Hau

Go back to the calendar, and try to identify the titles of the columns at the top of Option 2, Image 1. What script and language(s) are these in? What do they tell us about the meaning of the calendar? What information is still missing, if any?

I have been successful in translating the top portion of this calendar to “room/chamber/class.” I do not think this is translated in the literal sense of a physical room, but perhaps class in the sense of a group name and/or title of an entity (either rows or columns). The titles of the columns are all months of the year, spanning from July to December, which I have marked in red in the image below. I also noted a repeated word that appeared under each month; this word also makes an appearance on the flag in the front cover. However, I had difficulty in translating this word.

I infer the calendar consists of Laos script. I argue that it is a part of the Pali language, since most of the words translated have Pali for its etymology, as indicated on the translator program provided by Professor Walker. Furthermore, on the front cover (image inserted on Page 4), the Lao script marked as Yellow 3 was translated to “Pali Language” on the translator program. The script and language of this manuscript implies that it is likely from Laos (I posit that it is from Luang Prabang, specifically. I elaborate on this view in the second question). There is some information missing, nonetheless. Many calendars can come from Laos, and these calendars may also pertain to astrology. I am curious what makes this manuscript special.

Now return to Option 2, Image 3. What words can you make out between the two animals, and also on the flag? And what do they tell us about the nature of the calendar?

Fortunately, I was able to translate many words on the front cover of this manuscript. I can confirm that this is a calendar, since the word between the animals translates to “calendar” with Pali for its etymology. Furthermore, this manuscript seems to belong to Laos, as translated between the two animals. The animal on the left is, indeed, a rat, and the second set of words under the rat most likely translates to “year of rat” (first year in cyclical calendar). The animal on the right is most likely an ox, as indicated by the translation “year of the ox,” which is the second year in the cyclical calendar.

Furthermore, I translated the following on the flag (indicated on the image). Green 1 states “New Year’s Day” and Green 2 translates to “Wednesday.” Although I was not able to translate Green 3 and 4, with the guidance of Professor Walker, I noted Green 5 appeared consistently on the top portion of the calendar. I have indicated this in the image above (with the yellow star on the front cover and the calendar). Furthermore, the top red box in the flag translates to, “First day of waning moon, second half of the lunar month.”

Piecing the translations I have of the flag together, I interpret the avatar figure announcing some great significance to occur on New Year’s Day (which would land on a Wednesday). This is perhaps a celebration of a lunar new year (transition from the year of the rat to the year of the ox). The traditional lunar new year is celebrated around late January (with a new moon), but it appears that Lao lunar new year is celebrated around mid-April. I infer that there will be a “first day of waning moon,” on Lao lunar new year instead of the traditional new moon.

In addition to interpreting the words between the two animals and the flag, I also decided to interpret the words on the cloud or flame (it is difficult to identify the object) at the bottom left of the image. Professor Walker guided me to the correct characters in yellow, since they were difficult to identify using the default characters in the translation program. Yellow 1 translates to “For the sake of (in the name of).” Translating Yellow 2 and Yellow 3, however, were difficult. I first began translating Yellow 3 to backtrack to the translation of Yellow 2. The first half of Yellow 3 translates to “Pali Language” on the translation program, but “Bali” on Google Translate. The second half of Yellow 3 translates to “Government/administration” (as a noun) and “Royal, great/enormous” (as an adjective). Google Translate identifies Yellow 3 as “Luang.” Professor Walker hinted that Yellow 2 and 3 were places, so, after doing some research, I inferred Yellow 2 translated to Luang Prabang, which was the seat of government of the Laos Kingdom. Piecing these translations together (“Luang Prabang” from Yellow 2 and “Pali Language” and “Royal” from Yellow 3), I inferred that Yellow 2 and 3 together translate to the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang.

Additionally, the bottom red boxes translate to “particle used before the names of deities” and “to worship; to make offerings and sacrifices.” Piecing all translations on the cloud (or flame) and the flag, I believe that the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang is celebrating Lao lunar new year (on a Wednesday with the first day of waning moon) and to accomplish this, there will be gift offerings. I infer, then, that Lao lunar new year is a religious holiday in celebration of some facet of Buddhism.

How are these two calendars different? Where do their counting systems diverge?

The calendar from the manuscript studied by the class and the Thai calendar from the website provided are notably different. For starters, their layouts are not the same, where the Lao calendar includes days that must be read vertically. Furthermore, they have a different counting system; the Lao calendar has a 15-day interval between the new moon and the full moon (with the exception of the middle column of 5/1 to 5/14 on Option 2, Image 2), whereas the Thai calendar has a 14-day interval between the new moon and the full moon. Regarding the interval for the Thai calendar, I was counting the days that did not include the new moon and full moon symbols on them.

Parth

Go back to the calendar, and try to identify the titles of the columns at the top of Option 2, Image 1. What script and language(s) are these in? What do they tell us about the meaning of the calendar? What information is still missing, if any?

I took a look at these in an earlier reflection, and already identified some of them as Lao. I had put them into Google Translate, which just transliterated them into Roman script, leaving me with pronunciations that I couldn’t make sense of. But, the SEAlang Library Lao Lexicon was much more helpful!

Here’s the header, in Lao script, and the translation below, from the lexicon:

The first column makes more sense to me now. Assuming that the calendar was made some time around 1948 (the year on the first page of the manuscript), there was a well-established government in Laos, so it probably makes sense to talk about the “Laotian month” as there was likely a unified national system of time-keeping. Then, this calendar seems to be translating between the Laotian calendar and… something else.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the difference between ວັນ and ມື້. Based on my limited understanding from the lexicon, the former might refer to a day as a unit (like “weekday” in English) and the latter might refer to a property of the day (like the hour). Weekday is a sensible interpretation of the first header, given the length-7 cycle of symbols. For the second symbol, I’m not sure.

Now return to Option 2, Image 3. What words can you make out between the two animals, and also on the flag? And what do they tell us about the nature of the calendar?

Between the two animals, I see the word “ປະຕິທິນ” which means “calendar” in Pali (as a side note: it’s quite exhilarating to finally get the translation after struggling with it for so long). I also see the word “ລາວ” or “Laos”.

Then, on the flag, I see “ສັງ” which means “how” or possibly “conch” and “ຊືນ” which means “lead”. I struggled with translating more of these words for a bit, but this line of inquiry wasn’t particularly helpful for me. I can’t quite say what they tell us about the nature of the calendar. I actually suspect that I translated them wrong. If I did translate them correctly, those could be references to magical implements, perhaps.

How are these two calendars different? Where do their counting systems diverge?

I can track the manuscript’s calendar most easily by where it indicates that the moon phases change. The calendar notes a full moon before 4\1, which likely corresponds to March 28, 1949 in the website calendar. In that case, the calendars agree for the next fifteen days—then there is a new moon, as noted in both of the calendars (on April 12). However, the manuscript’s calendar tracks 15 days before the next moon phase, but in reality there were only 14 days before the new phase on April 26. That seems almost like an accidental mistake (i.e., it was difficult to identify the precise day that the moon was completely dark). But, I’m not sure about that theory. In any case, the days seem to “drift” almost immediately.

Overall, I’m honestly not too sure about this analysis. Though, to be fair, I often feel out of my depth with this manuscript :). Analyzing the script seemed particularly challenging, because there really wasn’t any good way for me to have confidence in the characters that I identified.

One more note: Google Translate has a feature on the iPhone and iPad apps where you can write a symbol and it attempts to convert it to the script you’re translating from. The translation from Lao doesn’t work too well, but the character recognition is decent. Hopefully that helps someone!

Sisely

Starting on image one, I think we can identify the script as Lanna. For the most part, the symbols on the manuscript match up with known characters of Lanna which after further research, I learned is typically used to transcribe Southwestern Tai languages and old Lao. It makes sense that it is known to be commonly used for transcription in religious Buddhist manuscripts. After identifying the script, I was able to translate some of the manuscript into roman letters while also referencing the portion given (as already translated) for help when stuck. It took me a long time to get from the translation of roman script to the point where I was able to extract any sort of meaning from it, but once I did, everything became a lot clearer.

The first word I was able to identify after looking at the translation of roman script is “Girimikhalam”. This was the key for me as it was the catalyst for further understanding of the text’s meaning. I recognized Girimikhalam or Girimehkala”m (I’m unsure about the reasoning behind the different spellings) as the one-eyed elephant referenced in Sri Lankan mythology. Girimikhalam is said to be ridden by Mara, a demon lord who tried to tempt Buddha so that he would not reach enlightenment. From what I could find online (which is not much), according to legend Mara tries to order Girimikhalam to tempt the buddha but he ends up just dropping to his knees. Decoding more of the script, I was able to identify it as at least part of the Buddhist chant Buddha-jaya-maṅgala Gāthā, or Verses of the Buddha's Auspicious Victories. In roman script it goes as follows:

“Baahu"m sahassam-abhinimmita-saavudhanta"m

Girimehkala"m udita-ghora-sasena-maara"m

Daanaadi-dhamma-vidhinaa jitavaa munindo

Tan-tejasaa bhavatu te jaya-ma"ngalaani

[Tan-tejasaa bhavatu te jaya-ma"ngal'agga"m].”

And further, it can be translated into English as below.

“Creating a form with 1,000 arms, each equipped with a weapon,

Mara, on the elephant Girimehkala,

uttered a frightening roar together with his troops.

The Lord of Sages defeated him by means of such qualities as generosity:

By the power of this, may you have victory blessings.

[By the power of this, may you have the highest victory blessing.]”

In other texts, the chant goes on eventually to say “These eight verses of the Buddha’s victory blessings, whoever person of discernment recites or recalls them day after day without lapsing, destroying all kinds of obstacles, will attain emancipation and happiness.” I wonder if the purpose of the chant in our manuscript is this as well - I did not get far enough in translation to find out whether this portion of the chant is included. As for what the different is between other texts containing this chant and our manuscript, the spellings seem to be a bit different. I am unsure of why this is - maybe slight language or time period differences?

Sylvia

To begin, I looked at the transliterations offered by our dear professor, Dr. Walker. Purely instinctively (based off of my background in Bengali and Urdu), the first one feels Indic to me while the second does not:

1. omº sabba omº sabba he he titha ti

2. ńgho mā păṅº tȏnº gū ḍvayº₂ phā bănº jănº păṅº dăṅº kāṃbeṅº cyań dạṅ vesº₂ lạm rạḍ

Om is also a recognizable word of Indic origins, and as we discussed last week in class, it is often the first word of a recitation or chant. This led me to consider that all the occurrences of om are potential transition points between a Southeast Asian language and an Indic one. (Of course, om can also appear in the middle, so this is not by any means a hard rule.)

Last week in class we also discussed the translations and possible etymologies of some of the words from a spell in the Dunhuang Book of Spells. Within one spell, there was a mix of Indic and Southeast Asian etymologies. I would then suggest that if our manuscript is written for a Southeast Asian audience, there should be limited usage of Indic words within Southeast Asian blocks of text. However, within blocks of Indic chants, there may be words of Southeast Asian etymologies.

If our manuscript does indeed contain a mix of Southeast Asian and Indic languages, then it is likely that the Indic languages are recitations or chants. These would probably appear as lines or longer blocks of text introduced by a Southeast Asian language, similar to the manuscript which Dr. Walker verbally translated for us at the Berkeley library and the Dunhuang Book of Spells. In both these cases, a problem or situation was established in the audience’s language, and then the appropriate Indic chant for the situation followed.

Turning to the nitty-gritty of this orthographic encodement, I began with the working assumption that our manuscript uses the Khün variant of the Tai Tham script. The Lanna variant seemed too dainty and had lots of small extra lines that were not immediately obvious to me in our manuscript. The Lü variant differs from our manuscript in noticeable ways. The ạ diacritic is different, and I found examples of the Lanna/Khün variety in our manuscript, so I eliminated Lü as a possibility.

However, upon closer inspection, I began to wonder if I was not indeed looking at Lanna. It is possible that the daintiness is simply a symptom of the font, and so while at first glance our manuscript looks more like Khün, it may be Lanna. I began to think this because many of the letters contain extra spirals or indents which are present in Lanna but not Khün. However, once again this may be a symptom of the font, and handwritten Khün may indeed utilize these embellishments. In other words, it is still difficult to tell exactly which variety we are looking at, but the two are very similar and for my decoding process, I mainly considered Lanna.

According to the crosslinguistic transliteration handout, a long straight line above a word (as in the picture below) could be indicative of two different things: two separate tone markings or certain vowel diacritics (although it is unclear to me what distinguishes these from dependent vowel forms).

Indo-Aryan languages have far less vowels than many Kra-Dai languages, and my best guess would be that these vowel diacritics are not among those usually used to write Indo-Aryan languages. Sanskrit and Pali, alongside most South Asian languages, also do not utilize tone. This would mean that we should not expect to see these long straight lines above Indic text. However, I am yet to make sense of the double parallel lines and whether they can occur within Indic text.

Looking at the manuscript, this seems to make sense. In image 1 from the middle of line 6 through the beginning of line 8 there are no such lines above any words. If we also exclude the doubled lines, then it’s an even longer chunk of text. Similarly in image 2, in a large chunk in the middle of the page from around pages 9-12, there are no such lines. Even more compelling is that the absence of this mark (underlined) lines up pretty nicely with the occurrence of om (circled).

My next point, in which I am not too confident, is that I’ve only noticed the following subscript around the Indic sections. I’ve also only seen it attached to this letter, which I think is (b). It could be that this is a completely separate letter which I’ve been unable to identify, or perhaps some sort of consonant/vowel diacritic. As this appears in the section which Dr. Walker transliterated, my best guess is that it is gemination, or a double b. This would help explain why it may only be attached to this letter (if it were only the sign of an additional b attached to b). Perhaps a double b is more common or only in Indic languages; I am not sure.

There were also two more diacritics which I failed to find within the sections I am considering Indic. This first is one which I was unable to identify on the handout, but from following Dr. Walker’s transliteration, it appears to be what he’s transcribed as ṅº. This appears fairly frequently in Dr. Walker’s transliteration of the section I am considering to be a Southeast Asian language. It’s possible that this sound or at least grapheme is not used in Tai Tham transliterations of Indic languages. The second one which I’ve underlined here is ạ, and this is given on the handout. Again, this could be among the vowels not used in Indic languages.

Victor

I used a backwards translation approach to determine the script used in the text. Using the hint, I tried to identify the most complicated character I could find in the Roman script, as this would make it easier to differentiate that character between different scripts. For instance, the Roman character “ka” is written very similarly (sort of like an “m”) across Lanna, Khun, Lu, and Burmese since it’s quite simple to write, which means it’s not a great candidate. On the other hand, a character like the Roman “gha” is more complicated and there are thus more differences between scripts that I can use to identify the appropriate script. In the hint, “gho” appears as a Roman character, which I was able to immediately map to the Lanna version of the character (it’s the Lanna “gha” preceded by the dependent vowel “o”, which makes the entire character “gho”).

The only other close equivalent is the Khun version of the character. To determine whether Lanna or Khun is being used, I looked through the list of characters that mapped to the same Roman character and looked for one that differed between the two scripts. “kha” is quite different between the two, and it also appears in the hinted text. I’m able to tell that the written character in the manuscript is the Lanna version of “kha”, which has the distinct downwards indent at the top of the character and is missing from the Khun version. Lastly, Lanna’s version of the dependent “u” is quite unique from the rest of the scripts’ versions given its especially long tail (which seems to be common for the Lanna script), and these long tails appear in several places on this manuscript page. My final verdict is that the script is Lanna.

Then, I tried using the Pali-English and Thai-English dictionaries to translate the Roman-script version of Line 6, where I was able to get the following rough phrase translations:

• “vudha” = Buddha

• “giri” = mountain

• “mekhala” = girdle

• “ghora” = howling, lamenting

• “dana” = to gift

• “dhamma” = to hold, support

• “amala” = without fault

• “vijina” = distress

With some help from Trent, I was able to identify an excerpt with a similar Roman script from San Sarin, “Les textes liturgiques fondamentaux du bouddhisme cambodgien actuel” (École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1975), 197–209, which describes Buddha’s eight victories over different beings in the form of several verses. There are subtle differences between the manuscript’s Roman script and this source’s script. For instance, “girimikhalaṃ” from the manuscript is instead “grīmekhalaṃ” in San Sarin. Also, the “udita” in San Sarin is instead “uǵita” in the manuscript. These differences indicate that the scripts are either entirely different scripts, or possible variations of the same script given how similar they are.

Maria

The objective of this option is to identify - the language, the meaning of the calendar, and any missing information of - the titles of the columns at the top of Option 2, Image 1. Based on the dictionary page’s many helpful key words, I hypothesize that the language the text of the calendar is written in is Lao. The meaning of the calendar is more elusive. From what we’ve gathered as a class, it appears that the calendar depicts a twenty eight day cycle juxtaposed with a thirty or thirty one day calendar in the form of a single column of repeating numbers one through thirty. Within the twenty eight day cycle, however, exists a whole world of information that is unknown to me as a reader at first glance. With the help of a careful classmate, we’ve identified four characters each with their own cycles; as in one character repeats every ten squares, another every seven. What do these have to say about the title column? That remains mostly unclear, though I venture that the calendar has something to do with monitoring the night sky as I know that to be a practice of old by which people made weather predictions and guesses at other unknowns of the future. At first thought, the top column perhaps then, are star placements in the night sky and the fraction-esque characters that fill the calendar are coordinates. Though, something about that doesn’t feel completely true….

With some degree of clarity, I propose that the Hindu-Arabic numbers throughout the calendar represent days of the month, or dates. The dates follow a month/day pattern up to fifteen, by that I mean, for example, they follow as ½, ⅓, ¼,... 1/15. The dates repeat, however, once the fifteenth marker is hit and to me all that means is the author has chosen to stick as carefully to a lunar calendar as is possible as in series of fourteens (which is very nearly fifteen) are suitable to the moon which never changes course or pattern, it is of a fixed twenty eight day rotation, the month is more flimsy in its numbering: some months may have thirty days (twice fifteen), some months may have thirty one.

The identity of the topmost column is still a mystery though based on what lay beneath it, it can be surmised that the top column is concerned with a traceable phenomenon that occurs and repeats throughout the month. I opine that what the top column is concerned with is human behavior because it seems as though those who interact with the calendar seek one or maybe more constants by which to organize something. It does not, to me, make sense to lean on the repetitive structure of the moon and sun and days of the month if one does not want to be able to know what happened on which day. Perhaps still the idea that the calendar depicts star “movements” (though those are illusions of the earth’s rotation), but why dedicate three columns to each day then? How much about the star do you want to know other than its location? And, if you wanted to know more about the star, then why choose a calendar with such tiny boxes where no lengthy description is possible? Surely this calendar is a job sheet or some way of keeping attendance and the tiny boxes next to the dates are filled with names or positions or both.

But then, as in now, I’ve remembered that I am in a course called “Buddhist Magic” and I’ve paused to think…. Why would we be concerned about an old chores manuscript? I still do not know what the - I’m venturing Lao - characters say within the calendar, but I have reason to believe that they are relevant to someone concerned with spells or magic and the like. Is that a sufficient answer? Not really. I will venture further, then, and hypothesize that the top column depicts date and human spiritual behavior. By that I mean, oblations or sacrifices made and/or rituals and spells performed or cast. I am eager to find out the truth.