness. Auspiciousness has to do with auspices, meaning a good outlook from a divination. In Italy they call it Auguri and, so, are wont to say “Buon auguri!”  This makes me think of things auguring well for the future as I believe they must. But Tibetan tashi translates Sanskrit mangala, and I believe it does mean auspiciousness in the sense of sign of good things to come.


Buddhaghosa, the famous 5th-century Pāli commentator (or, as I’ve been told, the committee of commentators that passes under his name), analyzes auspiciousness into three kinds, auspicious sights, auspicious sounds and auspicious scents and textures.  Among the sights that are auspicious to see first thing in the morning he mentions, a bird of prey, a bilva sprout, a pregnant woman, a youth, a full pitcher, a fresh fish, a thoroughbred horse or a carriage pulled by the same, a bull, a cow, and so on.  I wonder if he would consider a rabbit auspicious to see in the morning. Well, of course I mean one that was not running away from what little remains of your lettuce patch.

We’ve discussed already the difference between the hare and the rabbit. Some regard this as quite the crucial distinction. I managed to get myself in over my neck by offering the merest suggestion there may be some truth to rabbit parthenogenesis, as you probably remember (I for one will never forget it). Maybe that was why Ownerless Donkey excited so many comments, not just that rabbits are the most popular of animals.


To go back to the subject of auspiciousness, I once translated a brief explanation of the symbolism of the Eight Auspicious Symbols by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in which He draws out their more profoundly Buddhist meanings. In my translation I haven’t tried to tone down the tone of it, as you will see. Read slowly.  Slowly, I said.

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The Eight Auspicious Symbols

The reason and need for putting the eight auspicious symbols in various painted and sculpted forms in temples, in town and countryside, in buildings and homes:

1.         The Parasol made of Precious Substances: a sign of starting an extensive festival of cool shade of comfort and betterment, shielded from the oppressive heat of temporary and longlasting sufferings including, in the present lifetime, unfortunate accidents and obstructions; in future lives, the sufferings of gods and men and the three lower realms -- animal, preta and hell realms.

2.         The Golden Fish: a sign that just as small fish swim through the ocean fearlessly wherever they please, we as well as others are able to move without fear of sinking in the ocean of sufferings and go, on our own power, from comfort to comfort with nothing getting in the way.

3.         The Vase of Great Treasures: a sign of the satisfaction of never seeing the end of all the things for which one wishes, the blessings of cessasion of suffering along with those of life in the three realms (desire, form and non-form), including long life, glory and wealth.

4.         The Lotus: a sign that without any impurity from faults of the ten non-virtues, the petals of pure virtues open free and relaxed while we imbibe at our ease the honey-like sap of resting assured of longlasting comfort.

5.         The Rightwise Spiraling Conch: a sign of goading us into action for the comfort and betterment of ourselves and others, arousing beings from the sleep of unaware ignoring by broadcasting the lovely sounds of Dharma, profound or detailed as it may be to suit the constitutions and inclinations of those capable of spiritual involvement.

6.         The Endless Knot: a sign that religious and secular are joined in an interactive chain, one helping the other along; similarly with the integration of method and insight on the Path to Enlightenment, of Voidness and interdependent origination paired without opposing each other, as well as of knowledge and love in the experience of the Goal of Buddhahood.

7.         The Victory Banner: a sign of the victory of all our own and others' actions of body, speech and mind over the oppressive weight of unfortunate accidents and obstructions, and of the complete victory of the Buddha's precious teachings over the dark delusionary forces.

8.         The Golden Wheel: a sign that, by relying on the precious wheel of the holy Dharma preached and realized by the Buddha which turns unceasingly through all realms of the universe, all beings work for the power and beauty of goodness with no strings attached.

Wherever the eight auspicious symbols are found, it is a sign of the multiplying of good signs and good fortune in that place.

7His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Eight Auspicious Symbols, Mongolian painting; HAR 50808

If you have gone to homes, monasteries or events of the Tibetan communities around the world and haven’t noticed these symbols at every turn, it’s a sign you haven’t been paying very much attention.

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Himalayan Art has a delightful page devoted to a Mongolian hare painting that looks just like this:

See this page; then go here and look in upper left hand corner.

On the Himalayan Art page I just linked there is a very cool graphic showing how you are supposed to see the hare in the moon. Many Americans (I know, I’ve experimented with them) try and fail to see it. They are used to seeing the Man, not the Hare. Funny thing is I’ve always seen a very different hare shadow on the moon (well, at least since I was in highschool), one with two distinct and very tall ears sticking up. I think if we can’t even see the same rabbit (or hare) in the moon (not to mention those poor dears incapable of seeing any rabbit at all), it could be a good analogy to illustrate why it is that any two of us are not seeing the same world despite our appearing to share it.

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Sources of auspiciousness:

Barbara O’Brien, The Jataka Tale of the Selfless Hare.  Look here. If you want to read the complete unedited story, you can't do better than Peter Khoroche’s translation made directly from the original Sanskrit. It’s chapter six in his Once the Buddha Was a Monkey: Ārya Śūra's Jātakamāla, University of Chicago Press (Chicago 1989).

Charles Hallisey, Auspicious Things, contained in: Donald S. Lopez, ed., Buddhism in Practice, Princeton University Press (Princeton 1995), pp. 413‑426. The sutta translated here appears to be Buddhaghosa's source for the list of auspicious sights (see p. 416). There are lots of brief Maṅgalastotra and Maṅgalagāthā texts in the Tibetan Kanjur, but I don't know that anyone studied them, do you?


If you would like a longer, more detailed explanation of the Eight Auspicious Symbols, go to Dagyab Rinpoche's book Buddhist Symbols in Tibetan Culture: An Investigation of the Nine Best-Known Groups of Symbols, Wisdom (Boston 1995).

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The frontispiece has a Tibetan label reading Ri-bong Dben-pa-la Dga'-ba, or, Rabbit who Loves Solitude. It isn’t the same story as the 6th chapter of the Jātakamāla of Āryaśūra.  It’s chapter 43 in the continuation written by the Third Karmapa Rangjung Dorjé (1284‑1339). If I had more energy, I would look it up in this book: The Tibetan Rendering of the Jātakamālā of Āryaśūra, Supplemented with 67 Additional Jātaka Stories by the Third Karma-pa Rang-byung-rdo-rje, "reproduced photographically from a rare manuscript preserved in the library of the Stog Rgyal-po of Ladakh," Kagyud Sungrab Nyamso Khang (Darjeeling 1974), in two volumes.

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postscript

You may not have noticed over in the sidebar, but PSz of Thor-bu blog gave Tibeto-logic one of those highly coveted Liebster awards. This is a kind of pyramidal scheme, which is to say you are supposed to pass it on to 3 or 5 (there seems to be no agreement) of your favorite (or most loved, as I believe the name means) small blogs with less than 300 followers (Tibeto-logic certainly meets this last qualification). I decided to pass mine on to only two blogs that I believe deserve more attention. I mean first of all The Lost Yak blog by Geoff. Go there and have a look. Geoff has a talent for writing directly to the subject, no messing around. I would also recommend you aim your browser at a special blog that sees Tibetan culture as something that bears weight, that is made up of all kinds of marvelous or even auspicious substances. The name itself, Sitahu, is one of those substances. It has a very useful collection of links. And if you are the writer of the Lost Yak or of Sitahu, Hey! This badge is for the two of you! You don’t have to pass it on to anyone if you don’t want to.  Nothing bad will happen. Just the contrary, you should take it as a sign that good things will be coming your way.

Free Losar E-card Advice for the Iron Tiger Year

This year Losar coincides with Valentines Day.  There must be a good reason for this.

The last time an Iron Tiger (lcags stag) year came around, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was made the leader of Tibet.  He was 15 at the time, and that was 60 years ago.  Tibetans by tradition have Jovian cycles called rabjung instead of assuming the centuries we've been brainwashed into accepting over the, well, over the... centuries I guess we'll have to say.

If you are one of those dozens of people out on the web at the last minute looking for a free e-card to send to friends on Losar, you can just slide this one off the blog page and into the body of an email.

If you're feeling more inventive, I'm sure you can do better, so why not go to 

http://www.freetigerpictures.com/ (expired link)

or maybe here

http://www.copyright-free-photos.org.uk/tigers/index.htm

and take one of their many photos, like I did, and then add your own words to it, using photoshop?  Well, why the hell not?  Your friends and family will appreciate homemade better than store-bought any day of the year.

I recommend taking one that has the tiger looking calm and serene, relaxed, with its mouth closed.  I don't think you want your holiday greeting to traumatize your friends out of their wits now, do you?

Oh, and I hope all Tibetans and all people of goodwill everywhere who feel concern for their future will find good reason for hope.  Soon.  We'll celebrate some.  And we'll pray.  But we'll also do our best to do something that will make a difference.  Buddha taught that things don't last, and if that holds true at all, it surely does for intolerable situations.

I'll see y'all again before long.  Meanwhile, visit these fresh new Losar blog entries for inspiration:  This one, this one, this one and this one. This article in the Bhutanese newspaper Kuensel also has an interesting bit on some special Bhutanese observances.  And if it's Ladakh you're concerned about, this piece offers an explanation for why they have already celebrated Losar two months ago.  Most of the rest that I could find here and there on the web was a little disappointing, but feel free to schmoogle or scroogle* for yourself.

(*Scroogle is a cookie crumbler, if you want to know.)

Losar eCard

What makes this year different from other years?

By now it would appear that the movement to give up Losar — Tibetan New Year — celebrations has gained considerable momentum among Tibetans everywhere.  Some may see contradictions in today's blog, or even reactionary impulses. I fail to see any. Losar observances will without doubt be carried out in every Tibetan home this year more or less as they always have been.  The very idea that there won't be any Losar is, let's admit it, a little bit like calling off Christmas in a Christian community. Not very likely. But I think what we are going to see this year are less of the public 'celebratory' parts of Losar than usual.  The simple reason is the grief of the previous year (unless you've been sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, you'll know its reasons). For more on the problems with New Year this year, read this blog by Agam's Gecko. The news from Lhasa and eastern Tibet in recent days is disheartening. Don't think for a moment that anything about the Tibet situation has been resolved. Not at all. When Beijing isn't displaying its anxiety, it's indulging in denial. And if you have questions about what Tibetan New Year is, or in more ordinary times would be, there might be a few answers in this post from last year.

If you have Tibetan friends, why not send them a Losar eCard on or before the new moon of February 25th? I wasn't able to get my Tibetan fonts to work together with photoshop, but perhaps you will have more success with that. If you would like to add your own message to the card, download this uninscribed version by double-clicking and sliding it onto your computer desktop

Then import it into Photoshop and see what you can do with it. Or take your own photo of an ox-like creature if you don't think highly of mine. I know a lot of you have been searching the internet in vain in hopes of finding Losar eCards. I know. I have my sources.  

But now that I look, I see there are a couple of ready-made cards for the Earth Ox over at "Tibet Cafe." Never mind. I spoke too soon. It happens.

If your Tibetan friends are living a place without fast internet connections, do them a favor and print your cards out on photo paper and drop them in the mail.  If you act quickly there may still be time.

This Losar will begin the 23rd year of the 17th rabjung.  Some have developed the custom to number the year from the first year in the reign of the first Tibetan Emperor Nyatritsenpo.  They would call it the year 2136. If you have read this far, consider this to be my Losar eCard to you this year. We'll just leave it without any labels, or call it Tea-Coloured Light.  Let's say its rays symbolize hope in all its audacity.

Happy New Year (This time it's for real!)

A Tibetan friend just sent me this very nice digital eCard for the Tibetan holiday known as Losar. Losar (lo-gsar or ལོ་གསར་ if you prefer) means Year New.* 

(I assume the eCard isn't under any copyright, but in any case its use in this blog is entirely non-commercial.) 

(*unmarked adjectives come after their nouns, not before like in English. Where in English you say white house, in Tibetan you say house white. Get used to it.)

Sending Losar greeting cards is a new custom, unknown to traditional Tibet. So Losar eCards are needless to say much newer still. The absence of cards and eCards was no great loss back then. Believe me, there was plenty to do with family and friends living close by.

Today's (technically last night's) new moon begins the Earth Mouse year. In 1027 CE Tibet had its first rabjung (rab-byung or རབ་འབྱུང་) year. Well, the first year of the Jovian sixty-year cycle is called the rabjung year, a direct translation of Sanskrit prabhava. Tibetans use the name of the first year of the Jovian cycle for the entire set of sixty years as well. These Jovian cycles themselves are numbered. I would like to point out an interesting thing in the first line of the eCard. The first three syllables mean "Tibetan Royal Era year" followed by the number 2135,* then the four following syllables,་that mean "rabjung mountain moon," followed by a genitive ending, and the last four syllables of the first line, "earth mouse sky-year."

(*Tibetan numbers look a little different from Arabic and Indian forms of the numbers, but work in just the same way. It has become customary in recent times to give the Royal year. But let's try and be real for a moment. Traditional chronologies are by no means in agreement about when the first Emperor ruled Tibet. Modern historians see little use in giving an entirely dubious numeric value to this event.)

Now I can hear you saying, What the heck is this mountain moon about? Well, interesting that you ask, grasshopper. At least since the 10th century (if not as appears likely much earlier) when the Kalacakra ('Wheel of Time') Tantra made its debut in India, there has been a custom, mainly in works on calculation and chronology, to use words in place of numbers. I call them numeric code-words. Mountain means 7. Why? Because there are 7 circles of mountains in traditional Abhidharma cosmology. Moon means 1. That's because the earth only has one moon. (Clearly, the system was not invented on Jupiter.) Why were code-words used instead of numbers? I don't know. It was an Indian tradition that Tibetans kept on following.

But then that would seem to translate into the number '71', wouldn't it? Wrong! When you make use of numeric code-words, the numbers are always (and I mean always) read from right to left. Mountain moon means 17. And why 17? you're thinking.

Ah! We are now in the 17th rabjung. Let's see. Well, the first rabjung started with the rabjung year, or Earth Hare year, that corresponds to 1027.* A lot happened in that year. Naropa is said to have died in India. The Kadampa teacher Potowa was born... But most relevant for us right now is the fact that the Kalacakra tantra was for the very first time translated, together with its most important commentary named Vimalaprabha, from Sanskrit into Tibetan language.

(*Csoma de Kőrös, a Hungarian traveler-scholar who is sometimes called the first Tibetologist, thought the first year of the first rabjung had begun in the year 1026. That's why for a few generations after him Tibetan dates when 'translated' were off by one year. Of course, even today Tibetan dates, when translated, may well be a year off because people fail to take into account the only partial overlap between the 'years' of the two calendrical systems.)

Herein lies a mystery. The number 60 is very important in Kalacakra. Kalacakra time measurement includes not only 60-year cycles, but there are actually 60 hours in a day. Uh huh, right, that means Kalacakra hours were only 24 minutes long, just enough for the TV sitcom after subtracting the time taken up by commercials; but yes, due to the degeneration of time, by now that might be more like 15 minutes for the commercials.

The Kalacakra itself lists Sanskrit names for each of the 60 years in the cycle. It does *not* name them for the animals and elements as Tibetans do. The truth is that Tibetans (just like their neighbors) most usually made use of the simpler 12-year animal cycle of years already in the middle of the 7th century or so. It might seem that they adjusted their customary 12-year cycle to conform with the Kalacakra by combining the 12 animals with the 5 elements. (But this would not be true. In fact, the earliest known use of a Jovian cycle or "sexagenary" date in Tibetan would be the Iron Ox year in the Sino-Tibetan Peace Treaty of 821-822 CE; see Uray's article for more about this.) The five elements were, perhaps surprising to some, not the five elements as known to the Greeks and Indians: earth, water, fire, air, ether. Instead, they used the five elements as known to China: fire, earth, iron, water, wood. When combined with the 12 animals, each element is repeated twice.

To illustrate this last point, the first year of the rabjung is the Fire Hare. The years that follow the Fire Hare are, in order: Earth Dragon, Earth Snake, Iron Horse, Iron Sheep, Water Monkey, Water Hen, Wood Dog, Wood Pig, Fire Mouse, Fire Ox, Earth Tiger, Earth Hare... You get the idea, I guess and hope. (You might have noticed that I've ignored the minor complication of the gender elements here.)

This year is 2008 CE, so 981 years have passed since 1027 CE. 981 divided by 60 equals 16.35, which puts us well into the 17th set of 60. In fact we are now entering into the 22nd year of the 17th rabjung, which started about this time of year in 1987 CE. The Sanskritic name of this year, according to the Kalacakra system, is Sarvadharin, which is Kun-'dzin when translated into Tibetan. It means Holder of All, which might be considered as an epithet of Shiva. Tibetans hardly ever make use of these Sanskritic year names, although they are sometimes encountered in the colophons of Tibetan books.

Now whether I've bored you to tears, or not, with all those numbers and calculations, I feel like I should say something about what I think Losar means to Tibetans. That's truly difficult, but why not give it a try... I'd say that if you know what Christmas means to most North Americans of Christian background, then you might start to understand just how important Losar is to Tibetans. Of course, the Tibetan observances are very much different. There is no Christmas tree with bulbs and tinsel, and wrapped gifts beneath. Still, the stacks of Kabtsé* on the altar along with the pot of freshly growing grass and the sheep's head made of porcelain mean every bit as much to the Tibetan soul as the Christmas tree to most Christians. Family. Togetherness. Warmth. Prosperity. Abundance. Food. Fun. All that and more.

Kabtsé

(*Kabtsé is a kind of deep-fried bread, twisted into various pretzel-like shapes. The stacked-up plates, called derkha [sder-kha or སྡེར་ཁ་] are usually further decorated with colorful objects, especially hard candies, which adds to the 'Christmas tree' illusion. One of my favorite fried bread shapes is the bongui amchog (bong-bu'i a-mchog or བོང་བུའི་ཨ་མཆོག), a name that translates as 'donkey ears.' These make me think of Haman's ears, eaten during the Israeli (and Jewish) holiday of Purim. Well, differences aside, at least it is another kind of pastry 'ear' eaten during a particular festivity.

Hamantaschen

The object depicted in the eCard is called the Droso Chemar (gro so phye mar). It is a box (called a bo ['bo]) with a wooden divider in the center, and two wooden 'tags', one sticking up on each side. Both sides are filled to overflowing (perhaps overly clearly symbolizing or demonstrating abundance). If you visit a Tibetan friend on Losar, which I hope you will, you might be immediately invited to take from the box a pinch of chemar (phye mar), that means a slightly buttered flour (I think some people add sugar), which you toss in the air and shout Tashi Deleg! (bkra-shis bde-legs), a phrase you will probably hear a lot during the days of Losar, and not all that much in other parts of the year. You'll also almost certainly be offered a beaker or bowl of chang (chang), a bittersweet beer traditional to Tibet since the beginning of time, which when good, as it often is, has a slight lemony taste that lingers on your tongue. The beer vessel and your beaker will both be decorated with a generous dab of butter, which as you all know from experience is a symbol of wealth and nourishment, even if you like me should be doing your best to eliminate it from your diet. Don't be surprised if you discover big white splatches of chemar all over your clothing. It happens. This is a very good thing.

I don't want to speak too much about the gambling and drinking and partying that goes on, and on, starting on the second day of Losar. Or too much about other things both seriously meaningful and fun, like dressing up in your best new clothes, hanging up strings of multicolored Wind Horse flags (rlung-rta), feasting on 'Nine Soup' dumplings with special gifts hidden inside (dgu-thug),* visiting temples, burning juniper incense (bsang) on the mountainside, and the like. Did I mention dancing? Yes, I guess I did.

(*The hidden objects are omens for what will happen to the person who happens to get them during the following year, although they may not be taken entirely seriously, but all in good fun. Here are the objects according to my understanding: The person getting a dumpling containing paper will be bookish and good in school (or a victim of theft?); wood means being like a poor man walking with a stick (or lucky enough to travel); a pebble means a lifespan as lasting as diamond; salt is cleverness and fame; wool is for disease (or new clothing?); and cayenne pepper for a temperamental personality or a 'sharp tongue.' Charcoal of course means you will have 'dark thoughts.' Onion means you will have body odor. I guess that last one might be a result of eating it. There have to be nine. Did I miss something? Yes, I guess I did.)

Oh well, all that was just therapy for myself, isolated as I am in a place in the world without any Tibetan community. Please do send a comment to let me know how you celebrated Losar this year, and don't neglect to tell me and everyone else what it means to you. Correct my misunderstandings. This is one subject about which truly every single Tibetan is the ultimate expert, your best Tibetologist. Losar is something so good that it just keeps on going for many people. Although surely an exception, I met one Tibetan man who was still partying non-stop into the month of May. I'm thinking this was, is and would be just way too much of a good thing.



Read more!

Last year Phayul news site had a very nice article about Losar by Phayul correspondent Phurbu Thinley (Phur-bu-phrin-las), which you can find here.

I think this is certainly one of the the best things there is on the subject on the entire internet. Highly recommended. But see also Tsepak Rigzin's (Tshe-dpag-rig-'dzin) article "Losar" posted at Tibettalk. Or if like me you prefer to read it in print, try Tsepak Rigzin, Festivals of Tibet, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives (Dharamsala 1993), pp. 1-8. For an account of Losar observances with real photographs from pre-invasion Tibet, including an unforgettable shot of a rope-sliding demonstration about to take place with the Potala as the backdrop, see Hugh Richardson, Ceremonies of the Lhasa Year, Serindia (London 1993), pp. 11-22.

For more examples of numeric code-words derived from the Kalacakra, look here. And thanks to the strange ways inherent in synchronicity and interdependent origination, on Wednesday, February 06, 2008, PSz of Thor-bu blog made a list of Sanskrit numeric code-words (go here and scroll down past the mysterious ruins until you get to them).

If just for fun you would like to hear somebody's idea about what your Tibetan birth-year means for your personality, etc., look here.*

n

(*Beware! Tibetan prognostics are often anything but reassuring.)

Here is a lovely little essay about Tibetan astroscience* by one of it's leading 20th-century practitioners, Professor Jampa Gyaltsen Dagthon (1939-1997).

(*Tibetan rtsis, which is translated 'astroscience', 

actually means 'calculation' in general, and includes 

mathematics, astrology and astronomy, among other matters.)

Here is a useful chart of the Tibetan and CE correspondences covering 1027 through 2046.

Géza Uray, ‘The Earliest Evidence of the Use of the Chinese Sexagenary Cycle in Tibetan.’ Contained in: Louis Ligeti, ed., Tibetan and Buddhist Studies Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander Csoma de Körös, Akadémiai Kiadó (Budapest), pp. 341-360.

There are quite a few technical writings on astroscience (besides the article by Uray you see here), and its sub-branch of chronology. I'll list them for you some other time. There's a lion in my library that requires my immediate attention. Now where did I leave those tweezers?




I apologize that many of the links in this old blog have expired. You should have read it sooner.