Uncharted Knowledge Wisdom From Previous Realities
View as JSON for agents & LLMs

Sacred Texts: Buddhism

Chapter XVII. Description of Various Tables used for Astrological Purposes

19th Century BuddhologyBuddhist IconographyTibetan Buddhism

Connected to
Chapter VIII. The Sacred Literature Shares 3 topics Chapter XV. Worship of the Deities, and Religious Ceremonies Shares 3 topics Chapter III. The Religious System of Sakyamuni Shares 3 topics Chapter VII. Historical Account of the Introduction of Buddhism into Tibet Shares 3 topics
Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »
This is a 19th-century Western ethnographic study — likely a chapter from a larger academic work on Tibet — cataloguing and describing the astrological and divinatory tables used by Tibetan Lamas, situated within the scholarly tradition of European orientalism. The central argument is that Tibetan religious practice assigns enormous weight to astrological calculation in governing everyday decisions, from auspicious travel directions to marriage compatibility and illness prognosis, with specialist "astrologer Lamas" consulted for high-stakes matters and ordinary Lamas handling minor questions. The text provides unusually granular detail: it transcribes the actual structure of divinatory scrolls, including the five elements (iron, fire, wood, earth, water) mapped to colors and symbolic figures, the twelve cyclic animals in human-headed robes, and the "nine blots" (Meba gu) numeral system used to identify years dangerous to a person's life. A distinctive and recurrent claim is that Tibetan astrologers maintain strict secrecy around their interpretive methods — keeping the logic of their calculations hidden even from fellow Tibetans across different provinces — which the author candidly acknowledges as a major obstacle to producing a complete account. The author also notes regional variation in divinatory practice, undermining any notion of a unified Tibetan system, and points out that even their primary Lama informant, Gombojew, encountered unfamiliar material when asked to transcribe certain diagrams.

Related pages View as graph →