chapter 4 Mālā

1 Treng Mo: A Popular Tibetan Way of Divining with a Mālā

Translation, Interviews, and Discussion

By Solvej Hyveled Nielsen

Among the many tools for divination mentioned in the introduction of this book, the most popular one among Tibetan Buddhist and lay practition- ers is a string of 108 beads (Skt. mālā, Tib. phreng ba). It is in Buddhist practices a popular tool for counting activities like recitation, breaths, or pros- trations. It is both used when a diviner, often a , performs divination for a client, and when experts and non-experts make divination for themselves. A mālā is always at hand and continuously blessed through daily ritual use so that the relationship of most Tibetans to their personal mālā is often charged with religious sentiments. It is, therefore, a sacred randomizing tool1 in everyone’s hand. Dice (Tib. sho), on the other hand, are not a typical commodity item, and, moreover, they would have to be produced explicitly for divination practice since ordinary gambling dice are not acceptable in this context. Both my infor- mants, Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen and Dorzin Konchog Dhondrup Rinpoche,2 say that they use the mālā when they perform divination. More- over, as we will see, the mālā can be used as a substitute for the dice even in dice , such as the Achi Mo. There are many different ways of holding the mālā and counting its beads for the divination, but it seems to be common to all that the diviner has to obtain three results in a sequence.3 In the mālā divination manuals, each of these three results is typically obtained through two counts of beads, producing two num- bers, whereas the orally transmitted systems explained by Khenchen Nyima

1 As Jan-Ulrich Sobisch explained in the introduction, an (etic) technical term for the dice, the mālā, and other tools for divination would be “tools for randomization.” From an emic per- spective, as explained by Khenchen Nyima Gyaltsen, however, these are instead tools that manifest the awakened activities (’phrin las) of the respective deity. 2 For biographical information about Dorzin Dhondrup, see the interview section below. 3 The mālā divination manual T2, however, does not mention this three-fold repetition. The mālā divination manuals T1–T4, which are all ascribed to Atiśa, will be described below.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004402621_005 mālā divination 187 and Dorzin Dhondrup (see below) are more simplified and only operate with one count for each of the three sequential results. The numbers are then analyzed according to the particular system that the diviner is using, either transmitted in a written or oral form, and there seems to always be room for his or her intuitional judgment of the outcome concerning the situation or client.4 The present chapter contains a translation of a short manual of mālā divina- tion (= T1) that is ascribed to the great Indian Buddhist master Atiśa Dīpaṁkara Srījñāna (b. 982CE) of the Buddhist university of Vikramaśilā in North-East India.5 Atiśa was invited to in the early 1040s and taught there until his death in 1054. The title and colophon of the manual mention that Atiśa had received the text by way of a revelation from the deity Tārā. Apart from this text, there are at least two other, substantially different mālā divination manu- als of Tārā ascribed to Atiśa.6 One of them (= T2) was briefly mentioned above (ftn. 3). It was scanned in Bhutan by Karma Phuntsho as part of the Endangered Archives project. The manuscript has eight pages and is handwritten in a fairly standardTibetan dbucan script, but with some orthographic abbreviations and variant spellings. The other manual (= T3) is available in handwritten Tibetan dbu med script among the writings of the female Tibetan adept Sera Khandro (1892–1940). It also has eight pages (pp. 513–520 of the volume) and is the only Tārā mālā divination that I have seen so far prescribing preliminary recitations of Tārā’s mantra before performing the divination. A unique feature is that the introductory and concluding lines, as well as the liturgical instructions (“recite seven times,” etc.), are written in ’khyug yig script. There are a few modern prints of the T1 Tārā Mo, but also an old Bhutanese manuscript (=T4), which was scanned by Karma Phuntsho under the ArisTrust Centre of Oxford University. This manuscript has an introduction of two and a half pages (not contained in the other available versions of the manuscript) with prayers and a few explanatory lines that are difficult to understand, partly because of the non-standard orthography. It contains numerous variants of spellings and grammatical particles, which are much less standard than those in the version (T1) translated here. The T1 version was published in Delhi in 1997 by Konchhog Lhadrepa and is the only text on mālā divination from a col-

4 Khenchen Nyima emphasized the diviner’s intuition many times during the interviews; see also Lama Chime (1981: 16) on this point. 5 I am very grateful to the venerable Khentrul Khorchak Rinpoche of the College in Dehra Dun, India, for his kind explanations of difficult phrases and terms in this text. 6 Martin (forthcoming, p. 7, ftn. 14) also mentions a possible existence of a mālā divination manual by Atiśa in Mongolian language.