Newsweek’s Photo Fact-Check Fail

This is not, we repeat, NOT, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Discovering a major news magazine’s huge mistake ought to be an opportunity for gloating. In this case none of that gloating would be mine, since the whole idea and the research involved here comes not from me but from R.K., who is now going to build a major reputation for his initials, since that’s all he wanted to put here. The problem is a photograph that has sometimes been used in stories about His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who yesterday enjoyed a Prayer Breakfast in Washington with The President of the United States of America Barack Obama, and had a long time before that received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, etc. etc. Honestly, I assume everybody in the known universe knows to whom it is that we refer.

In the Newsweek story in today’s February 6, 2015 issue — Peter Popham’s “Relentless: The Dalai Lama's Heart of Steel” — the photo appears as above in our frontispiece, but labeled with the following caption:

“Young Dalai Lama at Usersky-Danzan temple in Mongolia in 1939, aged three. KEYSTONE/AFP/GETTY”

Since the present Dalai Lama — or, if you prefer, Jampel Ngawang Lozang Tendzin Gyatso, འཇམ་དཔལ་ངག་དབང་བློ་བཟང་བསྟན་འཛིན་རྒྱ་མཚོ་ — was born on July 7, 1935, and Tibetan ‘age’ is always calculated up one year, that would make the photo date from around 1937, right? Wrong.

To see just how wrong this is, have a look at the front page of this newspaper. Do not fail to make a note of the date you see there.

"The Great White Lama:
Notice His Cunning Little Toes"
published Monday, June 3, 1929

Our conclusion is very simple and indisputable. Since this photo was published in 1929 (and it seems it had already been published in England a year earlier*), it simply cannot be His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Newsweek must fix their error in dating it to 1939, ten years later. It is really beside the point if others made this or similar mistakes before them.** It might be interesting to trace the genealogy of this particular error in some detail someday, in some doctoral dissertation or whatever, but an error it most surely is.

(*This website [go there and search for the number "10215921"] says it took the photograph from The Illustrated London News of 22nd Dec 1928.)

(**Just do an “image search” on the internet, and you will find it has been used a number of times as if it were a photo of the His Holiness.  Of course there is yet another mistake in the Newsweek picture caption, since His Holiness as a child never set foot in Mongolia.) 

It has to be a photograph of someone else, and the question remains, Who? The newspaper story places it inside Tibet, but it is not always the case that the earliest version of the story is the truest therefore. If the photo was taken at a place called “Usersky-Dazan,” it would not have been in “Thibet,” but rather in Mongolia, Buriatia, or Kalmuckia somewhere.* So if you know or can find out anything at all about this little Lama with his dextrous toes, drop us a comment, let us reason together and seek out the truth even while we are sifting out the errors.

(*That Slavic genitive ending kind of gives it away, and the “Dazan” is a foreign and very likely Mongolian spelling for Tibetan Datsang, or གྲྭ་ཚང་  Mongolian always replaces the Tibetan final ‘ng’ sound with final ‘n’.  For a curious picture said to be from Usersky-dazan, have a look at this commercial site.  I also found in a newspaper archive a story published in the San Antonio Light for April 10, 1932, an article entitled “Why the Obscure Mongolian Baby Born at the Proper Minute is Worshipped as a God,” but seeing it involved filling out a long form and paying ten U.S. dollars, I decided to let it be.  I did manage to find a clue that this Dazan ought to be located 20 miles from the ever-moving and ever-growing town of Urga. Urga is regarded as the old name for Ulan Bator.)

Here is the larger version of the photo I promised you earlier on. Take a very close look at it. If you detect signs it could be a collage of two different photographs, you may not be entirely alone. You can see that somebody's bad touchup job turned the beautiful double-Vajra design on the hanging cloth into a kind of crude looking cross.

For this Getty image, look here.

Addendum (February 7, 2015):

I am happy to report that the identification problem is largely solved, and I can tell you, Newsweek is going to feel even sillier than expected with cake all over his face. Again, I don’t get any gloating rights.  All the credit goes elsewhere.  Well, yesterday, as I was putting up the blog I did have the presence of mind to send an email to someone I was sure would be able to answer a few Mongol-ological questions, about where the monastery might be, in particular. But I have to admit that Agata Bareja-Starzynska of Warsaw surprised me with her brief and directly to the point information. In yesterday's first email she identified the “Usersky-Dazan” monastery as Gusino-ozersky (or Gusino-ozerskii Datsan) in Buryatia. And already last night she told me that the boy in the photo was most probably the one playing a lama in the Pudovkin movie “A Storm over Asia.” And this morning, I received the following email sent late last night. Seeing this evidence throws a very different light on the identity of the toe-crossing child Lama. To put it mildly, it was not the  solution I was expecting, not at all.

Dan,
Found it via Internet!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xc6OncdsdI
see a scene at 1:04:13 till 1:06
the Lama boy is there playing with his toes.
Goodnight!
Agata

For myself, the scene started closer to 1:03. I recommend starting several minutes earlier, since there are scenes to be seen of Cham dancing that are quite impressive. I admit I have still never seen this movie (apart from this scene of course). I only now learned how to make “screen shots” on my Mac, so I’ll put some examples down below for the convenience of blog readers too lazy to watch movies.

Oh the movie! I forgot to say something about the movie. I found out that it’s a famous full-lengthed silent film, supposed to have been a landmark in cinematographic history when it was made in 1928. The director was Vsevolod Pudovkin, and the English-language version is called “Storm over Asia.” The original title means “The Heir to Genghis Khan.” If you want to know what it’s about, have a look for yourself. But before you go, just let me get in one last jibe, smear a bit of that cake around on Newsweek’s face. The photo Newsweek innocently believed to be an image of His Holiness the Dalai Lama took on an aura of reality in two distinct historical phases: [1] an early Soviet period movie and [2] a newspaper story concocted out of the same for the bemusement of English and American readers who would not have known any better. Or were the journalists themselves the ones who knew no better?

Screen shots from the movie

§   §   §

Another Addendum (February 8, 2015):

I was thinking there was still an area of mystery that ought to be explored if possible, namely, ‘Can anything more be known about the actual child who played the part of the infant Lama?’ Somebody told me he would be the best person to find out about anything that happened in Buryatia, so I wrote to Nikolay Tsyrempilov, who works at the Buryat State University in Ulan Ude. I was delighted by his fast response, and will, with his kind permission, pass on two passages from his emails, the first dated yesterday and the second dated today.

The first quote:

“As for your question, I have nothing new to add to what you already know. That’s absolutely true that Usersky Dazan is Gusinoozersky Datsan, the main Buddhist monastery of Buryatia until 1940s. Pudovkin made some important episodes of his movie at that monastery. I think that the boy was just a simple boy who was selected in the process of casting. I don’t believe that he was a real tulku. My opinion is based on the fact that in 1928 it was not safe for high foreign Lamas to stay in Buryatia. A year earlier the Soviet authorities launched repressions against the Lamas, and if you watch the movie carefully, you’ll see how anxious the lamas’ faces are. A couple of years before some Tibetan tulkus, e.g. Tangring Rinpoche, had stressful experiences  staying in Buryatia. In 1928 the situation was even worse. If you look at the boy you can see that his attire is not typical for small tulkus. They just put a piece of yellow (I believe it is yellow) cloth on him. Probably, that was the reason he was called the white lama.”

The second is in answer to a question I had about the throne, and not just the child seated on it.  I was thinking that the cloth that hangs down in front is a real throne cloth, featuring a large double-Vajra design, as we often see on Rinpoche thrones. But I was also thinking that the throne was far too low and close to the pavement to be a real Rinpoche throne.  So here is Prof. Tsyrempilov's response:

“As for the throne, I think it’s a fake. It looks like a real one, but I believe this one was hastily constructed specially for the movie. Yes, it seems rather too low. The boy is not an ethnic Russian, he is a typical Buryat.”

§   §   §

A wrinkle (Valentines Day, 2015):

If we were thinking there would be a smooth path to identifying the real young man in the photo and in the movie before the photo, a new and interesting wrinkle has come up along the way. I also wrote to Andrey Terentyev of St. Petersburg, author of some excellent books on Tibetan art and so on that I may blog about sometime soon. The surprising new news is that the temple in which the little lama was sitting was not in Buryatia as we had thought. I mean, it would be only natural to assume that he was filmed there, in the same place as all Cham dancing scenes that came before. But it now appears that this, like so many other things, is an illusion. Andrey says he immediately recognized the temple and its main image (or images) as the ones that were, in around the mid-1930's, at least, in the Buddhist temple that Agwan Dorjiev founded in St. Petersburg, Russia.  Just below is a photo from that time that he sent me. I could locate a similar photo in a published book that dates it to the early 1930's, so at least we are in the right general time frame here. The temple still stands in Petersburg, I once visited it myself, and I can tell you that the large main image that is there now is not the one you would have seen in the 1930's (the one that appears in our photos).  Andrey also sent a nice photo of the main image that you can see further down.

Interior of Dorjiev's Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg, early-to-mid 1930's

Compare what you see here to the first in the set of four screen-shots from the 1928 movie that I’ve posted above. Look closely and decide for yourself if what you see is the same place or not.

Main central images in the Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg, early-to-mid 1930's

I’m not one hundred percent, but I think that the smaller Buddha you see in front is the silver Gautama Buddha donated by the King of Siam especially for the consecration of the temple.* Its building began in 1909, with the permission of Czar Nicholas, and that story is a fascinating one we can’t go into right now. Needless to say, not everyone was in favor of its building, and Dorjiev reports in his memoirs that he received a number of death threats. Still, after the building was finished, the monks seem to have gotten on well with their neighbors.

(*Now, February 15, 2015, Andrey informs me that the Gautama was in fact copper, not silver, so my authority on this is  certainly misleading. Thanks to Andrey for fixing still more of my mistakes.)

An email communication, dated February 15, from Andrey:

Dear Dan,
It’s true about looting the temple and fixing main image afterwards. But that image was made of alabaster and later was changed by Dorjiev for a metal one which you see on our photos.
One friend of mine, who was the main Snelling’s informant didn’t speak good English, so I suspect that Snelling mixed info on Siamese Buddha with another story concerning the famous Sandalwood Buddha statue made during Buddha’s lifetime and kept in Russia since 1900.
The Siamese statue was made of copper or brass. It was kept in the Museum of History of Religions and Atheism where I worked for 13 years.a

I should add a few clarifications: The alabaster, being either white or lightish golden colored, was at least partly gilded over.  The 1916 photo is different from all the others, since the Buddha's curls appear white (probably because the alabaster was not gilded there), the eyes are quite glowingly white, and the throne backing is very different.  The sandalwood Buddha Andrey mentioned is something he knows about, since he wrote a book on exactly that subject:  

The Sandalwood Buddha of the King Udayana. St.-Petersburg: A.Terentyev, 2010

Parallel Russian and English text

ISBN 978-5-901941-25-6

I noticed one detail that confirms or even clinches the fact that the scene of the little Rinpoche was shot in the St. Petersburg temple. I wish I had a copy of it to upload, but if you have the book at hand, turn to John Snelling's book Buddhism in Russia (Element 1993), photo no. 16 in the middle of the book. There you see a photo labelled "Danzan Norboyev, sixth incarnation of Ganzhirva-Gegen, on the high lama's throne in the Leningrad Temple." Now get out a magnifying glass and examine the fabric covering the backrest part of the throne (the part behind the back of the Lama).  Now look at the fabric covering the backrest in the scene from the 1928 movie.  The floral fabric pattern is the same. And Danzan Norboyev (1887-1935) would have arrived in St. Petersburg in around 1929, so the dates are close enough we can be fairly sure it is the same piece of cloth. A minor detail, I suppose, yet telling.

So, let’s see where we stand right now...  Far from being a photo of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the photo Newsweek published as being of Him was passed down from English & American newspapers of 1929 to 1932 that, without admitting doing so, took it from a Russian movie released in 1928. Now we know that the shots of the young reincarnate in that movie were actually taken in St. Petersburg, in a temple built for the use of the many Kalmucks and Buryats staying in St. Petersburg in those days. No reason why the child could not have been a Buryat as N.T. says he was, no reason at all. If I had a hammer handy I would want to pound on each letter as if it were a nail piercing the conscience of Newsweek, but I guess bold print will do well enough:  His Holiness was not in St. Petersburg in the 1920's, and the child filmed there was not Him, not Him at all.

Embed from Getty Images

Can you believe that "Getty Images" still has it up on their site among its Dalai Lama photos? And with what is, in any case, a very mistaken caption: 

"Un des enfants designes par les pretres de la Cite interdite comme pouvant eventuellement succeder au Dalai-Lama defunt, il n'en fut pas le cas, a Lhassa, Tibet, Chine, le 21 decembre 1933."

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Read more...

P.S. (Not intending to let Newsweek off the hook, but...)

• Of course, to His Holiness this kind of identity problem will bring no grief at all. 

• It is difficult to predict precisely, and I wouldn’t ever for the life of me even seem to second-guess His Holiness, but I strongly suspect His reaction would look a lot like this:

View image | gettyimages.com

End of story?  As of beginning of July 2015, it would appear that Newsweek did at last remove the offending photograph.  It took them a long time, but they were finally responsive.  This has now been independently confirmed by Raj Kumar, so we may regard our campaign as successful.  That feeling of success is such a sweet one, isn't it?

Marvelous Man-Lifting Kites (& Giants in Caves)

Topkapi Palace, Istanbul

Several years ago I joined a Yahoo discussion group devoted to the teachings of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (1910‑1981). It was not just a whim, I was more than a little curious and thought it would be a learning experience for me. Once again, I heeded that irritating impulse of mine to dig into things a little further, or to do, in a word, research. These are people who have heard all the evidence that Rampa was himself a faker, yet go on insisting that his teachings are none the less true and very effective for them, regardless of all those misrepresentations they are couched in. I am a little perplexed when I see this, thinking that genuinely useful teachings ought to come from a genuine source. I could be wrong about this. People want to grow, that’s for sure, and usually it happens while they are preoccupied with other things. But they don’t have much patience or perseverence, and meanwhile they would really rather just be entertained. I guess we are all familiar with the Barnum effect, the dictum — not Barnum’s own — that a ‘sucker is born every minute’ so why not serve their needs? Excuse me, I’ll be right back. I just remembered I have a giant petrified hominid in my back yard begging for me to dig it up.

If Rampa told something not true about the man-lifting kites to make the story more entertaining, what’s to say he wouldn’t also add non-truths to his instructions on telepathy, astral traveling and so on? People are in some ways and at some times so trusting, so likely to get hooked in. How do you know when you’re real enough to be teaching other people in an honest way (I don’t mean specially religious or spiritual teaching, but any kind of teaching). I think about it and then go on to think some more, and in the end I just don’t know. If every person has to work out her or his own salvation anyway, then the search for the ‘perfect’ teacher could be a distraction. True no doubt, but what would that perfection look like if you found it? If there is no complete fraud, there is no completely genuine article, both are idealizing extremes that ought to be recognized as such.

“They shall have mysteries-- ay precious stuff For knaves to thrive by-- mysteries enough; Dark, tangled doctrines, dark as fraud can weave, Which simple votaries shall on trust receive, While craftier feign belief till they believe.”

— Thomas Moore (1779-1852),

The Veiled Prophet of Khorrasan 

What he says is true enough, but for all we know Moore could have been talking about psychoanalysis... Well, if the word had even been coined yet. The poster above Fox Mulder’s desk in the X-Files, if I remember right, reads “I want to believe.”* Indeed. What are we to believe? Just because something is unbelievable does it mean we have to make an all-out special effort to believe it? Amusing to consider the consequences of applying this axiom in a number of areas!

(*Imagine a man who everyday tries to walk out on a branch, reassuring himself by repeating to himself ‘The branch is strong.  The branch is very strong, very very strong...’ and each day his faith becomes stronger and stronger while he walks out further and further on the branch until one fine day the tree breaks a limb and so does he.)

Rampa was in reality a cranky old opinionated paranoiac, sour and sickly for most of his life, who didn’t mind telling people how he was against women’s rights (for example)  and how everybody — Tibetans, Tibetologists, the press, the governments — had been plotting against him all along...  Sound like somebody you know? And since he didn’t have all that many visitors up in cold Calgary, most of his socializing seems to have taken place through the postal system. 

Okay, more than enough of that sad contemplation, and on to something really interesting, those man-lifting kites!

The Rampa Kite Illustration

Can you make out the human figure standing there in the pilot’s seat? Is that ballast hanging at the ends of the wings?  Do you think they flapped?  Flight worthy you think?

But do notice this:  Man-lifting kites were employed by Chinese generals in warfare in quite early times, or at least the idea that they did is very firmly in place in the Chinese sources.

“Kung-shu* himself made an ascent riding on a wooden kite in order to spy on a city which he desired to capture.”

 ——Berthold Laufer, "The Pre-History of Aviation," Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago 1928), p. 23.

(*This Kung-shu was a contemporary of Confucius.)

And military uses of kites, even for lifting up humans for surveillance purposes, were well known to other nations well before Rampa’s time. Notice the date on the source that follows, six years before the birth of Cyril Hoskins.

^{Anonymous, Science, New Series vol. 20, no. 497 (July 8, 1904), p. 64:}

“IT is stated in the London Times that the man-lifting kite, as invented by Mr. Cody, has during the last few days been subjected to further trials at Aldershot with the view of testing its feasibility and usefulness for observation purposes in war time. The main features claimed for the kite are, first, its extreme simplicity and the ease with which the various component parts required to work it can be transported from place to place; and, secondly, that it can be flown in heavy wind such as would render the use of the war balloon almost impossible. A number of Royal Engineers are now under instruction in the working of the kite in order that it may be thoroughly tested.”

It isn’t exactly the question here whether man-lifting kites were known in China or England at any particular time. The question is ‘Did Tibetans in the first half of the 20th century fly inside kites for recreational (or any other) purposes?’  The answer to that question is by all accounts of Tibetans themselves an unequivocal “No!”

•  •  •

For background on what follows, try looking at L. Fitzpatrick, "L. Rampa: Sacrophagus with Giants of the Past and Machinery in the Caves of Tibet."  Click here.  

The western idea that there was a kind of giant Golem or the like in the Bietala* has a bit of history behind it, going as far back as the 18th century. My position is that it emerged out of a misunderstanding of descriptions of what the tomb-chortens of the Dalai Lamas were built to contain (along with a confusion between container and contents). That Rampa continues this earlier western misconception fits into a larger pattern that extends to his teachings, including practical instructions for astral travel, presented as Tibetan when in fact they are entirely taken from western occultism (Proclus, Blavatskian Theosophy etc.).

(*i.e., Potala; as long ago as 1683 in a book by M.A. Mallet, De L'Asie, some imagined they could hear the Italian word bietola for ‘beet’, the red vegetable source of all borscht.  For the illustration, go here.)

Q: What was gold-covered, in fact?  A: The chortens.  But the mummies could also be gilded.

Q: What was giant in fact?  A: The chortens.

Q: What do the chortens contain?  A: Mummified bodily remains of the Dalai Lamas, mummified in cross-legged seating position, of ordinary human size or smaller.

Q: How ancient are the times we are talking about here?  A: The first in the series of tomb chortens built within the Potala was the one for the Fifth Dalai Lama after His death in 1682.

§  §  §

Biblionotes:

I noticed an interesting thing in a bibliography, something I haven’t seen yet, that may have a bearing on a future discussion of Rampa kites:  J.E. Nowers, “The Man Lifting Kite: A Forgotten Invention?” Royal Engineers Journal, vol. 109 (1995), p. 96.

If you are deeply into kites, man-lifting or not, you must read Laufer’s little book we mentioned above, but also this:  Joseph Needham, et al., Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4: Physics and Physical Technology; Part 2: Mechanical Engineering, University Press (Cambridge 1965), pp. 568-602.

If you need some introducing to Rampa, here is something short and to the point from Tricycle magazine: Lobsang Rampa: The Mystery of the Three-Eyed Lama by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

For Tibeto-logic blogs on the "Three Eyes," see this one and this one from way back in 2007, with some of the more essential Rampa bibliography not mentioned here today. Those old blogs provoked some animated and entertaining discussion, informative, too.

There is, of course, a website devoted to Rampa's teachings, but at this very moment, it is "under construction."  Try your luck and look here.  And yes, there is a Wiki page about him.

Ancient Indian Aircraft on Agenda of Major Science Conference.  Huh? 
(See now the postscript, below.)

§  §  §

After a talk that was then published in 1961, the late Hugh Richardson fielded questions from the audience, including this one:

 Q: Is there any truth in the story of an operation to open the "third eye"? 

 A: None whatsoever. The book which describes it is an utter fraud. It was written by somebody who had never been out of England.

"Utter fraud?"

There are those fascinating figures from long ago who had the vision to believe the moon was a reachable goal.  Were they believed much?

A few like Wm. Blake thought it would be wanting far too much (as we tend to do).

Speedy Gonsalez? Far ahead of his time.

I want!  I want!

There are genuinely people (6% of the population of the U.S.) who believe humans have never set foot on the moon, viewing NASA as an utter fraud. But even if these people are as deeply deluded as I believe they are, isn’t it also the case that the moon landing was "staged" to appear in a particular light, to make a particular type of impression on we the earthlings? Do you think everything about it was utterly spontaneous and unrehearsed? I guess you get my general drift.

One of Cody's Man-lifting Kites

I’ll end by giving Rampa the final word. These are practically his final words, since they come from the end of his final book, written not long before his death. I want to underline the words true, absolutely true, but perhaps it isn’t necessary:

“These books, my books, are true, absolutely true, and if you think that this particular book smacks of science fiction you are wrong. The science in it could have been many times increased had the scientists been at all interested, but the fiction—there just isn't any, not even “artists' license.” ”

°=°=°

Postscript (May 16, 2015):

Turkish & Mongolian Loanwords

The Tibetan words here are, to transcribe them into Wylie, in order:  sku-bde-rigs, gang-zag, chol-kha, 'jam, thu-lum, na-so, no-kar, pag-shi, beg-tse, sbe-ka, tshan, she-mong, hor-dud, and am-chi.  I know the letters are small, so double-click on the image to enlarge it.

In times gone by, musk was the most popular Tibetan product in the whole world. Now that the musk deer is considered endangered it’s been replaced by synthetics, so much so that now Tibet’s biggest money maker is Buddhism, which seems to be facing the same fate. The Mongolian is kuderi, and the Tibetan borrowing of it gives it Tibetanizing spellings that make it seem to mean family of healthy bodies, but using very honorable language. Why would Tibetans ever think to borrow yet another word when they already had such a perfect one of their own for it, gla-ba? I have no idea.

Gang-zag is a tricky word, since its usual meaning is person (Sanskrit pudgala), not pipe.

I know I once claimed that sbe-ka had something to do with the Sanskrit word for frog, and now all of a sudden I’m contradicting myself finding an Old Mongolian origin for it in a word for wrestler. I admit I was probably wrong, although come to think of it I could have been right. For more on the frog read further.

You may well wonder what metal ingots might have to do with whole animal pelts. Well, even if you weren’t wondering: In ancient times in the Middle East and elsewhere, there was a practice of pouring molten metal into whole animal skins immersed in water. The result would be an ingot with four short legs that made the very heavy objects a lot easier to for two people to handle.

Emchi is nowadays a most common Tibetan word for physician, entirely suitable for addressing your doctor in person. Goldstein's dictionary even records the spelling em-rje, one of those cute (and endearing) Tibetanizing spellings since the 2nd syllable means lord, making it all that much more respectful.

I imagine all, or at least most, of these loanwords from Mongolian entered Tibetan during the time of the Mongolian Empire or at least not before. I doubt you will find any of them in the Dunhuang documents or other pre-Mongol period sources, but Tibetanists can test this for themselves at the OTDO.

Here is a photo of a horse-hair thug, a traumatic symbol of Mongolian terror in the late 12th-13th centuries that we mentioned in an earlier blog. Still today, Tibetans use it to mark the location of gönkhang chapels where fear is (ideally) taken onto the Path.

•

The Tibetan words here are, to transcribe them into Wylie, in order:  khol-po, cog, chu-ba (or phyu-ba), 'cham, thug, sbal-kha, yol, gshang, and sag-ri.

Many of these words you see here, taken from Turkic languages, are not commonly encountered in Tibetan and a few are extremely rare (the names of Turkic gods, cog and yol only occur in long-forgotten Old Tibetan documents), although others such as chu-ba and 'cham are everyday words.

Here is a home video that shows you not only how to wrap your chuba, but throws in momo steaming as well. What a bargain! There is plenty of evidence for what early Uighur outfits looked like in donor portraits. Look here. Find a discussion of the word-connections for the clothing here (but please do correct the picture label there to read "Tibetan Chuba").

On the Turkic words for both the masked performers and the bell (just below), see Emel Esin's A History of Pre-Islamic and Early-Islamic Culture (Istanbul 1980), p. 107.

The gshang bell, used primarily by followers of Bön, but also by some Kagyü Lamas and spirit mediums, looks like this:

For the Tibetan word for that shagreen that helps you keep a nice and tight slip-free grip on knives and swords, have a look at this March 2009 blog entry of Sitahu where C.C. and I had a lot of fun discussing it. I have to say, I have nothing more to say about it, and I admit this much to my great chagrin.

•

I’ve found that you can find a lot more Tibetan words lifted from Mongolian in a convenient list — with discussion — in the 2008 doctoral dissertation of Tóth Erzsébet (Elisabeth Toth), Mongol–Tibeti Nyelvi Kölcsönhatások (found online here), pp. 13-34. It’s interesting that the Tibetan name used in recent times for Russia, ཨུ་རུ་སུ་, was taken from Mongolian. It would appear that Rgya-ser/ རྒྱ་སེར་ ['Yellow Expanse'?] is the more genuinely Tibetan name for this northern vastness, but it, too, doesn’t seem to date back more than a few centuries, so I very much doubt it could have anything to do with the Khazars.  I think it could very well have something to do with the memory of the Golden Horde.

All these vocabulary connections are provisional and merit prolonged study, reflection and discussion.

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Postscript!  (January 18, 2015)

The more I travel the less I know. No need to search afar for something so close to home. These wise adages (or something close) are often repeated and never heeded. But I had a funny experience today that brought it all home for me. I was digging in the back of the refrigerator and came up with a good proof of that ages-old wisdom (wisdom being something I do believe can be found at home, after all). It's been ages since that change of flights in Istanbul, over a month now, but I found the leftovers of something purchased in the duty free there. I hope you won't be offended if I show it to you. I must warn you it is slightly smelly, but not in such a bad way:

Notice those words on the label “Tulum Peyniri.” That means ‘cheese’ (peyniri, evidently the same word you find in palak paneer!) made in a tulum. That’s right, this cheese was traditionally (at least) made inside of a complete skin of a four-legged animal, the same word tulum that Tibetans borrowed at one time or another. A search of the internet came up with this exact cheese, suggesting we ought to mix it with walnuts, and this turned out to be a very good idea. Go ahead and go here and read what it says. I couldn’t find any pictures of how the cheese is or was made in Turkey, although I did find some nice photos of Jordanian Bedouin women showing how it’s supposed to be done.  Go here and here (I didn’t want to swipe the photos, since it’s a commercial site intending to make money... Follow the links, but beware of buying!)

By the way, a quick search of the e-text repository at TBRC immediately turned up 272 matches for ཐུ་ལུམ་ (thu-lum). So it is a word that is encountered in Tibetan literature from time to time (I’ve encountered it mainly in colophons... I remember I once mistranslated it as ‘cannonball.’  Live and learn. See you later. Take it easy.).

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Oh, I forgot to say that tulum is also a modern Turkish word for the bagpipe. I imagine it has something to do with the way they used to be made. And we really shouldn't leave the subject of inflatable skin bags (a subject that has been interesting me lately for other reasons) without mentioning their use for floating on the water. There is a remarkable Assyrian frieze depicting a man using a skin bag for floating in the water supposed to date from circa 800 BCE.  And the use of flotation devices is well known from Tibetan travel accounts, and in older Tibetan literature we have the very interesting Tibetan words rkyal (རྐྱལ་) used both for the float and for the storage bag and phyal (ཕྱལ་) more with the meaning of a float or a buoy.* To judge from the Englished version, the preparation of flotation devices for crossing rivers was something Padampa used as a metaphor for helping other people to get beyond suffering.**

(*The Rangjung Yeshe Wiki entries I've linked for you don't have either of these meanings with the meanings I've given for them, but that ought to be no great cause for surprise or concern. Longchenpa loved to use the word phyal metaphorically for floating freely with nothing to hold you in place.  **Blue Annals, Roerich tr., p. 922; but now that I check the original text, there is no word for any flotation device there.  It uses the word skya-gdos, སྐྱ་གདོས་, a compound of the words for oars and mast, both of them locomotive rather than flotation devices.  Which goes to show, it can be a problem to rely on translations, even when done by humans as competent as Gendun Choephel, who used the same woodblock printing of the Blue Annals as I do. So don't blame the different readings on variant readings.)