̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Lobsang Yongdan

Tibetan scholar’s first hand account of the earthquake in Nepal

pbh25 — Fri, 01 May 2015 15:59:29 +0000

When the first earthquake struck Kathmandu close to midday on April 25 Dr Lobsang Yongdan was in a small hotel getting ready to head out into the city and find some food.

A scholar working on Tibetan historical texts Yongdan had been in Tibet visiting relatives following the successful completion of his PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology.

Following his visit to relatives Yongdan had then travelled from Lhasa to Nepal’s capital by road on his way back to the UK because he wanted to see the Nepalese countryside up close and knew Kathmandu was a good place to buy classical texts and dictionaries.

Sitting in the safety of the Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit’s (MIASU) Mond Building in Cambridge just a few days after leaving the capital he says: “ ̽��ֱ��Nepalese will need our help. I saw villages on hillsides during my 24 hour car journey to Kathmandu. I do not know what condition they are in now. ̽��ֱ��villages are remote and in the mountains so I can imagine the landslides affecting whole villages and wiping out the roads.”

Yongdan's scholarship reflects the strong links between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Nepal and Tibet. They encompass many disciplines including archaeology, biological and social anthropology (for example the Digital Himalaya project and the work of the MIASU). ̽��ֱ�� students have also volunteered as English language teachers in rural Nepal through charities. Some of those students have undertaken their own fundraising following the disaster.

Arriving in Kathmandu Yongdan had bought a Tibetan-English dictionary and a few classical texts and was ready to “do the tourist thing”, taking in some of the city’s famous sites such as the Boudhanath, a place of great significance to Buddhists and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Such sites reflect the connections between Nepal and Tibet, says Yongdan: “ ̽��ֱ��links between Nepal and Tibet are strong. Many craftsman who helped build the Tibetan temples and monasteries came from Nepal.”

But as he prepared to take in the sights the earthquake struck.

“When the earthquake came I was lucky as I was on the ground floor of my hotel so it was easy to run outside. But there were many large flower pots on the balconies of the surrounding building which were all falling down. I was very lucky not to be hit as these pots were falling from the fifth and sixth floors. A large one just missed me by a few centimetres,” says Yongdan.

By this time many other guests were flooding from the building into the courtyard. “Many were crying. There was shock and a lot of distress. ̽��ֱ��first earthquake was over in just one minute I think – but there were many aftershocks.”

It is those aftershocks which took a huge psychological toll, says Yongdan, adding: “Everyone reacted very strongly to the aftershocks. ̽��ֱ��first, big quake, was all about fast reactions, but the later shocks created much more fear and anxiety. Even a heavy footfall, or airplane flying overhead, would cause feelings of panic. I was there for just two days; those still out there, feeling aftershocks over a longer period, will have suffered much more and the trauma could be very great.”

Yongdan remained in the courtyard for some time, eyeing the cracks in the building warily, conscious that they had no food or water. Knowing he was due to fly from the capital that very day Yongdan risked entering the hotel to retrieve his wallet and passport. Eventually he was able to walk into the city and buy some water and a biscuit. It was then he got his first glimpse of the powerful and tragic effects of the earthquake. “There was a wall, about 10 feet high, which traders used to do their business from. It had collapsed and it was here I saw the first people who had died.”

Back at the hotel Yongdan and his group moved to an open field nearby and spent a fearful night as the aftershocks continued.

“During the night we had two big aftershocks at about 4am and 6am, I think. We could not sleep as all night we could see the buildings shaking. Sometimes the shocks came like a wave, sometimes quickly like a train going along the tracks.”

Yongdan realised that food and water would be a huge problem and that should take his flight, if possible. ̽��ֱ��next day Yongdan, accompanied by an US woman in her 60s, went looking for a car to take them to the airport. “It would be a long way to walk. People were in the centre of the road, staying away from the buildings, finding a car seemed impossible. To our surprise we eventually saw one single taxi driving around. He charged us fifteen times the normal price but we got to the airport,” says Yongdan.

On the way to the airport the full extent of the devastation hit Yongdan. Buildings had collapsed or were heavily damaged. “When we got to the airport there was a truck which was delivering water to people who had gathered in a nearby field - but there were thousands of people in the field and a long queue.”

“ ̽��ֱ��airport was crowded and everything was being done manually. Only those who had tickets were being allowed to fly at this stage. People were shouting. We stood in line for three hours waiting to hear if we would fly out or not. Once through we were in an open field and I felt much safer. We waited almost five hours and saw the Indian Air Force flying in with supplies.”

It was only when Yongdan was in the air that he relaxed enough to sense how lucky he was – and only once in Abu Dhabi that he felt anything close to the full impact. “I suddenly realised what I had been through and that I had nearly died. I called my family. I have never heard my father cry before but both of them were very emotional.”

It was at Abu Dhabi that the news of his having reached safety finally reached colleagues in Cambridge.

Dr Hildegard Diemberger, Director of MIASU, says: “I was hugely relieved when I was woken up at 1am by a text message from New York telling me they had heard Yongdan was safe. When he arrived at Pembroke his luggage had been left somewhere between Kathmandu and Abu Dhabi and he just had the clothes he was standing in.”

Safe in Cambridge, staying in a student room at Pembroke College, Yongdan says his thoughts are with those left behind. “I had to leave,” he says, “I thought whether I could help there and then but without knowing much about the place and the people I would have been another burden. I thought that mobilising competent international help would have been more useful and I hope we can help get the Nepalese and the Tibetans affected by the earthquake food, water and whatever they need as soon as possible. We keep hearing heart-breaking messages of people, including young children, now exposed to rain, lacking water, food and trying to cope with loss and fear”

̽��ֱ��problem will not just be food and water, says Diemberger: “Sewage will now be an issue as will disease. ̽��ֱ��way some buildings are constructed means the earthquake has had a devastating effect.”

Once the initial battle for survival is over and food and water supplies have been secured other priorities will surface.

“We must look to the international relief effort first and then in the long term we can look to charities and action to support communities and help rebuild and ensure the rich heritage of Nepal is protected. But first they will have to get through the monsoon season. It will be a difficult process. Once the reconstruction process is underway there will be an enormous amount to do. Many of the sites affected are UNESCO World Heritage Sites so the hope is they will not be rebuilt too quickly and destroy what little is left. I am also thinking about the multitude of temples and monasteries scattered across the region. They house precious ancient manuscripts and prints, which are likely to have become exposed to the rain and are at risk of being lost forever” says Diemberger.

Much will need to be done to rebuild Nepal and the focus now must be the international aid effort. To donate go to: www.dec.org.uk/appeals/nepal-earthquake-appeal.

I hope we can help get the Nepalese and the Tibetans... food, water and whatever they need as soon as possible.

Dr Lobsang Yongdan

More information:

For more information on the Nepal relief effort and how to offer support go to: www.dec.org.uk/appeals/nepal-earthquake-appeal.
Yongdan is a scholar who straddles the ancient and modern worlds. Initially educated in the Buddhist monastery of Kumbum (Qinghai Province, PRC), he possesses a rare talent for languages being fluent in Classical Tibetan, the Tibetan dialect of Amdo, Chinese and English. His PhD at Cambridge was on a remarkable Tibetan text, the Dzam gling rgyas bshad (DGRB), which translates as ̽��ֱ��Detailed Description of the World. He is currently working on an AHRC project hosted at MIASU to create a database of the earliest printed texts in Tibetan culture and the biographies of the Tibetan masters involved in the production of woodblock prints since the 12th century.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��Tibetan lama who wrote a world geography

amb206 — Sat, 14 Jun 2014 07:00:00 +0000

Early in the 1800s, a Tibetan lama travelled from Drepung monastery in Lhasa to Beijing. ̽��ֱ��journey of more than 2,000 miles would have taken him around four months. As an important Buddhist leader, he may well have been conveyed most of the way in a sedan chair. On the way, his retinue would have fallen in with travellers from other lands and heard unfamiliar languages. Perhaps this journey wakened the young lama’s natural curiosity about the world’s geography and its peoples, their customs and characteristics.

No-one knows why Btsan po no mon han wrote the remarkable Tibetan text, the Dzam gling rgyas bshad (DGRB), which translates as ̽��ֱ��Detailed Description of the World. First published in Mongolia in 1830, the book is in several parts, divided by continent and country. ̽��ֱ��section that describes Tibet, which comprises less than a quarter of the text, has been translated into European languages and has become one of Tibet’s most-read classics. ̽��ֱ��remainder of the text, however, has not been widely researched in the west.

Research by Lobsang Yongdan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology, now sets the entire text of the DGRB into a more deeply informed historical, political, anthropological context. In particular, Yongdan shows through his tracing of the many influences apparent in the book just how widely its author interacted with other thinkers in the intellectual circles of early 19th-century Beijing which was host to missions, trading posts and diplomats from many parts of the world.

“As a Tibetan, I come from a country that has been a magnet for western anthropologists who are drawn to the integrity and ‘otherness’ of its culture. I began my academic career as a historian of Tibet but in studying the DGRB within a western framework, I have taken an anthropological approach in order to look at the text from multiple viewpoints in terms of spiritual belief systems and history of science as well as national and cultural identities,” said Yongdan.

“I am myself the ‘otherness’ because I am that ‘native’ or ‘local informant’ on whom anthropologists rely to conduct interviews and to obtain information. Returning to the places where I was born, grew up and was educated is not the typical model for conventional anthropological inquiry. However, I considered that by going to back to Tibet and conducting my inquiries at Kumbum monastery, I was carrying out ‘anthropology at home’, an approach that is making an increasingly important contribution.”

Historically, interest in the DGRB has been patchy. From the later 19th century onwards, Europeans focused on the section of the text that deals with Tibet as a useful source of information. Tibetans, on the other hand, were much more intrigued by the sections that describe the world beyond their borders.

Yongdan is uniquely qualified to research the DGRB and its author. He was raised in Dobi in Amdo, north east Tibet. As a boy he joined a monastery and it was there that he first read the DGRB. Fluent in Tibetan, Chinese and English and conversant with the practice and literature of Tibetan Buddhism, Yongdan brings a multi-cultural viewpoint to his study of the text. “I first studied Btsan po’s work as a young Tibetan monk trying to understand the history of my country and how Tibetans studied world geography in earlier times,” he said. “I’ve spent the past four years looking in detail at the geographical conceptualisation, the creation of, and responses to the work.”

Only the sketchiest of details are known about Btsan po. He was born in 1789 in U lan mu ru in Amdo. Identified as a fourth reincarnation of third Btsan po no mon han, Ngag dbang ’phrin las rgya mtsho, he may have entered the Gser khog monastery as young as two. As a child, he would have been taught Buddhist logic, literature and cosmology. From 1808, he studied at Drepung monastery, one of the largest monasteries in Lhasa. He passed away in Beijing 1839, the year that marked the first Opium War between the Manchu and the British.

Around 1814, Btsan po travelled to Beijing to become a spiritual leader to the Qing emperor. During his long residence in Beijing, Btsan po read early Jesuit works of geography and became friendly with members of the Russian orthodox mission in Beijing. He met European scholars and diplomats, scientists and conversed with them on matters of world geography and the events of the day. ̽��ֱ��country-by-country descriptions in the book contain evidence of his encounters.

Yongdan reveals that Btsan po embarked on the compilation of a detailed world geography of his own volition, and as a Tibetan intellectual engaged with western knowledge on an equal footing with Europeans and others. In this respect, his research challenges the accepted view of geography - as a rational or scientific way to study lands, their inhabitants, and features of the physical world – as an exclusively European enterprise shared with the rest of the world.

He said: “Western discourse tends to make a sharp distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ geography. Geography compiled with religious motivations is often regarded as ‘cosmography’ and depicted as belonging to the super-terrestrial realms, with little or no relationship to the geographical features of the earth. On the other hand, scientific geography is seen as rational and global. Most importantly, scientific geography was developed in Europe where its driving forces were exploration and imperialism.”

For centuries, Tibet was seen as one of the most remote places in the world. ‘Isolated’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘unmodernised’ became standard descriptions of historical Tibet. Yongdan suggests that this stereotypical picture is misleading and that Tibetans, like their European counterparts, were intensely curious about the world and open to the communication of knowledge on all kinds of topics.

“My work contests the view that Tibet was a backward place, closed to the rest of the world, prior to the arrival of the British in 1904 and the Chinese in 1950. Independently of European participation, Tibetans were actively involved in translating, studying and writing about European mathematical, cosmological and geographical knowledge in Tibetan,” said Yongdan. “Btsan po’s descriptions of countries in Africa, the Middle East and central Asia suggest that these countries were not new to him by virtue of his encounters with Europeans. Rather, he treats at least some of these countries as places that Tibetans had known for centuries.”

Africa appears in the DGRB as the continent of Ba lang spyod, the western continent in Buddhist cosmology. Btsan po writes: “ ̽��ֱ��European calls this continent Libby [Liberia?] or Africa. ̽��ֱ��continent is triangular in shape and it is huge. Its north extends to the Mediterranean Sea, the southern tip of continent is near the Steel Wall [Antarctica], the east extends to the Indian Ocean, and the west is bordered by sea. It takes eight months to journey from east to west and one year from the tip of the south to the north.”

̽��ֱ��rich detail found in the DGRB indicates that its author had read widely in a range of languages. After giving the names of almost 80 European countries and places, he provides a general description of the continent: “While summer is hot and it rains a lot, in the winter there is heavy snow and cold. Because of the four different seasons, the Earth appears in four different colours, white, yellow, black and green. As I hear, there is a variety of grains in this land, and its harvest is better than other places. There is a tree called “olive” (a li ba) from which the fruit can be eaten and which can be ground for oil.”

Btsan po describes Europe as a fertile land where all kinds of foods and fruits grew, where people lived happily and in prosperity. “ ̽��ֱ��kings are friendly to each other, and they send goods to each other, so if there is a shortage of materials in the one country, the other kings send the materials to that country. Men do not marry until they are thirty years old, and women twenty years old, none have the custom of having more than one wife, whether the person is a follower of Jesus, a monk or nun, a king or a minister, and all respect women.”

In the style of the time, Btsan po makes sweeping statements – especially in his descriptions of people. “In general, Chinese people are beautiful and well-shaped. They speak with gentle voices and are polite. Although they act as deep thinkers and honest, in reality, they are accustomed to trickery and cowardice. They have difficulty in trusting other people. If they do trust someone, they are loyal and steady.” ̽��ֱ��English do not impress him because “… compared to other Europeans, they are ill-mannered people as they like to drink so much”.

More than 20 years have passed since Yongdan first read the text of the DGRB as a teenager in the Kumbum monastery in the north-eastern part of the Tibetan plateau. He recalled: “One night an older monk invited a group of us to supper. During the course of a conversation about Tibet and the world beyond our borders he told us that Tibetans knew about the world before the British and Chinese arrived – and that Tibetans charted the world like Europeans did in earlier times. We did not believe it as we had already absorbed the universal message that Tibetans knew little about what lay beyond their borders.”

Yongdan’s trajectory as a Tibetan scholar has taken him first to monasteries in Amdo, where he studied Tibetan languages, Buddhism and philosophy, then to California where he studied political science, and most recently to Cambridge where he has spent the past five years studying for a MPhil and PhD in Social Anthropology.

He said: “Like Btsan po, I was raised in the Buddhist tradition and, like him, I left my country to learn more about the world. Throughout my years of studying in the west, Btsan po and his world geography remained at the forefront of my mind. As a Tibetan, I always wanted to know how Tibetans viewed about the Europeans and its cultures in the past. My research into the DGRB has provided me with answers and insights that have changed my views about the history of east–west encounters, and those between the west and Tibet in particular.”

Inset images: Amdo, Tibet; Btsan po’s residence in Drepung monastery, Lhasa; globe with place names in Tibetan, said to have been made by Rtse sngags ram pa, a monk at Labrang in the 1920s, based on a wall painting in the Hevajra Temple at Labrang monastery; Lobsang Yongdan as a young monk (all images: Lobsang Yongdan).

A study by Tibetan scholar Lobsang Yongdan revisits a long-ignored section of a historic text to reveal how Tibetans were engaging with western scientific knowledge two centuries ago. His research into a geography of the world, first published by a lama in 1830, challenges stereotypical views of Tibet as an isolated and inward-looking society.

My work contests the view that Tibet was a backward place, closed to the rest of the world, prior to the arrival of the British in 1904 and the Chinese in 1950.

Lobsang Yongdan

̽��ֱ��Russian State Library, St Petersburg.

̽��ֱ��Fourth Btsan po no mon ham. Watercolour portrait by Zakhar Leont’evsky (1799–1874).

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes