Naxi divination: selecting a wedding date

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Duncan

The following is a diagram used to select an auspicious date (Chinese zeri 择日) for holding a wedding ceremony – and to avoid having evil spirits bedevil the bride or groom. The picture and a gloss can be found in Wang Shiying 王世英, Naxi Dongba Zhanbu Dianji Yanjiu 纳西东巴占卜典籍研究.

The Naxi believe that spirits exist everywhere around us, and that these spirits must be placated when disturbed – large events such as weddings tend to disturb the harmony between the human and spirit world.

The diagram shows who, or what, will become disturbed by evil spirits depending on which day of the lunar month the wedding is held.

In a lunar month of 30 days ( he3 me33 dɯ21), a ‘large month’, the diagram is navigated clockwise. This is depicted by the person moving to the right in the top right corner of the chart. During a lunar month of 29 days, ( he33 me33 ʨi55), a ‘small month’, the chart is navigated counter-clockwise (the person moving to the left in the top left corner). Direction of navigation is depicted by the character ʐɪ33 ʥi33, literally ‘to set off on a journey’, with the journeyer facing either left (counter-clockwise) or right (clockwise) as required.

If the wedding is held on the first day of a ‘large month’, evil spirits will haunt the groom. On the second day, spirits will haunt the mothers and maternal aunts of the couple; on the third day, the new house will become haunted; on the fourth day, the paternal grandfathers and maternal uncles; on the fifth day the residence and surrounding plot will become haunted; on the sixth day the cook; on the seventh day, the bride; on the eighth day, the cook’s assistant. On the ninth day, the groom will become haunted, and the cycle starts again until the end of the month.

If the wedding is held in a ‘small month’, we move counter-clockwise. On the first day, the bride will be haunted. On the second day, the cook will become bedevilled, and so on, counter-clockwise…

We can see then that there are no ‘safe’ days – on every day of the month that the wedding is held, come rain or shine, spirits will end up haunting someone. I think you have to feel sorry for the cook’s assistant, who seems to be the safest bet for a haunting – he’s not a family member, nor is he presumably as important as the marital house itself. Even so, there are ceremonies that can be performed to appease the spirits that are disturbed during a wedding, so all would not have been lost for the chap who kept the stove burning.

A Dongba’s phonebook

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Duncan

[This post was originally written in June 2009 for my old blog, Lijiang Times.]

One of the common misconceptions about the Dongba script is that it’s not really a living, working writing system. Phish!

Whilst tactically avoiding instant inebriation at the hands of the Dongba priest He Xiudong’s self-brewed paint stripper (baijiu) one afternoon, I discovered his phonebook. Now, He Xiudong can’t write Chinese, so everything he notes down is in the Dongba script – including the phonebook. This means all the names are wrriten in Dongba, and Chinese names are transliterated phonetically. The phonebook is written on traditional Dongba paper.

Looking at the phonebook you can see that the most common family name is ho33 (Chinese 和 he), the Naxi character for which means ‘ribs’. Ho is a traditional Naxi family name (and incidentally the name of all the Dongbas at the Lijiang Dongba Culture Research Institute). Ten out of the twenty-two names listed on these two pages share this same surname.

Book review – Sons of Heaven, Brothers of Nature: The Naxi of Southwest China

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Duncan

Any new release concerning Naxiology in the English language publishing world is cause for celebration. Sons of Heaven, Brothers of Nature: The Naxi of Southwest China by independent researcher Pedro Ceinos Arcones is essentially a prospectus of the Naxi and their culture, their funerary customs, their religion, music and dance. There is no other comparable, one-stop English language book that contains all this information, and for this I commend the author.

It is a summary of what has been written about the Naxi, and looking at the bibliography we see that Mr Ceinos really has done his homework – as far as I can tell, the author has read every available work that has been printed in English about the Naxi, from Bacot, to Rock and McKhann, and much of the Chinese literature as well.

The book serves then as a great overview of this fascinating people: open the chapter on Naxi religion and you are treated with a systematic breakdown of the Dongba pantheon, with dense quotations from secondary sources. This over-reliance on secondary sources does not serve to hamstring the book, but instead to elevate it above the typical “I saw this…” style of travelogue that so plagues English-language China publishing.

Pictographs – although without Naxi pronunciations – are scattered throughout the book in relevant chapters. Unfortunately there are no Chinese characters in the text, and the romanisations for proper Naxi names jumps from Hanyu Pinyin back to Naxi romanisation, seemingly depending on the source that the author has used. Orthographic issues such as these have however plagued bigger publishers.

The real enthusiasm that the author has for his subject really does come through, and although it’s difficult to recommend it as a very well-written book (English is, after all, not the native language of the author), this is just the kind of introductory text that would suit an enthusiast who doesn’t have the time to trawl through old issues of Monumenta Serica in search of Rock’s articles.

One minor nitpick. Ceinos, if only in passing, perpetuates what I call the “mnemonic myth” that the Dongba script was only used in the scriptures as a mnemonic aid, saying: “As this script was not used for administration or literature, but only for ritual and religious activities…”

This has been the commonly-held view for decades, but as Yu Suisheng has shown, it is simply not true.

But no matter. This is a real labour of love, and for only six dollars for an ebook version, it comes very highly recommended.

*The author kindly provided me with a copy to review. Note that I don’t make any commission on sales via Amazon!

Escaping brigands with Naxi language skills

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Duncan

The Russian traveller Peter Goullart spent the better part of the 1940s living in Lijiang, and was a contemporary of the eccentric yet gifted Austrian explorer-ethnographer, Joseph Rock.

He wrote a book about his time in Lijiang, Forgotten Kingdom, which I recommend everybody interested in the region pick up and read. As the author doesn’t make much mention of the Naxi script one can only assume he wasn’t particularly familiar with it, but there is a particular passage that leads one to believe that he was at least proficient at a conversational level in spoken Naxi. The author is making the long and arduous caravan journey from Dali to Lijiang, and is waylaid by bandits upon nearing the Lijiang plain. His knowledge of the Naxi language helps him escape unscathed. I’ve always felt that this is the kind of dialogue they should teach in schools – it’s really simple, but the context is fascinating. Something like “Lesson 1: on extricating oneself from highway robbery in the native parlance’.

Plodding hour after hour in the oppressive silence and utter loneliness, we stopped talking.
At last we came to a turn, after which the dreaded temple should have been visible. A band of ten men, poorly clad but each carrying an old gun, appeared as if from nowhere. We did not stop and they fell in with us. At last one of them spoke.

‘Zeh gkv bbeu? (Where are you going?)’ he asked me in Nakhi.
‘Ggubbv bleu (Going to Likiang),’ I answered brightly. He pondered.
‘Nakhi kou chi kv (You understand Nakhi),’ he smiled.

A flood of conversation followed with my boy, the guards keeping discreetly silent. Hozuchi explained who I was, where I lived and where we were travelling from. I guessed at once who the strangers were, but kept my own counsel. I was not afraid of being killed, but I hated the idea of appearing in Likiang in only my underwear.

Following Goullart’s generous transcription of the dialogue, I have reconstructed this exchange in both the Naxi dongba script and IPA – to the best of my ability (note that I am by no means fluent in spoken Naxi so if anyone has any comments or corrections, then please do speak up!).

1st line: Where are you going?

Ze21 kʏ 33 / bɘ33?

Winged demon, garlic = loan for ‘where’ / to go

2nd line: Going to Lijiang

gu21 be33 / bɘ33.

Dayan town (Lijiang old town), literally ‘granary [town]‘ / to go

3rd line: You understand Naxi?

Na21 ɕi33 / k’o33 / tʂ’i33 / kʏ 33.

Naxi / horns = loan for ‘speech’ / this / able to do

KFC in Naxi

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Duncan

I don’t think I will be inviting much opprobrium to suggest that food is not one of Naxi culture’s greatest achievements. Most esculents in Lijiang tend to be either too spicy or too salty, which is why the influx of western cuisine – and dare I say it, junk food – is not really the bane many purists imagine it to be. KFC may not be an Epicurean’s delight, but I dare say its brand of fried chicken has staved off the starvation of many a tourist over their brief stay in Lijiang. KFC does a roaring trade in the city (the last time I checked, the two KFCs were within a stone’s throw of one another around the square that marks the boundary between old town and new), and just in case you ever wanted to know, the Naxi for KFC (or more accurately, the Naxi transliteration of the mandarin 肯德基 kěn dé jī ), is this:

(Notice the English lettering, KFC, has actually been omitted here in favour of the Naxi.)

The first character is ‘dog’, kɯ33.

I trawled through all my dictionaries and couldn’t find the middle character. The closest I got in visual resemblance was dʑi33, apparently a kind of Chinese yeast (notice the indentation in the middle character on the sign). But its pronunciation is not really all that close to the Chinese ‘de’. This could be a mistake on the part of the translator, or perhaps the graphics company responsible for the printing. Anyway, I think the sound ‘tɯ’ is much closer, represented by the character for ‘to rise’: tɯ33

The last character is scissors: tɕi55, a very close phonetic match.

I’m a big fan of these Naxi signs. Sure, the transliterations are haphazard at best, but at least some effort has gone into it, and it gives the place a bit of much-needed character.

Walking with Mao

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Duncan

This was originally posted on my former blog, Lijiang Times, in May 2009 (has it really been so long?)

On October 1st 1951, Naxi scholar and general historian extraordinaire Fang Guoyu went to Beijing, as part of a delegation of ethnic minorities, to attend the second anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Fang was a representative of the Naxi minority, and on the eve of the anniversary, he presented Chairman Mao with a silk banner, upon which the following sentence was written in the Dongba script:

ŋə21 gɯ33 zi33 be33 ŋʏ21 gu21 dʐi33 bə33
(click here for pronunciation, read by Naxi scholar Li Jingsheng)

Let’s break it down:

ŋə21 gɯ33 “We”
The character for ‘I’, resembling a person pointing at themselves. The character for crack/split (resembling a crack in a piece of wood), which here is a loan character representing the Naxi plural marker.

zi33 be33 “Always”
The character for grass and the character for ‘to do’; both loan characters that together mean ‘always’ in Naxi.

ŋʏ21 gu21 “behind you”

The character for silver, loan character for ‘you’, and the character for ‘carry on the back’, the meaning of which is extended to ‘behind’.

dʐ˧ bə˧ ”want to walk”
The character for ‘to walk’, followed by the character for ‘sole of the foot’, which here is a loan character for ‘want to go’.

So the whole sentence should be:
“We will always walk with you”, or, “we will always follow you”.

Here you can see the reliance on phonetic loan characters; and of course that the verb is at the end of the sentence – like Tibetan, Naxi sentences follow the basic SOV structure.

In his dictionary, Fang says that of all the times he used the Donbga script, this occasion was the most profound.

Pound’s poetic pictographs

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Duncan

It is perhaps one of sinology’s greatest ironies that a man who could not even read Chinese has contributed so much to the field of Chinese translation, and ‘orientalist’ literature in general.

Understanding Ezra Pound’s Cantos can sometimes feel like trying to scale the Parnassian heights of the Jade Dragon mountain while travelling backwards on a recalcitrant yak – basically, if you are fortunate enough to have a firm grasp on philosophy, literature and poetry from Confucius to Cummings – by way of Ancient Greece – then you should be just about well-enough equipped to read Pound.

Joseph Rock, one of the first scholars of Naxi studies and still the greatest, was a contemporary of Pound, and was busy publishing book-length articles about the Naxi and their rituals and language while Pound was formulating his ‘ideogrammatic method’ after the theories of Fennollosa.

Knowing Pound’s ardent love of the symbolism conjured up by the ‘pictogram’, it is with great delight – but no real surprise – that we discover the Naxi Dongba script appear in a brief cameo in one of his later Cantos. From Canto CXII:

Here is the entry for the first Naxi character on the left, in full, from Rock’s Encyclopedic Dictionary:

“1mun. A winnowing tray. It is made of bamboo and is more than three feet across. The symbol represents such a tray.
2mun. An offering of a life, animal. The Chinese ming 命, life, fate.
2mun. To dream; see 2mun-3yi.
2mun. Destiny; fate.
2mun. Grey; also drab or fawn-colored.
2mun. To hold in the mouth.
2mun. A womb; female womb holding the foetus like the 1mun the grain.
1mun. To wear; as a dress or armor.
1mun. A specimen; mould; sample; custom.
1mun. Soldier; army.
2mun. To think of; to hanker for; to meditate; to dote on.
3mun. To hatch.
1mun. Therefore; the Chinese hu [sic] 故. NNCRC, p.432″

Now let’s take a look at the corresponding entry in Fang’s dictionary （纳西象形文字普).
mu21. 簸箕. 按：大簸（晒簸）曰t’y55 ly21; 小簸（掦簸）曰mu21 me33.

Translation: winnowing basket. Note: large baskets (for drying) are called t’y55 ly21, small baskets (hand-held) are called mu21 me33.

Fang only gives us the original meaning of the character and none of the rebus meanings of which Rock is so generous. Because there are so many rebus meanings for this character, in this (fairly representative) case the dictionary is little more than useless when it comes to actually decoding text.

So, the mu is a bamboo winnowing basket. The second character, the ‘luna’, is rather more obvious – read he33 me33, ’moon’. In this part of the Canto Rock is waxing lyrical about Li Chiang (Lijiang – there’s a distinct literary quality about Wade-Giles, isn’t there?), the Elephant Hill (‘Hsiang Shan’, or Xiang Shan) and the Jade Spring at the Temple of the Dragon King (‘Lung Wang’, or the Long Wang Miao).

The Artemisia is a purifying herb (mugwort) used in many Naxi rituals to banish impurity.

According to Rock: “the Artemisia is used in the purification of a room before spirits are invited. Quantities of the ’2bbue’ are placed on a door step in the place of a mat, to remove all uncleanness, but such of an immoral nature only, not dirt.”

Its name refers to Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon (hence the Naxi character). In Naxi it is read pɯ³³.

Arundaria is a type of small bamboo that grows abundantly in the Lijiang region, and is used to make the winnowing basket.

There exists a parallelism then between the two plants and the two characters that embody their meaning.

The mun here is not referring literally to a winnowing tray three feet in diameter: Pound is referencing the bamboo from which it is made, and its rebus meaning, ‘fate’, which is why we have the words ‘winnowed in fate’s tray’. We have then a conflation of meaning – but more than that, the shape of the mun, and the fact that is is juxtaposed with the moon, which we are told is above it – leads us to believe that Pound is using it as a metaphor for the earth. After all, what is this world, if not a spherical tray in which all life is winnowed?

A Dongba’s record of a prescription payment

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Duncan

First of all, many apologies for my extended leave of absence from Naxi blogging. Has it really been four months?

I’ve always wanted to translate some more examples of secular Dongba text as there are plenty of people who still believe the script to be not much more than a ritual tool. The following text (essentially a record of a prescription payment) was collected and published by Naxi scholar Yu Suisheng 喻遂生 in his Naxi Dongbawen Yanjiu Conggao 纳西东巴文研究丛稿 (pp 264-66). It is an extract from the notebook of an old Dongba priest, who would jot down notes to help him remember important pieces of information. The text is not dated, but is a good example of everyday use of the script.

Continue reading →

Worship of the family God – the wedding ritual of “Suzhu”

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Duncan

The following article will be published in the third issue of Dongba Culture 《东巴文化》, the newsletter of the Lijiang Museum; many thanks to the Museum and Zhao Xiuyun, the translator. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of any of the original scriptures mentioned in the article.

A note on some of the terminology
The article was originally written in Chinese, and did not contain any Naxi phonetics or Dongba script. Proper Naxi nouns are therefore transcribed in pinyin. Using my dictionaries I have traced the original Naxi for some of the terms: Continue reading →

Polishing one’s jade instrument

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Duncan

One of my favourite quotes from the three character classic is 玉不琢,不成器。人不学,不知义. In English:

If jade is not polished,
it cannot become a thing of use

If a man does not learn,
he cannot know his duty towards his neighbour

(translation by Herbert Giles)

Interestingly, this can be rendered in Naxi thusly (according to my collection Dongba aphorisms 常用东巴文字明言俗语, written by He Baolin 和宝林):

Naxi:

o21 tʂ’u21 me33 ze33 na21 me33 piə33

so21 bɯ33 me33 ɣ33 du21 me33 sɪ33

English word-for-word:

green jade / black jade / not / cut (phonetic loan from ze33, flying ghost) / item, instrument (phonetic loan, from na21, black) / not / become (phonetic loan from piə33 seashell)

study / want (phonetic loan from piə33 kɯ55, belt) / intention (phonetic loan from ɣ33, dance) / wisdom (this character represents the male God of wisdom)/ not / understand (phonetic loan from sɪ33, sage)

So the Naxi is roughly equivalent to the English “jade that is not cut will not become an instrument, [he] who does not have the desire to study will not understand wisdom”.

I find it odd that the three character triplets have been mangled in the Naxi by the seeming insertion of extra characters: the first line uses two characters for jade (one for green, one for black), and the second line by the use of both ‘want’ and ‘intention’, which again seems superfluous.

That said, I am by no means fluent in Naxi so there may be reasons for the wording beyond my (very) limited comprehension.