More Questions of Regalia

This list was already posted here. To start at the beginning, go here.

Here we are, back with those nine regalia passed down in the Tibetan imperial line, couched in terms that are mostly very difficult to read and understand. Why bother with them? I know some people are wondering what Tibetans could have done with regalia, anyway. They're thinking, Weren't all Tibetans peacefully meditating in caves all the time so why ever would they need rulers? Or, at one of the other extremes, Weren’t those primitive Tibetans always so completely satisified with their lot being a part of the Chinese motherland in the capable hands of their Han superiors, what could they have possibly been doing with power symbols like regalia? We may have more to say on these much more significant subjects another day. It isn’t my present plan to reduce anybody’s stereotypes to dust, as if they would even begin to let me (just this once excuse my delusions of grandeur thinking I might ever succeed in such wickedness).

Right now we’ll just wonder why it is that we find two very different lists of regalia in the Deyu (ལྡེའུ་) history. Well, the dating of the earliest Tibetan member of the imperial dynasty Nyatri Tsenpo, the one who came down from his home in the sky, is impossible to calculate using our quotidian tools of historical verification. But let’s say for the sake of saying something that he lived around 127 BCE.  (Don’t quote me on that, although this is in truth the basis for calculating the ‘Tibetan royal year’ - བོད་རྒྱལ་ལོ་.)  That’s the time when the first set of regalia would have appeared, the list that begins with the seashell wampum —  the Riji Cowries — but otherwise contains mainly self-powered, even we could say automated tools of warfare, cooking, bodily ornamentation, millstones and so on.*  

(*It also includes an item that excites a lot of popular interest, the nine-stepped Rmu ladder, རྨུ་སྐས་རིམ་དགུ་. We won't go that way today, since it would take all of next week to get this blog up.)

Oh, and another thing — The Deyu history historian doesn’t really say anything for himself. He just quotes from other sources, including some bona fide document-quality sources, and he never tries to make his different accounts harmonize with each other as a careful writer would do. What that really means is we ought to trust the Deyu history even more than, say, Butön's more famous one. Butön was no doubt a great writer, but the Deyu historian was a great collector.

The second list, the one you see above, is mentioned for a historical context around 1,300 years later, the time of Atisha and Rongzompa sometime in the 11th century. There was a problem in the royal succession that involved disputed ownership of the regalia.

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We’ve already offered some kind of solutions for numbers 1 through 3 as well as 5. Just yesterday a light switched on above number 4. And perhaps it’s time to turn on a tiny nightlight for no. 6, also, and see if we can get somewhere with it. Let’s get started and get it over quickly, in case you have more important matters begging for your immediate attention. Oh well, I would just like to tell you, Relax, so what if you do?

Number 4 could be very literally translated as copper [thing] - having navel.  As one of the parting gifts from his mother as the first emperor was about to descend from the sky, it is likely something of domestic or culinary use. Here zangs doesn't mean just copper, it means copperware. If there were a syllable preceding it, we would know what kind of copperware was intended, but unfortunately it appears here by itself.* Among the possibilities, more likely intended would be either a water vessel or a cooking cauldron made of copper. Or I suppose a second syllable could have been dropped, in which case we might think of a platter made of copper (zangs-sder - ཟངས་སྡེར་), a copper sheet (zangs-glegs -  ཟངས་གླེགས་ for zangs-ma’i glegs-bu - ཟངས་མའི་གླེགས་བུ་), or again, a water vessel (zangs-bu - ཟངས་བུ་).

(*We would expect a two-syllabled term here. That would preserve the parallelism with the others in the list. It's also possible the initial syllable was dropped here).

The thing that decided me in favor of a more particular shape for the object is the lte-ba-can, meaning having a navel.  How to explain the navel?  Remember we mentioned one of the power symbols used by Caesar, the patera, a kind of ritual libation bowl the Greeks called phiale?  In the middle of this small bowl is what else but a navel? It's called a phiale omphalos (or mesamphalos). An example is illustrated in von Heland's book, and it was that particular one that gave me the Eureka! moment. Just feeding the words into a searchbox can yield a number of examples, like this one:

Taken from an online auction house, where it is given the date 5th century BCE

I add a photo of the bottom side, so you can see that the bulge inside, in the middle, corresponds to the concave outside, in the base.  This indentation allowed use of the bowl with one hand only, with no need of a handle. In ritual lustrations you might need the second hand free for holding other things. With this kind of bowl one finger and a thumb should be sufficient to keep the bowl under control.

The underside of the same bowl

I'm not sure we should argue that the Tibetan item was the same, or even had the same function, as the Latin and Greek (I think not), just that if we are looking for a piece of metalware that has a navel, no need to look further.  We can at least begin to imagine what the Tibetan item could have looked like and why. This solution has the virtue of requiring not even the least emendation in the reading.*

(*Not overly relevant here, but the Tibetan object that most corresponds to the phiale in both form and function would be the ting offering bowls you find on Tibetan Buddhist altars everywhere.  [The phiale is shallower in its shape, and that is one important difference.] It's been suggested the ting word is a borrowing from Chinese, but some disagree and I'm not ready to reproduce these arguments here and now. I slipped in a photo of the Tibetan bowls further down below. These are totally not the more famous singing ones, in case you were wondering, although another meaning of ting is the sound that comes from striking metal, or as we would say in English, Ding! For the surprising news that the phiale makes an appearance in Scythian myth as a regalia object that came down from the sky, see the added note dated April 23, 2024, below.)

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Now just a word on number 6 and we’re done for the day. No. 6 is the one regalia term that seems most opaque. As it is, hardly anything makes sense. The first two syllables don’t make sense, and neither do the final three. We’re left with little choice but to emend it, the question being only how best to do it.  

I was thinking, since this triadic group of regalia is all about food preparation and serving, and given that 4 is a copper vessel and 5 a silver ladle, then what thing resembling me-tor would fittingly fill in the blank?  The answer that came to my mind at least was me-phor. I do recognize the problem that there is insufficient graphic or phonic similarity that could explain the ph-to-t shift, forcing us to argue that a form me-thor could have come in between: ph-to-th-to-t. Whenever an emendation requires more than one stage we are likely to regard it with suspicion, but in this case it only involves change in one letter after all, so why not? The ph (ཕ་) could have shifted to th (ཐ་) for graphic reasons, and then to t (ཏ་) for phonic. To put it simply, to the best of my knowledge me-tor means nothing in Tibetan, while me-phor means a brazier, a metal cannister-shaped implement made to hold coals for cooking or tea warming. A couple of examples of these braziers are illustrated in one of the several books that have come out in recent decades about the Potala Palace of Lhasa. Here is what the more fancy one looks like:

After The Potala: Holy Place of the Land of Snows (1996), p. 191.  The
English-language caption says it is a white copper stove made in 19th century.
The base forms a tripod.

For the time being agreeing the first two syllables mean brazier, what can we do with the last three:  ti-lig-can, or having ti-lig? Any idea what this ti-lig might be? I have none. Yes, it did occur to me it might be something drawn from Sanskrit, and I’m still considering the idea. I think it looks more like Zhang-zhung than Tibetan, but if that were so it would mean water life. That’s not making sense — water life decorating a brazier? I don’t think so! — so I’m wondering how I could emend the reading. Perhaps the scribe was a little dyslexic, and meant to write li-tig. If that were so: Perhaps the brazier had orange lines, or Khotanese lines (in either case the spelling li-thig would be working better), I don’t know. Or is li for bronze or bell-metal, meaning the brazier had lines or drops or bits of bronze decorating it? That seems to work for me, although I’m not sure it’s the truth of the matter.* It’s never a good sign when you’re trying too hard.

(*It may or may not be relevant, but the one item that is most frequently paired with the me-phor is something called the khog-ltir/khog-ldir, a kind of kettle and/or teapot made of either clay or metal. Brazier with kettle would have made sense here, I suppose, but making such an emendation would take far too much work to be believable.)

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Places to read or find out a thing or two:

Bu-ston Rin-chen-grub, Butön's History of Buddhism in India and Its Spread to Tibet, a Treasury of Priceless Scripture, tr. by Lisa Stein and Ngawang Zangpo, Snow Lion (Boston 2013).  Butön's history is now available to English readers in a much more readable and less forbidding version than that old (but not badly done) Obermiller translation, and for this we must be thankful. There are about two thousand missing footnotes, but I guess there are readers who won't miss them. Compared to the Deyu, Butön's treatment of Tibet is very thin indeed, largely confined to the history of the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Tibetan, the subject of his greatest concern, obviously.

Madeleine von Heland, The Golden Bowl from Pietroasa, Almqvist and Wiksell (Stockholm 1973). Unfortunately here there are no color photos of this unique gold bowl, associated with some kind of late Platonic cult, so for that we have to go to the internet, especially this short but remarkable video that finds scenes of Orphic initiation in its figures. Interesting.

A.A.Y. Kyerematen, Panoply of Ghana: Ornamental Art in Ghanian Tradition and Culture, Frederick A. Praeger (New York 1964). I just located a copy of this book, very rich in photographs and information on African regalia. As expected anywhere there is a cult of royalty, figuring very largely are chairs, clothing, ornaments and weapons. But there are also musical instruments, umbrellas, fly whisks, palanquins and staffs of office (scepters). If cooking utensils are considered regalia, as it seems they are, they remain the property of the queen. I believe at some point the African evidence will have to be regarded as relevant to rulership patterns throughout Eurasia and beyond. As you probably have heard Africa is now increasingly regarded as the actual Garden of Eden, with African Eve the genetic mother of all Eurasians.  Hmmm...  Pygmy Kitabu was right after all! Even if Colin Turnbull didn't think so.

Asadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani & Jaʿfar Šahrī, "Brazier," Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 4, fasc. 4, pp. 443-444. Also online here. Nowadays braziers are better known as barbecue grills. Well, not exactly equivalent, but close enough. I found a set of fascinating old photographs from Tehran on Youtube [video no longer available]. You'll find there not only braziers, but some obvious examples of regalia.

Added note (April 23, 2024)

Recalling what we said about the libation bowl, notice that in a Scythian origins myth, the regalia objects that descend from the sky are “a plow and also a yoke, a battle ax, and a phialê.” See Bruce Lincoln, “Once Again ‘The Scythian’ Myth of Origins (Herodotus 4.5-10),” Nordlit, vol. 33 (2014), pp. 19-34, at p. 20.

Regalia Untranslatable - Part Three

To start at the beginning, go here.

Look back at the frontispiece of Part Two, the first-listed of the nine regalia, the གསེར་ཁྲི་ཆུ་དར་ཅན་, “golden throne with/having chu-dar” — that term chu-dar that we will prefer to translate very literally as water silk. Notice what was said just above about it being a blue material resembling water. (Feather clothing is an interesting side issue we won’t enter into now, although it was possible to use feathers as fiber source for making a fabric...)

Notice now that it is no longer blue but has a golden finish (I would rather interpret as having a golden luster). Remember this, it may prove significant.

As you read here, knowledge of ‘sea wool’ or ‘silk’ goes back to the earlier centuries of first millennium China. Here is what the Mediterranean mollusk Pinna nobilis mentioned here looks like.

And here is what it looks like under water:

The fibers that anchor the mollusk to the rock are semi-translucent, with a smooth tube-like structure — the color changes depending on light, but ranges from brown to orange to golden, with other colors refracting in light. It can be treated to make it even more translucent and shiney. Carded, spun and woven, the fabric is extremely lightweight (and they say a pair of gloves made of it can fit inside a walnut shell). It is said to be difficult if not impossible to make it take dye; if so a blue color would be unlikely. Moths love it, so few medieval examples survive, and those that do had to be carefully stored. It is quite inflammable.

There is a class of icons venerated in Greek Orthodox Christianity called acheiropoieton, ‘not handmade.’ In English they are usually called “Icons not made by hand” (words that may be useful for an internet search). But unlike rang byung images in Tibet, which can take shape on their own, these Christian icons result from direct contact of the body with a cloth or other medium.

It may still be true that few people know about the existence of sea silk, but it’s become better known early in the 21th century largely due to attention paid this icon and because of a 2004 exhibit in a museum in Switzerland that gathered together the rare objects made of it from all over Europe.

So, to sum up, water silk was known in early days at both ends of the Eurasian continent, although it occurs in nature in no other place than the Mediterranean Sea. Chu-dar is known from other contexts in Tibetan literary history where it is often associated with water sheep (chu-lug) and water wool (chu-bal), just as it had been in the Mediterranean region and in early China. And, being a substance of such extreme luxury, it was connected with royalty. I am now convinced it was this very substance that was used to upholster the golden throne of the early Tibetan emperors.

The Tibetan letters fail to stack properly (I apologize)

But we are not quite finished yet. There is a closely related but distinct issue that merits a few words. In a different listing of regalia found in the very same Khepa Deyu history (p. 234), we find as the first listed item “ri-sdzi mgon-bu.”

In this other list of regalia, full of its own obstacles to interpretation, we find objects that came down from the sky with the first Tibetan emperor (Nyatri Tsenpo), most of the objects later on are magical implements of household, hunt and battlefield, tools that do their jobs automatically without the need to expend human energy. These very much resemble the wellknown magical weapons of Indian mythology, in particular the Vajra, a weapon that throws itself, hits the target, and returns to the owner's hand.

With ri-sdzi drawing a complete blank, and unsure what to do with the mgon-bu, I eventually decided that mgon-bu probably had the intended spelling mgron-bu ( མགོན་བུ་ ~ མགྲོན་བུ་). Mgron-bu (also spelled 'gron-bu) is the word for the cowrie shell, well known in ancient India as an object of exchange, a kind of currency (even after coins were introduced they continued to be called by the name karshapani, that was translated into Tibetan as mgron-bu).

I imagined that the entire expression might refer to a particular kind of cowrie shell, so I started looking around for it, and finally by searching for "riji cowrie," something popped up on the internet that astounded me:

Etched Pearl Shells were items of both bodily decoration and of exchange just as the cowrie was in early Africa and India*, and there is an emphasis in the literature on how they work as ‘power tokens’ in exchanges between men, that accumulating them leads to being regarded as Big Men. They are used not only in NW Australia where they have the name riji, but under other names with similar usages in New Guinea and further out into Polynesian island cultures. Within that region, at least, they served as currency for international exchange.

(*I hope to learn more about this, but I believe that since ancient times the Maldive Islands were the main suppliers of cowrie currency to both Africa and India, and it seems entirely possible that the designs were added to the pearl shells to make them resemble cowries, so that they, too, could be used for currency. Evidently the people who make the riji understand these to be water patterns. In his long entry on "Cowries" Paul Pelliot, in his Notes on Marco Polo, gives a lot of evidence that cowries and other shells were used as currency in China from early times, and in some areas such as Yunnan, continued to be so used until recently.)

Why were the two terms riji and cowrie juxtaposed like this? Because the riji is less familiar, and the word cowrie explains its function as currency.  The more familiar explains the less. Or it could be a conjunctive compound, "riji and cowries."

Is it possible that the landlocked Tibetan kings were passing down through the generations two symbols of their royal power that derived from far distant shellfish? Can two different ‘untranslatable’ regalia have conchological explanations? The first of the two I feel quite sure about  (given widespread knowledge of it in medieval Eurasia), and will certainly go with it, translating chu-dar literally as sea silk and adding an explanation in a footnote. The pearl shell I’m still unsure how to proceed. I may just let it go and forget about it. Is an Australian connection too difficult to accept? Will I lose credibility if I pursue it? Will tough-love reviewers say it’s idiotic? What do you think?

So, in conclusion...

There are times I think impossible passages are there to push in front of our noses the unwelcome truth that even our translations of the passably possible passages are not necessarily on the mark, either. The big and glaring failure points to smaller failures, very likely invisible ones. It is hard to discern the hope in this... and I did want to offer some hope.

My history translation experience made me more than ever a big believer in parallel texts. As I mentioned before, there are texts incorporated into the Lde'u history that may no longer exist in any other form (some smaller bits are quoted or summarized in other early histories), but the largest part of it by far is copied out from some existing text, one that simply must be consulted. Often it is the only way to find justifications for emending difficult passages. The parallel texts supply alternative readings, and these help to sharpen your mind to find the solution even when they don’t serve up solutions on a silver platter.

The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center has just released online their searchable eText repository. As of now, this is the place to go to locate unusually difficult vocabulary items in various contexts. One may also with extreme ease locate parallel passages there that can prove to be essential aides in the overall understanding of difficult passages.

Of course, experts of various sorts need to be consulted, ideally the more the better. They, too, don’t always have immediate or ultimate solutions to offer, but they do very often have ideas that turn you in a different direction where the answer may be found if you persevere. And when this still doesn’t get you anywhere, at least you have the satisfaction of reassuring yourself that since experts X, Y and Z who know so much in this field didn’t offer a conclusive solution to the problem, it’s OK for me not to be able to explain it. At the end of my first two years of translating, I was left with a list of about 200 of what I called ‘double question marks,’ and even after much consultation during the last two years (both in person and by email), I think there are about 100 of these that are to my mind still less than satisfactorily resolved.

Impossible passages demand emendations. These fix-ups might be applied to the text from a variety of angles, but they do need to be justifiable, with the alteration minimal. We try tinkering with a spelling or toy with inserting or removing a  punctuation mark. But in the end, when all our efforts fail us, we may have to admit defeat. And when this happens, it is so much more honest to present the reader with a blank _____ (perhaps in the form of a phoneticized representation of the original wording) rather than slipping in a vague and careless conjecture just to smooth over the difficulty. The text demands too much respect to allow us to take the easy way out, at least not before it drives us crazy. Translators have responsibilities in two directions, both back in time to the composer as well as forward in time to the readers. We can't give up on either one.

So the simple and not very enlightening suggestion I have is this: Translators need to do everything they possibly can to come to an understanding of difficult vocabulary items and phrases. They may have to look very far and wide for the solutions, they may be forced to leave their comfortable positions, to get out from between the covers of the book they’re  translating, and this might lead them to look in some rather unexpected directions even as far away as the distant oceans.

— Continued here —

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Listing of some significant writings on sea silk and pearl shells

John H. Appleby, The Royal Society and the Tartar Lamb, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 51, no. 1 (January 1997), pp. 23-34.

Brendan Burke, Looking for Sea-Silk in the Bronze Age Aegean. Follow the link.

Berthold Laufer, The Story of the Pinna and the Syrian Lamb, Journal of American Folk-Lore, vol. 38 (1915), pp. 103-128.  I also recommend Paul Pelliot's entry "Cotton" (the last several pages of the entry) in his Notes on Marco Polo.  You can get to it page-by-page at this website from Japan.  Try vol. 1, pp. 522-532, and note, too, the lengthy entry "Cowries" immediately following it.

There was a museum exhibition on sea silk in Basel in 2004, that brought together pieces from other parts of Europe.  Look here. A catalog was published: Felicitas Maeder, Ambros Hänggi, and Dominik Wunderlin, eds. Bisso marino: Fili d’oro dal fondo del mare / Muschelseide: Goldene Fäden vom Meeresgrund. Naturhistoriches Museum and Museum der Kulturen, Basel, (2004), bilingual Italian and German. I haven't seen it, have you?

There have been some more or less popular books written about the Manoppello icon coming out in Europe in recent years. See for some examples Das Muschelseidentuch: Auf der Suche nach dem wahren Antlitz Jesu (2005), by Paul Badde; Das Göttliche Gesicht: im Muschelseidentuch von Manoppello, also by Paul Badde; Von der Angesicht: Betrachtungen und Erfahrungen vor dem Muschelseidenbild in Manoppello (2007), by Cornelia Schrader; Der Manoppello-Code: Veronica Manipuli (2013), by von Markus van den Hövel. I see that the Paul Badde books are also available in English. For a dedicated Blogspot, see "Holy Face of Manoppello."

Just last month the icon made a personal visit to the Philippines, meaning I can’t tell you where to find it right now. So I recommend traveling to Sardinia instead of Italy right now, that is, if you dream of dropping in on the last remaining master of sea silk weaving. Look here or here. She has her own website, here. She has a small museum, too.

For a collection of scientific data on the Pinna nobilis, look here.  

For a discussion we once had back in 2009 about ocean products in Tibet with C.C., the author of Sitahu blog, look here. Although originally about a Tibetan word for shagreen, the ray skin grips used on knife or sword handles, Turkic original of the English word chagrin, it turned out to be about sea silk and other matters, and is worth revisiting. Shagreen is yet another sea product Tibetans made use of. (I’ll just mention conch shells, so as not to leave them unmentioned.)

And for pearl shell pendants:

Try searching the net and Googlebooks (or JSTOR, if you have institutional access) for riji and pearl shell. Don’t miss Cloth and Shell: Revealing the Luminous; not only aesthetically pleasing, informative and accessible, it gives inspiration to find out more.

Added Note (July 18, 2015):  

I just finished reading an article by Egami Namio, “Migration of the Cowrie-Shell Culture in East Asia,” Acta Asiatica, vol. 26 (1974), pp. 1-52.  One thing could prove especially relevant for understanding the ri-dzi 'g[r]on-bu of our text.  It is known from excavations of quite early sites in China that cowries were dug up together with other items that often included pang shells. Here pang shells are defined as freshwater bivalves.  However, I've found that  when pang shells are mentioned it can mean either one of two types of shells, one a type of native bivalve (some kind of clam or mollusk), and the other a [likely imported] pearl oyster shell.  I will have to try and find out more before using this to make conclusions about anything. Meanwhile, I ought to read this as well.