Saturday, January 09, 2010

Buddha's Life Relics Found in Antwerp




Relics of the Buddha’s life have been rediscovered in Antwerp.

Not that they were ever lost, mind you, just that sometimes through lack of attention, remarkable things escape us until someone points them out to us once more. Relics are more than just reminders. And really, anything that jolts us into remembering the Buddha has to be, even if for that reason only, effective in promoting Buddhist liberation. So, if you please, save those predictable knee-jerk Calvinist reactions for a more fitting occasion. This may be the story of a quest, but it’s a quest that can’t be undertaken for you. You have to participate. There are so many thousands of threads connected to treasures in worlds both yours and not yours. Pick up any thread you like, and be on your way.

In reading the Christian story, keeping the Buddhist original version in mind all the while, I’m inspired to contemplate the fictions of our as-usual lives, to reflect on how illusions can trap us, and how we can attempt to trap other people in our delusions, even under the guise of ‘protection.’ Several times dissimulations and pretenses become transparent to the hero. It isn’t simply through faith and humility that his sanctification comes about. It’s partly due to cognitive events and things of his own doing. There is something familiar about this kind of innocence and experience fable. ‘How was I to know that such a thing was even possible?’  ‘Who could believe that people would be so untrue?’  If you’ve ever needed to ask such questions, then you know what I’m talking about.

I’ll avoid insulting your intelligence, and just remind you politely that the young prince, the future Enlightened One, was carefully coddled inside the stone walls that surrounded the palace by his father, kept safe from all contact with the negative side of life. These precautions were motivated by a prophecy that said he’d either be a universal monarch or take up a life of renunciation. The king naturally wants his son to have it all, to become king. The prince feels trapped, so the king permits him, carefully supervised by his handpicked friends, to go on an excursion to a park outside the walls. There the innocent prince is confronted by a series of disillusioning meetings, with a set all Buddhists know as the four signs. The future Buddha encounters an old man, a sick man, and a corpse. And although this one is not always present immediately, he eventually meets an ascetic.

Quite similar to the Buddhist story, in the various Barlaam and Josaphat accounts the prince Josaphat comes in contact with the almost identical truth-dealing visions. In the Ismaili Arabic version, already, things had changed slightly, but not tooo much. The Prince goes out of the palace the first time and sees a sick man and a blind man. On a second excursion he meets an old man, which leads to a weighty discussion about death. Later on he learns about the existence of renunciates, and meets one by the name of Barlaam. So almost all the same elements are there, and they are very nearly identical in setting and tone.

In one version of the Buddhist story, the Bodhisattva meets the four on four successive days, each time going through a different gate of the palace.  At the eastern gate, he meets an old man, at the southern gate a sick man, the western gate a corpse, and at the northern gate a renunciate.

I'll leave you to explore the co-incidents and inter-connections, but I must say, in reading the first half of the account in The Golden Legend collection of saint stories I see India, and Indian origins, at nearly every turn.

Barlaam comes to the king offering a wish-granting jewel, one that looks just way too much like the Indian Buddhists' fabled cintamani (this Wiki entry is weak and inadequate, but anyway...it's something).

The episode of the archer and the nightingale immediately reminded me of Padampa's diamond-fed bird parable. I won't go into that any more right now since I've long planned a blog on that very theme. It can wait.

The cliff hanging episode is one that has a man fleeing a charging unicorn (it had been a rutting elephant before the Christians got ahold of it) fall into a pit. He grabs a branch, stopping his downward plunge, and just hangs there... but he sees that two mice,* one white and the other black, are gnawing away at the roots of the tree... Meanwhile, now and then, honey drips and dribbles from the tree into his mouth, and he imagines he’s happy. ‘My, isn’t life sweet?’ Well, alright, but he’s hanging over the open mouth of a hungry dragon hot to devour him. This story exists in both the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, and in the Indian Buddhist Lalitavistara.  Tibetan Buddhist teachers today tell the same story as part of the introductory Stages of the Path (lam-rim) teachings. Max Müller took notice of this migrating narrative well over a century ago in his well-known article.  
(*The white and black mice are the days and nights of our lives... Tibetan versions of this story may be found in Drolungpa’s extensive treatise on the Stages of the Path, in a collection of stories by Lorepa, and in a Mind Training text. For this last, see Thupten Jinpa's translation, p. 446.)

What’s missing from the Christian story, and had already started fading from view before reaching the borders of Christendom, is the account of Buddha’s Enlightenment. MacQueen explains how and why this happened very succinctly and nicely, so I'll just send you to his 2001 article to find out more.


It was in the middle of last year while reading Joseph Jacobs’ old and remarkable 1896 book that I ran across this passage on page xviii:

“In 1571 the Doge Luigi Mocenigo presented to King Sebastian of Portugal a bone and part of the spine of St. Josaphat. When Spain seized Portugal in 1580 these sacred treasures were removed by Antonio, the Pretender to the Portuguese crown, and ultimately found their way to Antwerp. On August 7, 1672, a grand procession defiled* through the streets of Antwerp, carrying to the cloister of St. Salvator the holy remains of St. Josaphat. There, for ought I know to the contrary, they remain to the present day.”


(*This, an out-of-date usage of the word, just means they went in single file.)

I was very much intrigued by those last words that kept echoing around inside the upper part of my ribcage and inside my skull cavity.

How to best explain this? Relics of a narrative? Corporeal relics of a literary corpus? Something like that, I suppose. Significant in a nearly intangible way. How to put a finger on it? A light goes on, goes off, goes on again...

So I fired off an electronic mail to my good friend Henricius Leidenensis (this being, in our vulgar Vulgates, Henk Blezer). Henk caught the fever, and before too long made the pilgrimage, for him not all that far, to the presence of the relics. It is entirely thanks to him and his gracious permission that I am miraculously able to present to you the amazing history of the relics as he has so far managed to trace them. Practically the only thing I would have to add to it is just the likelihood that the relics that first (?) surfaced in Venice had a prior existence in Constantinople, and before that the Holy Land. That is the way such things went — or, as they were wont to say, were translated — in those days.*

(*Over the centuries, the relics apparently have been making a very long and slow pradakshina of continental Europe, one that is not quite complete. Those who are familiar with the Vedic horse sacrifice, ideas about the Wheel Turning King, etcetera, will see the symbolism in it.)

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Henk's reports on the history of the narrative and its relics, as presented to Buddha-L on two different occasions:


The long itinerary of the legend to Europe presumably starts from Buddhist India and possibly proceeds through eclectic Manichaean hands, such as attested by documents from Turfan in Central Asia; but in any case the legends seem to have reached our earliest Christian versions, probably in the form of a Georgian text (see work by D.M. Lang), via earlier Arabic versions; and eventually continue to fan out into many, many European languages, via early Greek and further via Latin translations. Other itineraries exist for other regions of the world.

To my best present knowledge, in the Dutch language community, Philip van Utenbroeke may have first included a substantial version of the legend in his sequel to Jacob van Maerlant’s Spieghel Historiael, at around 1300.  Look here, here, and here.


The itinerary incidentally may also enlighten us on the possible transformation of the name Bodhisattva to Josaphat: 
E.g.: Bodhisattva (India)/ Bodisav (Turkish) / Budhasaf (Arabic) / Yudasaf (Arabic, apparently only one diacritical dot different)/ Iodasaf (Georgian)/ Ioasaph (Greek)/ Josaphat (Latin).
Particularly N. D. may find Almond's article 'enlightening,' for instance, for appreciating how Josaphat and Bodhisattva/Buddha possibly relate.

Almond, like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, takes care first to point out the immense popularity, starting at around the eleventh century AD, of these legends and the attendant narratives in Europe. Some of the attending stories and fables equally go back to Indian origins, and some also survived independently of the Josaphat legends. The stunning amount of extant manuscripts., translations, borrowings, and references amply underline their impact.

The Josaphat legends apparently were greatly loved and thus seem to have had a profound impact in Christian ‘Europe’, not only on story traditions, by their apparently enchanting fables and stories (some will beg to differ, of course), but certainly also vis-à-vis the main theme: appreciation of asceticism. They indirectly or directly influenced figures such as Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

One cannot help but wonder how this matrix of Buddhist-derived and otherwise accrued narratives may have facilitated later reception(s) of Buddhism in (Christian) Europe, which indeed is the question which incited Almond to embark on his journey. As said, I (still) feel little inclination to get into comparative study of this huge, multi-lingual, literary complex, but considering the apparent appeal and wide spread of the legends, its impact may be both considerable and considerably understudied. If not the legends and stories themselves, in any case the history of them may not only be ‘fascinating’ but also revealing.  




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Dear Josephists,

For the Buddha-L records, the history of the relics of Josaphat in a nutshell (from easily accessible secondary sources and certainly without doing any laborious archival researches):

1571 - Doge Luigi Mocenigo of Venice donated the relics (bone and piece of vertebra) to King Sebastian of Portugal (Jacobs 1896:xviii*1* and Lang 1966:9*2*), through the Spanish Envoy Pedro Velasco*3*

1580 - Spain seized Portugal and Don Antonio, Pretender to the Portuguese crown, removed the relics (Jacobs 1896)

1595 - Don Antonio of Portugal was defeated by Alva and fled to Paris, where he passed away*3*

1633 - Relics arrived from Portugal with the Cistercians in St. Salvator, in Antwerp (plaquette at the relic shrine? I am not completely sure about the date)?

1672 - August 7th 1672, the holy remains of St. Josaphat were carried to the cloister of St. Salvator*4* in a grand procession (Jacobs 1896:xviii)

Jacobs (1896:xix) presumes that the relics may then still be in St. Salvator. But they seem to have been removed, about a century before:

1796 - December 19th 1796, some time after the French revolution, during the French occupation, the monastics of St. Salvator were led out of the Abbey, with drums beating (Cruys and Cheron 2003:7)*5*

1797 - June 16th, 1797 the Abbey and its possessions were sold (ibid.)*6*

Already fearing that the 'paper' trail might stop here, much to my surprise, I found an on-line article by Wilfried Nijs and Rudy Janssens in a publication of a local history Circle in Holsbeek,*7* which indicated that all 36 relics at around that point in time had been relocated to the St Andrieskerk (see the section on "Relieken") - serendipity now!


(Tibeto-logic's note: You can see a photo of this reliquary if you look just below. Notice the words inscribed below the angels:  "Rel. XXXVI Sanctorum," which I take to mean ‘Relics of the 36 Saints’ — Hmm. See the bibliographical listing below, under Scholem...)



That's more or less what triggered our pilgrimage.

The present silver reliquary was produced around 1846 by J.B.A. Verschuylen (quite a stunning piece of craftsmanship in fact).*8* The angels adorning it were produced by others (Lodewijk Corijn and brothers de Cuyper). The shrine is carried around yearly, in the procession of "de parochie van miserie".*3*

For the legendary Indian Saint Josaphat, who is probably intended here, see the Martyrologium Romanum (1956), at the entry on Barlaam et Josaphat apud Indos, 27 Novembris (p.297f. of my Latin edition).

The bulk of the literature on the many versions of the legend, quite frankly, I find a bit intimidating, and much also has already been accomplished in previous scholarly publication.*10* But, if I ever have more time on my hands, I would enjoy tracking those relics back in time (and also filling up some of the gaps). This might even make for a nice documentary. There is more to be said about the history of the relics, of course. Just today, I spotted a small old (1901) local publication on the topic;*9* presently on route to my Leiden office.

However, the fact that the trail leads us to Venice in the 16th century AD does not bode well in this regard. Venice was a node in major trade networks and we are looking at the aftermath of a rich history and economy in mediaeval Europe of both trade and pilgrimage relating to relics -- or what had to pass for relics anyway. I am therefore not overly confident that we will find any useful antecedent trails. DNA testing of the relics would of course be very interesting; but then, permission and funding would become major issues.

As to N. D.'s doubts, I have not much to add or detract. I presume that if we would try to fit all the teeth and other relics ever presumed to be of the Buddha into a human figure, we would probably end up with an interspecies creature that would do well in the next sequel of Alien.

BTW, a nice project for retired scientists: trying to fit replicas of all the pieces of the Holy Cross together?! They could probably build a spacious wooden retirement home for themselves from that.

If anyone has seen some interesting leads, we would be much obliged. Many thanks to D. M. for arousing my interest, with a reference to Jacob's publication, and to S. D. for his great hospitality and company in Antwerp.

Namo tassa Josaphato Arahato Sammaasambuddhassa,


Henk



*1* See Joseph Jacobs's 1896 study on Barlaam et Josaphat here (thanks to Microsoft and the University of Toronto.

*2* Lang, D.M. (1966), The Balavariani (Barlaam and Josaphat) A Tale from the Christian East Translated from the Old Georgian, Berkeley 1966.

*3* From on-line description of "Tentoonstelling 'De augustijnen, de inquisitie en het ontstaan van de Sint-Andriesparochie (1514-1529)".

*4* Note that in the 17th century, St. Salvator changed from a Priory to an Abbey (Cruys and Cheron 2003:4).*5*

*5* Marc van de Cruys & Marc Cheron 2003: De Sint Salvator Abdij, in Heraldiek van Abdijen en Kloosters (series of 8), Vol.7, Wijnegem 2003.

*6* We visited the remains of the Abbey in the Grote Pieter Potstraat (Pieter Pot, 1375? - 1450, is the patron and founder of St. Salvator charity). Only the chapel presently still remains. It was last used as rentable office space. When we visited, last Saturday, the chapel looked empty and deserted. Particularly on a dark and rainy day in November the chapel appeared sadly dilapidated.

*7* Informatieblad Gemeente Holsbeek, 3de jaargang {2003}, nr. 1, p.21-23, with an entry on the relics of another one of those 36 Saints, to wit: Saint Hatabrandus or Hatebrandus (link not active).

*8* Nieuwsbrief, "Sint Andries 2000", eerste Trimester 2009, p.2.

*9* Geschiedenis van de Reliquieën der XXXVI uitmuntende Heiligen in St Andrieskerk, te Antwerpen alsmede Broederschap ter hunner eer opgericht, en van deszelfs Plechtige Diensten van 1671 tot heden. Antwerpen, De Vlijt, 1901.

*10* See, e.g., Dr. Ernst Kuhn, "Barlaam und Joasaph, Eine bibliographisch -literaturgeschichtliche Studie", in Denkschriften und Reden der K. Bayer. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 20. Bd. 1897 [= Denkschr. Bd. 67], pp.1-88.

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My note:  I highly recommend visiting this site to view the pages of the ca. 1476 Augsburg version of Barlaam and Josaphat.  This is probably the only way you will ever be able to see it. Our blog frontispiece was (ultimately) taken from it.  It shows Josaphat outside the palace with his father, the one with the crown, inside peering over the wall. Josaphat appears to be confronted at the gate by a blind man and a man with leprosy (I think the third person standing behind them is just an attendant).

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St. Josaphat as depicted in a painted mural in Serbia.  For the source, look here.  A photo of the place where it is found, the Studenica Monastery, is here.


Read me! Read me!

You'll find more articles than books here. For books, just try one of the internet booksellers and you will find quite a lot of them in a wide variety of languages. I've picked a few things that were for myself the most interesting. It's impressive to see just how much has been written about the Bodhisattva of Christendom.

Prosper Alfaric, La vie chrétienne du Bouddha, Journal Asiatique (Sept.-Oct. 1917), pp. 269-288. Based on the discovery of a Turfan Manichaean fragment of the story Alfaric argued that it reached Europe via Manichaeans, but not before the 3rd century AD. To read it, go here, type "269" in the small box, and hit return. Also, take some time to learn how to read French if you haven't yet, since you'll need it. It's awkward to navigate, but you can find all the content of the Journal Asiatique, starting with the 1822 issue and ending with the 1938, here, 199 issues in all.

P.C. Almond, The Buddha of Christendom: A Review of the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, Religious Studies, vol. 23, no. 3 (1987), pp. 391-406.
Enrico Cerulli, The Kalilah wa-Dimnah and the Ethiopic Book of Barlaam and Josaphat (British Museum Ms. Or. 534), Journal of Semitic Studies, vol. 9 (1964), pp. 75-99.  I found it here.
R. Chalmers, Parables of Barlaam and Joasaph, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, n.s. vol. 23 (1891), pp. 423-49.  I found an html version here.  Some of the ideas in it have passed their freshness date.
Abraham ibn Hasdai (d. 1240), Ben ha-Melekh ve ha-Nazir (The King's Son and the Monk).  This Hebrew translation/adaptation, made in early-13th-century Barcelona, is available here (click on the words next to the arrows and it will download for you in three parts if you have good karma).  It was eventually translated into Catalan...  There's a version in Occitan,  too, if you're interested: Barlam et Jozaphas.
Joseph Jacobs, Barlaam and Josaphat: English Lives of Buddha, David Nutt (London 1896). Go to the "Internet Archive" here, and download the PDF if you can. The scan is so beautifully done you can almost feel the paper.
Thupten Jinpa, tr., Mind Training: The Great Collection, compiled by Shönu Gyalchok & Könchok Gyaltsen, The Library of Tibetan Classics series no. 1, Wisdom (Boston 2006).  The story of the ‘Black and White Mice’ (byi-ba dkar nag) is found on p. 446.  One of the oldest records of it may be in the Mahabharata; look on p. 78, here.
 "To save himself from a wild beast, a traveller jumps into a dry well, but perceives at the bottom a dragon with open jaws, ready to devour him. Not daring to climb out of the well and in order not to be devoured by the dragon, the man catches hold of the branches of a wild shrub growing in a crack in the wall of the well. But his arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon succumb to one or other of the menacing dangers. He holds on, however, when he sees two mice, one white and one black, at the foot of the shrub, steadily running around it and gnawing it through. He sees that at any moment the shrub may topple over, and he must drop into the jaws of the dragon. The traveller feels that he is inevitably lost ; he gazes around and discovers a few drops of honey on the shrub. He can reach them with his tongue, and licks them up. Thus do I cling to the branches of life, knowing that the jaws of death may close on me at any moment, and I cannot understand why I am in such torture. I am trying to suck the honey which used to comfort me, but now I do not enjoy it. The black and white mice continue day and night to gnaw the branch to which I cling. I clearly see the dragon and the mice, and cannot take my eyes off them. This is not a fable, but a clear, indisputable truth, evident to everybody."  The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy. 

D.M. Lang, The Life of the Blessed Iodasaph: A New Oriental Christian Version of the Barlaam and Ioasaph Romance (Jerusalem, Greek Patriarchal Library: Georgian Ms. 140), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 20, nos. 1-3 (1957), pp. 389-407. Try JSTOR if you can. Notice especially on the final page the stemma that had to be redrawn to accommodate the (as of then then) newly available and lengthier 11th-century Georgian manuscript, microfilmed for the Library of Congress. The scribe's name was Davit', or if you prefer, David.
Graeme MacQueen, Changing Master Narratives in Midstream: Barlaam and Josaphat and the Growth of Religious Intolerance in the Buddha Legend's Westward Journey, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, an online journal, vol. 5 (1998). If you want to read it now, go here.

Graeme MacQueen, Rejecting Enlightenment? The Medieval Christian Transformation of the Buddha-Legend in Jacobus de Voragine's Barlaam and Josaphat, Studies in Religion, vol. 30, no. 2 (2001). Look here.

Graeme MacQueen, The Killing Test: The Kinship of Living Beings and the Buddhalegend's First Journey to the West, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, vol. 9 (2002). Download the PDF version here.

Francis Mershman, Barlaam and Josaphat, Catholic Encyclopedia. This encyclopedia entry is available all over the internet. Here, for example.

M. Pitts, Barlâm and Josaphat: A Legend for All Seasons, Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 16 (1981), pp. 1-16.
E. Rehatsek & T.W. Rhys Davids, Book of the King's Son and the Ascetic, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (January 1890), pp. 119-155.  Translation of an Arabic version that has been in some degree Islamicized, even if sometimes it seems to me ambiguous whether 'religion' might mean Buddhism or Islam.
Gershom Scholem, The Tradition of the Thirty-Six Hidden Just Men, contained in: Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Schocken Books (New York 1974), pp. 251-256.  I'm just wondering if these "Lamed-Vav-nikim"  otherwise known as the Hidden Tzadiks, have something to do with the "36 Heiligen" that St. Josaphat numbered among. I doubt having this common number is just a sheer coincidence, don't you?  But who started it?  Wait, I know someone I can ask.

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An Edifying Story from the Inner Land of the Ethiopians, Called the Land of the Indians, Thence Brought to the Holy City, by John the Monk (an Honorable Man and a Virtuous, of the Monastery of Saint Sabas); wherein are the Lives of the Famous and Blessed Barlaam and Iosaph. Read it at the Online Medieval and Classical Library, here. This other link seems to take you to the very same book.

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Apparently it's true, there are also St. Josaphat relics in the Vatican.


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A musical program will soon take place in Vancouver under the title Barlaam and Josaphat, inspired by the legend, and resuscitating some of its actual music that was long ago inspired by it.  That's on January 24, 2010.  With 11 days remaining, there may be just barely enough time to order tickets and jump on a plane for British Columbia.  In the Ensemble Dialogos, are two musicians from Köln, the other from Croatia.  Their schedule is here.  And what do you know?


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Of course they're going to be in Antwerp in February 2010 (doing sacred songs from Dalmatia). I guess we understand, perhaps better than they, why that is.  Reminds me of that old quip, ‘If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium.’  The premiere of Barlaam and Josaphat took place in Köln, Germany, on June  5, 2009, by chance about the same time I noticed that passage on the relics in Jacobs' book.


Entrance to the chapel at the Monastery of the Cross, Jerusalem (lots of nice photos, if not this one, are here). This is where the wood of the Cross grew, as you may see in the painting above the doorway. It was here, too, that sometime in around the 11th century the lengthier Georgian-language Barlaam and Josaphat legend was scribed (see Lang's article and especially the stemma on p. 407). This, being the more complete legendary cycle, proved crucial to understanding the historical transmission. I'm not sure, but it may have been the very first written text of the legends in their Christian conversion. It went on to inform all the later European retellings. Also, in this same chapel you can see a tiny painted portrait of Shota Rustaveli, the most famous poet of old Georgian.

Rustaveli

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Take the Cursive Test


To enlarge the picture, just click on it
What you see in our frontispiece this morning is a finely scribed sample of Tibetan book cursive. Not to dive head-first or too quickly into technicalities, Tibetans call this ‘headless’ or umé (dbu-med) script.* It’s a fragment taken out of its context. In fact, I am borrowing it — for educational and non-commercial purposes only, mind you — from eBay or another such place on the web where it was put up for sale.**

(*It may be more accurate to call this semi-cursive script, since true cursive would mean the 'fast letter' handwriting used in letters and in some official documents, which is something else altogether. **Now I don’t remember where it was. Anyway, not everyone feels completely fine with the fact that there is so much internet trade in Tibetan manuscripts these days. But I’m not going into controversies about cultural property rights today. Let’s save it for another time and place.)


It is just one end of one side of one long ‘leaf’ from a number of ‘leaves’ made from the bark of the Daphne shrub, stacked and wrapped together into what Tibetans call pecha (dpe-cha). The text, I can tell you, is both tantric and ritual. It might even be considered by some as secret, but as a ritual text it doesn’t really explain anything — it even gives the mantras in truncated form without spelling them out — so I’m not concerned about breaking any samaya. As a fragment, it is especially challenging to dissolve the abbreviated forms it contains, so the task is a hard one for me, not just for you. I’ll offer some initial help to unraveling what the text says later on, but I won’t do everything for you, and before you know it I’ll be asking you for your help with the parts that don’t yet make sense to me. If I gave all the answers up front it wouldn’t be a test then, would it?


If you have never started to study Tibetan language you may want to skip over today’s blog. You would be well advised. Unless you’re looking for insight into reasons Tibetan is just so hard you would never want to even contemplate learning it. That is, if you’re trying to rationalize your reluctance to take the dive. That’s why I wrote to someone named Gary [altering the name to protect his innocence] in one of those online discussion forums (that’s right, not fora, please!) almost exactly two years ago. Some irresponsible Tibetanist had warned him about abbreviated cursive manuscripts, and he found the whole idea discouraging in the extreme. What you see here below is basically the same two-year-old letter, although I’ve revised some of the information it contained, expanding the explanations a little this way and that here and there. I doubt if our friend Gary will mind.


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Dear Gary,



I don’t think it’s exactly proper to call what happens in Bon (and other) Tibetan manuscripts “shorthand,” and let me tell you why.


Generally, while shorthand just might incorporate some part of a relevant letter, it usually transforms common words or common clusters of letters (or their sounds) into a new symbol. In the Tibetan case you could say that all the letters that are visible are completely recognizable and in their ‘original’ forms (or at least leave vestiges as in case of the tsa, tsha & dza / ཙ་ཚ་ཛ་ letters where only the tiny flag [Tibetan texts call this the tsa-lag, or tsha-lag, or tsa-lhag; I'm not sure which is more correct] that all three have in common remains, and leaving aside a few other exceptions... there are not so many... we'll have a look at them later).


Therefore I think it is more correct to call what happens simply ‘abbreviation.’ You generally take a two-syllable term and condense it into one. But Tibetan has what may seem like a further complication, since they often take 4-syllable stock phrases and collapse them into two syllables (preserving the 1st and 3rd syllables only). So in effect what you can get sometimes is an abbreviation of an abbreviation. And it’s also true that longer strings of three, four or still more syllables can be collapsed into one.*


(*The work by Bacot gives some examples of long passages getting collapsing into a single syllable, but in my experience with manuscripts these are quite rare, and therefore not worth being overly concerned about except in theory.)


Shorthand is designed to make it possible to write as fast as people speak. Tibetan abbreviation practice is designed to save paper and ink. This is an essential difference.

To try to give an English example that might help to make clear how Tibetan abbreviations are working, “Braitt is 1 moiear.” You take the initial consonant[s] of the first syllable and jam them together with the final consonant[s] of the second syllable, and allow the vowel marks to pile up in the middle.*

(*The ‘i’s, ‘e’s, and ‘o’s above the consonant, or above the highest of several stacked consonants, with the ‘u’s hanging down below the lowest consonant.)


And it’s true that there are sometimes — thankfully fairly rare — characters that are idiosyncratic and therefore impossible to understand. I’ve been keeping a xerox of one of these characters for years now, and even though it’s been shown to some real experts, no one has figured it out yet.

There is at least one aspect of Tibetan abbreviation practice that does resemble true shorthand. It’s when numerals (especially 4, but also 9 and even 10) are used not only to replace the written-out words for the numbers (which is perfectly sensible, especially since we do it in English, too), but are used to replace the same cluster of letters when used in an otherwise totally unrelated word. For the most common example, the number 4 is written out in Tibetan as bzhi, so you can write “4n” instead of the word bzhin, which means ‘like, as.’

Another shorthand aspect is when prescript or postscript letters of the Tibetan writing system are replaced by subscript letters. This one is a little harder to make intelligible to those who haven’t already mastered that system. One of the most radical examples of it you can see in the abbreviated phrase “sku sya thya,” which is shorthand for sku gsung thugs (Body, Speech and Mind [of Buddha]). Here the subscript ‘y’ is standing for the otherwise absent ‘g’, in the first case a prescript ‘g’, and in the second a postscript. To give another less common example, mgo (‘head’) can be written as gho, replacing the ‘m’ prescript letter with the ‘h’ subscript letter (but manuscripts using this convention are rare and these are largely Bon manuscripts). Performing these kinds of substitutions economizes on horizontal space, allowing the scribe to cram more into the page. (The lines that they must follow are usually scored for them in red ahead of time.)

Another common practice is to take the postscript cluster -gs, as for example in the word thugs, and spelling it in the cursive form of the reversed Tibetan ‘t’ or

that is also used to represent the Sanskrit - Devanagari letter ‘ṭ’ or
.
This one is even used in headed script on occasion, especially when space is running out at the end of a line.

I hope that fear of Tibetan abbreviation doesn’t prevent you from pursuing your dream of learning Tibetan. Be warned that you may even need to increase your daily caffeine dosage (I recommend espressos and cappuccinos, or Tibetan tea if you prefer, but you know, you have to drink a lot more of that last one). Still, it’s entirely doable. Oh yes, right, I ought to tell you, what I said before, “Braitt is 1 moiear,” abbreviates ‘Brad Pitt is a movie star.’



For endless opportunities for entertainment in the meantime, take a long glance back at Bacot’s ancient French article in Journal Asiatique. Anyone anywhere could be amazed at the lengths to which Tibetan scribes occasionally went. They are rare (and generally they are just standing in for long prayers or other passages that the reader was expected to hold in memory anyway), but there are some manuscripts for example that stack up vowel signs like the ‘o’s and ‘i’s a half mile high. Those are truly awesome, and apparently defy human comprehension. But like I said, they are as rare as blue yaks in the Changtang, and perhaps even less likely to be encountered.

See this link:
this being the June 29, 2006 blog entry of P. Sz's Thor-bu, and follow its link to the Bacot article, which is on a slow server, so do be patient with it. If that link isn't working for you, try this.



I’d say that Bon cursive manuscripts are typically written quite beautifully, and when and if the words are not entirely spelled out, what you find is 95-percent abbreviation and only 5-percent shorthand. Be assured that many non-Tibetan-speakers do learn to read Tibetan very well without ever giving a cursive, let alone abbreviated, manuscript anything more than a moment’s glance. But really, if you first learn to read Tibetan well, it’s not all that difficult to make the move into cursive. And if you don’t learn it, there will be so much that you will never be able to read.



Yours,
Dan


§ § §




Well, are you ready to take the test? I’ll limit my example to the first line and let you try your luck with the rest.

Since this is the front side of the folio (did you notice the page number out there by itself on your left?), we naturally start with a ‘head letter’ symbol. It’s usually called the ‘head[ing] letter’ or yiggo (yig mgo), although I’ve seen it called in Bon sources dangtog (dang-thog I take to be a shortened form combining the two Tibetan words dang-po and thog-ma, which both mean ‘first’). It usually looks like this:
༄༅
Now there is a widely-spaced double shad punctuation followed by the words gzung[s] dang, which present no special problems. But I could imagine some people who already know the letters in their cursive forms stumbling over the next bit. The first thing you see there is the numeral ‘2’. Move on to the next thing you see to the right of the ‘2’, which is, starting from the top and moving to the bottom, made up of [1] the vowel ‘e’, [2] the consonant ‘s’, and [3] the vowel ‘u’.



Move on to the next place to your right: This is a letter ‘d’ with an odd hook shape above it. The odd hook-like thing is the anusvāra,* which Tibetans call the lekor (klad-skor — it seems this last means ‘brain circle’ for some reason not apparent to my brain at the moment). You often see it in its non-cursive form, which differs in the cursive, looking more like a circle (a dot in Devanagari), in transcriptions of Sanskrit in Tibetan letters. However, in cursive it looks like the tiny circle was made in two parts that at some point stopped meeting each other and became ‘disjointed’ (the later example on line 2 better illustrates this, since it hasn’t run together into one fluid line like we see here). In Tibetan cursive the anusvāra is used in ways Indians never dreamed about. Tibetans use it as much as possible in cursive abbreviations, almost every time a letter ‘m’ is in postscript position in the syllable. But not only that, some scribes like to use it when the ‘m’ is in prescript position.

(*In Sanskrit, the anusvāra lends a nasal twang to the vowel that comes before it, although it is likely [especially in final position] to sound like ‘ng,’ which is anyway the sound Tibetans tend to give to it when it occurs in Sanskrit mantras... )


Still with me? Next you see a mistake. Oh, well. They happen. No reason to be too concerned about it. No need to dial 911. But where a single letter would have done the trick, here we see two. Both letters look like the cursive form of ‘r’. Let’s try to transcribe the letters that are actually there so far (I put dots here, for a change, to represent the syllable-dividing punctuation called the tsheg — the tsheg looks like a dot in headed script, a short slightly curved line in the headless):












gzung.dang.2suṃedrr.


Make any sense yet?











{I may have cheated slightly in my ordering of vowels, out of my wish to help you just a little.}


Now for the final remaining syllable of line 1, which would be easier if a small part of the anusvāra hadn’t gotten covered up by the pages stacked over it in the photo. It just says bsaṃ, ‘think, imagine,’ and is followed by the shad punctuation.



So, here’s my way of understanding the first line, correcting what I believe needs correcting:


gzungs dang gnyis-su med-par bsam.


I interpret it, assuming it is part of a visualization practice (there is more evidence that this is the case in the other lines):


‘Imagine [the deity] as non-dual with [his] dhāraṇī.’


The rest is up to you. Please do let me and Tibeto-logic’s other remaining reader[s] know, using the comments, how well you are getting on with it. But please! If you are already a master of the game, don’t answer too fast and spoil the fun for the rest of us.


§ § §




Eager to hone your cursive skills?



For those tyros — don’t you love that nobbish English word? — who just today for the first time resolved to familiarize themselves with Tibetan cursive script, I’d most recommend the 2nd volume of David L. Snellgrove’s 1967 book, Four Lamas of Dolpo, though it may be difficult to find. I should warn you that the 2nd volume is not part of the recent paperback reprint by Himalayan Bookseller in Kathmandu.



If you have a big university research library within driving distance, it’s likely you will be able to locate and photocopy (for your own personal use only) this brief & useful article: Ramon Prats, On “Contracted Words” and a List of Them Collected from a Bon-po Work, East and West [Rome], vol. 41 (1991), pp. 231-238.


Advanced students who have been reading Tibetan with a decent degree of fluency for several years now will greatly benefit from Nor-brang O-rgyan, “Bod-kyi skung-yig-gi rnam-gzhag chung-ngu,” contained in: Bod rig-pa’i ched-rtsom gces-bsdus, ed. by Ngag-dbang, Bod ljongs mi dmangs dpe skrun khang (Lhasa 1987), pp. 413-483,* where the rules and rationales behind manuscript abbreviations are explained quite well. The truth is, you don’t really need to learn the rules ahead of time. Equipped with a few basic principles you can simply plunge into the texts. Another good method is to find a cursive manuscript of a work that also exists in a clear woodblock print, using the latter to check your reading of the former. Employing these tried-&-true sink-or-swim methods, it is guaranteed that before you know it abbreviations will start dissolving by themselves with neither apparent method nor special effort.

(*If you have too much trouble finding this volume, I once made a note to myself indicating that this same article is also located in Bod-ljongs Zhib-'jug, the first issue for the year 1987.)

I'd love to see this one. From the title it's supposed to be specifically about abbreviations used in Bon manuscripts. I located it in the Bya-ra database. Bstan-'dzin-rnam-rgyal, Bon-gyi Dpe-rnying-las Bsdus-pa'i Skung-yig Grub-cha'i Skor-la Dpyad-pa, Bod-ljongs Sgyu-rtsal Zhib-'jug. issue no. 1 for the year 1996, pp. 118-128. It's item no. 127 in the Bon bibliography of the last Tibeto-logic blog.


The classic work on cursive script and abbreviations is the one by Jacques Bacot mentioned before: L’écriture cursive tibétaine, Journal Asiatique (January-February 1912), pp. 5-78. You do not necessarily need to first study French to make use of it. Here’s a sample of one of the ‘extreme’ abbreviations, the very last in Bacot’s list (you will notice it is not done in cursive, but in the so-o-o much better-known ‘headed’ [dbu-can] script).







Last question: Some people know Tibetan abbreviations by the name bsdus-yig, which means ‘compounded [gathered together or combined] letters,’ while others know them as skung-yig, or ‘concealed / invisible letters.’* Some people call them by the letters that are visible in them, while others call them by the letters that have disappeared from view inside them. Either way, they’re talking about the same phenomenon. Is there a mystery concealed here that we’re not quite glimpsing yet? I’m curious. Just asking. Please tell us if you see it.

(*I believe the most correct spelling is bskungs-yig, since the first syllable ought to be in the past form, although hardly anyone seems to pay much attention to this fine point. Nor-brang’s article says that some people also call them sbas-yig, which also means 'concealed letters,' but he insists that these names, along with bsdus-yig all mean exactly the same thing.)


§ § §



How and why did headless writing develop? Probably because scribes were in a big hurry and wanted to get their work out of the way before supper so they could have more time to drink chang with their pals. That’s more-or-less what you find in the famous theory of Gendun Chömpel. You can find a source for it, in the late K. Dhondup’s translation, in this brief article: Amdo Gendun Chophel, The Evolution of U’med from U’chen Script, Tibet Journal, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 56-57.


§ § §


And in closing — honestly, this is the last thing — here are two of the more mysterious and obscure ligatures in use:



ṆAThis backward version of the Tibetan letter ‘na’ occasionally occurs in manuscripts as a way of abbreviating the syllable med, meaning ‘is no’... ‘is not’... ‘doesn’t have.’ I have no reasonable explanation for this, do you? Of course, the ordinary unreversed (or undotted) Sanskrit syllable na is one of the standard ways to express negation in Sanskrit (it became in Hindi naheen).



NYAOf course this Tibetan word does mean ‘fish,’ but in cursive texts, a syllable very much resembling the nya stands as a shorthand way of writing bdag, a way of referring to one’s humble ‘self.’ This is certainly to be explained (I alone make this argument as far as I know, which would make me eccentric) by a famous mantra used in very many sādhana texts, which has the Sanskrit word aham (meaning ‘I’ as the first-person singular pronoun in nominative case) spelled with the avagraha as ’ham.











I'm not sure why, but the unicode developers decided to call the Tibetan version of this sign the paluta. It ought to look like this: ྅. But in practice, in cursive, it usually looks just like the letter nya.


These two mystery syllables, when used together, nicely add up to the Buddha’s idea of non-self or, to give the proper Sanskrit, anātman. We could write it like this in headed letters (it would look a little different if it were headless):











ཉ༌ཎ༌

I’ve actually seen it done. I consider it one of the Seven Wonders of the Tibetan manuscript world.





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A fascinating book I've started reading:
Trent Pomplun's Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri's Mission to Tibet.
Googlebooks tells more about it, but tell me, how can I be reading a book published in 2010 in 2009?  A faster reader than I am, by the name of Jeff Mirus, has already read and reviewed it 3 days ago at Catholic Culture — here.  Desideri's birthday is coming up in just 3 more days, on December 20 in 1684, in Pistoia. Another sign that the fullness of time for Desideriology has officially arrived, we find a set of several papers on Desideri in the journal called Buddhist-Christian Studies, the issue for 2009 
(but check out earlier issues for still more).


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Another book I'm hoping to read soon:
Kurtis R. Schaeffer's The Culture of the Book in Tibet.
Indologica blog tells more about it.


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On my night stand:
In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 
104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, a Bilingual Edition
edited and translated by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
See the cover at Googlebooks.


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A Paean of Pride or Encomium (take your pick) to Chas







{double-click on the doggerel to try and locate the video evidence}
 
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