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.

Ownerless Donkey

The rabbit has a charming face;

Its private life is a disgrace.

I really dare not name to you

The awful things that rabbits do.

. . . 

—   Anonymous contributor to The Week-End Book, 1925.

Any idea what inspired this Tibetan epithet for 'rabbit' (ri-bong):  bdag med bong bu?

Donkeys (bong-bu) have long ears.  They don't do what anybody tells them to do once they've made up their minds not to.  They dig in their hooves and you can yank all you want for all the difference it will make.

Don't try to contact me or dissuade me.  I'll be in temporary blog retirement nirvana for the next few months. My loyal readers — both of you — will have to find something better to do for awhile.

It's spring, you know?

The frontis-hare is from the Church of SS. Lot and Procopius, at Mt. Nebo, Jordan.  Here are some more mosaics, including another rabbit, at this site of the Franciscan Archaeological Institute.

The final palm-rabbit you see below is from the mosaics of the Byzantine church at Petra, Jordan (more mosaics from there here).  I'll call it, The Rabbit at the Ends of the Palms.  You'll see why.  Most Jordanian mosaic rabbits I've seen seem to be frolicking amongst the grapes.

Look here for a rabbit mosaic at Beit Shean.

And here for another at Kisufim in the northern Negev Desert.

What you will see in this next picture is, well, something like an donkey, a tired one, with nary an owner in sight.

Clue: It's not a mosaic.  

I don't want to say what it is exactly.  

That's for you to know or find out.

Think you can puzzle it out?

From the monastery (laura) of Euthymius in the Judaean Hills.

Are all the pieces there?

They say the donkey is just the domesticated form of the wild ass.

From folio 118 verso of the materia medica work of Jampal Dorje (1792-1855). The author was a multi-lingual Mongolian prince (tho-yon/toyin) who spent much of his adult life doing research in Tibet (he made a collection of rare Kadampa texts that he collected by traveling all over the Tibetan plateau, to give another example of his wide-ranging interests). I haven't yet seen the article by P. Banzragch & B. Gerke, “Some Notes on the Famous Mongolian Pharmacologist Jambal Dorje,” Ayurvijnana vol. 8 (2002).

Here's the best blog about mosaics I know about.


Here is something for you to look up in your local library if you can:

W.T. Blanford, Notes on a Large Hare Inhabiting High Elevations in Western Tibet.  Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 44 (1875), pp. 214-5.

To get an inkling of what Tanachic Judaism and particularly Christianity have had to say about the hare, look here, and turn to page no. 66, if the Google-guards permit you. Basically, they are said to be wise enough to run away as fast as they can or to take refuge in secure places.  (To see the remarkable images, you would have to buy the book, unfortunate since, in the physical book, you could behold the hares of the four directions in a circular array.)  Notice how the same book, on p. 97, etymologizes ass:  "The ass gets its name because men sit on it (a sedendo), but this name is more fitting to horses."  This doesn't agree with etymologies found elsewhere.  It looks like it goes back to the Etymologies of Isidore (d. 636 CE).  Just search for "a sedendo" once you get to the link, and you'll find these words: 

Asinus et asellus a sedendo dictus, quasi asedus: sed hoc nomen, quod magis equis conveniebat...

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A final mysterious note: In Nicholas Sihlé's article Lhachö and Hrinän (contained in: Henk Blezer, ed., Religion and Secular Culture in Tibet [Tibetan Studies II], Brill [Leiden 2002], at p. 190), is an example of a ritual effigy of a rabbit, in which the word for rabbit is bo-rang. This form of the rabbit-hare name found in northern Nepal (Baragaon) is very interesting to me, since Zhang-zhung language also has a word for 'rabbit' that appears variously as 'bo-la, bo-la, 'bo-la-sti, bho-la, 'bol-la. ('Bo-la is the form that actually occurs in the texts of the Mdzod-phug cosmological text.) It might be significant that many Tibeto-Burman languages, especially in western Tibetan areas, have a word for 'thumb' (or sometimes 'toe') that looks a lot like bola. One of the usual Tibetan words for 'thumb' is mthe-bong, and there we see that bong syllable again.  Perhaps that, in turn has something to do with the Tibetan word for 'clod,' bong-ba? Would the bong syllable have something to do with 'swollenness' or something like that?  A common Tibetan verb that means 'to swell up,' is sbo-ba.  Perhaps sbong-ba, 'soak, drench' ['make bloated'] belongs in the same word group?  Just wondering aloud. An intransitive form of sbong-ba would lose the 's' and likely be 'bong-ba, wouldn't it?  (I don't know of such a verb, but 'bong-ba means 'roundness.')  Just thinking out loud some more. Perhaps a real linguist could step in about now and set me straight.

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A donkey with a load of holy books is still a donkey.

— A Sufi saying (is it really?)