Scanned leaf from Matho, BDRC no. W1BL9, vol. 405 (click to enlarge) ཀུན་བྱེད་རྒྱལ་པོ་, the All Making King, is difficult to talk about. Let's start with the end of his name. As you may notice, if not right away later on, his gender identity and preferred pronoun can be an issue, although we’ll follow the grammatical clue of the final syllable and use him. The word king might seem to lend him a governing or ruling function, just that his kingdoms and governments tend to dissolve away. He may look like a creator god, a highly intriguing point for followers of monotheistic ..read more

Title page of a text included in BDRC no. W4PD975 (click to enlarge) If you’ve been with us in recent years you would know this: Surprising new pieces of older Tibetan literature are popping up all the time. You would also know that the main place where this is happening is BDRC (formerly TBRC) and its BUDA website. The title page you see just above with the unusual archway of entry is a great example. Maybe the best part of its story is that, for Tibetan readers of the world, it presents a number of puzzles, puzzles that I haven’t, or haven’t yet, solved to my own satisfa ..read more

Pemakarpo, HAR 65368 Over the years I’ve developed my own way of seeing holy places. I’ve spent decades living in one of the most celebrated pilgrimage destinations the world has ever known. I see today’s Places as rooted in the primordial human past, when divine presences began to be enshrined in natural features such as standing stones, cairns and groves that eventually evolved into the towering cathedrals and temples of our time. Simplistic? Well, of course, simple ideas are the most difficult to arrive at sometimes, and to keep things simpler still, we have to ignore the ways hol ..read more

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 7, Episode 6 — Phantasms Internal conversation, discursive thinking and troubling thoughts. All three are practical synonyms for something that keeps going on when you sit down to try, with all the goodwill in the world, to meditate. Trying to turn them off unleashes the inevitable flood. Seeing the flood inspires frustration, and frustration can give way to surrender.  Understanding what namtok (རྣམ་རྟོག) is is something you can only come to when you try to practice meditative concentration. And meditative concentration, I think ..read more

  Everest & Nubtse, photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg.   The Land of Snows The land of snows, where mountains touch the sky, And rivers flow from glaciers pure and white. A sacred place, where ancient wisdoms lie, And monks recite their prayers day and night. The land of snows, where culture thrives and grows, And art and literature reflect the soul. A diverse place, where many languages rose, And people share a common dream and goal. The land of snows, where history is long, And heroes fought for freedom and for right. A troubled place, where conflict still is st ..read more

  I never expected to see this. Last year I blogged about the several Afroeurasian versions of the Seven Seals. Among other things I concluded that the several sets of seven are interrelated only with difficulty, but also that Tibetan sources never seem to correlate them with symbolic figures as the Arabic and Hebrew versions do. Have a quick look at that earlier blog, entitled “Seven Seals, Times Several,” and then come back here before getting lost in it. The frontispiece you can see there is a fine example of an Arabic set of the symbolic figures. Let me quote a passage from it: “O ..read more

Plates 1 and 2 If you are intrigued by the use of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in Tibetan funerals, these drawings are well worth examining.  What they may lack in artistic refinement they make up for in illustrative value. They open a window on actual practice, so much so that it doesn’t matter too much if we find the windowpanes are not fully transparent. There are a few more-or-less contemporary examples of British and Europeans commissioning Tibetan artists to depict Tibetan life and culture.  We have the Hummel essay with its illustrations of medieval tortur ..read more

  Horse enteroliths (the circled area much resembles the Bhutanese Horse Egg) Nota bene! All of today’s blog is a guest blog authored by Ariana. For the original posting, look here. The Horse Egg posting brought back memories of the many, many discussions held at NMB about the object, its attributed origins, potential constituent material(s), and cultural significance. I was based at the National Museum in Paro for much of 2009-11, during which time I was part of a team working to digitize the collection, enhance collections cataloguing, and contribute to a series of publicatio ..read more

  Orgyanpa, detail What kind of royal history is this? Represented to posterity as a gift to the Khan, we get the feeling it was produced without much enthusiasm, and definitely without much literary style. I don’t believe it is stated clearly anywhere, but it could be that the Khan commanded him to write it. That would help explain why it is so dry, largely lists of names in kingly or other types of lineages. But in those rare spots where it does manage to supply a little narrative it tends to say something remarkable. You can gain a general impression of the content of this wor ..read more

རྟ་ཡི་སྒོ་ང་། Egg of Horse I’ll admit my ability to think stopped cold when my eyes fell on this object in a Bhutanese museum back in 2015. It threw me for a loop. I’m still curious about it, as I think anyone ought to be. I don’t think we should dismiss miraculous or anomalous objects until we’ve heard the whole story. I’m as skeptical as the next guy, and unwilling to play the sucker or the fool gladly, but the predisposition to dismiss miracles with alacrity can sometimes look more like fear than rationality, fear our accustomed categories might come into question. It’s the pango ..read more