Tibskrit Reloaded

If you are the sort of person who has made use of Tibskrit in the past, you will probably find its largest and latest incarnation, “Tibskrit 2011,” a little more useful.

Because upload services drop files if they have not been downloaded frequently enough, you will help to keep Tibskrit up there if you will do us the favor of downloading it. Recent studies have proven once and for all that information gains enhanced survival capabilities if it is spread around.

If you would like to take your chances and try going directly to the download of the Word version by all means go to the link just given. If it doesn’t take you there more quickly than expected we have no one but our selves to blame.  

Whatever you decide to do, best of luck with it.

Mindfulness of walking and sweeping-
January in Sarnath

Postscript

Why is it called “Tibskrit”?  Because a distinctive name like this will make it quickly located by a simple web search.  (And also because it signifies a very strong and continuing cultural relationship between Tibetan and Sanskrit.  The materials included in it testify to the truth of it.)

Why “Philology”?  Because this 20-dollar word is likely to intimidate people who wouldn’t find this sort of thing useful anyway.  (Oh, and also because it's all about the love of the language arts, which is what philology is supposed to mean, contrary to common misconceptions both inside and outside the academies.)

§    §    §

The next release of Tibskrit, Tibskrit 2014 we’ll call it, will surely overshoot the one million word mark.  A present there are about 970,000 words, a 40,000 word increase over Tibskrit 2009.

§    §    §

On another matter altogether...  


Think it will be a good hare year? I sure hope so. Been thinking about that Losar card to e-mail to all your friends? This one is from none other than Professor Emeritus Dieter Schuh of Bonn via the Wikimedia Commons. It has authenticity written all over it, but I’m thinkin’ any ol’ bunny wabbit* would do the twick.

There’s still plenty of time to create your personalized e-card. The Chinese “Spring Festival” may be starting about now, but Tibetan Losar is still a month away. The nice thing about e-cards is that, generally speaking, they are no sooner sent than received. Don’t neglect to put a little of your ingenuity into it, though. Nobody really appreciates an inbox stuffed with generic off-the-shelf e-cards. When you come right down to it, it really is the thought (and the effort and the artistry) that counts... Quality, not quantity.

*We’ve already had occasion to blog on (and on) about Tibetan words for hare and/or rabbit. See the Ownerless Donkey for this along with some fairly good photos of Middle Eastern bunny mosaics. And of course one of the best places to turn for rabbit & hare art, as you probably know from experience, is Tibetan Buddhist Digital Altar. (Wait, let me go look up the correct name, since I’m always getting the words mixed up: Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar: Buddhist Polemics, Rabbit Appreciation, Desert Life and the Daily Lama.)

Fake Spotting

I saw something that was both entertaining and instructive but also dismaying on eBay the other day. It was the above image offered for sale by one of those eBay companies that shall remain nameless.

Actually, this same image is offered for sale more than once on eBay, which ought to be enough to tell even people who may be borderline clueless in the field, that it isn’t all that rare or precious.  The price of the golden one, described as 24 carat gold (of course we know they mean gold plated even without them saying so, right?) ranges between $4,999.99 and $5,999.99 US.  A “purple bronze” version of it is going for $2,499.00 by one seller, and $1,999.99 by another (both explicitly described as "old").

One seller, who claims only that the piece is authentic and never directly states that it is old or otherwise distinguished, adds this helpful paragraph at the end, although if you read it for what it says, it does tell you that the piece ought to be the opposite of non-ancient, and therefore ancient:

“Whether you buy your antiquities from us or other eBay sellers we strongly recommend that you identify all your purchases by professional expert from your nearest reputable recognized testing laboratory for authentication and peace of mind. Unfortunately the ancient art market is cursed with a high proportion of fakes. Fakes often look better than real antiquities to the inexperienced eye - they are often intact, invariably un-restored and their colors are more vivid. Our buyers can count on a 100% money back guarantee if a recognized testing laboratory judges their purchase to be non-ancient. Seek the same re-assurance from all those who sell to you.”

Disingenuous is the word that comes to mind. Worthy of a true grifter. Look again at that sentence and reflect on its meaning a time or two, “Fakes often look better than real antiquities to the inexperienced eye - they are often intact, invariably un-restored and their colors are more vivid.”


I recognized the original for this image right away, because I once was so interested to get my own reading of its inscription that I wrote to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I was not pleased to find out how much it would cost me to get these photographs, but decided to tolerate the lightening of my wallet for the sake of science. Without written agreement I can’t pass on to you the three photographs of the inscription that forms a semi-circle on the rounded back part of the base, but I can give you photos of the image itself (which anyway are available on the web; see below). I can also give you my own transcription and interpretation of the inscription. I have made it much more precise than necessary, in order to at least show that the inscription, while done with exceptionally beautiful calligraphic style, neglects rules about the use of the tseg dot before the she (shad) punctuation marks.  (Although written in a single line, I have put it in a verse format.)

@@@ ||    || na.mô.'ghu.ru.|| 

ngan.lam.ban.chung.bdag.gis.ni.||


bla.ma.rin.chen.sku.bzhengs.pa.yi.||


bsod.nams.'di.yi.byin.brlabs.kyis.||


'gro.drug.sdug.[b]sngal.zad.par.shog.|| ; ||

                   - - -

༄༅༅།།  །།ན་མྰོ་འགྷུ་ཪུ་༎ངན་ལམ་བན་ཆུང་བདག་གིས་ནི་༎བླ་མ་རིན་ཆེན་སྐུ་བཞེངས་པ་ཡི་༎བསོད་ནམས་འདི་ཡི་བྱིན་བཪླབས་ཀྱིས་༎འགྲོ་དྲུག་སྡུག་སྔལ་ཟད་པཪ་ཤོག་། ༑ །*

 (*Sorry, but that's what my unicode looks like here, which is why I don’t normally use it. Perhaps it will look ok if you cut and paste it into an ordinary Word file?)

Homage to the Lama!

Through the blessings of the merit resulting

from the erecting of this image of the precious Lama

by myself Nganlam Banchung,

may the sufferings of the six gatis* come to an end.

(*The six gatis are the favorable rebirths as gods, asuras and humans plus the unfavorable rebirths as animals, pretas and denizens of hell.)

All my effort, time and money might be regarded as wasted since the inscription had already been transcribed very accurately and translated in a way that, in meaning, closely enough matches my own (in Weldon and Singer).

The Cleveland piece you see here is surely one of the most wonderful examples of early Tibetan sculptural portraiture, but in my opinion there isn’t sufficient evidence from the inscription or the iconography to know who the depicted person would be.  I know that “bla ma rin chen” is being read quite hopefully to refer to Rinchen Pal, but really, it just means ‘precious Lama’ and doesn’t contain any definite clue to the identity of the Lama. I searched everywhere for an identity for Nganlam Banchung, but nothing even remotely conclusive comes up. Nganlam is a clan name, associated with a particular area of Central Tibet, and Banchung just means ‘small monk [bande],’ a modest way of speaking about oneself. Much more often than not it proves impossible to turn up further information about patrons named in inscriptions, although the human subjects of painted and sculptured portraits are almost always famous enough to be identified if they are named.

The Cleveland image bears a very close identity to a small image in the Musée Guimet (MA 6032) that was published in a catalog by Giles Beguin in 1994 (plate 42), which I don’t have available and can’t look into further right now. The only information I have on it is in an article by Heather Stoddard, but although using the words “with little doubt” she doesn’t mention the basis for her identification of it as Jigten Gonpo. There is no hint whether there might be an inscription or not.

The verifiable Jigten Gonpo paintings (like the one with the Rubin writeup, or like the one in Amy Heller's article) don’t display the same mudras as these two just-mentioned images from Cleveland and Paris.

So, really, I have no compelling reason to believe that either the Cleveland or the Paris images ought to be Jigten Gonpo.

As far as I know the intuition, expressed in Singer and Weldon, that it might be Pagmodrupa could be correct...  his head tends toward the shape we see here, but then so might Lama Zhang's. And we could further argue that it might be Gampopa, or any number of other early Kagyu teachers.

There is a verse passage at the beginning of Phagmodrupa's classic biography in which he refers to his own teacher Gampopa with the epithet of ‘precious Lama’ (bla-ma rin-chen). You find it yet again, as part of a string of epithets, in one of the verses of praise he wrote to his teacher Gampopa (the source is here):

mtshan ldan bla ma rin chen ’gro ba’i mgon | |
gdul bya’i don du ri bo shan tir byon | |
lung dang rtogs pa’i chos kyis gzhan don gyi | |
b[s]tan pa’i rgyal mtshan khyod la phyag + | |

        Homage to you, the qualified precious Lama lord of beings,

who went to help the spiritually amenable at the Shanti Mountain,

victory banner of teachings for the benefit of others accomplished

through your Dharma teachings both scriptural and realizational.

I know a few of you may be asking the question, ‘Why do you call it a fake? Isn’t it just a rather nicely done reproduction?’ My answer is that since nobody in eBay is calling their sale item a ‘reproduction,’ someone along the line is misrepresenting it as an original, or at least allowing us to believe it is an original on the basis of (i.e., assuming as they do) our lack of knowledge. When the motive is to fool us, what we get when we buy it is what we rightly call a fake. When everyone is honest about it being a reproduction, that very same object is indeed a reproduction. I see nothing wrong with reproduction. Clear enough?

§   §   §

Source: David Weldon and Jane Casey Singer, The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet: Buddhist Art in the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Laurence King (London 1999), p. 135 (inscription visible on the back of the image): [illeg.] ngan lam ban chung bdag gis ni // bla ma rin chen sku bzhengs pa yi // bsod nams ’di yi byin brlabs kyis // ’gro drug sdug bsngal ... [illeg.], but see n. 310 on pp. 146-7 of same publication for the complete inscription (and here they see no proper name being given for the subject of the portrait):

na mo ’ghu ru / ngan lam ban chung bdag gis ni / bla ma rin chen sku bzhengs pa yi // bsod nams ’di yi byin brlabs kyis // 'gro drug sdug sngal zad par shog //

Heather Stoddard, 'Bri gung, Sa skya and Mongol Patronage, contained in: Ingried Kreide-Damani, ed., Dating Tibetan Art, Ludwig Reichert (Wiesbaden 2003), pp. 59-69.

- - -

At the website for the museum (please do go to the link) we read:  “A Portrait of Lama Rinchen-Pel (1143-1217) (Founder of the Drigung Monastery), Central Tibet, 13th century 1200s 
1993.160.”

Title:A Portrait of Lama Rinchen-Pel (1143-1217) (Founder of the Drigung Monastery)

Maker:Central Tibet, 13th century

Medium: gilt bronze, inlaid with gold, silver, copper, turquoise, lapis and coral

Measurements: Overall: 13.5cm x 12cm x 8.5cm, Base: 8cm x 19cm x 14cm

Date:1200s

Acquisition: Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Location: Not on display

Accession Number:1993.160

Department: Indian and South East Asian Art

Inscription: / / Na mo ’ghu ru / / Ngan lam ban chung bdag gis ni / / bla ma Rin chen sku bzhengs pa yi / / bsod nams ’di yi byin brlabs kyis / / ’gro drug sdug sngal zad par shog / /

Translation: "Salutations to the master ! May the sufferings of the six kinds of beings be appeased through the blessing of merit gained by me, the little monk of Ngan.lam, in having this statue of the Lama Rin.chen made."

(*My note: Notice how they capitalize "Lama Rin.chen" as if they knew it to be a proper name.)

 - - -

Interesting that the scribe for the inscription does not recognize Tibetan punctuation conventions governing the use of tsheg immediately before the shad (it uses tsheg in every case, all of them ‘incorrect’).  The ’a-chung beneath the 'm' in na-mô is totally unknown and superfluous (ignorance of Sanskrit is not the excuse it’s made to be). The ’ghu-ru spelling for Sanskrit guru is known to a mid-13th century manuscript we have often mentioned before, the Zhijé Collection (although not limited to it).  This is at least consistent with the purported dating of the sculpture to the 13th century.

I believe that the lama rinchen epithet is just an alternative version (more amenable to versified contexts) of lama rinpoche (bla-ma rin-po-che), and the latter is a way of referring to one's own teacher that was initiated by Pagmodrupa (I didn’t make this up — for testimony on this point see The Collected Writings [Gsung-’bum] of ’Bri-gung Chos-rje ’Jig-rten-mgon-po Rin-chen-dpal, reproduced photographically from the ’Bri-gung Yang-re-sgar xylographic edition, Khangsar Tulku [New Delhi 1969], vol. 4, p. 385).

The back of the Cleveland.  Notice where the inscription is
(there is no inscription on the fake version)

An as yet unidentified (or overconfidently identified)
early Kagyü Lama portrait in the
Cleveland Museum of Art

Tibetan Histories - Addenda et Corrigenda

A library at Lumbini (the LIRI)
Birthplace of Śākyamuni Buddha

Today’s blog is really nothing but a link to a Tibetological resource located at — Where else? — Tibeto-logical website. The only reason you may like to look at or download this file is because you are already familiar with a book called “Tibetan Histories” (if you haven’t seen it you can scroll through most of it at Googlebooks). Apparently Serindia, the publisher, has allowed it to go out of print, since already Amazon marketplace sellers are asking an arm and two legs for it. 


I would hang the full text up for free download, but I’m afraid it’s still under copyright for a few more years. So what I will put up here is a link to over an hundred pages of addenda.* Of course this file won’t make too much sense unless you have the original publication in hand.

(*This was already about 10 pages long when the book was released.)

I do this as a continuation of my homage to the late E. Gene Smith, who helped more than any other person with the really difficult bibliographical problems. I still have over ten pages of his detailed notes on my draft, which he sent me in Oslo when he was in Cairo. At the time we hadn’t even met, which does make his determination to help me as much as he possibly could that much more impressive.

Well, to keep this brief, if you think you will have a use for it, go download this file at Tibetological.* I’m afraid we haven’t been so diligent about adding references to the new publications that have come out during the last five or ten years, although eventually that ought to be rectified. 

(*As of 2020, that link is no longer active. Ignore everything else in this blog entry and just go to this link instead:

https://www.bdrc.io/blog/2020/12/21/dan-martins-tibetan-histories/)

If I may quote here what it says there,

"We hope that having this additional material accessible to internet searches will assist in solving some of the problems in Tibetan history bibliography that remain to be solved in the 21st century."

Sarnath, where Buddhist history in some sense began
(Tibetan histories very often include histories of Indian Buddhism as well)

E. Gene Smith - An Anecdote

That's him on the right, at a library in Cambridge,
examining a Tibetan pecha

I hope you know Tibeto-logic is not a personal blog, and I would just as soon keep it from becoming about moi. But today circumstances demand that I make this one exception and tell a personal story in memory of E. Gene Smith who left this life just two days ago.

Gene was legendary for his prodigious memory of Tibetan bibliography. Of course, an essential part of his story is that he headed the New Delhi office of the Library of Congress and its effort to preserve Tibetan Literature for many years... but anyway, the legendary status was not without good reason, I can tell you... and in fact I will. And he was always openhandedly generous with his knowledge and other resources, as many besides myself will tell you. About how many persons could you truthfully say, "What he had he shared"?

In 1998, I went with my wife on a side trip down from Harvard to Yale to visit J., the resident Buddhologist in that place in those days. For entertainment, weighing the alternatives, he thought we would have the most fun in the Beinecke Rare Books Library. When we got there he ordered up from the stacks a number of Tibetan books, including a few boxes of uncataloged materials. One book was so big the librarian couldn't lift it, so she had to call upon a strong young man to wheel it out to us in the reading room on a cart. I found several things of interest to me, but one of the most intriguing items in the boxes was a cursive manuscript made up of exceptionally narrow leaves, but with the front leaf, the one that would have contained the book’s title, missing. I could tell soon enough from its content that it was a Tagtab (Brtag-thabs) text, a fairly rare genre of Tibetan literature, one that resembles pariksha texts in India (there is a similar genre in classical Arabic literature). It described such things as saddles, horses, helmets, swords, teacups and so forth. These connoisseur's handbooks, if we may call them that, have hardly ever been noticed outside Tibet himself, despite their inestimable importance for cultural studies.

Back at Harvard Square, I had a supper appointment with Gene that very night. At the time his incalculably huge collection of Tibetan books was housed in nearby Somerville. Before the food arrived at the table, I decided to tell him about my great find in New Haven. No sooner had I started to describe the manuscript than — to my utter consternation — he told me nearly everything there was to know about it. He told me its title, the name of the person who once owned it (J.F.W.), the monastery where it was kept before then, the name of the author, the probable date (1536 or 1476 CE?) given that the author was a student of the 7th Karmapa hierarch (1454-1506 CE). But what astounded me almost as much as all this detailed knowledge about something I had assumed was my own original discovery was the news that he had never actually seen the manuscript with his own eyes. He had long tried to persuade the owner to let him publish it — he had heard about it from a former Lhasa noble who had actually seen it, but Gene had never seen the book himself.  The only thing new I could tell him, the one detail he didn't yet know, was that the former owner had meanwhile donated the manuscript to Yale.*

(*This bit of information about the text's present location has since been added to that wonderfully useful database of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centre (www.tbrc.org) at TBRC Work RID: W30393. The author's name is Cha Jamyang Tashi Namgyal — Bya 'Jam-dbyangs Bkra-shis-rnam-rgyal. Chances are very good that the library system in Yale is still entirely unaware that it exists in their collections...)

I write this mainly as a way of finding an outlet for my personal grief. Gene was an irrepressible character who will remain forever irreplaceable. If you want to read a moving tribute, read what Matthieu Ricard has written at his blog page. Now that we've gotten this far into the 21st century, it’s even possible to find an endless stream of messages on Twitter.  If you are a Tibetan reader you can find a story, with added comments including many tributes to Gene, at the Tibetan-language site Khabda.  

I am not sure what Gene would want exactly, let alone what his family would wish, but I can only recommend from my own side that if you would like to honor Gene's memory, do something to honor his vision. One thing you could do, among others, is donate something for the movie that is being made about his life by Digital Dharma. Another even more obvious choice would be to give something to the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center he founded. 


The funeral is tomorrow, in case you find yourself in the New York area, but a more public memorial service is planned for the near future. A tribute page has appeared overnight on the internet, here.  


There is a blog entry at Digital Tibetan Buddhist Altar.  More tributes and anecdotes have appeared at H-Buddhism and H-Asia. I also just noticed these words by Tim McNeill of Wisdom at Buddhadharma.  The Library of Tibetan Works and Archives has an obituary. There is another tribute by Jeff Watt... one by Ariana Maki...

A Door in the Library of Congress

I recommend watching the video of Gene Smith's presentation of a "mini-Mac" hard drive containing scans of 4,000 Tibetan books to Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche at Bka'-rnying Bshad-sgrub-gling ("Isle for the Teaching and Accomplishment of Kagyu and Nyingma Teachings") in Bodhanath, Nepal at this webpage.

Postscripts (Sept. 24, 2012):

A little behind on my reading — and who isn't? — I noticed only just today that the manuscript that features in this blog has now been publicized in an appendix to Donald J. LaRocca, et al., Warriors of the Himalayas: Rediscovering the Arms and Armor of Tibet, The Metropolitan Museum & Yale University Press (New York & New Haven 2006).  You can find a Tibetan-script edition of some parts of it, and even a photograph of the colophon page with the authorship information.

The movie about Gene is now out, and I've heard it has been shown in NYC.  I hope to see it before long.