By Nate Murray
Gold Solas Award-winner in the Travel & Ideas category
Palms up and resting one atop the other, to keep the water energy—representing blood and other bodily fluids—circulating through your arms. Chin down, to block the fire energy—representing digestion and body heat—from escaping through your mouth.
At least, one meditation guidebook called it energy. Another called it air. Another, wind. So, which was it? Or did the original Tibetan term, Lung, have no direct translation?
Buddhists and yoga practitioners might better know it by the Sanskrit term prana, often translated as vital energy or vital wind—wind here having a spiritual meaning like life force. But I also saw Lung used in Lung Ta, Wind Horse, the mythical creature who carried the blessings written on multicolored prayer flags across the Tibetan Plateau. Did Lung have the additional meaning of physical wind, which the Sanskrit prana did not?
And why did different guidebooks spell the Tibetan word for dharma as chos versus chö, in addition to the term itself seeming to have different meanings in Tibetan versus Sanskrit. Or was I overthinking it? Without knowing the language, I could not be sure.
The questions kept flooding my mind during meditations, disrupting my focus despite all efforts to push them out. The last straw came in my research on Tibetan history, when I found the name of the Tibetan Empire’s first king to be written variously as Songtsen Gampo, Songzän Gampo, Srongtsan Gampo, and srong btsan sgam po.
That did it. I needed find out why Tibetan was so hard to transliterate into English. Maybe see whether knowing the language could provide some cultural insights to help my meditations.
First, I had to make sense of the script, the beautiful squiggly lines that reminded me of Elvish but blended together in look and sound. ཀ and ཁ were both [ka], but the former pronounced softly, the latter forcefully. མ [ma], ས [sa], and ཨ [a] were easy to confuse. འ was also [a] but of a shorter duration. I found it dizzying, the whole system shrouded in mystery, with a third of the consonants not existing in English. But after several months of daily drills, the intricacies started making sense, and the language felt more accessible. Like being initially intimidated by a high mountain, only to feel more comfortable once you started climbing it. And Tibet’s mountains were high.
Next up the mountain came the vowels, which like Hebrew and Arabic were written as strokes over or under the consonants, such as མེ [me], མོ [mo], and མུ [mu]. Turns out that Tibetan script, adapted from Indian Gupta, had the same ancestor with the Semitic alphabets: Aramaic, which itself traced back to the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Westerners often thought of Tibetan culture as completely insular. But it never was. The Tibetan Empire cut into present-day China, India, and Afghanistan, trading its salt and yak skins with the caliphates in Damascus and later Baghdad, before fragmenting and being absorbed by the Mongols. Tibetan vocabulary told you that tea came from China, sugar from India, and saffron cloths from Persia. And while Tibet has always been a world of its own, it also lives between two worlds, as evidenced by two different ways of saying ‘world’: dzamling, the Island of the mythical Jambu River, an ancient Sanskrit name for the Indian Subcontinent; and nyi-oh, a translation of the Chinese “all under heaven”.
Higher up the mountain came the subscripts. And superscripts. And prefixes and suffixes. And post-suffixes. An intricate set of rules with no widely accepted pronunciations. A silent suffix might inflect a preceding vowel, which explained why chos [dharma] could sometimes be pronounced as chö. The subscript r of srong [honorable] and prefix b of btsan [teaching] might be silent or partial. This lack of standardization made sense, in a terrain so mountainous that isolated villages might develop separate dialects. Maybe at some point, the Tibetan king’s name really was pronounced srong btsan sgam po, until vowels and consonants decayed into Songtsen Gampo, the honorable teacher.
Speaking of honor, Tibetan’s system of honorifics went well beyond the formal and informal modes of address found in French and Spanish, to include nouns, verbs, and entire phrases. A verb might have an honorific form you used when speaking to a teacher, a high honorific form when speaking to a lama, a humilific form when speaking to that lama about yourself, or a double honorific if you were also a lama. Korean and Japanese had similar features, but many Tibetan honorifics also had religious roots, a characteristic shared with Thai. Pecha, the traditional block-printed manuscripts containing Buddhist sutras, became chägpe, chäg meaning to fold your hands and bow. The values of respect and humility, built right into the language.
I arrived at Labrang Monastery in Gansu Province, China, eager to test my newfound language skills, particularly the honorifics to show humility. I was certainly humbled, when people did not understand a single word I said, beyond knowing that I had studied what turned out to be the textbook Lhasa dialect. Though the red-robed monks appreciated that I could read the classic blessing “Om mani padme hum” etched into the outer wall, in a spot where they tapped their heads during their clockwise circumambulation.
Although the writing system was standardized, regional dialects varied widely. In fact, different Tibetan communities were happy to maintain their distinctive dialects and cultures. A local Tibetan friend told me that Tibetan residents of Amdo—the eastern part of the former Empire, now split between Gansu and Qinghai Provinces—prided themselves on producing many scholars, in contrast to Sichuan Province who produced more entrepreneurs, and Lhasa who produced more civil servants. For centuries, Lhasa was the political center of the Tibetan world, while Sichuan served as commercial gateway between eastern plains and western mountains. Amdo’s scholarly leanings traced back to the early seventeenth century, when civil wars in Central Tibet pushed monks eastward, establishing monasteries such as Labrang, which built many famous schools of art and medicine. Since the 1980s, many of the Tibetan scholars who have gone abroad for graduate study have come from Amdo.
Some time later, I found myself at Kumbum Monastery in Qinghai, this time prepared with a few phrases of Amdo Tibetan. In the main assembly hall, ringed by hundreds of golden Buddha statues, I donated 20 yuan to light a butter lamp. A monk uttered his blessing, then gave me an apple, according to the custom of giving pilgrims and visitors a food item in exchange for an offering. I followed up with my Amdo phrases, which surprised him enough to call a few of his fellow monks over. They briefly corrected some pronunciations, and gave me a second apple out of gratitude.
But even Amdo Tibetan had its variants. The same phrases which had been perfectly understood by the monks at Kumbum, were only partially understood by a group of souvenir vendors—actually yak herders moonlighting as souvenir vendors during the touristy summer months, given the increasing difficulty of subsisting on pastoral work alone—at a horseback riding field near Chaka Salt Lake. Tibetan was like Arabic in that sense, with a standard textbook version that you could not always use on the street. Although this made it harder to practice than more widely-standardized languages like Spanish or Mandarin, I could be proud of the progress I had made.
The study of Tibetan did help improve my meditations, but not in the way I had expected. As I got the answers I was seeking, the questions stopped interrupting my thoughts, enabling me to quiet my mind and better manage the flow of Lung. I also verified that Lung did have the additional meaning of physical wind, being used in words ranging from ventilation to jet engine. The language updated for the modern world. As for the meaning of dharma across different languages, I decided that everyone could find an interpretation that worked for them. Buddhist philosophy could be highly individual in that way. Like the Tibetan language itself. That answer satisfied me.
Not that the questions stopped coming. On the contrary, the more I entered this new world—whether dzamling or nyi-oh—the more I wanted to know. It seemed appropriate that the syllable ཀ [ka], being the first letter of the Tibetan alphabet, was sometimes used in words relating to new beginnings. One day, I will make it to Lhasa, and hopefully have the chance to practice the dialect of Tibetan that I started with.
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Nate Murray is a writing instructor, outdoor enthusiast, and occasional cartoonist. He lived in China for eight years and has also been spotted in Europe and the Dominican Republic.