Five Seals of Bon, New Surprises

Five Seals symbols at end of Menri Manuscript EAP687/1/39
Click to enlarge

You might remember last May’s posting addressing my mistake in saying that in Tibet the Seven Seals (or in Bon, the Five Seals) are never represented by symbolic figures. If memory is short, go to “Five Seals of Bon, but with Symbolic Figures This Time.” Then come back here.

As if to drive the point even further and deeper into my earlier error, yet another rather different representation of the Five Seals according to Bon has shown up among the manuscripts digitized at Tibetan Bonpo Monastic Centre or, as it is also known, Menri Monastery.

We’ll just look at the first two lines of the script underneath the symbolic figures, as they supply explanation for what we see there.  You see a whole string of five syllables in the 2nd line outside the margins, so you have to wonder if it was there originally. This repeats the syllable that means ‘seal’ five times: རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ།.  

From the manuscript of a work entitled ’Od-gsal Sems-kyi Me-long, or Clear Light Mirror of Mind. It forms a part of the orally transmitted Dzogchen teachings from Zhangzhung (ཞང་ཞུང་སྙན་རྒྱུད་).

The two lines that serve to label the seal illustration reads like this (forgive me a few tacitly fixed spellings):

མི་འགྱུར་གཡུང་དྲུང་ལྗང་ཁུ་རླུང་གི་རྒྱ་།

The Seal of Air, green, an unchanging yungdrung.

འཁོར་ལོ་བསྒྱུར་རྒྱལ་སྔོན་པོ་ཆུའི་རྒྱ་།

The Seal of Water, blue, the wheel-turning king.

པད་མ་དབང་ཆེན་དམར་པོ་མེའི་རྒྱ་།

The Seal of Fire, red, the lotus of great power.

རིན་ཆེན་ནོར་བུ་སེར་པོ་སའི་རྒྱ་།

The Seal of Earth, yellow, the precious jewels.

མི་ནུབ་རྒྱལ་མཚན་དཀར་པོ་ནམ་མཁའི་རྒྱ་།

The Seal of Space, white, the victory banner that never declines.

རྒྱ་ལྔས་མི་འདའ་བཀའི་རྟགས་།། རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ་རྒྱ་།

The marks with five seals of the inviolable word: seal seal seal seal seal.

I hope that was clear enough to show that once again, we can and do indeed find in Tibet a set of seals (five rather than seven this time) accompanied by symbolic figures, here we even find color correspondences. The figures are interpreted and named in terms of the five elements of traditional physics. If we were to look into this further, we would see that much of it agrees with symbolism typically found embedded in the hearts of mandalas.

So before saying farewell for today, I’d like to add one more piece of evidence in case it is needed to argue against the many who are understandably skeptical of my claim that a quite ancient Aramaic expression for “seal” may be found in medieval Tibetan manuscripts simply transcribed. It is for the sake of these doubters that I present a piece of manuscript evidence that necessarily precedes the 1245-ish evidence in the Zhijé manuscript we already supplied (here). The following illustration comes from the Matho fragments, taken out of a virtual time capsule closed in around 1200.

Matho fragment "v424."

Right there in the penultimate line, at the very end of the line, you can read ཁ་ཐམ་མོ་།།, kha-tham-mo. There you have that word kha-tham that goes back to ancient Aramaic, even if what we have here is a little unusual in placing a ‘final stop’ (slar-bsdu or rdzogs-tshig) at the end of it. So far this is the earliest datable manuscript use of this particular sealing expression in a Tibetan work that I know of. 

And it is clearly datable prior to the advent of the Mongols and Tibet’s borrowing of the Mongolian term tamga, in the form of tham-ga (dam-kha, etc.), a word Turko-Mongolian tribal groups used to mark group identity and ownership using emblems that often look like runes. I think these two Tibetan borrowings, despite their similar meanings and the syllable tham they hold in common do not share the same history.  They may both ultimately go back to the same ancient origins at the cusp of Afroeurasia, and I believe this to be the case, but in Tibet the two were borrowed via different languages at different times, and went on to serve different functions.  Kha-tham, I would say is the earlier borrowing, pre- rather than post-Mongol advent, just how early and from whom I’m not yet ready to conclude.  And kha-tham, unlike tham-ga, is only used in these sealing expressions at the end of a book.

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Need more to look at?

The Matho manuscript fragments, retrieved from chortens near the Matho Monastery in Ladakh, were introduced in some recent blogs. I have it in my mind to do more blogs about them concentrating on their Zhijé and Kagyu content.

EAP687 - Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), British Library, London.

EAP687/1/39.

Samten G. Karmay, The Little Luminous Boy, White Orchid Books (Bangkok 1998). Through painted images and brief, often very brief, biographical sketches, this book informs us about the masters who transmitted the Zhangzhung Nyangyü teachings, instructions on the nature of mind of breathtaking beauty and wisdom.

A.E. Rogozhinsky and D.V. Cheremisin, “The Tamga Signs of the Turkic Nomads in the Altai and Semirechye: Comparisons and Identifications,” Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 47, no. 2 (2019), pp. 48-59. 

Andras Róna-Tas, “Some Notes on the Terminology of Mongolian Printing,” Acta Orientalia Hungarica, vol. 18, nos. 1-2 (1965), pp. 119-147. Here Tibetan tham-ga is identified as a “late borrowing” from Mongolian. Indeed, it was getting used increasingly over time, with its primary usage being seals used by members of the official bureaucracy.  Thel-tse is another word for it.

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An exchange of ideas that took place in the comments section of Sam's blog Early Tibet back in 2009 is worthwhile going back to, especially because it’s funny.  A veritable riot of ideas bouncing back and forth:

https://earlytibet.com/2009/02/19/a-tibetan-book-of-spells/

Now the riots are all taking places in Twit and Ex and I’m left here all alone, me myself and I. My how times have changed. And is it for the better?

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Addendum

In response to today's blog Lloyd Graham made these much valued remarks, sent via academia.edu messages on December 14, 2023, and placed here with his kind permission:

Excellent, thanks Dan!

The overt colour correspondences interest me as I have previously argued that the colour associated with each of the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation links that seal to one of the seven classical planets.

Here's the link: 

https://www.academia.edu/440506/The_Seven_Seals_of_Revelation_and_the_Seven_Classical_Planets

It seems to me that the two seals at the right of this new set have a lot in common with the corresponding two seals in the previous set that you posted back in August: (1) three tear-shapes or triangles in a pyramid configuration, and (2) a spiral crook ornamented with adjacent leaf-tips or serrations. The swastika appears in both sets, albeit in different positions. The remaining two seals in the new set seem to have no relationship to their counterparts in the earlier one.

The right-most seal is much more coherently and carefully drawn in the new set; the version in the earlier seal set is very crude and looks as if the original has undergone numerous rounds of poor copying to the point where it has become completely cryptic. The next seal along is also reduced from an intricate and cursive leaf-like icon containing three “eyes” in a pyramid configuration to a bare schematic of three triangles in the same configuration. Overall, the seal set that you posted in August could be a much debased form of the one in the Menri manuscript, with symbol degradation (of the two right-most seals), repositioning (of the swastika) and outright substitution (of the remaining two seals).

I see exactly this sort of degradation in representations of the Judeo-Islamic Seven Seals.

An afterthought. If I’m correct in reading the seals left-to-right, the Menri Ms. identifies one of the fully substituted seals as Water. The stack of three wavy lines at the left of the earlier seal set is similar to the almost universal pictogram for water, of which the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph is a good example: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/AncientEgyptian/comments/mca2ji/random_egyptian_word_water/

= = =

A brief reply (Dan, December 19, 2023) 

A victory banner ought to look something like this:

Rgyal-mtshan, Victory Banner

I’ve been looking hard for something like a star or other celestial body in the various series of Tibetan seals, and haven’t found any. Here it appears that all the colors correspond to those commonly associated (in symbolism found in many mandalas) with the five elements. So this seems to set the Tibetan (and Indian Buddhist) evidence of the Seven (or Five) Seals apart from the rest.

I wonder why the foliage seems to accompany most of the elements in this new example. It is boxed together with each of the first three seals, but then boxed alone between the 4th and 5th. I suppose I’ll go on being puzzled by this until long after the holidays are over. Shouldn’t some mysteries remain sealed?

§   §   §

Postscript (February 14, 2024)

Now this!  I can’t explain how these things keep popping up.

I found it as fol. 4 of text no. 194 in the Drangsong Collection in Mustang, Nepal.  For more on this collection, look here:

http://mustang.uw.edu.pl/?page_id=7455&lang=en

For an introductory video about the collection, look here: 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kog9bJ8TIQA?si=mVxK7UV9C4acEU1t" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Or if that isn't working, try this instead:

https://youtu.be/kog9bJ8TIQA?si=zpz04_4SVuxiNs87 

You can go here and view the entire text in question:

http://mustang.uw.edu.pl/?page_id=11350&lang=en

The cursive manuscript doesn't have a front title, although in the margins it does have the short title Rab-gnas meaning Consecration.

To get a better look, just double-click on the photos to expand them.

Here the Five Seals appear to be growing on trees, like fruits.

I know, I should transcribe and translate the accompanying text. Give me some time and I’ll make the effort.

Five Seals of Bon, but with Symbolic Figures This Time

 

click to enlarge

I never expected to see this. Last year I blogged about the several Afroeurasian versions of the Seven Seals. Among other things I concluded that the several sets of seven are interrelated only here and there and with difficulty, but also that Tibetan sources never seem to correlate them with symbolic figures as the Arabic and Hebrew versions do.

Have a quick look at that earlier blog, entitled “Seven Seals, Times Several,” and then come back here before getting lost in it. The frontispiece you can see there is a fine example of an Arabic set of the symbolic figures.

Let me quote a passage from it:

“Observe that much of both the content and the context of the Islamo-Judaic seals is not findable in the Tibetan. You find no symbolic figures or ‘signs’ in the set of Seven Seals in Tibet. You find none of the symbolic correspondences with the seven then-recognized planets, or the seven days of the week. Perhaps most significantly of all, you never see the talismanic theme of personal protection in those same Tibetan accounts.”

We could add that the seven seals in Tibet are never representing a series of disastrous world-ending events like you find in the book of Revelations. To the contrary, they usually represent exclusivity, secrecy, occultation, and hidden knowledge.

So, Lo and behold! Here we have a set of five at the end of the next-to-last line. Let me clip it out for you to make it clearer, I hope.  

First you see what look like three wavy lines one on top of each other. That’s a stack of Tibetan na-ros, or ‘o’ vowels. Then you see a three-fold stack of what I suppose could be number ‘4’s, although I read them as being three ‘l’ letters in their subscript forms (la-btags).* Next is, ‘obviously,’ a version of the well-known swastika (in case you are curious, it is oriented in the normal Bon direction; the banned-in-Germany National Socialist swastika is not only oriented in the opposite direction, it is also standing precariously on one of its four corners... Please pay attention to the distinction, people).  The fourth item you see is a stack of three triangles arranged to create one larger triangle.  Finally we see something that could represent flames, I suppose, although in truth I am not at all sure how to read it.  Just before the set of five symbolic figures is a list of three types of seals: the secret seal (gsang rgya), the hidden seal (gab rgya), and the treasure seal (tyer rgya, i.e. gter rgya). Then, at the beginning of the next line is the label “Five Seals” (rgya lnga).

(*I’m thinking they could be meant to represent three eyes, stacked one on top of the other... but in that case I see no clear sign of a dot for the pupil, which seems essential.)

 

Let me try clipping them out again, perhaps clearer this time:

So, there you have my conclusion for today: It turns out I was mistaken in saying that the sets of seals in Tibet never are found keyed to symbolic figures. This one example just proved me wrong.

I think it is just as well that I find myself unable to give a more cogent interpretation of these five symbolic figures. They really ought to remain secret after all. In a general way I’m reflecting that they (whether in this Bon example, or the sets in Arabic and Hebrew sources) may have something to do with traditional marking systems such as those humans have been using for many millennia by now, as ways to talley up numbers or mark ownership (mason marks and livestock brandings, are good examples). Well, before you call me out on my silliness, I would ask you to admit that when we are presented with basic letter-like figures that make no immediate sense, our minds are likely to place them in some such category. Other speculations I’ve seen associate them with the 7 chakras, but this idea is entirely invisible in pre-20th-century sources that I know of.

Well, I didn’t open up my blogsite today just to confess the errors of my ways or announce to the world my failed attempts at understanding (there are even more important examples I could show off to you another day), but on a more positive note to alert the researchers in our field of Tibeto-sophy to an amazing new resource for Tibetan texts belonging to the Bon religion. Without more ado before saying adieu, I abruptly send you there to explore for yourself.  Just go here:

https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP687

To find the particular volume and our passage, go here:

https://eap.bl.uk/archive-file/EAP687-1-16

Then navigate to the scanned page no. 33 for the title page of the text that continues until scanned page no. 55, where you will see the Five Seals (or Five Seals + 3 = 8?).

•

PS: I don’t know much about the cycle of teachings our colophon page belongs to, apart from it being a long-life ritual practice involving both medicines and prayers associated with Tsewang Rinzin (ཚེ་དབང་རིག་འཛིན་), one of the ancient Bon sages. If we restrict ourselves to what is there on that single final page, I’ll quickly and lackadaisically paraphrase some of it for you, like so:

The sum of all the knowledge-bearing sages of India, Persia, Burusho, Orgyan, Zhangzhung, Tangut Land, Tibet and so on is found combined in this practice.  It is the heart-of-hearts of the twenty-five aural transmissions. If you were to practice it without distractions in a secluded setting you would be bound to swiftly attain the superpowers. This particularly aural transmission was passed along by Dranpa Namkha to the triad of the Lord Monarch, Pakor Bairotsana, and the woman sky-goer Coza Bönmo. These three regarded it as especially profound and precious, so they hid it in a hardened leather chest, so that one day when due to karmic forces Bon would decline, it would transform lack of faith into faith [?unclear to me]. When they were at the treasure sites in order to conceal these texts, they hid them as first-fruits treasures and as profound treasures, and accompanied this by aspiration prayers that they would in the future be revealed.

An Arabic Seven Seals example,
after Dawkins (read from right to left of course).
Notice the ‘ladder’ in the middle
(it sometimes looks like a hashtag - #)

Suggested readings

Joám Evans Pim, Sergey A. Yatsenko, Oliver Timken Perrin, eds., Traditional Marking Systems: A Preliminary Survey, Dunkling Books (London 2010), in 518 pages, with plentiful black-and-white illustrations.

Donatella Rossi, “The Lo rgyus chen mo in the Collection of the Ye khri mtha’ sel Attributed to Dran-pa nam-mkha’,” contained in: Samten G, Karmay and Yasuhiko Nagano, eds., New Horizons in Bon Studies, National Museum of Ethnography (Osaka 2000), pp. 181-191. I think it is suggestive that the rare Ye-khri cycle of Dzogchen shares the same “teaching scene” with our colophon in which Drenpa Namkha passes his teachings on to three prominent disciples: Emperor Trisongdetsen, Pagor Bairotsana and Coza Bönmo. These teachings were then received as an aural transmission from Tsewang Rinzin to Lungbön Lhanyen in 1088 CE, although that date isn’t very secure (1088 according to some is his birth date, in which case the aural transmission would have taken place in 1118, his 31st year).

Richard Smoley, “The Mystery of the Seven Seals,” originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of Quest magazine, but also placed online. Not everyone will appreciate the Theosophical approach taken here, but there is something to be said about connecting the Seven Seals with a liberating ascent through the planetary spheres (in Judaeo-Christian-Islamic sources, not in Indo-Tibetan sources, even if there, too, you can find liberating ascents aplenty). This author takes a further step by mysteriously connecting them with the chakras of the human body.

You may also want to go back to still another recent Tibeto-logic blog entitled “One Secret of the Seals.” It demonstrates the presence of an Aramaic (as well as Hebrew and Arabic) word for “seal” in a Tibetan manuscript scribed in  the mid-13th century. Yes, it does.

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Comments by Lloyd Graham

Hi Dan, and congratulations on spotting that seal series! I have never come across anything like that sequence of glyphs, so I’m afraid that - beyond guesswork - I don’t have any insights into what might lie behind the symbols. If, as you suggested previously, the Tibetans were aware of the Solomonic Seven Seals as a series of symbols, this may have motivated one or two Tibetan writers to give graphic form to the local set of seven seals, even if they were primarily textual in nature.

At a stretch, one could see the strange 5- or 6-spike symbol at the far right of the Tibetan series as reflecting the vertices of the pentagram/hexagram at the far right of the Islamicate series, the three-triangles glyph as a refraction of the Islamicate “three strokes” symbol, and the centrally-positioned rectilinear swastika as a local reworking of the centrally-positioned rectilinear “ladder” glyph, but the two left-most Tibetan symbols lack any correspondence with the canonical Islamicate series.

The only other thing that I noticed is that the subset of five Tibetan seals that have been illustrated graphically in EAP687/1/16 seems to correspond well with the subset that you mentioned previously in connection with O-rgyan-gling-pa's 14th-century treasure finder, Bka’-thang Sde Lnga, Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 1990). Your paraphrase of the page on which the symbols appear reveal that it is focused on supreme knowledge being hidden as a treasure for later seekers to (re)discover, so there is a strong thematic overlap.

Similarly, one of the uses claimed for the Islamicate Seven Seals was in finding hidden treasure: 

“... these seven signs were written on the gate of the Ka'ba, and they can be applied in seventy-two ways to lift buried and concealed property and treasures. If you want to undertake such a work with them, write with saffron and hang them around the neck of a white much-crowing cock and allow it to run at the place where the treasure or the concealed property should lie. At every place where he stops and looks with his foot or beak in the earth or where he crows, there is the treasure or the concealed property.” 

—    Hans Winkler, Siegel und Charaktere in der Mohammedanischen Zauberei.