The Flood that Backfired, & the Tangut Refugees

A Tangut Tangka
Below is a donor couple, the man holds an incense burner

This is hardly the first time we’ve spoken of Tanguts. You might remember we once blogged on evidence of the Tangut ties of Padampa and his spiritual descendents.* I’m walking on air these days, since an unbelievable source for the history of Tibet and the Western Xia has suddenly popped up. This is the biography of Tishirepa by his Tangut-born disciple Repakarpo. Let me assure you it is chocked full of fascinating information about the life of a court-appointed Tibetan ritual master’s activities in Tangut Land. The proud but few experts in Tangut studies will particularly crave to know everything that is in it. Part of what makes it most fascinating, its frequent first-person narration, also creates difficulties. It’s somewhat colloquial and a challenge getting used to the cadences of the syntax, a style of Tibetan we moderns are bound to find strange.** It is further complicated by being located in a somewhat alien environment that was even then disappearing from the face of the earth, person and place names were transcribed back and forth between very different languages. Here the Tibetanists require the help of Tangutists, Mongolists and Sinologists.

(*See The Tangut Connection, and for more interesting discussion see the articles of Sun Penghao listed below. **Bear in mind the text was put together by a non-native speaker of Tibetan. Tangut and Tibetan may be distantly related, but the two languages were never going to be mutually intelligible.)

We find that Tishirepa very often tells his prophetic dreams, but immediately before and after them he also narrates the events of his day matter-of-factly, in a somewhat glib manner, without a lot of descriptions or adjectives. We can’t dismiss what he says just because we might not think dreams can be taken serious as prophecies or signs as most people did believe in the past, and many in fact still do today. We didn’t have such excellent and contemporary sources on the events in Tangut Land from the Tibetan side before, but now we have something, so I’m asking you, How would it hurt you to stop complaining about the difficulties and try to overcome them?

Today I’m just going to translate one brief paragraph. That should be enough of a taste of it to awaken somebody’s appetite to study the entire text in detail, since I’m not about to do it.

Repakarpo’s biography of Tishirepa, at page 304:  

Then on the first day of the third moon the fortress was surrounded by water, which made people anxious. In the evening of 17th day of the 7th moon prior to this I had dreamed it was surrounded by water, but then I dreamed that things turned out well.  But then in the evening of the 15th day the water supply of the fortress overflowed. Just as [the fortress] was about to be breached (?), a way was shown to stop the water, so it did not destroy the fort from within. Later that evening Tsangsoba and I together made tormas and hurled them into the water. Then on midnight of the 6th day the water spilled outward, and much of the Mongol encampment was swept away. On the 14th they made a gift of the king's own daughter and held negotiations. They went back to their own country. On the 17th the Tibetan lama teachers requested a timeout (?tshe-ka) and went each to his own monastery. I, too, went to the Gzing-gha Monastery of Ling-chu.* In those times I had one evening a dream in which the Precious Taglungthangpa was giving teachings and said, “The inhabitant of the center has a lotus ground.”

(*Ling-cu or Ling-chu has sometimes been taken as a Tibetan form of the name of the city of Liangzhou, but Sperling believes it transcribes the name of a different Tangut city, Lingzhou. For its location see this Wiki page. It is just over the river from Yinchuan, so this means Tishirepa didn't go far away.)

Here is the Tibetan text in Wylie transcription:

de nas zla ba gsum pa'i tshes gcig la mkhar chus bskor / blo ma bde bar byung / sngar zla ba bdun pa'i tshes bcu bdun gyi nub mo chus bskor ba rmis nas / de nas bde bar byung bar rmis / de nas tshes bco lnga'i nub mo mkhar gyi chu khung nang du brdol bas / chod la khad du yod pa'i dus su chu 'gog pa'i thabs bstan pas chu khog nas mkhar ma zhig / phyir de dgong mo rtsang so ba dang nged gnyis kyis / gtor ma byas nas chu la 'phangs pas / tshes drug gi nam phyed na chu phyir bo nas / hor gyi dmag ra mang po phyags / tshes bcu bzhi la rgyal po'i bu mo byin nas 'dum byas / khong rang gi yul du phyir song / tshes bcu bdun la bod kyi bla ma dge ba'i bshes gnyen rnams / tshe ka zhus nas rang rang so so'i dgon par song / nged kyang ling chu'i gzing gha dgon du song nas / de'i dus su nub cig rmi lam du rin po che stag lung thang pas / dbus pa padmo'i sa gzhi yod // ces bya ba'i chos bstan gsungs.

The mysterious words received in a dream about the lotus ground I understand to be prophetic in the sense of saying that the “center” (Central Tibet) would be the safer option. Overall, this seems to be the same as the story from Chinese language sources, but our eye-witness Tishirepa saw things differently. According to him, the city’s own water source welled up and overflowed — nothing here about the river water being diverted through Mongol dam and dike building. Yet we are left to wonder why to begin with water surrounded the city. When the water later spilled out of the city to flood the Mongol camp we are meant to understand that this was due to a torma ritual performed by the Tibetans. Admittedly there are problems in the reading of the passage that may allow it to be read differently, and bluntly stated, I have probably made mistakes. But this is the kind of material historians need to do their job, and I think they ought to go to work on it.

Tishirepa says the Mongols “went back to their own country.” This is an overly hopeful statement. I think what really happened is they retreated to higher ground to regroup and rethink strategy. The Mongols kept coming back until 1226 when they finally defeated the Tanguts. We know from their later campaigns in other parts of the world that the Mongols did not in the least appreciate it when people refused to give in to their awesome military power, and they simply could not stand the effort invested in lengthy siege warfare, so in the end they punished and made examples of the resisters by slaughtering them one and all. The only Tangut survivors fled to Tibet and Tibet's eastern borderlands. Tishirepa and his disciple Repakarpo were among them. That’s why they could tell the story of the tragic events they witnessed firsthand.

At the Tangut Royal Tombs. I believe these eerily unearthly monumental figures are protectors.
Photo by Andrew West - see this blog entry at Babelstone CC BY-SA 3.0

Read these today or tomorrow:

Wikipedia has what turns out to be a very creditable page called "Mongol Conquest of Western Xia."

“One of their first endeavors at siege warfare, the Mongols lacked the proper equipment and experience to take the city. They arrived at the city in May, but by October were still unsuccessful at breaking through. Genghis attempted to flood the capital by diverting the river and its network of irrigation canals into the city, and by January 1210 the walls of Yinchuan were nearly breached. However, the dike used to divert the river broke, and the ensuing flood wiped out the Mongol camp, forcing the Mongols to take higher ground.”

Ruth Dunnell, “Translating History from Tangut Buddhist Texts,” Asia Major, third series, vol. 22, part 1 (2009), pp. 41-78. There is quite a lot of discussion here about who the Dishi actually were. The same author has a number of articles on Tanguts that deserve attention.

H.H. Howorth, “The Northern Frontagers of China, Part VI: Hia or Tangut,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, new series vol. 15, no. 4 (October 1883), pp. 438-482, at p. 472:

“... after which the Mongols crossed the Yellow River and attacked Chung sing, the Calatia of Marco Polo, and now called Ning hia, which was the capital of the empire of Hia. Finding the city too stong, Chinghis tried to turn the waters of the river into the town; but the current burst the artificial banks which he had erected, and flooded his own camp so destructively that he was obliged to raise the siege. Thereupon he determined to gain his end by peaceful means, and sent an envoy into the city to invite the King to treat with him. To this the King agreed, and in token of his friendship he sent Chinghis his daughter to wife.”

Rob Linrothe, “Xia Renzong and the Patronage of Tangut Buddhist Art: The Stūpa and Usnīsavijayā Cult,” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies, vol. 28 (1998), pp. 91-123. This essay mostly concerns a slightly earlier period, but it does demonstrate the Vajrayāna interests of the Tangut royalty.

H. Desmond Martin, “The Mongol Wars with Hsi-hsia (1205-27),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1942), pp. 195-228, with maps. It has this to say, on p. 201, about the flooding incident of 1210, entirely based on Chinese language sources:

“The enemy at his gates, Li An-chuan took personal command and directed the defence with such energy that by the end of October the Mongols had not gained a single foothold on the walls. But there then occurred a catastrophe that nearly brought the capital to its knees. Seeing that the autumnal rains had swollen the Huang Ho, Chinghiz Khan ordered the construction of a great dyke to turn the river into the city, and the waters entering Chung-hsing, took a fearful toll of life and property. 

“Faced with this predicament, Li An-ch'uan sent in November to beg the Chin for help. Many Chin ministers and high officers urged that troops be dispatched to break the leaguer, for they pointed out that the conquest of Hsi Hsia would certainly be followed by an attack upon their empire. But the new emperor Yüng-chi (1209 1213) regarded both contestants as enemies and turned a deaf ear to the Tangut cry for succour. The siege dragged on until January, 1210, when the walls of the city were on the point of collapse. Then suddenly the pent up waters of the river burst their outer dykes, and spreading over the surrounding plain, forced the Mongols to retire to higher ground.”

Adrienne Mayor, “Rivers as Weapons in Ancient War.” Learn about some historical instances of weaponized water here at “Wonders and Marvels.”

Mi-nyag Ras-pa-dkar-po (1198-1262), Bla ma rin po che 'gro ba'i mgon po ti shri ras pa'i rnam par thar pa, contained in the series entitled Lo paṇ rnam thar phyogs bsgrigs, Krung-go'i Shes-rig Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 2018), vol. 7, pp. 255-365. This is the biography of Tishirepa (1164-1236). Note that this volume 7 has its own distinct cover title: Lam yig phyogs bsgrigs.

Kirill Solonin, “Local Literatures: Tangut/Xixia,” Brill Encyclopedia of Buddhism, vol. 1, pp. 844-859. Especially valuable as a survey of surviving writings in Tangut including translations from other languages, and for its bibliography. Other works of the same author should have been listed here, although they haven’t been. And if there is any chance you might be contemplating learning Tangut language, try this link. And don’t be too discouraged, because as you will learn when you watch it, “Compared to Tibetan, Tangut is relatively easy.”  "A very simple language in fact." Well, I can never tell when he’s not joking, and this might not be an example.

Elliot Sperling, “Further Remarks Apropos of the 'Ba'-rom-pa and the Tanguts,” Acta Orientalia Hungarica, vol. 57, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1-26. I believe this article is the only one to take notice of the Tibetan-language flooding account (at pp. 17-20). Of course this mid-15th century history translated by Elliot, the Lho rong chos 'byung, even if it did made direct use of our 13th-century biography, is nonetheless a secondary source compared to the Repakarpo. I only wish Elliot could still be around to hear the news , he would have been so excited.  Although the Lho rong chos 'byung preserves the first-person nature of the account, it abbreviates and leaves out quite a lot, as you can see in Elliot's translation of it:

“...I had a dream that the Xia citadel was surrounded by Mongols. In the first month of the Horse Year [January 17-February 25, 1210] the Mongols surrounded the Xia citadel. Shri Phug-pa, Rtsang-po-pa and I, we three, took steps to repulse the troops. On the 1st day of the third month [March 27, 1210] the citadel was surrounded by water. We did a gtor-ma and on the 6th [April 1, 1210] at midnight the water fell back and many Mongol troops were swept away. On the 14th [April 9, 1210], using the king's daughter, peace was made...”

— Elliot besides his brilliance dealing with languages both old and new had a famously acute sense of humor, and I'm sure he felt no need to point out that the backwash took place on April Fools Day.

Elliot Sperling, “Rtsa-mi Lo-tsâ-ba Sangs-rgyas Grags-pa and the Tangut Background to Early Mongol-Tibetan Relations,” contained in: Per Kvaerne, ed., Tibetan Studies, The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture (Oslo 1994), pp. 801-825.

Elliot Sperling, “The Szechwan-Tibet Frontier in the Fifteenth Century,” Ming Studies, no. 26 (Fall 1988) 37-55. This is important for evidence of Tangut migration and eventual integration into the Tibetan population.  In Tibetan, the name for both the original Tanguts and their later descendants is Mi-nyag (མི་ཉག).

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, “The Tangut Royal Tombs near Yinchuan,” Muqarnas, vol. 10 (1993), pp. 369-381.

Shen Weirong, “A Preliminary Investigation into the Tangut Background of the Mongol Adoption of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism,” contained in: Orna Almogi, ed., Contributions to Tibetan Buddhist Literature, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies (Halle 2008), pp. 315-350.  This article emphasizes significant Sakya connections with the Tangut court. Our source is all about the Kagyü connections, and during the time of Tishirepa the awareness of different subschools of the Kagyü was only just getting started. His biography has important information about a struggle between the Taglung and Drikung sub-schools that started in around 1209 in an argument about books that escalated. After his return to Tibet from Tangut land Tishirepa tried to mediate peace between the two sides.

Sun Penghao, “Four Texts Related to Pha dam pa sangs rgyas in the Chinese Translation of the Tangut Kingdom of Xia,” contained in: Shen Weirong, ed., History through Textual Criticism (Beijing 2012), pp. 85-97.

Sun Penghao, “Pha-dam-pa Sangs-rgyas in Tangut Xia: Notes on Khara-khoto Chinese Manuscript TK329,” contained in: Tsuguhito Takeuchi, et al., eds., Current Issues and Progress in Tibetan Studies, Research Institute of Foreign Studies (Kobe 2013), pp. 505-521.

Andrew West, Western Xia Tombs Revisited. Totally worth visiting.

Assignment: Go study Tangut art at the site of the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.  Notice especially this one that is identified as a Dishi or Guoshi.

It could just be me, but I’ve been there and found it so awesomely hideous it had best be dismantled. You’ll have to go to the link if you want to see it since I won’t put any photo of it here on my blog: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6079991/Genghis-Khan-statue-Mongolia-sees-tourists-anniversary-death-800-years-ago.html#i-f5a6c44417858606

§  §  §

A note on ethnonyms:  Tibetans always call the Tangut country and nation and language by the name Mi-nyag (spelling variant: Me-nyag). The Tanguts called themselves something like "Mi-nia," and their state the "Great Xia" (Chinese sources call them Xixia, or Western Xia, in an effort to disambiguate which Xia is meant). This "Xia" (once upon a time not so long ago transcribed as "Hsia") is represented in Tibetan sources as 'Ga' or Gha (འགའ་ or གྷ་), and later on as Sga and sometimes Rga (སྒ་ and རྒ་). There were a number of famous persons in later Tibetan history who belonged to this clan called Sga, including teachers of both Sakya and Bön schools, and I believe they are all supposed to be descendants of Tangut families who escaped the Mongols and emigrated to Tibet.  I'm sure you know of it, but I won’t go into the problem of historical [mis]usages of the ethnonym "Tangut," a category where even Tibetans have sometimes found themselves placed.

—  Oh, and I think the right name of the other Dishi (in the present text it is sometimes spelled De-zhi, and that word is the same as the Ti-shi or Ti-shri in Tishirepa; the "repa" means cotton-clad, just like in Milarepa), or Imperial Preceptor, had the name Tsangsoba, and not Tsangpopa. The 'p' and 's' are close enough to be confused in Tibetan cursive script. To my mind, he was likely from a place called Tsangso (Gtsang-so) in La-stod region rather than from the Tsangpo (Gtsang-po) River. 

I'm not too sure, but this is supposed to be a wall painting of an imperial preceptor
of the Tanguts depicted in Yulin Cave no. 29. 
If there were five points in his hat, I'd say it could be Tishirepa.

* * *

This blog I solemnly dedicate to the memory of Elliot Sperling (1951-2017). There is so much more he was meant to do in this world.

Quingentenary of the Ganden Podrang Nearly Passes Unobserved

Ganden Phodang, the building, as it exists today at Drepung Monastery in Lhasa

It’s one of those mysteries in the history of history making why some major events get memorialized over the course of time with centennial observances, while others are overlooked.* A case in point: Even though the year 2018 is probably already over as you read this, it would be a pity if 2019 arrived before anyone thought to recall a significant development in Tibetan history that occurred in 1518, just 500 years ago. You heard me right, but allow me to explain.

(*To be sure, the idea of a centennial never occurred in earlier centuries in Tibet, where time was marked not by 100-year, but by 60-year cycles. But we’re not back there right now, we’re in the 21st century world, where things are seen a little different by us all.)

Well, with the deadline rapidly approaching, I’ll squeeze in a few words about why the restoration to the Gelugpa monasteries of a major annual festival and the presentation of a ‘palace’ to the Second Dalai Lama ought to be recalled half a millennium later. In a true sense, the past hasn’t even really passed, since the results of those events carry on in what is done and thought today, even given the twists and turns that occurred in the interval. I’m told dull-minded people do exist, and they along with certain politicians are the ones who when it suits them assert that the past counts for nothing for us in the present. I’d say the supposed irrelevance of history is just an artefact of our lack of attention to it, or an excuse for a more general apathy or antipathy.

The Zhang dictionary describes the events very succinctly:

"[In 1519] the Victor Gendun Gyatso was head of the assembly of the Mönlam.  This was the year the Great Mönlam was reinstituted in accordance with the earlier traditions of Sera, Drepung and Ganden."   

༼ rgyal ba dge 'dun rgya mtshos smon lam gyi tshogs dbu mdzad / 'di lo nas se 'bras dga' gsum slar yang sngar rgyun ltar smon lam chen mo tshugs ༽ 

"The Nedong ruler Tashi Dragpa offered the Blue Stone House (Rdo-khang Sngon-mo) of Drepung Monastery to the Victor Gendun Gyatso, and its name was changed to Ganden Podrang."   

༼ sne gdong mi dbang bkra shis grags pas 'bras spungs rdo khang sngon mo rgyal ba dge 'dun rgya mtshor phul ming dga' ldan pho brang du bsgyur ༽

From 1498 up to and including the year 1517, Gelugpa monks were not allowed to participate in the annual observances that follow the Tibetan New Year, even though this “Great Prayer Festival”* had been instituted by none other than Tsongkhapa himself in 1409 CE, the same year he founded Ganden Monastery. At first the school was called Gandenpa, after the name of the monastery. This -pa construction in Tibetan would have us understand that Gandenpa just means [an] inhabitant[s] of Ganden. I believe the Ganden in Ganden Phodrang, too, is meant as a reference to Ganden Monastery, even if not entirely sure of it.**  

(*Mönlam isn’t well served by the translation prayer since that might imply a petitionary type of prayer. It’s more like a prayer of hope, an aspiration for a distant but achievable goal of the most positive kind, particularly Complete Enlightenment.) (**Ganden is also the Tibetan translation of Sanskrit Tuṣita, a paradise for the Future Buddha. I’d like to go into this another time, but the prominent New England professors Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp and Georges Dreyfus have drawn some interesting conclusions about the emergence of the name and early institution of the Gelugpa School that go against the grain of the usual conceptions. It may be needful to say that institutions scarcely ever sprout up fully grown at the fiat of a single Great Person with a singularity of purpose, but that’s how institutions often come to portray themselves later on, perhaps a result of efforts to promote unity within their ranks.)

The Victor Gendun Gyatso (1476-1542) would today be called  the Second Dalai Lama even though the title “Dalai Lama” was first awarded in the year 1578 CE, thirty-six years after His death.

So, to keep things short since I’m writing against the clock: I always tell people I’m stuck in the 12th century. There is truth in this, I freely admit. It could explain why I’ve found myself clueless to fathom the shock on people’s faces when you tell them that the Gelugpa school and more particularly the Dalai Lamas haven’t always ruled Tibet from the beginning of time.* 

(*Someone should also inform them of a much broader truth, which is that nothing in the present world was or is inevitable, that there have been forces at work in the past that helped bring about, and other forces that very well could have prevented, today’s institutions. We live, as we always have lived, in a permanent state of precariousness.)

Those shocked faces reveal an assumption, that Tibet remained always the way it was at the verge of the 1950’s. For them it was a culture wedded to immutability from time immemorial, so stuck in place as to be practically lifeless. But pay attention while I say that rule by the Ganden Podrang, the same name that was given to a building five centuries ago and the name that would eventually be found on Tibet-minted coins and currency notes, only effectively began in 1642, when the Fifth Dalai Lama rose to power with the indispensable backing of Mongolian patrons. 

I would say that I hate to disillusion people, but I neither love nor hate it. Buddhism is always there poised and ready to raise in us the consciousness that whatever gets put together through combinations of conditions is bound to come apart eventually. For readers of Tibetan, I can just remind you, འདུས་བྱས་ཐམས་ཅད་མི་རྟག་པའོ།། Eternity never happens. Contingencies happen.

Who could be better to quote than His Holiness the present Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who has often in recent years suggested, to the shock and dismay of many of his closest followers and admirers, that He may be the last Dalai Lama, that it depends on how the institution continues to serve the Tibetan people. But then we have to underline how He emphasized on the same occasion that Tibetan Buddhism will in any case continue. I wanted to quote His words directly, but every single news story from the early-to-mid 2010’s seems to paraphrase and mis-hear as much as it quotes, so I’m waiting on a more authoritative source, if you could be so kind as to suggest one.

I know a lot of people haven’t been keeping up with the news, thinking the Dalai Lama still rules just as before. In His 2015 CNN interview by Amanpour, He said, as transcribed by myself:

“In 2011 I totally retired from political responsibility, not only myself retired but also [the] four-century-old tradition [of the] Dalai Lama institution, particularly being head of both spiritual and temporal. That formally, voluntarily, happily ended.”

Clearly, important changes have already taken place. As far as the future roles of the Dalai Lamas are concerned, just as in the past, there are forces at work pushing this way and that. How things will play out in the end is anybody’s guess. No historian can know the outcome in advance, and it’s first and foremost the fools and political prophets who claim to have that kind of knowledge.

Meanwhile, I think we should all join the Tibetan community around the world on the last day of 2018 by celebrating the long life of His Holiness. Every single Tibetan I’ve met inside or outside Tibet thinks the world of Him. And Gallup released a poll of Americans showing His Holiness still ranking highly—one of the top ten—among the most admired men. There are precious few humans with the ability to engage and inspire humanity in humans as He does. So if it is up to me we will end the old year and open the new with hopes for the best of all possible futures for Him and for all us sentient beings in the years ahead. That’s my Mönlam.

§   §   §

Read when and if you like:

There is a fairly good Wikipedia article on the Ganden Podrang that I recommend for those who feel need of an introduction to the subject.

Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetans, Blackwell Publishing (Oxford 2006), pp. 130-131.

Vincent Lemire, Jerusalem 1900: The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities, University of Chicago Press (Chicago 2018), particularly the section entitled “The Causes of Forgetting,” on pp. 7-10. Putting the many differences aside, it may be worthwhile to ponder why the Ottoman Empire, which lasted through roughly the same centuries as the Ganden Podrang, is also drably painted as dreadfully stagnant and unproductive. I see it as a failure of the historical imagination, which cannot find the life in these periods because of cultural and ideological presuppositions and biases.* Our lack of interest does not translate into the absence of events.

(*And, although I don’t intend to go into it right now, in both the Ottoman and Ganden Podrang cases, [1] the difficulty of access to sources due to limitations placed on their access or [2] our difficulties in reading and interpreting them.)

Pankaj Mishra, “The Last Dalai Lama?” The New York Times (December 1, 2015). You might not be able to procure it without a digital subscription to the newspaper, but go ahead and try. I suggest taking time to read the whole long essay, since it does have an important message about the variety of points of view available among exiles in India.

Glenn H. Mullin, The Second Dalai Lama: His Life and Teachings, Snow Lion (Ithaca 2005). Previously published under the interesting title Mystical Verses of a Mad Dalai Lama. There is a section on the reestablishment of the Great Prayer Festival on pp. 94-98.  Besides this work by G.M. I know of only a couple of studies and translations connected to the Second Dalai Lama, which is a pity. He wrote about a lot of fascinating subjects in fields of poetics, alchemy, philosophy, Buddhism and the Vajra Vehicle.

Hugh Richardson,  Ceremonies of the Lhasa Year, Serindia (London 1993), pp. 11-59. This is still by far the best account of the events in Lhasa during the first month of the Tibetan-style year, which include among other things the observance of the Great Prayer. It is illustrated with black-and-white photographs.

Tsepon Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa, One Hundred Thousand Moons: An Advanced Political History of Tibet, translated by Derek F. Maher, Brill (Leiden 2010), vol. 1, pp. 269, 295. An excerpt follows: 

“In 1518, the Nedong King Tashi Drakpa offered his home at Drepung Monastery to the second Dalai Lama Gendün Gyatso. Renamed Ganden Podrang, it served as a sort of monastic estate of the Dalai Lamas. When the Fifth Dalai Lama came to political power in 1642, he named his government after this institution.”

Turrell V. Wylie, “Monastic Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Tibet,” contained in: Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer, The Tibetan History Reader, Columbia University Press (New York 2013), pp. 266-277, especially p. 271.

Zhang Yisun (1893-1983), et al., Bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo, Mi rigs Dpe skrun khang (Beijing 1985),  in the chronological table in the back of its third and final volume. This has been reprinted several times, in 3, 2 or just one volume. By now every serious student of Tibetan knows and uses it in one form or another. If you like or need an introduction to this and other important lexical resources, look at this earlier blog.

§ § §

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  

—Wm. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.

And I want to add, quoting from who knows who:  

A little more knowledge is always a great thing.

A Tibetan banknote. The legend in the two yellow fields can be translated, “100-Srang currency note of the heavens-appointed Ganden Podrang, victorious over all directions, in both religious and political affairs.” From its serial number we may know that it was printed in around 1958. I apologize that the photograph is not reproduced here in the correct scale or dimensions. The printed field ought to measure 18.25 by 11.85 centimeters.

NEW YEAR postscript:

Have a look at the biography of the Second Dalai Lama by Miranda Adams, posted at The Treasury of Lives website ten years ago. The site has grown impressively in depth and coverage in recent years, and it relies on donations. That was a subtle hint.

Oh, and it came to my attention, since I was paying attention, that Martin A. Mills has written an essay entitled “The Last Gift of the God-King: Narrating the Dalai Lama’s Resignation,” for a new book entitled Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage, edited by Shelly Bhoil and Enrique Galvan-Alvarez, and published by Lexington Books (Lanham 2018?). It has several quotes from His Holiness I wish I had used, especially in this one, dated March 19, 2011, that you can find at the link he supplied. I think also well done and relevant is an article by Emmi Okada, “Constructing the Secular: The Changing Relationship between Religion and Politics in the Tibetan Exile Community,” Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, vol. 36, no. 1 (May 2016), pp. 80-95, perhaps available online (try here). There are other interesting things to read, just do a Schmoogle search for “Dalai Lama retirement.”

For the Tibeto-logically obsessed:  In case you tried getting to Tibetan Vocabulary when it wasn't entirely there, you can try again, this time with success. Click here to find the Tibetan Vocabulary.  The URL remains unchanged, but click on the links called "Continuation" and "Bibliographical Key" in order to see all three parts of it.

Tibetan Vocabulary or TibVocab

I must apologize. I know according to my own rules I am supposed to post something here every month or so. Ease up on me though. It’s not as if I signed a binding contract. I reckon myself free apart from the dictates of my own conscience. That’s the beauty of retirement. It gives a fellow lots of time to do all that work he’s been putting off for years. I know, I haven’t finished putting up all of TPNI yet, and already I’m starting to put up something else. 

I suppose my problem is that all of a sudden I discovered that free websites are now available that no longer limit the size of ordinary text files. That means the sky is the limit, I suppose. In actual practice what I get are “error” messages every time I try to add another big piece of text. Still, after some initial confusion and struggles against the machine, it seems to work just fine.

It’s true that a version of “TibVocab” has been available to the world for years now at THLIB, as part of their much-used “Tibetan-English Translation Tool,”  I say much-used because 21st-century students of Tibetan written language can scarcely move without it. But there is one particular inadequacy in the way TibVocab is presented there. I had intended to produce a word index, with the references supplied, and often with citations from the literature, especially in case of problematic terms that still haven’t been defined adequately. I do appreciate all the serious work that went into getting it up there, but in the dictionary tool there is no place to put a key to bibliographical references, so it simply disappeared. One large part of TibVocab's reason for existence vanished into thin air.

One more thing, TibVocab has expanded during the years that passed since it segued into the Dictionary Tool. That means when you go to the link I will supply presently, you will have a significantly better chance of finding that word you’re  looking for.

For more about what TibVocab is and isn’t you can read the introduction at the website itself. I can’t promise anything for tomorrow, but as of today, I have only gotten started with the initial letter KA. I know that in coming days I’ll be testing the limits of what ‘full capacity’ can mean in a free website, but I’ve got the time. And I’m developing the patience.

So if you like, go visit it now by clicking with all your might on THIS LINK, or just double-click on the banner you see up above at the very top of this blog entry. Once you get there, feel free to make a bookmark.

A free tip:  If you would like to limit your search to main entries, as you might, just add a bullet [•] immediately before the word you would like to find.

If you do on an odd chance come across a very unusual word such as mu-yad (or dmu-yad) I recommend that you look in TibVocab, of course, but I’m not saying you should stop there. Go ahead and do a word search in TBRC's repository of scanned Tibetan texts.* It immediately locates any Tibetan word within a corpus of over a million pages of text. You aren’t all that likely to find a definition using this method, but what you will find are a number of usages in various contexts that could help a lot in your efforts to divine meanings.**

*Come to think of it mu-yad wasn't such a good choice for an example after all.  Having gone to TBRC I see that only one result pops up, and not a very illuminating one at that. Since Tibetans didn't often have reason to speak of deserts, I'd say try searching for mya-ngam (with the final 'm') instead. And after the experiment do read Joanna Bialek's “The Tibetan Fiery Way to Nirvana: Reflections on Old Tibetan mya ngan,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny, vol. 70, no. 2 (2017), pp. 60-96. Or use a TBRC search to try and figure out which celestial display is indicated by dgu-tshigs or dgu-tshigs skya-mo. What does star arrow (skar-mda') mean? You got the idea even before I got to telling about it.

**I seldom make appeals for anything at Tibetologic, but seeing that many of us are in the middle of the holiday season, do think about making a donation to TBRC just because they are doing the work of gods and would make excellent use of the offerings. Without TBRC 21st-century Tibetologicians cannot thrive, let alone be of good cheer.

§   §   §

Progress (?):

December 22, 2018:  All my struggles with the letter tsha trying to get it up there have failed repeatedly. It seems my idea that limitless space was available for single documents wasn't correct. Wondering if I should open a new free website or what? Well, 2/3rds of it is up there. I may have to come up with some other solution. Meanwhile, for people in the Christmas world, Merry Christmas and/or happy holiday of your choice. In any case be happy.


Success!

January 5, 2019:  At last, success! Now, even though the document is divided into two parts (with the bibliography as a 3rd part), they have been linked almost seamlessly. Starting at this address (the very same link supplied before) I think anyone can figure out what's going on:

https://sites.google.com/view/tibvocab/home

And feel free to download (or cut-and-paste) the content to your own laptop, where you can find out how to combine the three files into one if you like. That way you won't be forced to rely on unstable internet connections. Forever free!

On the Dhole, the Wild Dog Dhole

A dhole, or more specifically Cuon alpinus dukhunensis

In the bus on my way back from my Rheumatology appointment, I wanted to withdraw my attention from the bothersome crowd, so I drew from my knapsack the reading material I’d taken with me for the waiting room. It was written by an acquaintance from long ago, and its title, implying some ambiguity or confusion between the classes of dogs and cats, intrigued me.

Of course the Tibetan side of things was what most interested me, nothing new there. Ruth Meserve, my muse, makes use of two lexicons of the sort that have Tibetan components entered into a multilingual setting. One is the five-language dictionary, called therefore the Pentaglot, that dates from 1771-1794, while the other is Jampel Dorjé’s Materia Medica. Well known to the world at least since Lokesh Chandra published it in Delhi way back in 1971, its woodcut illustrations of plants and animals, among them the Abominable Snowman, were its main attractions for the larger body of humans unready to get serious and deal with the language problems. 

For the translations from Jampel Dorjé’s book, the author relied on a Tibetanist, Frederica Venturi (footnote 45 on p. 147). In observance of old-school scholarly noblesse oblige, the author accepts all errors as her own responsibility. I won’t bore anybody with my quibbles about little inaccuracies. That would be unkind or boarish for no reason of any importance, so I’ll just give translations of my own. Here they are.

Jampel Dorjé, p. 237c:  The animal called gung.

The caracal (gung).  It is called Dog of the Forest. Like a tiger, but murkier colored, dark with black striations. Its body is about the size of a full-grown fox. The Crystal Orb (Shel-sgong) says:  

The types of flesh that eliminate illnesses caused by gdon possession are these: wild man [abominable snowman], lion, tiger, leopard, bear, wild goat, wild boar, sambar deer (lit., snow deer), bamboo [dwelling] tiger, lynx, lammergeier, elephant, caracal, hoopoe, crow and raven.

Jampel Dorjé, p. 237c:  The animal called 'phar-ba

The ’phar-ba. It is called Small Red Mountain Dog, as well as Lives on Game Animals. It bears resemblance to a domesticated cat (byi-la), but is larger, about the size of a fox, and is colored a murky red. The tail of one linking with another, they climb trees.* These both** are, in the [Medical] Tantras, taught to belong to the class of carnivores.***

(*This is my reading of the statement, although I do not believe prehensile tails are a feature of any kind of dog or cat for that matter. It is as if part of a description of the spider monkey got misplaced here. And if this is a dhole, the spots do not at all belong in its woodcut depiction.)

(**I guess this means the 'phar-ba and the animal mentioned just before it, the leopard [gzig].)

(***I guess this intends the section on flesh-derived medicinals in the Explanatory Tantra at the end of its 20th chapter, although I checked and didn’t find that leopard and 'phar-ba are mentioned in the same context.)

SO MANY THANKS to Ruth Meserve and Frederica Venturi for forcing me to think more about dholes. Not only myself, but everyone else on the planet should be thinking more about these disappearing wild creatures while we have the chance.*

(*Take note of this alarming evidence of human harm to the biosphere in the form of massive insect loss that goes together with declining populations of the creatures who feed off of them. See also this report from the World Wildlife Fund on just how quickly the free-ranging animals are disappearing. It’s called “Living Planet Report 2018: Aiming Higher.”)

I confess to being inspired by another message that issues out of Meserve’s essay. It caught me off guard, the idea that animal names can be shifted around because of naming taboos. I haven’t heard about this particular kind of naming taboo in Tibetan culture, but I guess it only makes sense that the most feared animal would be the one whose name would be avoided. Could this be invoked to explain why Padampa Sangyé always used the word for camel to name the bear?  I mean, literal dictionary-slaves would inevitably translate his words kind of like, “Camels crave honey,” when I think they do not, even if they can be made to eat it. Well, they are said to love air.

244a: Rnga-mong.  Camel.  Air Lover (rlung dga') is one of its epithets here.
Another is Wheel Chinned ('khor-lo'i mgrin-can).

All about the books:

Jampel Dorjé ('Jam-dpal-rdo-rje), Gso-byed Bdud-rtsi'i 'Khrul-med Ngos-'dzin Bzo-rig Me-long-du Rnam-par Shar-ba Mdzes-mtshar Mig-rgyan, contained in:  Lokesh Chandra, ed., An Illustrated Tibeto-Mongolian Materia Medica of Ayurveda of 'Jam-dpal-rdo-rje of Mongolia, with a foreword by E.Gene Smith, International Academy of Indian Culture (New Delhi 1971), pp. 1-347. I put up another entry  from this text for the hare or rabbit in an old blog of about 7 years back called Ownerless Donkey. In the colophon the author calls himself a layperson of the Naiman clan who later on after his arrival in Tibet made revisions to his text. We can call this a Mongolian work of Tibetan literature, as it was originally composed in Tibetan in Mongolia by a Mongolian. In the early days I had no idea who the author was, and only slowly, with help from a friend Vladimir Uspensky, could I begin to get an idea about who he was.

Jampel Dorjé (’Jam-dpal-rdo-rje) aka Don-grub-rgyal-mtshan, aka Tho-yon Ye-shes-don-grub-bstan-pa’i-rgyal-mtshan lived from 1792 to 1855. I’ve never seen the woodblock print of his entire collected works although a set is registered in the Drepung Catalog, p. 2063, and I’ve noticed a listing of the titles it contains in another catalog. And I’ve noticed a record of teachings received as well as a biography that ought to be available in Rome. One valuable contribution to Tibetan literary history is his anthology of early Kadampa works, or selections from them, many still not made available to us in any other form.

Mdo Dbus Mtho-sgang-gi Sman-ris Gsal-ba’i Me-long, Mtsho-sngon Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Xining 2009). In my experience copies were very difficult to obtain, but I finally succeeded. Volume 3 is the one about animals. Almost entirely in Tibetan language, it does supply Chinese names for the animals. This is a modern work, most of the time supplying systematic descriptions based on direct observation, it seems. However, the illustrations of animals are largely unclear, and not up to any scientific standards. It is a shame there is no entry for the gung, but the ’phar-ba entry is there, on pp. 55-56. To give a rough translation of the descriptive parts:  

“Its bodily shape resembles the dog. It is about a meter in length. Its tail is slightly bulging, its tip a murky dark color. The entirety of its body is the color of kham-ser, and on its back is kham-nag, its belly hairs lightish yellow. The fur on its four paws and on its back resemble each other. (This is written after inspecting an actual specimen in the district north of the Kokonor.)”

It seems to me that this description matches photos and descriptions of the dhole very nicely. The color terms here are tricky to translate, but perhaps the English word tawny works well enough, with kham-ser leaning more toward the yellowish tawny, and kham-nag toward the darker kind. I have another book on Tibetan wildlife that has only Chinese and English. I picked up my copy a long time ago at a bookstore inside the entrance to the Norbu Lingka. The English title is An Instant Guide to Rare Wildlife of Tibet. On p. 11 it has a photo of Cuon alpinus, and even though it is labelled as "Jackal (Wild Red Dog),” it absolutely resembles the dhole. 

Ruth I. Meserve, “Wild Dogs or Wild Cats? Puzzles in Lexical Sources and Medical Texts from China, Tibet and Mongolia,” Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, vol. 23 (2017), pp. 137-165.

Skad Lnga Shan-sbyar-gyi Manydzu'i Skad Gsal-ba'i Me-long, Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang (Beijing 1957), in 3 volumes.  Called the Pentaglot, this is a five-language dictionary published on the basis of a manuscript version kept in the “Pho-brang Rnying-pa'i Nor-rdzas Bshams-ston-khang.” Manchu, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Chinese are the five languages.

Joel Sartore, photographer for the National Geographic, takes amazing photos of rare animals he is convinced are unlikely to be with us much longer, and one of them is of a zoo-kept dhole that you can see HERE. His home page is here. You will probably find yourself unable to not love these portraits of extraordinary beasts.

After Mdo Dbus Mtho-sgang-gi Sman-ris Gsal-ba'i Me-long, 
a drawing of a dhole ('phar-ba)

(*) (*) (*) (*) (*)

Add-on (November 11, 2018):

I finally got ahold of a classic article by the well-known linguist and Indologist M.B. Emeneau entitled “Taboos on Animal Names.” It was published in the journal called Language, vol. 24, no. 1 (January 1948), pp. 56-63, with a brief appendix added on in no. 2 (April 1948), pp. 180-181. As a native son of the southern parts of India, likely the area of Andhra and so likely a Telugu speaker, the elderly Padampa could have been observing a word-avoidance practice from his childhood days. Of course, bears are not prevalent in south India, but we do find south Indians not naming larger carnivores such as tigers, particularly in the morning hours. They would call the tiger by the name of the dog or the jackal, and a number of examples for this are supplied. So I feel a little more emboldened to believe that Padampa knew he was avoiding pronouncing the name of the bear when he called it camel...  Emeneau didn't think the practice was just a hunter's superstition, but that it had wider religious significance.

Oh well, but then I find this article on Bear lore telling us that avoidance of the bear word is universal (by which I guess it means all over Eurasia):  

“Features that appear universally according to Vasil'ev (1948) and Paproth (1976) are: 1. prohibitions of direct reference to Bear by the general proper names, 2. use of circumlocutions in referring to or addressing the bear.” 

Source:  Page 346 in Lydia T. Black, “Bear in Human Imagination and in Ritual,” Ursus, vol. 19 (September 1998), pp. 343-347.

+  +  +

Meanwhile, I see that yet another bit of Jampel Dorjé's materia medica, the entry on the otter (ཆུ་སྲམ་), has appeared in an article that surfaced recently. Equipped with an institutional subscription, as you must be, just go here, and up on your screen ought to appear Lobsang Yongdan’s “Precious Skin: The Rise and Fall of the Otter Fur Trade in Tibet.”