Tibetan Bell in Armenia - Concluding

We continue where this blog left off.

This hand bell or drilbu, taken from an online auction site, has the mantra oṃ aḥ hūṃ in vertically stacked (not horizontal like ours), raised letters on the interior of the bell.  Click on the photo and perhaps you will see it better. This bell is rather unusual in its appearance, and although there are textual recommendations to place the mantra inside the slope of the bell, this seems to have presented some technical difficulties since it is rarely done. I assume our triply-repeated mantra was written in the form of a band encircling the outside of the slope of the bell, although I admit this is an assumption that could be proved untrue.

In general, what we can say about this three-syllable mantra — more ubiquitous in Secret Mantra Buddhism than the world-famous Mani Mantra — is that it is for blessing offerings.  The three syllables are for the Body, Speech and Mind of the Buddha. The mantra brings the blessings of all three to the offerings being made, whatever they may be. In practically every ritual you can see how the name of the offering is placed immediately after the first two syllables and before the third. In the case of our bell, my intuition is that it isn’t exactly or exclusively intended for offering purposes. For one thing, it is repeated three times, and this kind of repetition seems to be found mostly in food blessings and the like. I think our bell inscription has a consecratory significance, primarily, but I’m open to better suggestions.

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So while we are drawing to a close, with a fervently whispered hope for an actual photograph of the inscription, since having one would further our investigation like nothing else could, I’d like to draw attention a few of its interesting features. As we mentioned, it is usual to write oṃ without the length-mark. That the bell inscription surely has this length-mark appears to mark it as archaic or at least archaizing. The visarga here seen as two small circles one on top of the other is missing in the Alishan eye-copy, although it would be strange if it were just overlooked. Schmidt’s metal-type does have it (his own correction based on Csoma de Körös? How can we be sure?). And finally, it violates more recent writing standards to put a tsek-mark, the syllable-dividing mark, in this case, immediately before the shad sentence-ending mark (the vertical stroke). In truth, in writing Indic mantras such as this, it ought to be the rule, a rule not always followed, that no tseks should be used at all. After all, it is Sanskrit language, where nothing like the tsek is needed to begin with. 

 

Just one more example of the lengthmark, perhaps the earliest one known to me right now, comes from the Tibetan imperial (or early post-imperial) period. It is a “pen-testing” or doodling paper found in Dunhuang.* Here you can see twice the oṃ with the lengthmark beneath. The scribe amused himself, and us, by making the two wings of the vowel ‘o’ look, well, like wings ready to lift off and flutter about the room. This only helps with the point that the lengthmark is indeed found in early times.

(*I seem to remember Sam van Schaik was the first to draw attention to this, although at the moment I can't find the exact blog in Early Tibet. On the pen-testing papers, see Takeuchi.)

Now we should make some brief comments on modern ideas about the bell and the reasons for its unavailability. In 2014, I asked world-renowned Armenian Studies savant Prof. Emeritus Michael Stone some questions via email, and he is the one who suggested to me to have them circulated to an Armenian Studies discussion list. There were a number of responses, but since I haven't asked for let alone received permissions from them to repeat their words, I will just state my own generalizations, additionally based on modern literary sources both on and off-line, such as those you see just below:

Some interesting ideas on how the bell got there, found in recent literary sources.

To judge from the responses received back in 2014, we may say: There seem to be two opinions among the experts about why the bell itself is currently unavailable for inspection. One that it is still at Etchmiadzin Cathedral, but placed in storage somewhere. The other that a public address system was installed and the bells (the Tibetan bell presumably among them) subsequently distributed to churches in other parts of Armenia. My general impression is that for Armenians today, the existence of the Tibetan bell is a matter for pride, and one more indication among many of the wide-ranging activities of their ancestors.

A conclusion for the time being

If we were to draw analogies between philology and archaeology — and I think doing so could make very good sense — I would say that paleography is the pottery analysis of the text philologist. Together with the paper-and-ink analyses now gaining in popularity, paleography can prove a powerful tool for dating physical manuscripts and inscriptions, similar to the dating of archaeological strata through pottery. No serious paleography can be done on Armenia’s Tibetan bell inscription without first having an accurate record of the letters and their very shapes. This is the primary motive for our bell quest. Similar to paper-and-ink analyses, we might add, a 21st-century metallurgical analysis of the Armenian bell could allow certain conclusions about the places where the metal was mined. How unfortunate it is for us that the possibility of paleographical and metallurgical findings seems to have receded out of our reach.

Holy objects present us with the ever-mysterious numen normally out of our grasp in our everyday lives, but they may be the very things that make us hold on to religions as tightly as we do. As objects, they persistently present themselves to us, as if they possessed the formed solidity of text-book materiality, Aristotle’s forma et materia forever superglued together. Some objects are hard to ignore and demand our attention. Out-of-place objects particularly so.

Armenia’s Tibetan Bell bears on its surface an inscription identifying it as a consecrated Buddhist object, made holy through a consecration ritual. And what is consecration but a ritual agreement that with all the odds against it happening the holy can indeed be localized within the most material of things.* And there are reasons this unholy and theologically improbable union should be regarded as helpful.

(*See King Solomon's speech at the consecration of the Jerusalem temple in II Chronicles 6:18 where he brings up exactly this kind of objection.)

Out-of-place artifacts — and I think our Tibet Bell in an Armenian church must surely be seen as an example — threaten our normative academic discourses of difference and belonging. They are matter out of place, so to speak. They violate the normative philological principle of ‘fit’ (the demand that a new bit of evidence can only be accepted in evidence if it fits within a range of earlier well-established evidence). They seem to say, No more business as usual, it’s time for a change of view.

And in the case of our bell, despite all the objective materiality it ought to have, it remains elusive and untouchable, perhaps even hidden from our eyes, our touch, and most significant of all, our hearing. We can only hope that this out-of-place artifact turned mis-placed artifact will turn up soon to help us answer the remaining questions burning in our minds. Until then, I guess we can give the quest a short rest.

Some literature:

The blog called “The Last Yak,” entry dated November 3, 2010: How do You Spell Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ Anyway?

Yael Bentor, Consecration of Images and Stûpas in Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, Brill (Leiden 1996).

Tsuguhito Takeuchi, Glegs tshas: Writing Boards of Chinese Scribes in Tibetan-Ruled Dunhuang, contained in: Brandon Dotson, Kazushi Iwao and Tsuguhito Takeuchi, eds., Scribes, Texts, and Rituals in Early Tibet and Dunhuang, Reichert Verlag (Wiesbaden 2012), pp. 101-109, 150-153. 

A hare on a bell?  A highly curious modern sculpture to be seen in Yerevan, at the cascades.
Could this be a clue in favor of Hulegu?

That Tibetan Bell in Armenia Once More

What do we do with matter out of place? Do we ignore, reject it? Or do we find ways to accommodate it? Is it the exception that only serves to prove the rule? Or does it break and in doing so invalidate the rule? The existence of a bell with a Tibetan inscription in the heart of Armenia is so worthy of comment, we might wonder why it isn’t mentioned much more. But what ought to pique our interest instead risks embarrassing our grand sweeping theories, risks getting swept aside in the Big Sweep of historical narrative.

Map to show the distance the bell would have travelled.    

If you find it disconcerting that a Tibetan bell could possibly pop up in Armenia you should not for that reason feel lonely. After all, the distance "as the crow flies" from Lhasa to Yerevan is 4358 km, or about 2,700 miles, much further than the width of the contiguous-states part of the United States of America. In terms of long-distance horse-back riding, that would mean around 135 days of travel, more than 4 months, carrying an extraordinarily heavy object that would slow down even our hypothetical horse averaging 20 miles a day. Adjusting for the weight of the load and the indirectness of the routes, I’d say we’re talking at least 200 days of travel, perhaps even a year. Today, with two stopovers in Kathmandu and Qatar, you can do it in 17 hours.

Holy Etchmiadzin, the Mother Cathedral of Armenia.

The truth is that this bell has been discovered over and over again for a couple of centuries now, and each time people who hear about it find it surprising news. If you have a short memory, as we tend to, you likely forgot the 2006 blog on the subject called “The Mysterious Whitehead.” What I have to say today is yet another sounding of an alarm clock set at regular intervals in order to tell the world, Yes, what you’ve heard is true, no matter how unbelievable it may sound. But then people say, Okay, now I’m convinced, I can believe it’s there, but that only makes me want to ask you more questions about the hows, the whens and the whys.

Today I’m going to suggest some ideas from a Tibetocentric perspective, naturally, about how those questions might possibly be answered. I’ll supply some probable scenarios in terms of time and place. But regardless of the near impossibility of fully satisfying solutions, we ought to be able to find significance in our failures. So I don’t believe our time dwelling on this fascinating topic will go to waste.

 Two views of Etchmiadzin’s exterior.

The First Christian building was placed there in around 302-303 CE on the site of an ancient fire temple. Here Gregory the Illuminator beheld a vision of Christ descending from heaven.

   
Etchmiadzin in central position in a floor mosaic in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. 

Views of the bell towers.

Photo from a Bell Consecration 

This shows a bell consecration ritual for newly constructed St. Gevorg Church of Berd, in Armenia in 2014. This helps to demonstrate the importance of bells in Armenian Christianity, as objects worthy of their own consecration rituals. The Armenian “Book of Rituals” includes a special rite for the anointment and consecration of bells. Sometimes, on special occasions, divine service (or “mass”) was performed in the bell towers rather than in the main part of the church.

Now that the Armenian side has been introduced, I’d like to go with some care through the bits of evidence about the Tibetan bell in 19th-century, primarily western European publications. 

Title page of Frédéric Dubois de Montpéreux.

As far as I know right now, this is the first notice of the bell within the context of a published book. It is based on the author’s own visit to Etchmiadzin in 1831.

The author in the footnote makes reference to the Mani Mantra as if it were relevant to the inscription on the bell, a misunderstanding that took on a life of its own, as confusions tend to do.

Dated 1837 — A notice by Brosset and Schmidt in St. Petersburg, based on the finding of Dubois.

“The bell of the convent of Edchmiadzin carries a Tibetan legend repeated three times on the outer edge: ôm â houm.

“M. Schmidt, in giving us the reading of this inscription, which was collected by the seasoned traveler M. Dubois, in 1831, has communicated to us the following note:” 

The same, continued

“In the Tibetan grammar of Csoma of Körös we find among the interjections* the three mystical characters of the bell of Etchmiadsin explicated as follows: oṃ is the symbol of the substance or the person of Buddha or of a divinity in general, aḥ is the symbol of the word of Buddha etc. and hûṃ the symbol of his grace and mercy. This all together forms the idea or symbol of the Buddhist trinity, commonly called the three precious ones, whose representatives are: Buddha or his image, sacred books and the clergy.”

(*My note: I find in the Csoma de Körös grammar [1834], p. 105 on internet, heading the class of interjections, "oṃ, a mystical interjection, denoting the essential body or person of a Buddha or any other divinity. aḥ, ditto, denoting the word or doctrine of ditto. hûṃ, ditto, denoting the mind or mercy of ditto.”)

(Another note:  The script is here actually metal type for Tibetan that Schmidt himself developed in just about this same time. This same type would continue to be used in St. Petersburg publications for the following century.)

“The religious of Edchmiadzin do not know when and by what route this bell has been brought into their convent. It can hardly be doubted that it dates back to the Mongol era.”

Everybody knows Helena Blavatsky as a founder of the Theosophical Society. Long before that, in 1849, she had a very brief, eventful and unconsummated marriage with a Russian vice-governor of Yerevan Province in Armenia. It would have been after their supposed honeymoon, or around the end of August of that year when she visited Etchmiadzin Cathedral. For some time I was fooled by a passage in the book by Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky, theWoman behind the Myth, that seems to imply that she had taken note of the Tibetan bell during this trip, but further investigation led nowhere, so I’ve abandoned the idea. I think the modern biographer simply slipped in this bit of interesting information for the benefit of her readers. Searching through the 15 volumes of Blavatsky’s online Collected Works, she displays no interest at all in Christian Armenia, only in its pagan and Zoroastrian past, and with only a few mentions of Etchmiadzin, there is nothing to find about any bell there.

She also mentions “Chaldean” inscriptions. As background, we may say that Friedrich Schultz had discovered what we now know to be Urartian inscriptions near Lake Van in 1826. These began being deciphered only in the 1850’s, with success reported in 1882. The oldest inscription in Urartian dates to 9th century BCE. This does help us with the context for understanding why the monks proffered the idea that the bell inscription was Chaldean. But honestly, there is no way Tibetan script resembles Cuneiform. Not to my eyes, but well, you know, there are people who look at the Voynich Manuscript and see Tibetan there, too.*

(*There’s a 58-page pamphlet made available through commercial outlets on the internet entitled, The Voynich Manuscript: The Tibetan Bible. I haven’t worked up the courage to order it yet. If you think it’s worthwhile, write and tell us what you find out.)

James Bryce account.

As you see there is a bare mention only in Bryce’s book on his 1876 travels.

Chart of 19th-century sources on the inscription on the bell. 

To continue reading click here.

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Blogography

For background, as if you needed any, have a look at these back blogs:

The Mysterious Whitehead, Tibeto-logic blog, December 21, 2006. Notice also, “Renewed Bell Appeal,” May 15, 2007; and “Bell Envy,” June 15, 2009. Also on bells is “Another Disquieting Bell and Its Inscription.”