Translator Trip-Ups 1 - Script

With a sense of hope to a degree justifiable, we may think that these oddities, the things that can and do trip up even some of our best translators of Tibetan texts, are a disappearing phenomenon. After all, when they make sense they are no longer odd. The stumbling block becomes a stepping stone that helps us rather than hindering as it had been doing. I’ve divided up my examples of oddities into 3 types: [1] oddities of script or letter. [2] oddities of spelling. [3] word oddities. Along the way you may notice some odd examples that remain ambiguous which type they belong to. And beyond these three, there are still more types we will not intentionally address, like oddities of grammar, syntax, ideas... After all, an oddity is an oddity no matter which classification we place it under. Oddity is itself an odd concept. True, our recognition of oddities as such may be subjective, but we definitely know them when we see them. And oddities can be puzzlers, puzzlers that can at times prove to be even more challenging, frustrating and fun than riddles are. I hope you will see what I mean.

And please do remember this is a group-participation blog. I expect input from you if you have an idea how to make any improvements in its content. This is *not* a record of my successes. There are still some hard nuts to crack in case you want to try your hands and heads at them. And my proposed solutions may not prove to be correct, or entirely correct. Esoteric? Sure, but does the word always have to have that negative ring to it? I hope that even non-Tibetologists will keep reading, to get a sense of what translators need to do, how far they have to go. Know that it can be a struggle.  Worthwhile without a doubt, but also a struggle.

Most of my examples of script oddities come from “book cursive” and may also have to do with the abbreviation practices that are found most often in cursive manuscripts. I know that numerous Tibeto-logicians, specifically the ones who are not native speakers, spend their entire careers without ever even trying to pass “The Cursive Test.”  Thirty-five years ago while I was working with the Laufer Collection of the Chicago Field Museum when it was on loan to I.U., I was in the difficult position of needing to catalog cursive texts, most of them belonging to the Bon school. To begin with I was largely self-taught in this area, and there was a lot of trial and error. I came across some supremely discouraging examples of cursive abbreviations, with four-syllable names collapsed into one syllable for example. I thought of them as fully analogous to train wrecks. or was the train wreck me? Nobody ventured to help me with them. Even traditionally learned geshés were left scratching their heads. It was a truly disheartening situation, with sparks of light here and there but not much hope of any fuller illumination.

The classic work on cursive is one by Bacot published in 1912, and it is still useful. I made use of it myself when I was first trying to learn cursive. If you are interested, I could also recommend some modern Tibetan-language treatments that have all appeared since those bitter-sweet days I spent with the Laufer texts.

Here you see some of the most extreme examples Bacot gave in his article. I only encountered a few somewhat similar ones when I was working with the Bon texts. Quite unusual and odd beyond all doubt, you see there are pile-ups of the same vowel, in almost every case an odd number of seven or nine vowels. This reflects an Indic kāvya idea to use nothing but ‘a’s or ‘i’s or ‘o’s in a verse or line of verse. Such verses are known for example in poetic works of Tsongkhapa, who received some kāvya training as a young man. The vowel pile-ups are mostly encountered in verses for chanting, in the repeated lines or refrains. If you have the prayer memorized it jogs your memory just enough... In their contexts, they are not nearly as impenetrable as they may seem after Bacot extracted them.

Just below the lime-green splotch in the full page above and the detail coming up below, you can see an example of an extreme abbreviation practice in a Bon text from the canon.* I’m still not sure how to correctly read it, although fairly sure about the second syllable, the one that looks like a backward ‘na’ (we’ll see what that is in a moment), not so with the first.

(*This means the 192-volume one kept in Oslo that was catalogued. You can see the volume and folio numbers scrawled in the right-hand margin. I’ve shown the odd script to some of the best people in Bon and Tibetan studies, and they expressed puzzlement and nothing more.)

Here you see a close-up of the bizarre ligatures. We will leave it for now and look at similar examples.

From the same volume of the Bon Kanjur:

Here the arrow points to an example of the use of something that appears as if it were (but actually isn’t) the number 3, a 3 with an extra slash at the bottom. In the context it’s a colophon that ends in a lineage, a lineage that ends in ego.

Above is a close-up of the same, and my own transcription, that should make it clearer. I guess Tibetanists will be able to see from the context, even those who may tend to be skeptical, that the odd character we see here stands for the Tibetan first-person reference, bdag, ‘myself.’ How did this odd thing come into being?

Then after being transmitted from one generation to the next, it now [was transmitted] to me.

The solution revealed: Although Bonpos may not entirely appreciate my saying so, I believe the true origins of this sign are in the Sanskrit avagraha. In Devanagari script the avagraha looks rather like a hook or an ‘s’ with a larger, more opened curve at the bottom - ऽ. Tibetanists are most likely to encounter it in sādhana texts where it in fact is used to indicate the elision of the initial ‘a’ in aham, meaning ‘I’ or ‘myself.’

Can you read this? In actual practice, the cursive shorthand version of the avagraha can look like a simple nya as in the word for fish. But what is the backward ‘na’ doing here, any idea?

Well, here you see the answer. It would have been good to give actual manuscript examples of this phrase, but unfortunately I was unable to come up with a clear one at this moment, so this time you will have to take my word for its existence. 

Here is an example from a medical history of the reversed ‘na’. At the same time we also get a chance to see yet another common trip-up, an abbreviation for the word that means palace.

Roughly translated:  [seated] upon a silk cushioned throne made of precious substances inside
the pillarless Pangtang Palace.  (I’m planning a blog on the medical history.)

There is no Tibetan word phrong, although I wonder how many people have stumbled over it thinking it is one, flipping through the pages of their Jaeschke and Das in utter frustration.

And finally here below is an example I simply cannot understand with any assurance, so the responsibility is all yours. You can spot it in the exact center of the text (I’ve put a blue box around it in the shadow version), two syllables that make no sense to me.

I do have a guess about what the two syllables stand for, but only because of context, and not because it makes sense of the syllables. I’m tempted to read mtshams med, as in [mtshams med] pa’i las (karma with immediate consequence that comes from performing a particularly heinous crime), is the thing that could be expected here. I don’t see it, though, so unless you have something to add we had better just move on.

Here is yet another excellent oddity. Let me give a rough translation of the passage replacing the oddity with an “X.” ‘When engaged in erecting a scriptural volume, what are the X in inscribing the initial flourish (dang-thog)?’* There is no doubt that a “ya” with its own subscribed ‘ya’ is something that requires some explanation. Not to keep you in suspense:

Now that you think about it, as I hope you have, the ya + ya-btags doesn’t seem so odd after all. It just follows the pattern of the preceding sa + ya-btags and tha + ya-btags for Buddha’s Speech and Mind.** Therefore it stands for yon-tan, and means Qualities or Talents or Virtues (of the Buddha, in this case). Are you still with me? Hope so. We’re not done with oddities yet. Not by a long shot.

Please do join in the discussion by leaving a comment.

Coming up:  Odd spellings.

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Endnotes

(*The dang-thog is a kind of punctuation mark, explained in an earlier blog. It looks more-or-less like this: 

 ༄༅ 

(**Generally speaking, when used to make cursive abbreviations, the subscript ya can only take the place of a prescript or postscript ga, and there is no ga in yon-tan.*** But here we have an exception to that rule that works only because of an idea to continue the series. The abbreviation of phrin-las presents a special problem. Theoretically it could reduce to phris, but that would invite confusion with an existing word that means reduced or diminished, which is absolutely not a good way to think about Buddha Activity according to anyone I know.)

(***Although it is true enough that there is currently no ga in yon-tan, the second syllable was probably originally spelled gtan, and yon-gtan meant an abiding or always-present gift, hence a good quality or talent. The late Michael Hahn made this etymological argument. For an analogous word, note also the second syllable of nan-tan, meaning ‘persistence’... I still have a problem with this solution (if that is what it is), and that is that the subscript ya is commandeered to take the place of a ga prescript [primarily] or [secondarily] a postscript ga in the first syllable of the abbreviated form only, and anyway the first consonants of the second syllable are always simply dropped with nothing at all representing them, the only exception being the little flag in the case of tsa, tsha & dza.) 

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A further note  

This and two more blogs that will be posted before too long come from a presentation given at the translators' conference held at the University of Colorado in Boulder earlier this year. The illustrations found here were created on the basis of the slides that were shown there, although I’ve added a few new ones. I've also omitted materials not my own that may have been submitted by the co-presenter or by members of the panel.

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Appendix (October 25, 2017)

Just for the record I would like to quote from D. Martin's book Mandala Cosmogony (Wiesbaden 1994), pp. 100-101, with its attempt at a succinct explanation of Tibetan cursive abbreviation practices:

“I will give only a few comments on abbreviation.  While abbreviations are very seldom used in 'printed' (dbu-can) texts, they generally abound in 'cursive' (dbu-med) manuscripts.  As a basic principle, it may be said that the initial consonant(s) and vowel of the first syllable are pushed together with the vowel and final consonant(s) of the final syllable to form a compounded unit treated as if it were a single syllable (ending with tsheg).  Compounds of more than two syllables generally preserve the vowel mark(s) of any medial syllables.  Obversely, it may be said that the final consonant(s) of the first syllable, the consonant(s) of any medial syllables, and the initial (pre-vowel) consonant(s) of the final syllable are dropped.  Any letter ma  (མ་), but especially those occurring in post-vowel position, may be transformed into anusvāra  ཾ.  Of course, there are exceptions to these 'rules'.   Final -gs (xxགས་) is often represented by ṭa  (ཊ་).  

     Numeric symbols may be used, not only to replace corresponding number words, but also to replace portions of syllables.  See, for example, the many occasions when 4n  (༤ན་) represents bzhin (བཞིན་), the numeric symbol '4' (༤་) standing in place of the number word bzhi  (བཞི་) for the purpose of abbreviation.  Bon texts at times have some rather bizarre shorthand ligatures used in abbreviation, but these hardly occur among the source works used here.  Here we may only note the relatively more common (also employed in Chos texts) thya  (ཐྱ་) for thugs (ཐུགས་). The subscribed 'y' stands in place of the post-vowel 'g' (although in Bon texts this subscribed 'y' may also stand in place of a prefixed letter 'g' — example: སྱོལ་ for གསོལ་).  ...  ...  ...  Abbreviations are employed or not employed at the whim of the scribe.  A word may be abbreviated in one line and not abbreviated (or abbreviated somewhat differently) on the next.”

That Tibetan Bell in Armenia - Part Two

Title page from Ghevond Alishan’s book Ayrarat of 1890.

Today we will pursue those questions on Armenia’s Tibetan bell a little further by first looking at what I believe is, as of the present moment, our best available evidence on what its Tibetan inscription looks like. Then, after saying a little about the types of bells, we will go on to consider the two historical periods of contact between Armenia and Tibet that would best explain the bell being there in the first place.

Taken from the 1890 book Ayrarat. This shows what appears to be an eye-copy of the bell inscription, perhaps the only one in existence. Notice the character that looks like a number '6' or a 'g' at the end is a slightly misinterpreted version of the yig-mgo very often found at the beginning of any piece of Tibetan writing.  My point: If we imagine the inscription as entirely circling the cylinder of the bell, it would prove easy for an innocent copyist to confuse whether it belongs in the beginning or the end. (Indeed, to have a unique punctuation mark to initialize a piece of text is a thing not often seen in the languages of the world.)  I think this detail is quite telling and helps argue for it being an authentic eye copy. 

A clearer image of it.

Showing one of the uncommon but clear examples of a subscribed length-mark with the Oṃ (more on this later). This is one of those miraculously self-produced artifacts called rang-byung, one found at the holy place known as Yerpa, not too far from Lhasa, where a number of them can be seen today.

In the next blog we will go more into the epigraphical questions, so for now, just some words about the significance the shape of the bell might have for us, if we only had any clue what shape it actually does have, which we do not. We only know it was a foot and a half high (roughly a cubit, or the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger).

Already in imperial times, Tibetans borrowed the word as well as the form of the Chinese bell. Tibetan bells may have been locally casted, but the casting of large temple bells was done by Chinese artisans. And today we’re really only considering the large temple bells, and not hand-held bells,  the ones with handles used in rituals. They have very different names and are never confused. There is also a type of flat bell, with a clapper, used mainly by Bonpos and spirit mediums. It also has its own distinct name, shang (gshang), borrowed like the instrument itself, from the Persian realm. Curious fact:  One type of Tibetan bell along with its name came from China, another type along with its name came from Persia.

The Dpa’-ris and the Bsam-yas bells, showing typical shapes of Tibet’s imperial period bells.

A typical shape for a European bell is shown for comparison

Erford [Erfurt] Cathedral bell in Germany is, in a well-known volume by Athanasius Kircher, placed side-by-side with a Peking bell for comparison. The Erfurt bell was christened “Maria Gloriosa.” Weighing in at 13 tons, it was cast in the year 1497 and first rung two years later. This 17th-century illustration helps us to underline the point that European and Chinese bells have contrasting shapes.

So, there are two important kinds of information we do not have that would help us a lot in understanding the provenance of the Tibetan bell. First is, as we just showed, the shape of the bell, whether it is a European-style or Chinese-style bell. Just knowing which type it is could sway our arguments. (No need to mention just yet the possibility of metallurgical analysis.) Secondly, we need to know precisely the actual shapes of the letters for a paleographical analysis. Photographs, not just eye-copies, are needed. Later on, I’d like to say more about this. But first, a little discussion on a question of obvious relevance, What are the most likely times in history when a Tibeto-Armenian bell exchange would have taken place? 

The lectionary of Het’um. Het’um actually visited the Mongol Khan Mongke (1209-1259) in 1254. Please note the phoenixes and dragons, but especially the deer in the upper right-hand corner.

Basically there are two likely time frames: [1] The early Mongol Ilkhanid period in second half of thirteenth century, and [2] the second half of the seventeenth century, when Armenian tradesmen labored in Lhasa. These were the two historical periods when significant Tibeto-Armenian contacts are known to have taken place. Let’s start with the earlier period, with Hulegu and the Ilkhanid Dynasty that descended from him.

Between 1261 and 1265 the Mongol ruler Hulegu built a Buddhist monastery called Labnasagut in the Armenian central highlands. Hulegu could draw revenues from lands designated for that purpose (called appanages in the literature) in Tibet, and some of the letters written to him by the Tibetan abbot (who in some way or another represented his interests there) have been published only a few years ago, and some of these were translated with a Tibetan colleague Jampa Samten.  Although I have been unable to identify any particular individuals, it is sure that Tibetan monks were physically present in Armenia in those times. And it is sure from Armenian historical sources that temples with images of the Buddhas Shakyamuni and Maitreya existed there as well.

Not just any old deer.

• As a side issue, I think I can go a little further than Dickran Kouymjian, in his study of the lectionary of Het’um, and help him with his arguments. We can identify the deer depicted here as the one with antlers replaced by the lingzhi fungus of immortality (another lingzhi is held between its teeth). Of this fungus it is said that only deer can ever find them. For ordinary unprepared persons wandering in the mountain they would be invisible. I only delve into this because it seems to show that quite distant cultural elements could be produced by artists in residence in Armenia in the early days of the Mongol Empire.  

The lingzhi deer is a very specifically Chinese element, even more than the dragon and phoenix that are also represented in these tiles from around the same place and only a little later.

If I may be allowed to speculate about possibilities, the Tibetan-inscribed bell could have been (locally?) made for Labnasagut or some other neighboring Buddhist temple, and later got salvaged from the ruins and handed over to Etchmiadzin not far from the place of its original intended use. This is just an idea, just one of the questions we can ask.

Now let’s travel forward a little more than 400 years. Csoma de Körös published an 1833 article about Hyde’s 1700-published version of a Tibetan lam-yig, often translated as passport, but perhaps best understood as a letter of safe conduct, dated 1688. Turrell V. Wylie and Hugh Richardson also wrote about it; Richardson comments that it “appears to be the first example of Tibetan writing to be published in the west.” Wylie and Richardson identified the four travelers, including one named I-wang-na, or John, as Armenians.* Iwangna, although this may be difficult to recognize, has the same name as Armenian Hovhannes who stayed five years in Lhasa from 1686 to 1692, and whose trade ledger has been preserved and studied separately. Richardson says that two Armenians named John stayed in Lhasa at the same time, the John of the so-called passport and the John who kept the ledger.**

(*Hyde goes without saying, but no other European in his day could read or understand it; Hyde even says quite mistakenly that it was to be read from right to left. Truth be told, quite a few otherwise well-taught students of Tibetology still today can’t read cursive letters, let alone the official language of civil documents. A little more truth: even those with experience in these documents constantly run into difficult problems understanding them. **I’ve looked, and found no mention of a bell in the literature about the ledger. ) 

The lam-yig that Hyde published in 1700, itself containing the date 1688.

This is just to show that, after Hyde's book, bits of Tibetan writing started to appear here and there in
European sources as the 18th century wore on, leading up to the Alphabetum Tibetanum in 1762.

These Armenians came from New Julfa just outside Isfahan, in Persia. And New Julfa continued to be the center of their trade operations. So they had continuing ties not only with Armenia, but also with Persia. These ties could reasonably explain how the bell got to Armenia. Being international traders by profession they had all the right connections to be able to transport the bell. 

It may not be irrelevant to ask the question, When were the Etchmiadzin bell towers built? The main bell tower was finished in 1657 by the Catholicos Yakob, and was further decorated in 1664. Soon after, in 1682, three further bell towers were added by Catholicos Eliazar. The building of the bell towers and the activities of the Armenian traders in Tibet very closely coincided in time, yet it is possible to regard the coincidence as ‘circumstantial’ and hardly sufficient to clinch any argument. 

Well, let me say, it could conceivably turn out to be meaningful as part of a future argument not quite ready to be made. And if my experience can serve as a guide, these arguments tend to form slowly and change their shape as new evidence emerges and as old evidence is reconsidered in a new light.

• Next time, in the concluding blog, we’ll look more at the Tibetan inscription itself, and ask why this particular inscription might be found on this bell or any other for that matter.
• The continuation and conclusion is HERE.

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Some of the publications mentioned here:

Hyde — Thomas Hyde (1636-1703), Historia religionis veterum Persarum, eorumque magorum: ubi etiam nova Abrahami, & Mithræ, & Vestæ, & Manetis, &c. historia, atque angelorum officia & præfecturæ ex veterum Persarum sententia: item, perfarum annus ... Zoroastris vita, ejusque et aliorum vaticinia de Messiah è Persarum aliorumque monumentis eruuntur, primitiæ opiniones de Deo & de hominum origine referantur, originale Orientalis Sibyllæ mysterium recluditur, atque magorum Liber Sad-der, Zorastris præcepta seu religionis canones continens, è Persico traductus exhibetur: dantur veterum Persarum scripturæ & linguæ, ut hæ jam primo Europæ producantur & literato orbi postliminio reddantur, specimina: de Persiæ ejusdemque linguæ nominbus, déque hujus dialectis & à moderna differentiis strictim agitur [1700]. Find the whole book at archive.org.

Kouymjian — Dickran Kouymjian, “The Intrusion of East Asian Imagery in Thirteenth-Century Armenia: Political and Cultural Exchange along the Silk Road.” Prepublished galley of a "Chapter 6," posted at academia.edu.  

Hulegu's coins feature a hare above a lunar crescent for some
reason or another. Any idea?

Martin and Samten — D. Martin and Jampa Samten, “Letters for the Khans: Six Tibetan Epistles of Togdugpa Addressed to the Mongol Rulers Hulegu and Khubilai, as well as to the Tibetan Lama Pagpa,” contained in: Roberto Vitali, et al., eds., Trails of the Tibetan Tradition: Papers for Elliot Sperling, Amnye Machen Institute (Dharamshala 2014), pp. 297-332. Look there for references not supplied in this blog. 

Norwick — Braham Norwick, “The First Tsha-tsha Published in Europe,” contained in: B.N. Aziz & M. Kapstein, eds., Soundings in Tibetan Civilization, Manohar (New Delhi 1985), pp. 73-85.

Richardson — Hugh R. Richardson, “Reflections on a Tibetan Passport,” contained in: High Peaks, Pure Earth: Collected Writings on Tibetan History and Culture, Serindia (London 1998), pp. 482-485. This article was first published in 1984.

Wylie — Turrell V. Wylie, “Notes on Csoma de Körös’s Translation of a Tibetan Passport,” contained in:  Christopher I. Beckwith, ed., Silver on Lapis: Tibetan Literary Culture and History, The Tibet Society (Bloomington 1987), pp. 111-122.  Get it here.

On the dates of the bell towers of Holy Etchmiadzin, see “The Mysterious Whitehead.” Or for a quick reference covering the phases of construction of the cathedral, look here.

• I would like to thank both Isrun Engelhardt and Ruben Giney. Without their help via email communications of 2013-2014 I would probably never have gained access to the book of Frédéric du Bois de Montpéreux as well as the Armenian-language book by Ghevond Alishan that you see in the frontispiece. Both of these books provide key information.

“Water.” Photograph taken at D.T. Suzuki Museum in Kanazawa, April 16, 2016.