Translation pls - Part (II)

In a similar vein to my post "Translation pls", I've discovered through a friend this blog post about Facebook and Tibetan at the Overlooking Tibet blog.

The writer considers the 'Facebook wall' to be personal space, which some people might take issue with, since it is still a public space where one broadcasts information to people on their friends list. However, the blog post alludes to wider expectations that American (and I'd say most English speakers for that matter) have that things be made available in English.

In any case, I could spend hours talking about this, but I'm off to attend a seminar at La Trobe Uni on Tibetic languages by the eminent Tibetologist Nicolas Tournadre, whose Manual of Standard Tibetan I own a copy of.

Très coincidental. Well maybe just a little bit.

Mani Rimdu

The festival of Mani Rimdu at Tengboche, sometimes referred to that 'dancing monk' festival, takes place in the 9th Tibetan month, usually sometime in late October. The main festivities last three days - I believe right after the full moon, though preparations start much earlier. The 16th day is the most important day when the monks from the monastery perform a number of masked dances in the courtyard of the monastery.

The name 'Mani Rimbu' comes from the 'Mani', which forms part of the Avalokiteshvara (or Chenrezig in Tibetan) chant 'Om mani padme hum'. 'Rimdu' is from 'rildu', referring to the small red pills that are blessed and distributed at the main empowerment ceremony. (Note: I'm not sure how the alveolar lateral becomes a bilabial nasal here, not an alveolar nasal 'n', but it could just be one more step in the process of sound dissimilation.)

The Tengboche Monastery


It just so happened that the main festival day was taking place right in the middle of my short visit to Khumbu, so I decided to do the three hour hike from Khumjung to Tengboche (and back) to catch a glimpse of some of the festivities. It was a fun day, though I don't know if I would've liked to have spent the whole day and a night at the festival by myself (Sara had gone off trekking to the stunningly gorgeous area around Gokyo). In any case, I took her advice and got the little sheet of paper at the visitor centre which explained each dance.

While I arrived around 9.30am, the first dance I got to see was about an hour later (and after a piece of applie pie and pot of milk tea). The Ging-cham is performed by four dancers - two females with drums and two males with cymbals who act as the heralds of Dorje Trollo, the 'wrathful appearance' of the Rinpoche who established Buddhism in Tibet (I'm not quite sure why he would be wrathful), and a kind of patron of the monastery.

Ging-cham


Dorje Trollo appears


Nga-cham was my favourite dance, featuring a pair of 'skeleton' dancers with rather monkey-like movements.



At one point, the two skeletons take the ends of a rope, in the middle of which is tied a dough figure which represents evil. Two dancers in big black hats destroy this dough figure.





As a comic interlude, a monk appears as an old man, named 'Mi Tsering', who grabs an audience member, usually a poor unsuspecting tourist and drags them around the courtyard making them do silly things from exchanging hats to mixing flour and water throwing the mixture at people in the crowd. I'd heard the girl who got dragged along from the ride say earlier that she had to get to Machhermo - about 5 hours away - by nightfall. The poor thing...



Between dances, monks would come around and offer biscuits and milk tea. I'm not a big fan of hot drinks in small plastic cups, though it stop me from having my 6th cup of the morning.



There were a number of other dances, but I figured I needed to leave by early enough to get back to Khumjung by nightfall. Before I left, I was glad I managed to spot a monk with his digital camera filming some of the dancing - after all, why should the tourists get all the fun?

Yashargumba / यार्शागुम्बा

Last week when I was in Singapore, I caught a documentary titled Yarshagumba: The Himalayan Viagra which aired on the Australia Network. The documentary was about a fungus / herb that grows in the Himalayas that Nepalis risk their lives to collect every spring. The fungus in question is popularly known as 'cordyceps' (though 'cordyceps sinensis' is the scientific name for the particular species that is usually sold). It's an earthy (and by earthy I mean dirty) looking herb I'd seen quite often in the windows of Chinese medicine shops, but apart from the name, I didn't know what it was, let alone what it was used for.

According to Wikipedia, the Nepali word yarshagumba यार्शागुम्बा (even though it's transliterated as 'sh' Nepali doesn't distinguish the sounds 'sh' and 's') is derived from the Tibetan yartsa gumbu དབྱར་རྩྭ་དགུན་འབུ (literally, 'summer herb winter worm'). Similarly in Chinese you have 冬虫夏草 (literally, 'winter worm summer grass') or 虫草 'worm grass' for short. The reason for this odd name is that in winter, the 'herb' starts life as the larvae of any one of a few species of ghost moth found in the Himalayas. The larvae, which live underground, are infected by the spores of the cordyceps sinensis fungus. The fungus then grows in the moth larvae, killing and mummifying them. In spring, the fruiting body of the fungus emerges above the ground, and it's these tiny black stalks that people get on their hands and knees to look for at the beginning of spring.

As the title of the documentary suggests, the fungus is considered to have aphrodisiac properties and prized highly in Chinese medicine its ability to 'cure' other diseases like cancer etc. Consequently, hundreds of Nepalis rush up the slopes of the Himalayas in Western Nepal every year to try to gather as much of the stuff as possible, many of whom are ill-prepared for the extreme cold and occasional blizzard still associated with that time of year.

Sitting in a cafe in Kathmandu, I found 'yarcha gumba tea' on the menu, at an exorbitant 80 Rs a cup (about A$1.20) - double the price of regular tea. Being used to consuming products that people risk their lives to collect (think bird nest's soup), I thought I'd get a cup.

As usual, I expected to be disappointed - how much of an effect can one expect from a single cup? This is what I got:

I suppose I was even more disappointed that the tea came in a bag, with its black contents that really could have been anything. At the table someone noted that it smelt a little like Nepal, like the whole of Kathmandu with its marketplaces, smog and metallic water distilled in a single glass. I didn't think it was that bad, but it was nothing special either.