Giuseppe’s Jeep

A screen shot from the Swat Museum’s virtual tour website

Now that the Crown Virus lockdown seems doomed to be forever, we need to find more productive ways of wasting our time indoors. Not wasting it might mean doing what a lot of the world’s museums want us to do, which is to visit them virtually, online. It may be because their employees have nothing else to do but primp up their online incarnations. If you don’t believe me just go here, and get lost in a universe of awesome art. But if you are like me you know that big metropolitan museums are not always the best, and even when they are they can be simply overwhelming, not to mention exhausting. So today I’d like to invite you to take a tour in a smaller place without much-too-much space, and with collections especially interesting to us.

By now every Tibeto-logic reader has heard the news that the Swat Valley in modern-day Pakistan is the homeland of Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, known to Tibetans as O-rgyan or U-rgyan. If your memory is dim, as mine tends to be, try to recall that old blog, “Swat’s Good Feng Shui.”  Many know that a 13th-century Tibetan actually visited the place, and for this was rewarded with the name O-rgyan-pa.  But  besides yourself of course, few are aware that a study of O-rgyan-pa’s life was done by Giuseppe Tucci back in the ’40s already, and even fewer that Tucci involved himself in the archaeological excavations in the Swat Valley itself, excavations that continued over many decades. But I can hardly imagine how miniscule the number who could conceivably be aware that Tucci’s jeep has been made into a museum display in the newly furnished Swat Museum. Well, that’s why I’m putting out this brief blog-ette, to let everyone in on this amazing fact. That would probably be the first ever Tibetologist’s motor vehicle valued highly enough to be placed on display. Not that it has a price tag on it, it was a gift from Italy.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Tucci (1894-1985) was a man who packed a pistol wherever he went, it’s true. But that was common in those days in all parts of Central Asia, not just in Tibet. And he received financing for his expeditions from Fascist labor organizations, something we might tend to forget when we witness the poetic paeans to transcendence wresting control over his prose writings that tend at times to soar just a little too high. I’m not here to praise or condemn Tucci, not today. His super-deluxe publication called Tibetan Painted Scrolls, grandiose as it is, is still something we cannot live without, since so much of what we can find there (if we can master the alphabetic system used in the index!) has never been covered in the 80 years since. Academic Tibetan Studies has supposedly made such great strides in the mean time, but has it really?

One thing Tibetanists will be thankful for in aeons ahead is his employment of photographers, some of them what we would call multi-taskers. One was Eugenio Ghersi (1904-1997) who also served as physician on some of Tucci’s expeditions.* One of them, Francesca Bonardi, had the additional role of wife. Perhaps the most famous among them was Fosco Maraini (1912-2004), who accepted the job in 1937. He went on to write quite a lot of books and articles, some of them famously critical of Tucci, not an easy person to work with or for, no doubt about that. He published his own first book already in 1939, entitled Il Dren-Giong. Appunti di un viaggio nell’Imalaia.** Another photographer was Felice Boffa, who also made maps. For more on Tucci expedition photographs, see Nalesini’s essay listed below, or the articles by Deborah Klimburg-Salter. 

(*Subject of an obituary by D. Klimburg-Salter & D. Bellatalla, see East and West, n.s. vol. 47 [1997], pp. 435-437. **Dren-Giong is an Italian way of spelling the Tibetan name of Sikkim, ’Bras-ljongs.)

 

In closing I’ll just say this, in a spirit of constructive criticism. If the Italian people would like to make a nice gift to the Tibetan people, one worth much more than any jeep, I’d suggest open access digitization for the entire Tucci archive of not only photographs of Tibet, but also woodblock prints and manuscripts of works composed in Tibetan language. It’s high time this kind of cultural restitution became the new normal. I hesitate to use this sometimes overused word, but it surely smacks of fascism to maintain exclusive control over these cultural assets, withholding them from the endangered culture in question, for such a long, long time. Something needs to be done about this as soon as possible.*

(*And since I promised to be constructive it's clear what models ought to be followed. For supplying digital scans of Tibetan texts, nobody does it better than TBRC/BDRC recently upgraded to BUDA, to ensure they will be available to the interested public worldwide. For photographs of Tibetan and Himalayan subjects, follow the pattern of The Tibet Album and their collection of British photographs from the early 20th century.)

Tucci enjoying high Tibetan tea

Books and Articles in Print (or Printable, or Readable On-Screen)

I’ve mostly listed here scholastic publications put out in his honor, or in order to criticize him, obituaries, and some literature concerned with his photographers. Some of these things I mention just because they can be damnedly difficult to locate in a library, let alone online. For much more bibliography than I will provide here, see East and West, n.s. vol. 34, nos. 1-3 (Sept. 1984), pp. 23-42, or most recently Oscar Nalesini, Giuseppe Tucci’s Chronological Bibliography, Scienze e Lettere (Rome 2018).

Atti del convegno internazionale di studi in onore di Giuseppe Tucci (Macerata 1998).

Gustavo Benavides, “Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddhology in the Age of Fascism,” contained in: Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, University of Chicago Press (Chicago 1995), pp. 161-196.

A.A. Di Castro and David Templeman, Asian Horizons: Giuseppe Tucci’s Buddhist, Indian, Himalayan and Cental Asian Studies, Serie Orientale Roma CVI, Monash University Publishing (Melbourne 2015). Quite a diverse set of essays by various authors as we expect from conference-based publications.

G. Gnoli & L. Lanciotti, Orientalia Iosephi Tucci Memoriae Dicata, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Rome 1988), in three volumes.

Gururâjamañjarikâ: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Tucci, vol. 1 (Naples 1974).

Felice Boffa, “La spedizione italiana al Tibet (1939),” Bollettino del Club Alpina Italiano, vol. 45 (1946), pp. 126-152. Felice Boffa-Ballaran (1897-1994) was Tucci’s map maker and photographer.

Alice Crisanti, “Il memoriale di Giuseppe Tucci,” Quaderni di Storia, vol. 41, no. 81 (Jan. 2015), pp. 267-276.  Starting in July 1944, Tucci was about to be purged from the academy because of his commitments to the fascist regime. Here can be found transcribed a document Tucci wrote in his own defense, dated Nov. 20, 1944.

Mircea Eliade, “Giuseppe Tucci (1895-1984),” History of Religions, vol. 24, no. 2 (Nov. 1984), p. 157 ff.

Enrica Garzilli, Mussolini's Explorer: The Adventures of Giuseppe Tucci and Italian Policy in the Orient from Mussolini to Andreotti — With the Correspondence of Giulio Andreotti. This book is on my list of things to read, but I don't have any access to it yet.

 

Raniero Gnoli, Ricordo di Giuseppe Tucci, Con contributi di Luciano Petech, Fabio Scialpi, Giovanna Galluppi Vallauri, ISMEO (Rome 1985), 79 pp.

R. Hadl, “Zu Giuseppe Tuccis Bericht über seine Expedition nach West-Tibet, MCMXXXIII (1933),” Artibus Asiae, vol. 5 (1935), pp. 278-287.  PDF.  On Tucci’s expedition in western Tibet in 1933.

Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, “The Tucci Himalayan Archive,” East and West, vol. 41 (1991), pp. 379-384.  About photographs, etc. from Tucci’s expeditions.

Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, Oscar Nalesini, and Talamo Giulia, Inventory of the Tucci Photographic Archives, 1926-1936 (Western Himalayas, Nepal, Tibet), Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Rome 1994).

Simeon Koole, “Photography as Event: Power, the Kodak Camera & Territoriality in Early Twentieth-Century Tibet,” Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 59, no. 2 (2017), pp. 310-345.

Rob Mayer, “Uḍḍiyāna, the North West, and Treasure: Another Piece in the Jigsaw?” posted at Kîla Kîlaya blog (July 15, 2020).  Look for it here.  Uḍḍiyāna is U-rgyan is Swat Valley, it seems fairly sure to us.

Oscar Nalesini, “Pictures from the Roof of the World: Reorganization of the Giuseppe Tucci Photographic Archives,” East and West,  vol. 44, no. 1 (March 1994), pp. 185-210.

Bhikkhu Nanajivako, “The Technicalisation of Buddhism: Fascism and Buddhism in Italy, Giuseppe Tucci - Julius Evola,” Buddhist Studies Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1989), pp. 27-38; vol. 6, no. 2 (1989), pp. 102-115; vol. 7, no. 1-2 (1990), pp. 3-17.

Luciano Petech, “Giuseppe Tucci (1894-1984),” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (1984), pp. 137-142.

Ramon Prats, “Giuseppe Tucci e il Tibet,” contained in: F. D’Arelli, ed., Le Marche e l’Oriente: Una tradizione ininterrotta da Matteo Ricci a Giuseppe Tucci, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (Rome 1998), pp. 306-316.

Giuseppe Tucci, Cronaca della missione scientifica Tucci nel Tibet occidentale (1933), Reale Academia d’Italia (Roma 1934).  Coauthored with Eugenio Ghersi. English tr. published as Secrets of Tibet, Being the Chronicle of the Tucci Scientific Expedition to Western Tibet (1933), Blackie (London 1935), in 210 pp.  

Giuseppe Tucci, Travels of Tibetan Pilgrims in the Swat Valley, The Greater India Society  (Calcutta 1940). Unless you’re a total vegan I recommend the leather-bound versions available in India even now. It is really Tucci’s most enduringly fascinating accomplishment if you were to ask me.

I almost forgot what I set out to do, but I do much recommend visiting the Swat Museum’s website.  Just go here:

https://www.kparchaeology.com/virtual_tours/swat/

then aim a click at the middle of the screen and see where it takes you.  See you later, don’t get lost, have a nice trip!

Tibetan Histories, a New Website

Warning: The new edition of Tibetan Histories is on its way very soon. I hope it can be a freely downloadable ebook.  So please don't be surprised if one or two of the links supplied here don't work for you. New links will be provided when the 2nd edition goes up, I promise you. (Dec. 22, 2020)

I'm tickled to announce that the 2nd edition is now up for download at BDRC website. See the announcement by clicking here. (Feb. 10, 2021)

 

I was struggling with it until just a few minutes ago, but now I believe it is all there. I opened one of those new websites that Google supplies for free. As today is the eve of Saga Dawa I wanted to release it on this most auspicious day celebrating the Buddha. The website is the same kind I used for Tibetan Vocabulary, so there weren’t many surprises. Only this time I believe I succeeded in getting it all in one piece, without dividing it up.

What did surprise me on the day I first initiated the website was a visit from a very colorful bird with a distinctive song that descends like it’s running down a long staircase of sound, a Bee Eater. I had scarcely seen this rara avis before, and never outside my window. At first I thought I was seeing a Kingfisher, so I had to hit the reference books. Since then I’ve been hearing its song from time to time, unable to see where the sound is coming from. This could answer a question some people are bound to ask about the header photo you will see if you go to visit the new website.

While everything is already there, there are some more cosmetic types of formatting fixes that still need doing. So you might come back and have a look later on. I plan to work on it from now on online, rather than offline, so it’s likely to evolve by starts and jumps over the years that remain to me. I especially hope to integrate the add-in sections (marked off by bullets as you will see) into the main entries. That will take some time and effort.

Meanwhile I trust I can trust you to pass along the link to anyone you might think is interested in this kind of thing. I have a hope that non-specialists will read the newly added introductory survey of Tibetan historical literature, aimed at anyone who is curious enough to want an overview of what’s out there. I should have written this for the published book that came out over two decades ago. The late Anthony Aris wrote a clause in the contract so that the ownership of the copyright returned to my own hands in 2017, so no problems there. I don’t imagine the introduction by his brother Michael Aris was part of the bargain, so I haven’t included it.

Well, here it is. If you have comments and suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them in the comments section. If you don’t want your comment to be posted, just say so and I won’t post it. Or, if you know my email address you can write to me that way. So, anyway, here you go, just tap on it a time or two for quick results.

Tibetan Histories

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

WARNING! These links are now dead. Go to the note at the beginning of the blog.

• I've sometimes dreamed about making available a Tibetan-letter version of it — that would make it simpler for many Tibetans to use — and had a few nibbles from interested persons. I'm physically no longer able to do all the keyboard work it would entail, so if you have any ideas let me know. An unrelated dream: I've thought to make this into a website with links directly to online resources, in particular texts of the works that are cataloged in it.

PS: I've stopped trying to edit online, but I do commit myself to 
making it into a real book (or e-book) during the year 2020.

Not a Padampa

As we’re prone to do when trapped in our rooms with nowhere to go, I was wearing out my eyesight for a good cause browsing through some recently posted photos of Tibetan art works at Himalayan Art Resources website. If you are reading Tibeto-logic you no doubt already know that HAR is the best place in the whole universe to see Tibetan art. No museum can compete with it, not even the Newark Museum. I was thrilled to see what did at first seem to me to be a brassy image of our hero Padampa. Have a look at it yourself by tapping on those purple colored words (or are they orange, you decide). I mean, it has one hand raised above the head, the other holding what could very well be a bag, and we know that Padampa’s “Interdependence Bag” does at times occur as part of his iconography, even in his left hand as we see here. And Padampa was well known for practicing yogic gazes out into space, something perhaps indicated by the way the right hand is raised above the head. But when I looked at the back side of the lotus throne, I soon changed my mind. There we can read a inscription very clearly: 

grub thob gling la na mo, or Praise to the Siddha Ling.  

That means Lingrepa Pema Dorjé. On him have a look at the biographical sketch at Treasury of Lives. He may be regarded as the founder of the Drukpa Kagyü order, even if there has been some equivocation on that point. And that means the school affiliation of the image supplied on the website requires emending, too. Lingrepa is normally depicted in his untamable Siddha aspect, and the presence of a bag may just be telling us he was a wandering yogi, one who packed a bit of food for along the way, as yogis had been doing in India and Tibet all along, not just Padampa. I should look into this question, but right off the top of my head I just don’t know of any affinities Lingrepa may have had for Padampa or the Zhijé School. I do know that Lingrepa was often compared to the Indian Mahâsiddha Saraha, the one who made arrows.

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Read more

A fine new essay about Lingrepa has appeared. You may be able to locate a free copy of it on the internet, if not right at this moment in the near future. Here are the details: Marco Walther, “The Development of the Biographies of Gling ras pa Padma rdo rje (1128-1188),” Bulletin of Tibetology, vol. 51 nos. 1-2 (2015), pp. 99-113. It has a bibliography that includes earlier writings you may want to look into.

I guess I had a point to make about iconography here, and never actually made it. Padampa appears in many forms besides the better known ones (try looking here). There are quite a few un-inscribed portrait images that I would regard — because of a cluster of traits associated with him — to be what I call possible Padampas. This image could at first glance qualify as one of them, no doubt, but when we turn it over and find the label we realize our mistake.*

(*We might want to make an argument that labels carved in stone or etched in metal are always correct, but nowadays with the stakes high there is really no limit to the things business people might do to increase the value of their pieces. That said, I hasten to add that there is not any reason to think that is happening in this instance. After all, those particular iconographic features could just as well apply to Lingrepa as far as we can know, and anyway no particular advantage could be expected by altering the identity of the person portrayed. If anything, a depiction of Padampa would have more, and not less, value than one of Lingrepa.)

PS (March 24, 2020)

Since posting this I thought to take a closer look at other Padampa images that are featured on this HAR webpage. I was surprised to see a special category of Padampas in the [right hand] “salute gesture.” This does of course include the very image that contains the inscription identifying it as Lingrepa, and to me this casts in doubt the inclusion of this entire group among the Padampas. Why not call them all Lingrepas on the strength of the inscriptional evidence? Still, there are one or two examples in this group that have enough Padampa characteristics I would still want to call them possible Padampas, this one in particular, although the right hand really isn’t raised high enough to be in the salute gesture. This same one has been published a few times, as for example in D. Weldon & J.C. Singer, The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet, Laurence King (London 1999), plate 31 on pp. 154-55, where it is labelled as “Yogin.” This yogin, along with the nude image that once belonged to  R. H. Ellsworth, I regard as possible or possibly even probable Padampas, as I’ve argued before in the case of the Ellsworth.

PPS (March 26, 2020)

Just to add perplexity to complication, try this experiment. Go to the HAR website’s page about a thangka with Pemakarpo as its central figure. Scroll down the page until you find a detail with the added label “Ling Repa.” Tap it for a closer view (or go here). If it didn’t hit you like a hammer right away, let me tell you, this is a perfectly normal Zhijé form of Padampa, with the mirroring hand gestures unique to Padampa, the loose blanket around the lower part of the body, the earrings, everything. In my mind this is not just a possible Padampa, it’s a definite one. If you would like to have a closer look at the painting as a whole, you can see what I believe are biographical scenes from the life of Pemakarpo, the Fourth Drukchen showing his meditations and visionary experiences. One of these scenes shows what I imagine is the Drukchen himself in a posture of veneration beneath what would have to be a vision of Padampa's presence. Unless there is a label saying Lingrepa somewhere there, and I couldn’t find one, I think that is what we are seeing. Oh, and one more thing, unlike Lingrepa, we know that Pemakarpo had Zhijé teachings, and he composed a respectably lengthy text on the subject (details here).

HAR 65368, detail

PPPS (April 11, 2020)

Here’s another bit of fun with iconography I’d like to share and discuss if you have time for it. Have a look at this all-too-short video that informs us that the thangka, while bearing characteristic marks of an old (perhaps pre-Mongol period) painting, nevertheless has to be dated two centuries later because the curator identified a figure in its upper register as being Pema Lingpa (1450-1521 CE). It’s true that Pema Lingpa is often depicted this way, with an Orgyan hat like that of Guru Rinpoche and the longlife vase held in the palms of hands in meditation gesture, just as you see here. But notice right away in the first seconds of the video the arrow pointing to something the unnamed scholars supposedly missed, an inscription that indeed reads when we standardize the Tibskrit spellings Puṇyamaṅgalaṃ. Okay, but this is a Sanskritized 'name mantra' of a Tibetan (as we can see in the portrait itself) who would have been named Bsod-nams-bkra-shis.  The name Bsod-nams-bkra-shis does not as far as anyone seems to know belong to any set of names given to Pema Lingpa.  We know it *does* belong to a number of other people. So answer this puzzle: Given the fact that it fits the iconography and looks like Pema Lingpa, the label tells us it must be someone else. Is someone overlooking something?*

*(Just now I noticed that HAR has posted a version of this same painting with added English identifications. Have a look.)

Finally, if you went to HAR and liked what you saw there, you might consider a donation by looking at its Go Fund Me page. It's just a suggestion, I mean it's no business of mine what you do with your hard earned money or your ill-gotten gains. Whichever.

A Short Survey of the Stages of the Bodhisattva Path

I found this going though old papers I hadn’t had access to for a few decades. I was initially a little puzzled what it was. I did recognize it as a draft translation. I worked on a lot of those back in the days. But nowadays with such easy ways of searching things out on the internet, it wasn’t long before I was able to tell you it is the beginning of a translation of a work by Śākyaśrībhadra.*

I submit it to your critical eye with the hope that humanity will take advantage of their involuntary isolation to reconsider the wrong paths that have been taken in recent years and contemplate ways to achieve a better future for every last sentient suffering being.

(*Apart from the title itself, the most important clue was the name Byams-dpal. That’s a slightly shortened version of the name of Khro-phu Lo-tsā-ba Byams-pa-dpal (1173‑1225 or 1236?). He was the one responsible for inviting Śākyaśrī to Tibet in the first place.)

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For a biography of Śākyaśrī by Alex Gardner, see this page in Treasury of Lives. When he died in 1225 or 1226 or 1227 his age was either 64 or 99, it isn’t sure which. I hope you can enlighten us.

For a comparative edition of the Tibetan text, see this TBRC link.  This was not the version used for the translation you see here, something that at this point I have no easy way of knowing. Śākyaśrī arrived in Tibet in the company of nine or so “lesser pundits,” among them the famous Vibhūticandra, and he departed via western Tibet to Kashmir in 1218. Here are perhaps the main works written in languages other than Tibetan about his life, in case you are interested to learn more.

•     H. Hadano, Kāśmīra‑mahāpaṇḍita "Śākyaśrībhadra," Tibetto Kinsei Bukkyôshi Josetsu, Hadano Hakuyū Tibetto Indogaku Shūsei (Kyoto 1986), pp. 239‑258.  Originally published in Bunka, vol. 20, no. 5 (1957).

•   David Jackson, Two Biographies of Śākyaśrībhadra: The Eulogy by Khro‑phu Lo‑tsā‑ba and its "Commentary" by Bsod‑nams‑dpal‑bzang‑po, Franz Steiner Verlag (Stuttgart 1990). Not meant for easy popular consumption, this is one of the great works of late 20th-century Tibetology. Seriously, don’t let the thinness fool you.

•     Leonard van der Kuijp, On the Lives of Śākyaśrībhadra (?‑?1225), Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 114, no. 4 (1994), pp. 599‑616. At p. 603, LvdK promised a study on the dates of Śākyaśrī, something we anticipate with ever decreasing patience.

For a published example of the work itself, 
see Śākyaśrībhadra, Bodhisattvamārgakramasaṅgraha (Byang chub sems dpa'i lam gyi rim pa mdor bsdus pa).  Tôh. no. 3962.  Dergé Tanjur, vol. GI, folios 198v.1‑199v.5.  Translated by the author and Byams-pa'i-dpal.  Or just cut-&-paste the entire Tibetan title into the search box at TBRC.

For a resumé of its content, you might look at the entry in Malalasekera's Encyclopedia of Buddhism,  vol. 3, p. 240, or see Dölpa, Gampopa and Sakya Paṇḍita, Stages of the Buddha's Teachings: Three Key Texts, translated by Ulrike Roesler, Ken Holmes and David P. Jackson, Library of Tibetan Classics series no. 10, Wisdom (Somerville 2015), pp. 635-636. If I knew of a complete translation, I would have told you about it.

§  §  §

Postscript (April 7, 2020): I hardly believe it myself, but I actually did find a translation at BOOTL, an internet resource that will be of special interest to translators and people who read translations. I recommend to have a look at it here.

   

Stone Meditation Seat in Amdo

Our thanks to Katia Buffetrille, who sent us this remarkable sign of Padampa’s presence way up in Amdo to the south of the Blue Lake known under various names, among them Kokonoor.

The full stone inscription, written in widely separated syllables around two sides of the squarish boulder may be roughly phoneticized, Romanized and translated as:

“Gyagar Padampai Gom Tri”

rgya gar pha dam pa'i sgom khri/

རྒྱ་གར་ཕ་དམ་པའི་སྒོམ་ཁྲི།   

[This is a] Meditation Throne of India Padampa.

According to Katia, if I understood her directions correctly, it was in 2011 as they were walking around Nyenpo Yutsé (Gnyan-po G.yu-rtse), near Mâra Lake (Bdud-mtsho, or Sdug-mtsho) in the region now called South of the Lake (Mtsho Lho), meaning below the Blue Lake (Mtsho Sngon), that they encountered this remarkable stone.

Eventually I’d like to put together an inclusive account of Padampa-related sites. Knowing about this seating place in Amdo helps us by adding to what we have already learned about his visits to such places as Yunnan, Wu-tai Shan and the vicinity of Lhasa (Garu Convent).*

(*José Cabezón & Penpa Dorjee, in their brand new book, Sera Monastery, Wisdom (Somerville 2019), do mention, on p. 331, “Garu (Ga-ru), a nunnery, is said to have been founded by Padampa Sangyé in the eleventh century, Panglung (Spang lung) by one of Padampa‘s students in the eleventh century...”  Although such brevity in an otherwise elaborately detailed book might seem excessive, it is more than compensated by the more generous treatment by J.C. in “The Hermitages of Sera” at the THDL website. Go ahead and visit it by tapping here. The historical section that follows this one has the Padampa connections. What is most interesting for today's blog is just that there was once in Garu Convent a square stone throne Padampa sat upon as he was deciding where to site the building, a stone apparently no longer there. It also had letters inscribed on it.)

For fun, double click on Katia's photos to see what sentient beings you can identify.

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Postscript 1 (March 13, 2020):

I’ve been told I may not have gotten the geography quite right, making it sound as if it’s close to the Blue Lake when it’s actually quite far. I’ll look into that some more. And I’m also told that there is more on Padampa associated places in Lhasa and Phanyul areas in a recent publication by Serindia that I do not have at hand at this moment.  I’ll look into that, too, and get back with you. The book I speak of is this one: Matthew Akester, Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s Guide to Central Tibet.

Postscript 2 (March 13, 2020):

I sometimes wondered why I even had a copy of  J.F. Rock’s very heavy 1956 book The Amnye Ma-chhen Range and Adjacent Regions, a Monographic Study, published in Rome by the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. It could well be nominated for the most unreadable book in the history of Tibetology. I mean overall, since it does have some fascinating paragraphs buried in all the geographical minutiae. And the black-and-white photographs that take up most of the thick volume are really interesting, the pictures of people even more than the landscapes and buildings. My reason for mentioning is that it has a map, sheet 5 of the 5 folded maps inserted in a pocket in the back of the book, of the area “Nyen-po-yur-tse Dza-ra” (གཉན་པོ་གཡུ་རྩེ་རྫ་ར་). Actually, the brief section of prose about this same area is at this very moment of much interest (pp. 129-31). I think Rock didn't go there personally, but relied on information from a non-denominational Christian missionary by the name of William E[kvall] Simpson (1901-1932). Rock even credits him with the discovery of the place, whatever that means (and I guess what Rock does mean is that up until then, the mountain had not been included in any known map). This missionary named Simpson is subject of a 1932 book (or booklet?) given the title A Martyred Missionary, for reasons you may easily discern. I’ve never seen it. Few have.

Prayer Wheels Came from Where?

It’s such a pleasure to read the essays of Rasé Konchok Gyatso, each one devoted to a subject even more interesting than the last. Now is one of those times I wish I had paid more frequent attention to modern writings, although I refuse to regret all those years I was caught up in the 12th century. Hell, I still am. Anyway, here is my aim today: I just want to draw attention to a brave attempt to ascertain the time and place of origins of what the world knows as Prayer Wheels.

The Prayer Wheel, to call it by its popular-in-English but imprecise name, is one of the objects most associated with Tibetans, a kind of cultural marker of Tibetan-ness, in fact one of the best known such markers. As Rasé starts out his essay (I’m paraphrasing or summarizing in the following paragraph): 

Nowadays one of the special things that marks those who have faith in Tibetan Buddhism is the hand-held Mani Wheel and the more general category of Mani Wheel. There are nowadays, he tells us, even electrically powered Mani Wheels of various sizes, and they are often to be seen in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and areas of China. As possible sources for the earliest history of the object, he turns first to a “table of contents” of Ka-tshal Monastery, which lists one owned by Emperor Songtsen the Wise. He then mentions a story of one brought to Tibet by the Chinese princess Wenching Kongjo, and a Chinese Wheel of the Jowo (Jo-'khor Rgya-nag-ma) kept as one of the chief objects of veneration in Beru Monastery in Nangchen. Then he quotes at some length from a text devoted precisely to the subject, Talk of Immortal Joy: Precepts of All the Victors.* This text with no authorship statement attributes the same origins to the Wheel as is ordinarily given for the Perfection of Wisdom, which is to say that Nâgârjuna brought it to India from the land of the nâgas presumed to be in the ocean’s depths. It then followed the main trunk of the early Kagyu lineage, through Naropa, Marpa, Milarepa and so on. The Talk text says if you want to know more on the subject, look at the works of Karma Pakshi (1204 or 1206-1283 CE).

(*I supply the link to the cursive manuscript of which he speaks at TBRC. I think the printer named in the colophon as Rgyal-sras Rin-chen-rnam-rgyal is likely to be the one and the same as well-known printer Lha-btsun Rin-chen-rnam-rgyal [1473‑1557 CE], although this could benefit from further verification. On 2nd thought, he can't possibly be the Lha-btsun, because it says he was printing on the orders of Dwa-ching Ba-dur, this title, when used on its own, can be nothing except a way of speaking about Khangchenné Sönam Gyelpo, ruling Regent of Tibet until he was murdered by his ministers in 1727 CE. This is very likely some version of the Tibetan text that underlies the translation in Ladner et al., pp. 63-75. See its closing words on p. 75: “[This was written] by Rinchen Nampar Gyalwa in response to the inquiry of Tedai Chingwadur.”)

But then all of a sudden on p. 1383, all this purported evidence starts to lose air. In all the biographies of the early Kagyü masters, he says, and in all the works associated with them, not once does a Wheel make an appearance. It is true that if you inspect the works of Karma Pakshi, you do find out how four Skygoers revealed to him in a dream a melody for the Mani recitation. This initiated the practice of singing it rather than just reciting it, but it has no implications at all for the use of Wheels. Another fascinating and difficult work of the same author — recently studied by Matthew Kapstein* — does mention the turning of wheels, but there is no way this could refer to the Wheels as we know them.

(*See Kapstein’s work listed below. A side issue: If it is so that Tibetans did not do the Wheel turning practice in pre-Mongol times, then it does cast a shadow on Lynne White Jr's idea that the ball-and-chain governor would have been brought to Italy from Tibet via Central Asian slaves in the later days of the Mongol period of Eurasian domination. What would seem to be the case instead  is that both Italians and Tibetans were beneficiaries of a technology that some third party invented. )

The Rasé essay goes on to discuss the Mani Kambum evidence associating the practice with Emperor Songtsen (1st half of 7th century). He finds that when it speaks of the benefits of reciting the Mani, it intends just recitation, not Wheel turning, and likewise one finds no positive evidence in works of Nyangral (1124-1192) and Guru Chöwang (1212-1270). Rasé then concludes that there is absolutely no indication of the existence of the Wheel turning practice in the 14th century or before. To be clear, he isn’t ready to say exactly when or by whom the practice was first done, and finds it sufficient to be a little vague about dates if that’s the best we can do. I agree with that, too. I might not be so convinced that the large Wheels arrived first, and hand-held Wheels later, although I think I can see the logic of believing so, since the latter involves a technological innovation: the ball-and-chain governor.*

(*And, I might add, the early Huayen Chinese temples with their revolving libraries better compare to the large Wheels than to the hand-held ones. For one thing they lack the ball-and-chain governor. Oh, and the Chinese examples weren’t round cylinders, they were octagonal. I have a lot to say about octagons, but I’ll hold off on this for now.)

Then he goes on to some of these later works, including early 19th century works by Gungthangpa and Sengchen Lama already studied over three decades ago,* but newly indicating sources in works by Kagyü authors of the late 15th through early 17th centuries.

(*The footnote got too long, so I moved it to the end.)

It would be the more interesting part of the blog, but for the time being I will stick to the historical question of origins and avoid commenting on the past and contemporary significance of Wheel revolving practices, although the learned Rasé does go into this issue. He believes most people would benefit more if they would do more serious reading, study and reflection on the Buddhist texts and ideas, and less spinning. 

Once as I was traveling in the northern India I stopped in one of those travelers’ cafés for a much-needed tea, I happened to sit across from a young Britisher holding and turning what has to be the largest hand-held wheel I’ve ever seen. It had a huge cylindrical drum and a handle so long you could rest the end of it on the ground even when spinning in a standing position. It did make me curious, so I got into a conversation with him about it. By the time it was done I had the impression he was sincerely involved in the practice, and not just having a bit of fun. Not simply appropriating inappropriately, as we might be more likely to conclude when faced with things of this sort nowadays.

Today our most cosmopolitan convert Buddhists, as well as many young born-Buddhists, attracted as they are to the more cerebral science-like or philosophical types of Buddhism — or targeting what they regard as more profound meditations — almost instinctively disdain the practice. Or, even if they imagine it may be some good to some people some of the time, would never think of engaging in it themselves. People who see the Wheels turning might think it’s superficial when the problem is they are only seeing the surfaces of things. I think Rasé would agree with me that the practice has little or no value if it is in fact done mechanically. It ought to be part of a more general practice that includes actual (not virtual, digital, or mechanical) mantra recitation  and the visualization of divine forms of enlightened wisdom. But then as far as I think I can tell, it always is. So, no problem, is there? Do you see any?

At the Library, on a Cloudy Day

M. Kapstein, “The Dialectic of Eternal Heaven: A Tibetan Defense of Mongol Imperial Religion,” contained in: Matthew T. Kapstein and R. Jackson, eds., Mahāmudrā and the Kagyü Tradition, International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies (Andiast 2011), pp. 259-316. 

If you would like to try your hand at this or sharpen your skills, try to find the 2nd Black Hat Karmapa’s work in TBRC. To do this it may help you to know that it bears the title Dam pa'i chos 'dul ba'i gling bzhi [~gleng gzhi] na gos dmar can gyi yul nas 'ongs pa'i mkhas pa yang dag phyi rol nyid bzhugs gsungs te / de la sha na pa'i gos can 'jam dpal dmar po la sogs pa'i tshan 'brug tsam du tha snyad 'dogs shing ngo bo cig la / mthong tshul tha dad pa 'di lta ste / mo gho ding ri'i sgra tshad. Well, on second thought, follow my advice and just search for the last six syllables.

Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), China Illustrata. 

I’m not entirely sure of it, but this work first published in 1667 may be the first ever illustration of a Tibetan Prayer Wheel. A little difficult to make out, you may have to take a second look at p. 60 of Charles van Tuyl’s English translation from the Latin, as published by Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (Bloomington 1987), on the first page of Part II, Chapter 4. A "Tartar Kalmak Lama,” whatever that is supposed to mean, indicates with his right hand an immobile Wheel on a cubic pedestal below himself. Look closely and you will see that the cylinder is a little too elongated, but the handle is clearly visible, and off to its right you can see the ball-and-chain governor is straight, but angled awkwardly at around 3 o’clock. It looks as if it may have been held in the hand of the figure in the original sketch, but the illustrator took the liberty of portraying it separately. In any case, this visual European evidence doesn’t help us move back the dating of the hand-held Wheel.

L. Ladner, et al., Wheel of Great Compassion: The Practice of the Prayer Wheel in Tibetan Buddhism, Wisdom Publications (Boston 2001).

H. Loveday, “La bibliothèque tournante en Chine: Quelques remarques sur son rôle et son évolution,” T'oung Pao, 2nd series vol. 86, nos. 4-5 (2000), pp. 225-279. 

Loveday believes the building of these revolving libraries in monastery temples was very popular in China between the 11th and 13th centuries. Although only two examples have survived from those early times, we do have clear descriptions of them starting in the 11th. There is more literature on the subject of revolving libraries in China, so I only offer this as a sample, a recent sample. For visuals, try searching the internet for the words "revolving repository" or "revolving library" using the quote marks, and perhaps narrow down your search by adding China or Buddhist.

Ma-ṇi 'Khor-lo'i Phan-yon.  See it here. 

Apart from a partial translation in outline/summary form included in this essay by His Holiness Jigdal Dagchen Sakya entitled The Use and Benefits of Prayer Wheels, I’m not sure if anyone has made use of this text, printed at a Drigung site in Tibet in woodblock form in around mid-20th century. No author is immediately evident. Even if there is a tertön named near the end, he’s only tertön of a brief appended prayer, not of the work proper. Seeing that it hasn’t been completely translated as far as I can tell, I posted my own translation at Tiblical website. I translated this many years ago, and have only now dusted it off and polished it ever so slightly.

D. Martin, “On the Origin and Significance of ‘Prayer Wheels’ According to Two Nineteenth-Century Tibetan Literary Sources,” The Journal of the Tibet Society, vol. 7 (1987), pp. 13-29. Try to get the PDF by tapping twice on the title.

Rasé Konchok Gyatso (Ra-se Dkon-mchog-rgya-mtsho), “Ma-ṇi ’Khor-lo dang Lag-’khor Rigs-kyi Byung-tshul Dpyad-gleng,” contained in the same author's Bod Rig-pa’i Dpyad-rtsom Brgya dang Brgyad-cu-ma, Bod Rang-skyong Ljongs Dpe-skrun Do-dam Khru’u (Lhasa 2016), at pp. 1381-1390.

G. Schopen, “A Note on the ‘Technology of Prayer’ and a Reference to a Revolving Bookcase in an Eleventh-Century Indian Inscription,” contained in: Gregory Schopen, Figments and Fragments of Mahâyâna Buddhism in India, University of Hawai’i Press (Honolulu 2005), pp. 345-349. 

I might point out that if the Tibetan practice as such did not exist in the 11th century, then it might cast doubt on the interpretation of this Indian inscription as an instance of it. But then again, I believe Huayen temples in quite early times, let’s say in the 7th century, and in areas not impossibly far from the Tibetan plateau, did have revolving scriptural bookracks. To this Chinese Buddhist evidence of revolving holy texts our contemporary essayists including Rasé could have given more attention (see the Loveday, listed above).

For your more dedicated Tibeto-logicians, some further complications about sources

For the two compositions by Gungtangpa and Sengchen, both done at the behest of Mongolian disciples, see Martin, listed above, noting that translations of both texts appear in Ladner et al., pp. 53-61, 77-79. Left unnoticed in both Martin and Rasé's essays is yet a 3rd early 19th-century composition, one by the Fourth Panchen Lama (1781/2‑1853/4 CE) translated in Ladner et al., pp. 41-51, and the Kumbum printing of this text can be found here. It could not be immediately located in a listing of titles in the 4th Panchen Lama’s works, although it might have been included in his miscellany (gsung thor-bu), something I haven’t checked yet. Ladner et al., pp. 81-84, also has a briefer work by a Mongolian Lama of Urga: Kyai-rdor Mkhan-po Ngag-dbang-mkhas-grub (1779-1837 CE), on the benefits of turning Wheels. For its Tibetan text, try here.

Illustration from Alphabetum Tibetanum (1762), courtesy of
New York Public Library Digital Collections
If you require a brief introduction to the book itself,
look here.

Additives may be good for you (May 5, 2020):

I learned from an article by Fabio Rambelli I just read that revolving scripture repositories, “normally octagonal,” existed in Japan, too. Although documentation is not available for several more centuries, the Chinese figure credited with their invention was Fu Xi (497-569 CE), aka Fu Dashi. They were brought to Japan by Zen monks in the late 14th century. One of the oldest ones that still exists in Japan, built in 1408, contains a printed edition of the scriptures from Yuan period Hangzhou. This information goes along with a lot of theoretical reflections about culturally differing attitudes toward automation and automatons that often made me think of that old blog about “Dampa’s Droids.” I did wonder how the shakuhachi flute could enter into this kind of discussion (I never heard that Indians, Buddhist or otherwise, ever classified musical instruments as a kind of yantra), but then found myself convinced. Just search the internet for “Dharma Devices, Non-Hermeneutical Libraries, and Robot-Monks: Prayer Machines in Japanese Buddhism,” Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University, vol. 3 (2018), pp. 57-75.  Most of the information I mentioned could also be found, in shorter form, in Rambelli’s book, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism, Stanford University Press (Stanford 2007), pp. 106-107, in case you have this book or can locate the pages in Kugel Books. And while you are there, see if you can go here.