I too hope that some specialists in Chinese or Tibetan astrology and divination might happen to pass this way…

There is a Tibetan way of calculating on the hand in sixes in which the ‘gap’ between thumb and forefinger is counted. I forgot how that was supposed to work. Anybody able to refresh my memory? Anyway, I guess that it’s likely to be more or less irrelevant to the problem of deciding how to count on shell-less turtle parts. (Just that it’s an example of counting a ‘gap’ as part of a series of appendages.)

I think the shell itself has other divination purposes that were considered to be too distracting by the person who wanted to illustrate this particular type of divination. Hence the naked picture.

And if you’ve ever seen a Tibetan astro-expert at work, they like to use ‘dials’ (sets of larger and smaller paper circles pinned at the middle and turned independently in order to calculate relationships between two or more sets of ‘variables’. I think this might be part of what’s going on in this Dunhuang set of circles, too. Maybe you notice the circles are different sizes…)

There are people out there who know this stuff like the backs of their hands, but so far they aren’t talking to us.

In case you did not already know, she’u transcribes Chinese xué 学 “learning, study”, do’u transcribes Chinese dào 道 “The Way”, and jing transcribes Chinese jīng 经 “sutra” — repectively refering to Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.

I agree that it does point to a tradition in which the artists were unfamiliar with real turtles. But is this likely? Dunhuang was in a desert location of course, but the divination tradition represented here surely came from central China? Or should we consider that ru sbal might have indicated some other animal, even a mythological one, in this period?

Thanks for your page on the Zhang Zhung scripts, by the way, which has been useful to me recently.

I agree with Dan that ears are an odd body part to specifically mark out on a turtle, but armpits also seem a trifle strange to me.

rus sbal gyi rgyab kyi ri mo la brten nas ‘byung rtsis brtsams pa’i lo rgyus ‘di tsam las / rus sbal de thams cad kyi byed pa po yin pa’i gtam rgya’i yi ge dang gtam rgyun tshad ma rnams la ma grags pas / bod kyi nag rtsis pa dag gis lo rgyus de tsam la brten nas ma hâ gser gyi rus sbal zhes rtag pa rang byung gi byed pa po zhig byung ba skad byed pa ni sgro ‘dogs kyi gtam ‘dod rgyal du smras pa’o // des mtshon nas spar kha dang lo skor bcu gnyis kyi byung tshul sogs rdzun gtam mang du smra yang skabs su ma babs pas ma bris so //

This is part of his discussion of the Chinese religion he calls She’u, not the one he calls Do’u, and not the one called Jing. Thu’u-bkwan (1737-1802), a Tibetanized Mongolian Gelugpa, is quite skeptical about past Tibetan portrayals of these Chinese traditions, and very probably rightly so! We ought to learn more about the history of Tibetan Sinological studies, I think.

And I still have even more questions to add. Turtles, along with frogs and other reptilians, don’t have visible ears (they have a tympanum covered over by skin that might even look indented in relation to the surrounding areas, but nothing really visible on the outside, no ear-flaps like mammals have. So why is the shell-less turtle labeled with two rna-ba, ‘ears’? (Supposedly this type of hearing organ arrangement, while it doesn’t work so well out in the air for obvious reasons, helps them to hear stuff while they’re under water… Not that I’m a biologist or anything. In high school my lab partner did all the cutting. I just couldn’t bring myself.)

Oh, Karmay talked about the Gser-gyi Rus-sbal text in his Great Perfection book. It’s both Nyingma and Bön (one of those clear examples of intertextuality, I’d say). A related text is studied by J-L Achard in Le Tantra des Vingt-Deux Perles de l’Esprit de Parfaite Pureté: un exemple d’intertextualité entre les traditions Bon po et rNying ma pa, Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie (Winter 2006), pp. 57-104. Just try Googling “gser gyi rus sbal” (with the quote marks) and you’ll find more.

You might also appreciate this quote from Kong-sprul’s Shes-bya Kun-khyab (Mi-rigs Dpe-skrun-khang edition), vol. 2 [bar-cha], p. 347: rgya nag tu srid pa thams cad la ma hâ gser gyi rus sbal las byung zer ba’i gyim shang gi lugs. This is part of his treatment of ‘religions’ who preach harm or assert eternalism (not a good thing, by the way). It says that your Gyim-shang followers in China like to say that all of existence emerges from a great (Mahâ) Golden Turtle.

Oh, and turtles’ shells grow together with them. They never need to shed, exactly, or perhaps you could say that they are shedding all the time. But no, they never have to live without shells (although their shells are much softer when they are young).

Yours,
Dan

Is that Bonpo Great Perfection? I’m afraid its all Greek (or Zhangzhung) to me. Please expand, if you are inclined to do so. I do suspect there is a link with the later images of the turtle with the eight trigrams on its stomach. And I’m puzzled at the first diagram on this scroll that divides the sky into eight houses, rather than twenty-eight. But as I said, astrology is a new subject for me.

Rubel (rus sbal) is “bone-frog” isn’t it? Such a good name but a little odd when the turtle’s head and limbs are not very frog-like. But then I once met a small child who called frogs “wood-pigs”.

Why draw a turtle without a shell? Can a turtle survive without its shell? I don’t like to think it would have to. Could the shell be used for one form of divination and the body for another? As you see, I have many more questions than answers, perhaps even more questions than you!

e.T.

I don’t want to sound like I’m complainint, but I’m sure many of your readers, like myself, are wondering what the Golden Turtle has to do with the Great Perfectedness pf Dzogchen. We’re sure it has something to do with it. Aren’t you?

And on the other hand, what does it have to do with the Chinese “river chart”? And the turtle depicted in Tibetan paintings with the eight trigrams on his stomach shell?

And I have the feeling the turtle was drawn naked on purpose, not because the artist didn’t know what the shell-wearing version ought to look like. Of course, as its Tibetan name rubel implies, a turtle is just a frog with an impressive carapace, Isn’t it?

Yours,
Dan